Sparked into a flush of memory by a friend’s lament towards the end of summer, I was coated in the thick stain of Heaney’s lingering words:

Blackberry Picking – Seamus Heaney

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

There are so many beautiful transitions to discover, practically a coronicopia full– to learn from! to change around! to grow into! Ahhh, possibility!

A extra juicy reading of the poem can be found here, at good ol’ NPR.

photo credit: Andrew Michaels

Vancouver is a delight.

Dancing makes me feel good.

Canadians are adorable.

“Wait– what?”, you might be thinking.  Whats all this about? As you may have noticed, I wasn’t in class the past few whiles.

What was I up to? Lululemon invited me (and about 100 other ambassadors) out for a week of goal-setting, learning, networking, and “elevation” in their hometown.

Elevation, huh? Basically, its a matter of steppin’ yo’ game up, son.

For me, success has a transient definition, but today we’ll define it as impact. Impact is touching students in a meaningful way, and as such, impact informs success. The more successful I am at fostering transformation, growth, and education, the more impact I’ll have on my communuity.

And guess what? I want to take my impact to the next level.

That rise, that change, is elevation.

Not too heady a concept.

One of the keys to the kind of goalsetting work we did this week had to do with maintaining a certain level of transparency in the work that we do. This transparency breeds accountability. I’ve learned to relate this sort of accountability to integrity.

Consider this me looking to find integrity in my accountability. To you. To be held accountable for you, and perhaps not so readily apparently: for me.

A lot of the work of giving selflessly, for me, is going to start right here in a digital space.  I sure hope you’ll be joining.

Afterall, when the tide rises, all the boats are lifted.

Be the tide.

Michael in Tree atop Thomas Circle Statue

How is it August already?! Want some mid-week yoga in a fab mid city space?

TUESDAY, Aug 3! 6pm!

Parker Flats School House: 2035 2nd St. NW

FREE! FREE! FREE!

Join UrbanLand Company & Mid City Yoga for the FINAL Summer Yoga Session! Mid City Yoga teamed up with the UrbanLand Company as part of ULC’s “healthy living initiative” every month this summer. The last and final yoga summer session will conclude this Tuesday, August 3 at the Parker Flats School House Lofts in the beautiful LeDroit Park neighborhood. Ready for an energetic and fun all levels flowing yoga class? Hope to see you on Tuesday, August 3 @ 6pm!

Check out our Facebook event here!

photo credit: lululemon athletica

Hey Gang! Ready for another free class in a new space?

Come on out!

Join UrbanLand Company & Mid City Yoga for Summer Yoga Sessions! As part of Urban Land Company’s “Healthy Living” initiative, come and enjoy this urban yoga experience in one of The Floridian Condos fabulous Penthouse unit–  totally fab!

Come for the workout, come for the zen, come and enjoy an unparalleled view of the beauty that is DC–all for free! Ready for an energetic and fun all levels flowing yoga class? Hope to see you this Tuesday, July 6 @ 6pm

This is the link to the facebook event.

DC Yoga Challenge Launch

From WelcomeOmDC:

“On Wednesday evening, the space in Malcolm X Park normally enveloped in primal drumming broadcast a new sound: one giant “om”. Here, the DC yoga community official kicked off the city-wide Citizen Effect 30 Day Yoga Challenge (presented by glaceau smartwater) with a yoga class lead by Michael Hall of Mid City Yoga.”

It was my distinct honor to teach a class full of yogis, philanthropists, newbies, and a Venn Diagram’s worth of concurrents.

“The 30 Day Challenge is spearheaded by Dan Morrison and May Yu of Citizen Effect, Carolyn Butcher, Laura Goldstein, and supported by various yoga studios and businesses– such as glaceau smartwater, lululemon Georgetown, Lush, DC Dharma blog, and of course, WelcomeOmDC.com.”

photo credit: lululemon athletica

Hey guys! Come check out a fun outdoor class in Meridian Hill Park on Wednesday, June 30th at 7:30p! I’m teachin’!

This is the official kick-off event for Citizen Effect’s 30-Day Yoga Challenge: A movement combining yoga and philanthropy to build a foster home in South Africa.

