Category: yoga

faith, hope, love, relationships, religion, yoga

My Year of Hopefulness – Is Human Connection More Powerful than Prayer?

Christa Avampato

“The way is not in the sky. The way is in the heart.” ~ Buddha

How often do we raise our eyes to the sky and ask for help? I find myself doing that from time to time. Today I got word from a partner of mine on one of my projects that we are facing some critical obstacles. I asked if there was anything I could do to help. “Pray,” she said. “Lots.”

Now, I know she’s doing much more than praying. She’s actually working her tail off, jumping through dozens of hoops to keep us moving forward. I find that with any trying circumstance, the default solution is to pray. But what are we really doing when we pray? What am I doing as I go to my yoga mat in times of distress? What am I asking for and who am I asking it of?

Maybe prayer is better directed not up towards the sky, out of our reach. Perhaps it’s much more powerful if we turn in and not out. When I go to my yoga mat and create an intention for my practice, I’m asking for help and guidance and assurance. I’m tapping into my creative well. I’m actually searching for my soul and its wisdom. It’s an overwhelming idea if I think about it too long. Can we actually tap into the energy and light around us, all around us, by looking in?

My experience has demonstrated than the answer to this question is a resounding ‘yes’. Yoga and Buddhism have some basic tenants that I try to keep at the forefront of my mind, especially during difficult times: 1) the world will provide us the exact learning that we need at the exact moment that we need it and 2) to tap into the energy around us we must recognize that while we live in this world, we are not of it. Our souls are old. They have been through many trials. They are the ties that bind us to one another. They have knowledge far beyond what we carry within our minds and our own limited experiences. Meditation, yoga, or any other contemplative practice bring that soul knowledge to our consciousness.

While in Virginia, I used to teach yoga classes at my business school. They were my small way of making the stress that all of us felt in our studies a bit more manageable. (This Winter I’ll begin my 500 hours certification process. It will be a long road, though one I have wanted to be on for some time now.) I would close each class with a simple statement to my students that a teacher of mine used to use: “the light that is in me, honors that the light that is in you.” I’ve found that connecting with people, one heart to one heart right here on the ground, has brought me more lasting joy and peace than raising my eyes and prayers to the sky. I have more faith in us and what we can do together, here and now, than I do in anything else.
The image above can be found here.
calm, health, meditation, peace, stress, yoga

My Year of Hopefulness – Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

Christa Avampato
This week has been a roller coaster. My stress level was up and down every other hour, so much so that at one point I was physically dizzy. I was joking with my friend, Denise, who was having a similar week, that my theme song should be “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.” Then she reminded me that should be the theme song not just this week but every week.

To reduce stress and keep myself in check, I practice yoga, run, meditate, and breath. I back away from stress slowly, keeping my eye on its source so that it doesn’t sneak up on me again for a repeat performance. I think of it as a very hungry grizzly bear, something to be handled with extreme care and to diffuse by almost any means necessary.

I keep looking for ways to cut stress from my life, as if it’s some disease. The moment it rears its ugly head I want to banish it. This week I tried to appreciate stress’s occasional appearance in my life. It puts a fire under me to get something finished. In my effort to diffuse stress, I actually max out my productivity to get the job done. Stress often leads me to some of my most creative work. (I wish some scientist would do a study on stress’s effect on creativity.)

This isn’t to say that I crave stress, seek it out, or love opening up my front door to see it glaring down at me. It’s true that when it arrives, I hang my head a little low and quietly curse under my breathe “not again!” However, after a minute or two, I sit up straight, roll-up my sleeves and get to work. In the case of stress, there’s no way past it except through it. While the temptation is to step off the stress merry-go-round, there are a lot of learnings and value to be derived from its occasional visit. Our challenge is to manage through it so that it doesn’t set up camp and make itself at home in our everyday lives.

calm, commitment, yoga

My Year of Hopefulness – Problems and Answers

Christa Avampato

“If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it.” ~ J. Krishnamurti

So often we look at problems and answers as two separate entities, as if they have their own independent existence. I’ve been thinking about this recently with an education program I’m working on. I have specific problem I’d like to solve, and a specific need I’d like to meet. Reading this quote today I realized that I’ve approached the challenge backwards – I’ve been so focused on finding a solution that I haven’t spent enough time with the problem and all its layers and complexities.

Living with problems can be uncomfortable, so our desire to jump to a solution as quickly as possible is only natural. I’ve been practicing yoga for 9 years and one of the practice’s central tenants is learning to be comfortable being uncomfortable. I’ve found that the best way for me to achieve this is to focus on my breath rather than on the part of my body that might be uncomfortable in a pose. I apply this in other areas of my life as well – sitting in an uncomfortable meeting, standing in a hot, crowded subway, coping with a bad headache or other illness – I just keep focusing on my breath. It helps.

Another, less conventional practice that I am experimenting with is giving problems a physical structure. Meditation does not come easily to me. I like being active so sitting still and concentrating is some times a lot to ask of myself. I do notice that when I’m able to do it, it has great benefits. So I keep trying. Meditation is particularly helpful when I am trying to sort through a problem, though most of the problems I handle are abstract, without structure. During my meditation I imagine how the problems move around in the world, how they impact the places and people they effect, and then consider ways in which those effects can be countered. It’s complicated, and again not a natural method of dealing with problems, though I find this process helps me sit with problems that need my attention.

