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I have finally got myself in order and I’m starting to do some classes online on YouTube. I feel like an eejit doing this but sure, since I’m going around looking like the wreck of the Hespers, eating and drinking my way through Ireland’s food stocks, haven’t brushed my hair in a couple of weeks and am incapable of wearing anything that doesn’t include an oil-based stretch product; this’ll be just one more string to my mak-a-hames-of-it bow.

Here are the details. Please send any complaints to my Om Shanti Management Team. 🙂

From Wednesday April 15th classes will be live-streamed on YouTube at 12 midday every day. Some videos will remain available on the channel for re-watching afterwards. These classes are by donation with no obligation. I understand completely that many people are in a bad financial position with what’s going on. So, if you do feel that you would like to pay something for the class and you are in a position to so, please keep donations to single digits. You can donate by Paypal if you have a Paypal account, estellebirdy@gmail.com or by Revolut, number 086 794 1624.  Here’s the YouTube Channel. Estelle Birdy Yoga Online

Please remember that classes online are no substitute for practising together in a class setting but sure, we have to give it a go. Stay safe and well out there.

*****All Public Yoga Classes At The Wisdom Centre Are Postponed Due To The Covid-19 Crisis. We will return as soon as public health advice indicates that it is safe to do so*****

I must preface this story with an earlier story, lest anyone should think I’m mad or something. So, in 2016, I went back to the corporate world for a while. I was stationed in a key location in the military-industrial complex, Baggot Street, Dublin 2.. My desk was positioned on the first floor of a beautiful Georgian building on the part of the street where huge old trees line the centre of the road. If you know those buildings, you’ll know that the windows have little railings around them, not big enough to stand on but big enough for a window box. So one day this noise started behind me while I toiled away at my desk. I turned around and there was a grey crow making shapes in at me. There it was perched on the rail, looking in the window and shouting (cawing or whatever you like to call it) at me. Now, being a person who favours reason over nonsense, I at first thought the bird must be seeing its reflection and having a shouting match with itself. However, I checked the light and the way it was falling on the window and eliminated that as a possibility. So, I just sat quietly and looked at the grey crow, at about a metre’s distance, while it finished its talk and then it flew away.  All of which would have been no big deal, had it not happened repeatedly. It would come and make a load of noise at the window until I turned round and looked at it. If I didn’t turn round, it would hammer at the window. Then it would complete a load of funny whistley noises and fluff its wings and then just look me in the eye for ages. Then it would just fly off. It’s a grey crow you know. One day, I was having my eye contact communication with my grey crow friend when my colleague, Nina (a genuine beaut of a person) waved at it to scare it away. I said “Ah Jaysus, it only wants to come and tell us something.” That got Nina annoyed because “Animals do not come to tell us things. That’s wrong! Only the lord speaks to us!”  Which may or may not be true. Personally, if I was going to do Christianity, it’d be of the early-Irish Christian variety, with birds and animals and hymns to the rising sun-god. I have provided this preface to demonstrate an established relationship with grey crows.

So that’s the preface over. Now back to recent times. A few weeks ago, I was doing my weekly LSD. Yes, I did that deliberately to make my life sound exciting. It now means, in the context of my current life, Long Slow Distance. That week, it was 21K. Round and round the Phoenix Park. It was a beautiful day, sunny and cool and I was running like a champ. It was the easiest long run I had done so far. I was flying, legs light and they just kept pumping. I ran the hills faster than the flat. I run without headphones and on my own. So there are no distractions from the battles in my body and my mind. The whole thing is like one long meditation or series of meditations. There’s the mantra meditation phase, ‘when I run long, I’m light and strong’ or ‘when I run long, I’m fast and strong’. There’s the Mindfulness-Of-Breathing phase, listening to my breathing and counting to ten and repeat and repeat. There’s the counting with the Rhythm-of-My-Steps phase. There’s the Awareness-Of-Sensation-And-Relax phase. There’s the Sorting-Out-All-Past-And-Future-Rows-And-Problems’ phase. Mostly there’s the ‘I- Cannot- Believe-I-Have- Another-8-Miles-To-Go-I-Am-Going-To-Lie-Down-Here-In-The-Mud-And-Puke-And-Then-Die phase. Except this time, although there were the usual phases, it just wasn’t a battle. I was Usain Bolt trapped in a dumpy white middle-aged with GAA legs woman’s body. I finished my last of 13 miles at 9.5 minute per mile pace. That’s huge for me.

So I got back to the car and threw myself down on the grass to try and stretch because my hips weren’t feeling as Usain Bolt as the rest of me. After a while, I hear this rattling and cackling behind me and I turn to look. There’s a beautiful grey crow standing there looking at me. So I say, “Would you like an apricot?” because, by this stage, I had my packet of apricots in my hand. And she seemed interested and came a little closer and I threw her an apricot and she came closer still to collect it. She backed up to a nice patch of well cut grass and had a few nibbles and I munched mine at the same time.  She occasionally threw a few gurgly cackles my way and I said things like, “Yeah I know they’re nice and juicy aren’t they?” and other such small talk. She’d only actually swallowed a small amount of her apricot when she picked it up and walked over to part of the grass where there were a lot of dried grass cuttings. She turned her back to me and seemed to be scratching and digging at the ground. Then she turned and walked back to her nice fresh grass area where she felt we had a comfortable distance between us. She was now minus her apricot. “Did you just hide your apricot?” I asked and she said some cackles back at me. After a while, I walked over to the spot where I thought she’d hidden it, with her standing by making mad noises at me. Please see below photo of the little ground nest she’d made for her precious apricot.