All are welcome to join!

Enjoy free products from co-host glaceau smartwater and learn about how you can get FREE or deeply discounted yoga classes for the whole month of July, all for a fantastic cause!

Just bring yourself, your mat and an open mind. See you there!

For more info on Citizen Effect’s 30-Day Yoga Challenge, visit: http://www.citizeneffect.org/p/ycstudios

Check out the facebook page for this event HERE!

photo credit: lululemon athletica

I’m so excited to share some news with you guys! Mid City Yoga and UrbanLand Company are excited to announce a distinctly urban yoga experience: Rooftop Yoga!  Overlooking U Street, the Floridian is the perfectly picturesque place to get your practice out of the studio and into the world! Come for the workout, come for the zen, come and enjoy an unparalleled view of the beauty that is DC– all for free.

On the first Tuesday of the month all summer long, starting at 6:00p, grab a mat (and maybe a friend!) and join us for an energetic and fun all-levels flowing yoga class taught by Mid City Yoga’s own Michael Joel Hall.

The Floridian is located at 929 Florida Avenue, NW.  Mid City Yoga specializes in yoga in unconventional spaces. UrbanLand Company is a D.C. realty with listings of DC condos & Washington houses for sale in the best Washington neighborhoods.

For more information, check out:
Facebook Event Page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=129891367023538&ref=mf
Mid City Yoga on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/miDCityYoga
UrbanLand Company: http://www.facebook.com/urbanlandcompany

When the sky is blue and the road is clear, nature has a way of making magic happen. This past Saturday, I was friend-napped by a motley gang, thrown into the back of a car, and *ahem* forced to put on a big ol’ floppy hat. As a landlocked denizen of the city who travels nearly exclusively via bipedal locomotion, getting into the back seat of a car and heading a few hours out of town feels as rare as snow in July. As rare as finding real magic in the world.

A bit of hocus pocus (and a few hours) later, a car full of big brims and bigger grins arrived safely at the beach.

The weather was clear, the drinks flowed, and the mirth was so tangible you could swaddle yourself in it. In fact, that’s exactly what I did. I fell asleep on Saturday night listening to the sounds of the ocean and my best friends’ laughter.

I was aware that my my energy and mood were both beginning to run a bit low, but it wasn’t until I was able to fully peel back the outer petals and become “me” again that I realized how wilted I was before we left.

Yes, this week I’m fresh as a spring green, rejuvenated, and wholly healthy. It strikes me as amazing what taking yourself just a short distance away can do for… well, everything. My shoulders had hunched, my jaw had tightened, and my brow furrowed previously– but now? A tall stalk of Michael.

I can see clearly now the before and after. There is a term for this sort of awareness. It’s proprioception.

Proprioception is the sense of self, sometimes called the “sixth sense”. Don’t get it little-boy-and-Bruce-Willis twisted, there isn’t any voodoo in this sense. Its all very real, and very well designed.

We have proprioceptors all over our body that constantly give us feed back about our body’s relationship to space. The little inner receptors, like the golgi tendon organ and the muscle spindles, are what give us the information about how tense our muscles are, how our limbs are angled in space, and really, our general spacial relationship to the world around us.

These adequate stimuli receptors are there waiting to be used, and we do so without any real congnizance quite frequently. How frequently? Like, every second of every minute of every day. However, when we bring cognitive recognition to both the stillness and the actions of the body, we’re able to get a feeling of how and where we are in space that can be so enriching it borders on profound.

Just as my trip to the beach allowed me to bring awareness back to the self, I would encourage each of you this week to take some time and listen to your body. Ask it questions, and see what it says. Be patient as you listen for the answer. In the silence, your body will speak to you, and part of a strong yoga practice, I dare say an advanced yoga practice is listening in the silence for the body to whisper its subtle cues.

It can be something as simple as questioning “How straight is my arm?” or “Am I stretching the skin of my fingers?”

Then of course, you’ll have to listen for the answer.

As I got a taste of my bliss in a slow, sun-drenched beach town, I couldn’t help but wonder if the “sixth sense” went deeper.  Is this very sort of awareness, this practice of questioning and listening, capable of bring us closer to something more profound?