There’s no silver bullet here. Having problems and challenges is an uncomfortable condition, and will always be. What we can do is make slow and steady progress to ease the discomfort. And in that purposeful progress forward, it’s my hope that we will find the long-term solutions we seek to remove all our challenges.

health, healthcare, wellness, yoga

My Year of Hopefulness – Urban Zen Foundation

Christa Avampato

NBC Nightly News has been running a series called “What Works”, a follow-on to their wildly successful series “Making a Difference”. Think of it as nothing but positive news to brighten up your days. Stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, mostly for the benefit of others.


Yesterday, the segment featured the work of Donna Karan with the Urban Zen Foundation. Urban Zen has developed the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program at Beth Israel Hospital that is providing supplemental care in the forms of yoga and meditation to people with cancer being treated at Beth Israel. It is a year long pilot program that started last fall. The project is being monitored closely to assess results of the integrated program. It could be a whole new paradigm in U.S. healthcare.

You have to hand it to Beth Israel Hospital. For decades now, many U.S. hospitals have paid little or no heed to the power of yoga as a method to help patients heal. Mumbo jumbo, hippy medicine full of nothing but sweetness and light – that won’t kill cancer. What we really need to do is burn and chemically treat those cancer cells and hope we don’t harm too many of the good cells in the process. I don’t doubt the ability of chemotherapy and radiation to treat cancer. They are powerful tools.

What I believe, and what the Urban Zen Institute believes, is that yoga is a powerful compliment to traditional medical treatment. They are not a replacement – but rather a helpful, potent supplement that can actually enhance the body’s ability to benefit from traditional cancer treatments. It couldn’t have been easy for Beth Israel to make the case that this program was worth almost $1B of investment dollars. They were willing to go out on a healthcare limb to run a true, valid, scientific test of yoga’s ability to treat cancer. It’s courageous.

With Beth Israel’s pilot, it seems that the tide may be turning in our country. Perhaps we are coming around to seeing things a different way when it comes to health and wellness. We might be on to a better path forward.
books, environment, friendship, nature, yoga

My Year of Hopefulness – Winter Cocoons

Christa Avampato

My friend, Monika, was telling me about her recent spell of wanting to remain on her couch as much as possible. Though she likes the winter weather, this season she’s felt the need to hunker down and stay inside. I’ve been feeling the same way. It reminded of a story I like to read several times over the winter. It’s only one page, written by Nina Zolotow in Rodney Yee’s book, Yoga the Poetry of the Body.


Nina writes about her time in Ithaca, New York. Her neighbors had this incredible garden and the summer time lunches they would spread out in their backyard transported her to Tuscany. These lunches would always end with beautiful, fresh black figs from the neighbors’ garden. There was a massive fig tree in the middle the neighbors’ yard and she couldn’t understand how that tree would survive the rough upstate New York winters.

She finally got up the courage to ask her neighbor his secret. It’s very simple – after all the leaves have fallen, he severs the roots on one side of the tree, folds the flexible trunk down to the ground into a ditch he digs, and covers it with soil to rest, warm and safe, until Spring arrives. I think of this story all the time during the winter season.

Winter is a time of incubating, of resting and recouping, of letting ourselves get comfortable with peace. It’s a cycle. Monika’s cocooning really is a natural reaction, one we all should have. We burrow in to reflect on what’s happened to us in the more hectic Spring, Summer, and Fall. And we plan – for warmer days, for greeting friends when the sun comes out again, for reintroducing ourselves to the world when our surroundings take on that brilliant green hue again. 

For this next month or so of winter, I want to have that fig tree always in my mind. I want to imagine myself resting and regrouping, healing and soothing my tired soul, mind, and heart, gearing up for the best Spring of my life. 

The photo above can be found at here. 
calm, economy, meditation, stress, yoga

Getting quiet

Christa Avampato

I am a long-time subscriber to Yoga Journal. I read it cover to cover every month. One of my favorite sections is the 10 pose sequence that has a specific focus. This month, the focus is “Inviting Quiet”. What can I say? I like a challenge.


I am a talker, a chatty Cathy in some circumstances. On the Myers-Briggs test, a couple of things stand out as truly odd. I am OFF THE CHARTS on extroversion and ambiguity. Give me a situation that is mired in ambiguity and deals with boatloads of people, and I’m as happy as a mouse in a cheese shop. 

I like engaging with people about 95% of my waking hours. And then in the other 5%, I hide away from the world. It’s important to note that without that 5% of hiding away from all humanity, that other 95% of the time with them is far less enjoyable. So while this introspection is small in quantity, the quality is critical. Yoga generates this necessary high quality.

I think about this need for quiet, even in the loudest lives, as I make my way to work each morning. There is a very short walk from my office building to my subway line. It’s not pretty, but I use it to center myself at the start and end of my day. It’s my gateway between my working life and my personal life. It is especially important in this churning economy to spend some time getting quiet, calming down our nerves, and turning inward to remind ourselves of what’s important. Getting quiet, at least for a short time, may be our only avenue through the noise all around us.