I pulled off the lid to see if I could find it but covered it back over before I stepped way. Once I was at a safe distance, she blustered back over to her apricot nest and bad-temperedly reefed it out of it, marched back to her green carpet area and put her apricot down on the ground and started shredding bits off it. I thought she was angrily going to gobble it to show me what she thought of people who give her gifts, then try to steal them. She was certainly making enough noise about it. But then she picked up the rest of her apricot in her beak and stepped back from the shredded little bits she’d left on the ground. At an even further distance away, she put her apricot down again and started doing these gurgly and chirpy noises at me.  She was sharing her apricot with me. She’d shredded up the little bits off her big apricot for me. She probably thought that even though I have quite the shrón, it wasn’t capable of eating this rubbery sticky thing and I needed my food cut up for me.

So I walked back over to the little pieces and I thanked her very much but explained that it was her apricot and that I needed to leave. I walked back to the car and watched her as she came back to her little pieces and then stood there watching me as I drove away. I’m sure she thought I was a complete dope and really very rude. But I’m not actually mad so I’m not going to eat a beak-prepared meal just to be polite.

This then is the story of how I came to be sharing a meal with a grey crow.

Sometimes we all need information about unusual, perhaps niche matters. The skills described in the linked video might not seem, at first, to be relevant in an Irish context. However, think Badger, as I always do. You might be wondering what this has to do with yoga. Yoga is about connecting with all of nature, within and without. Shake of that stress. Push and fan. And of course, always lubricate the tail. I know I do.

www.youtube.com/watch

WHEN I WAS 24, I was having a chat with my dad. I had been reading an article about the legend of Shaolin monks walking through monastery walls. The story was that these monks had, more or less, meditated themselves through the solid stone.

I was full of how amazing this was – imagine if people were so enlightened that they were able to defy the laws of physics? My dad listened to me intently. Then he said: “That’s grand but who’s going to dig the spuds? Someone was diggin’ the spuds while them boys were gettin’ themselves through walls. Someone always has to dig the spuds.”

He was right, of course. There are people who commit long hours, days, years to their spiritual life; those who spend that time in silent meditation. According to the stories and legends, those people might, eventually, walk through a wall. However, those people still need to eat, drink and clothe themselves. In short, someone is digging their spuds for them because they’ve been sitting around meditating for the last ten years.

There are people who commit to their spiritual life but continue to do the day-to-day tasks for themselves, of course – Zen monks, for instance, tend to use general life tasks as part of their practice. However, no matter how simple the life you are leading, if you have removed yourself fully from normal life to pursue esoteric matters, be in no doubt that someone, back in the real world, is digging your spuds for you while you stand on your head.

Bringing it to the world

So, I’ve been thinking about the flip side of this. Another wise man whom I have encountered, Ken Jones, a political activist and leading light of the socially engaged Buddhism movement, explained that, for him, meditation without ‘taking it off the prayer cushion’ was almost pointless. After a long struggle with Zen practices, he decided that he needed to take his inner life into the world. He feels that anyone engaged in spiritual practices should bring what they’ve learned back into the real world. Conversely, though, he feels that without the inner work, your real world work, doesn’t work.

He cited the fact that so many very worthy movements and organisations ultimately fail in their aims. While the people who are involved are active and have the best of intentions, without those individuals doing some kind of inner reflective work on themselves, they become ineffective in the outer world eventually. People’s emotional baggage, their history, their lives, mean that, without a pause for reflection upon their actions and reactions, people act upon their own individual inner needs, at some point.

So now, it seems to me, that a balance is needed. A practical balance that is suited to this modern western lifestyle. Philosophical musings are grand but, again, who’s digging the spuds? Put simply, I’d bet there’s no woman sitting in Darfur navel gazing about how to walk through a wall or how to breathe into her hypertonic pelvic floor. That woman is digging the spuds, while I have the luxury of sitting here thinking and writing (and possibly boring everyone to tears).

As a yoga teacher, I have to consider that before ever stepping on a mat to practice there are the some precepts that we ought to bear in mind – like having gratitude and practising non-violence. We need to remember that it is these precepts that we must internalise before we step onto the mat. When we get up and leave, we need to take them with us.

Find your own ‘yoga’

Yoga without taking what you are learning back out into the world is pointless. Similarly, living and working in the real world is pointless without a pause, no matter how short, to check in with yourself. Your motivations, your feelings, your body. All of these are important, and those moments of reflection and tuning out the hustle and bustle will make you a more effective person in your general life. Most of us simply do not have the time, to spend hours in meditation or doing sun salutes. Those who do, hopefully, will bring what they’ve learned back to the rest of us. We need to find the balance between spud digging and walking through walls.

Not all of us will practise yoga as we know it in the west. The aforementioned great philosopher, Paddy Birdy, (AKA my dad), does his yoga in the form of sitting at a lake, fishing. There’s not a hope in hell of finding him chanting Om and sticking his leg behind his head. Not wanting to do myself, a yoga teacher, out of business, but your yoga might be just while you’re sweeping the floor, to really sweep the floor and nothing else. Don’t think about anything else, just really be sweeping that floor. If dancing is your thing, do that. Really, just be dancing.

Find your yoga and take your time out. Then go back to digging your spuds and I’ll warrant you’ll be much better at it.

This article first appeared on The Journal.ie years ago. Apologies for the blogging laziness but needs must. The Journal edited with a heavy hand too. So be aware the cut-out bits were far more insightful and terribly funny altogether.

Here’s the link to the original publication

http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/balance-between-your-everyday-life-and-spiritual-experience-1716442-Oct2014/

The church, the mosque, the mountains. View from the room. Waiting for my practice mates at Donore Community Drugs Team. Yoga in the mornings. Donore Community Centre. #lifeisgreatindublin8 #dublin #dublinireland #dublincity #yoga #yogainspiration #donorecommunitycentre #autumn