Can we hear our inner, authentic self if we learn to question and listen?

I think so.

What does your inner self have to say?

Love must be as much a light, as it is a flame.  ~Henry David Thoreau

I’ve been burning a dark, cold flame.

This week, I spoke to my classes about one of the different kinds of yoga that exist outside of the physical, specifically touching on the yoga of the heart: Bhakti yoga. While I worked on cracking open my student’s heart center (figuratively and litereally), a friend allowed obesity to end his life, a car came purposteriously close to endangering mine, and I couldn’t deadlift as much as I would have liked.

My inner monologue had begun to feel like crabs in a pot, only able to take so much of the flame before it came to a shrill scream. I nearly lost it on a couple who cut in front of me in line at Whole Foods with 18 items in the express lane.

Erica tells me I have white people problems.

She’s right, and it makes me laugh when I remove myself from my own malarkey. As I find myself noting the steam coming from the cracks in my exterior enamel, I’m reminded to return to my breath.

I didn’t flip out on the couple. Barely.

The next time you find yourself nearly going over the edge, as I nearly did, I would encourage you to disconnect from the anger by observing your breath. Allow your focus to shift from an outside perspective to an inner one.  The outer circumstances can’t always provide you with the context required to make an adequate, informed judgement call on whats happening; however, a look at your inner fire can access why you are responding in whatever a manner it is you’re responding.

I find that compassion, sometimes called karuna, is harder when you’re not as happy with your innerworld as you might like to be.  Was I really mad at the couple, or upset at Big Rob’s death?

You don’t have to like the person pissing you off, thats not what I’m implying, but it might be a good call to ask what good your inner anger is doing you. Or, equally valid, what its doing for those that have to deal with you, Oh, and for those that do love you.

The more love we’re able to give the more we’re capable of receiving. Compassion goes a long way to helping love those that we might not actually like, as it reminds us that we are all made of the same stuff. We’re all bound by one self– one huge love.

Bring awareness to all of your actions, and love openly.

Watch what happens.

I love you.

From the NYT Article, “A Yoga Manifesto“:

Yoga is definitely big business these days. A 2008 poll, commissioned by Yoga Journal, concluded that the number of people doing yoga had declined from 16.5 million in 2004 to 15.8 million almost four years later. But the poll also estimated that the actual spending on yoga classes and products had almost doubled in that same period, from $2.95 billion to $5.7 billion.

“The irony is that yoga, and spiritual ideals for which it stands, have become the ultimate commodity,” Mark Singleton, the author of “Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice,” wrote in an e-mail message this week. “Spirituality is a style, and the ‘rock star’ yoga teachers are the style gurus.”

Well, maybe it is the recession, but some yogis are now saying “Peace out” to all that. There’s a brewing resistance to the expense, the cult of personality, the membership fees. At the forefront of the movement is Yoga to the People, which opened its first studio in 2006 in the East Village on St. Marks Place, with a contribution-only, pay-what-you-can fee structure.

Lets make a few things really, really clear:

• Yoga on a mat without intention is simply exercise (albiet good exercise).
• Being an adept teacher (regardless of craft) does not automatically make someone a style icon but it will make that teacher a shaper of impressionable minds.
• Being free doesn’t mean being better, nor is the inverse true.
• Identifying with a teacher is not a bad thing, never has been, and it should come as no surprise that good teachers become well known.

So, what does it matter if you enjoy doing yoga in $108 yoga pants? It doesn’t.

What does it matter if you prefer sandy beaches over Manduka PVC? It doesn’t.

What does matter? Your attachment to these things. Me and my water bottle alone have no bearing on you as a yogi, but how YOU relate to me and my water bottle does. Luckily, if you practice yoga on the mat with good intention, you’ll be prepared to practice off the mat, too.

Pardon the platitude, but: practice, and all will come.

Yoga is a mind game, a breathing exercise, a way to prepare ourselves to be better for what lies ahead. That said,  if you’re confronted by a sexy ass in a pair of something lulu, or caught up in envy of the mat (or pose, or person or…) to your left, you’ve been given some excellent obstacles to overcome in order to enrich your real yoga practice. Your own indignation is a reflection of the work that lies ahead for you.

