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Strength. A strange word these days. What does the word mean outside of its typical egoic context? What does it mean beneath the outer experience as we’ve been taught it in Western culture? And this is a blog entry on the page of a yoga studio?

I know. This is yoga, or at least the yogic practice continues to be the doorway through which we enjoy a practice that, without premeditation or conceptualization, is expanding so fast and evolving in such ways that all we can do is surrender to it. It’s that powerful, that dynamic, and that soft and maleable. It’s like water…

How do we find the strength in a practice that, for most of its western life, has been mostly revolving around flexibility? How do we ‘cross-train’ and blend yoga into our lives in the most integrated, nourishing way? What happens if we are both flexible and strong?

Length and strength as one. This message is coming through so resonantly in this year of the water dragon. It is an extension of, if I may step into the world of dogma for a moment, the very Taoist vibe that seems to be flowing forth from such an intuitive practice.

There seems to be less and less room for discord, less and less room for anything that lacks balance. Less and less distance between such concepts as male and female, sky and ground, and all the endless conceptually opposed relationships.

Strength is in the flexibility, in the open-mindedness, and the willingness to step into the unknown. Strength is sensitivity, and the subtlety of awareness in everything we find ourselves immersed in.

You’ll find it in classes at the studio, where you can enjoy the ever-evolving and expanding practice. Threads are weaving themselves into a tapestry that keeps the practice so far outside the proverbial box that the word ‘yoga’ must be held with less and less attachment to what it has meant traditionally.

The postures are morphing, evolving, deconstructing, and refining themselves. The concept of ‘posture’ is breaking down under the creative flow of the primal dance emerging from the practice.

There are now three different variations of trikonasna, five different variations of parsvottanasana, and all the time postures seem to be emerging not as new, but simple and profound. The sequencing is nuts – a beautiful expression of symmetry as symmetry, and so deeply body appropriate and healing that we are finding depths of integration I never knew possible. But then another voice within says “duh”.

Now the martial stances are coming in that so beautifully bring Qi/Prana and Grace together, adding so much coiling and spring. The Dragon is certainly rising. There is truly no limit to movement as an expression of breath and core awareness. When I look around at all the beings in class, I don’t see students on the mat, but instead I am surrounded by the beauty of more and more awakening wild animals. It is truly awe inspiring.

You can attend classes yes, three times a week if possible is a magic number, a threshold that once traversed, amplifies the practice significantly. And if you want to go all the way into an exploration and study of where the practice is coming from, check out the yogananta training. Session 1 starts late next month, May 26th! There’s still time if you want to join us!

If you are attending classes at Dragon Rising, you get it. Sharing this practice and how it is reflected in the community is such a wonderful gift. To watch you embody, to see your energy soften and expand, and your awareness deepen – to see you all at once becoming soft and strong – I bow to that…

Much love in the creativity of the bursting Spring!

Surrender ~ it’s the core of the practice. And in the year of the Dragon, as so much transforms and it feels as if we are on the accelerated path of awakening, the old ways are shifting so fast it is difficult to keep up.

That might be exactly how you feel if you have been with us since last March, through all of our changes and adjustments. “What are they changing now?”, you may have asked yourself. On one hand it feels like all of our change is rubbing up against the status quo of the old paradigm business model, and yet to me it feels like the many changes have followed the natural evolution of what our yoga space is here to hold. It just feels right.

Recently I was contacted by a woman who owns a spa in Portland, Oregon by the name of Dragontree Spa. She explained to me that they are going national, expanding to everywhere, and that there might be client confusion in Santa Fe with our names being the same.

We went back and forth about it and I valiantly defended our cause. Then it turned into a threat of litigation and I had to check it out legally. After a bit of homework involving legal council, and the help of friends in the community, it turns out that the best course of action was to indeed change our name.

As you know, we have already been through one name change already. And now we are once more changing our name. There is no way that this event, although appearing like the good old days of businesses warring over ownership of things that ultimately have no substance, could be random or insignificant. I only defended our “Dragon Tree” name because we had an amazing logo from my friend Brian Stelfreeze, and I had personally done all the work with the website, graphic design, and everything that comes with it. It was a lot, and I didn’t want to start again from the beginning. But then…

Why not? Why couldn’t this be the perfect opportunity to let go and look with wide eyes at something that might actually more adequately reflect the space we hold and the practice we share at the nameless yoga studio?

If we are seeking to deepen our relationship with the Nameless through yoga, then in one sense there is no name that can possibly describe the practice we find ourselves so immersed in. Every day there is something fresh, new, crazy, and unorthodox that comes from the mat. It continues to be so joyous to surf such an intuitive practice.

And from that practice the song has come – the rising of the classical kundalini, the midline, the chong-mai, the yin, and the creativity that flows freely from the process of liberation. The Dragon is Rising.

It took some time. A handful of days went by as I tried to feel into where the name might go, trying all the while to somehow retain the tree from our original logo, and of course the most important part – the Dragon. I tried all sorts of names and bounced them off of Margi and friends that frequent the studio. For a while it seemed there was nothing that would fit. And yet it also felt that it would not require a complete departure from what had come before.

And then, out of the depths, a name came that was so obvious that I had really just stumbled past it. I bounced it off of Margi and a few others, and a friend just before a class who actually refined it. Thanks Jennie. I checked into it. Other than a conscious publishing company in Europe and a few little tags on the internet, none of which look ready to take over the world with such a name, it was clear. Then there was the web domain check and that fell into place as well.

The new name speaks more deeply to what has been flowing both in the studio and in life. It invokes the dynamism of the path we are all on. It stimulates our awakening and the drive for truth and our relationship with the One. The tree works beautifully, as a slightly more abstract expression of the rising of the Breath of Life.

As many of you have no doubt noticed, when we changed from ‘Center’ back to ‘Dragon Tree’, we didn’t change the property signs in Pacheco Park or on the studio door. I’m not really sure why I never seemed to get around to it, but here we are. Next week we get new signs, and the website is completely reworked as of this writing.

Once again I bow to you all for your yogi flexibility, for your faith in us, and most of all for staying focused on the real reason we are here – to practice as deeply as we can and share that with the community.

Much Love ~