This whole article struck me as indignant.

The goal, the main aim of (what I believe to be) true yoga is to stop the fluctuations, the churning, of the mind.

With the right intention you can charge how ever much you want for whatever you want and pay as little or as much as you want for whatever you want and it is yoga.

Everything else is yoga-based exercise.

It is the mission of Mid City Yoga (my company, for which this blog is a joyful supplement) to bring what I believe to be a transformative,  ancient practice to new places and spaces. I’ve been calling it guerrilla yoga for the past few years, but in reality, its just another name for the same thing: yoga.

So, what does this have to do with finances?

At the end of the day, wear what you want. Do yoga on what you want. And do yourself (as well as the universal self of which we are all a part) a favor and don’t judge others for preferring to do their practice how and where they care to– whether its on a statue in the middle of a circle, in a pay what you can class at the end of the block, or in a mirrored room at the Sports Club LA with a private teacher and a $900 water bottle. Seriously, dude,  just get out and practice.

Two more quick facts:

• Jealousy ain’t cute
• The paths  are many, the truth is one.

Now, in regards to the “rock star” yogi business… well, I’m a teacher, and I have people who like my pedegogy. Call me biased, but I’m glad for that. I love sharing my practice, and couldn’t do that without my students. The very same students who, not so incidentally, challenge me daily. I take pleasure in seeing my students progress in asana as well as seeing their world views shift based on their realizations fostered by simple mat-bound exercise set.

I would not be upset if more people wanted to share with me.

I have worked with many excellent teachers (including the aforementioned Bryan Kest), but I have very few people for whom I allow the term teacher to take reverence. Kristen Krash and Kristina Maze have both been very instrumental in my development as a man, a yogi, and a teacher for very different reasons. We have a relationship that is commonly called a parampara. Don’t worry if the term is new to you, it simply denotes a teacher who teaches a student directly from a specific lineage.

My paths?

BKS Iyengar  to John Schumacher to Kristen Krash to Me.
Swami Sivananda to Swami Vishnu-devananda to Kristina Maze to Me.

Would I call either lady my guru? Probably not, because much like the term parampara, that word has some boogidty-boo baggage with which I’d care not to associate directly. Perhaps its the American in me, but whatever. I’ll confess I’ve got hang ups around the notions of a guru.

A better question: would you call Iyengar or Sivananda rock stars? I’d call them world renowned teacher. I’m hard pressed to relate them to the Beatles, Lars Ulrich, Madonna (as much as I love her), or Robert Plant.

Is it really this articles assertion that their is a movement suggesting you knowing who my teachers have been (or heck, just knowing I’m going to be yours) make me less effective?

I don’t think so. I would argue the opposite but again, the paths are many.

One last thing: I practice, in my personal life, the yoga of syntheis.

From wiki:

Swami Sivananda’s approach to Yoga was to combine the four main paths – Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga,Jnana Yoga and Raja Yoga …. This is reflected in the motto of the society that he formed, The Divine Life Society…. “Serve (Karma Yoga), Love (Bhakti Yoga), Meditate (Jnana Yoga), Realise (Raja Yoga).” In his own words, “One-sided development is not commendable. Religion and Yoga must educate and develop the whole man – his heart, intellect and hand.”

Back to the money: Serve comes first.

I know we shouldn’t expect free things everywhere, but if you have a teacher not giving of themselves selflessly somewhere (in some way), then I’m hard pressed to believe they’re practicing fully off the mat. No judgement, just seems like common sense. Selfless service, Karma Yoga, is an essential part of a practice.

As I enjoy teaching (and might be better at it, than, say, collecting trash), I find that my volunteer hours are often well spent doing just that. So, it comes as no surprise to me that their are free classes all OVER the place. And you would be well served to take one. Just remember to give back, too. Teach your nephew wheel or something.

Practice yoga in line, in Stroga, and in the sack. Yoga everywhere. Yoga anywhere.

Everyone will be better for it, and it doesn’t have to cost a dime.