"By archery in the traditional sense, which he esteems as an art and honours as a national heritage, the Japanese does not understand a sport but, strange as this may sound at first, a religious ritual. And consequently, by the " art " of archery he does not mean the ability of the sportsman, which can be controlled, more or less, by bodily exercises, but an ability whose origin is to be sought in spiritual exercises and whose aim consists in hitting a spiritual goal, so that fundamentally the marksman aims at himself and may even succeed in hitting himself."  ~ Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel
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A multidisciplinary or, in our case a multi-sport approach to skills development, makes for a more adaptable creative athlete and paves the way for revealing ones highest potential.  The Multi Sport approach cultivates what Canadian Sport for Life describes “Physical Literacy.” Basically physical literacy is the ability to perform basic movement patterns that are common to many different sports.  Canadian Sport for life suggests that developing a broad range of physical literacies shorten the learning curve for new sports.  It also gives developing athletes a broad pallet of skills to work with that makes them uniquely innovative.  Often these are a the athletes that we see progressing sports.

I was very luck to have been put into dance lessons at a young age.  I started learning Highland Dance at the age of five and went on to compete until my mid teens.  It was remarkably demanding on me to memorize all the steps at that young age and very nerve racking to perform in front of large crowds but I gained so much from the experience.  One unexpected side benefit was how physically strong it made me.  

In grade two when I was seven years old my elementary school held a just for fun track competition.  Boys and girls competed together in running races, high jump and other events.  When it came to the running race I was really surprised to learn, in-spite the fact I was on the smaller side of kids in my school, I was really fast.  In fact, I was one of the fastest kid in my school.  All the Highland Dances have at their base a constant jumping motion for the entire duration of the song.  All this jumping, it turns out, was excellent cross training for sprinting.  

So often we are quick to label a kid who shows promise in a discipline from a young age naturally talented.  Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, demonstrates that quite often seemingly unrelated experiences and circumstances play a large role in determining who will be exceptionally successful in a given discipline.  The idea of natural talent is a bit of a myth.    

Yoga is one of those disciplines that cultivates so many physical literacies.  Most people when they think of yoga in the context of it's benefit for other disciplines they are pursuing naturally think about increased flexibility however, this is just one small component of the myriad benefits yoga instills.  Key amongst these are balance, coordination, core strength, effective breathing, concentration, refined use of muscular effort and an overall heightened sensitivity to as well as awareness of the body.  

For skiers yoga provides a perfectly complimentary overlay of physical literacies that lend themselves beautifully to the learning, refinement and perfecting of four foundational skiing competencies.  These are balance, alignment, power & flow.  However, in the vast unregulated world of yoga there are as many types of yoga practice as there are Yoga Teachers.  Skiers have specific needs and limitations that not all yoga practices effectively address.  

Next Week:  Yoga for Skiers Best Practices, What to Look For in a Yoga Teacher & Practice
             
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"I glimpsed it for fifteen seconds and it made me a servant for life." ~ Kabir
 
In the west when we think of yoga, many of us imagine a bunch of skinny people in stretchy pants performing exotic physical contortions on a sticky mat while breathing heavily.  We consider yoga akin to any other type of physical conditioning class like Pilates and Cross Fit.  This is because it has been rebranded and marketed to a western audience as such.  The high emphasis on the physical aspects of the practice and the exclusion of the religious, philosophical and psychological underpinnings is just the latest iteration in Yoga's five thousand year history. 

Yoga arose in India around the fifth and sixth centuries BCE and became one of the six orthodox philosophies in Hinduism.  From the pre-classical through to the medieval periods in India saw the composition of several profoundly impactful religious and philosophical texts that influenced belief systems throughout the eastern world.  These jewels of human contemplation were committed to history in the deeply symbolic language of Sanskrit.  

The Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, amongst others, describe a world view that is very different to that which we hold in the west.  In the west, we see ourselves a separate, autonomous units acting in the universe and being acted upon by the universe.  In eastern philosophy there is no individual isolated self separate from the universe.  All is one and therefore the self is the universe.

The goal of yoga is to attain liberation from the small view of self as a separate entity operating within the whole by experiencing union directly with the whole.  In fact, the word Yoga translates to mean to yoke or to unite.  The yoga practitioner disciplines her mind through yoga practice so as to reside in the perceptual state of experiencing herself as synonymous with the universe or, put another way, to remember that she is God.  That's a little more lofty than standing on your head or getting your leg behind it wouldn't you say?  

The method of attaining liberation differs slightly depending on the type of yoga you practice.  There are four types of yoga: Jnana Yoga - the yoga of knowledge: Bhakti Yoga - the yoga of devotion: Karma Yoga - the yoga of action; and Raja Yoga - the yoga of meditation.  Even if you are a regular yoga practitioner in the west you may never have heard of these four types of yoga.  Allow me to explain the long thread that links the yoga we practice on sticky mats in tight pants to the original yoga. 

Raja Yoga (or royal yoga) is described in The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is a systematic eight step linear process of attaining liberation.  Step one and two of Raja Yoga are the Yamas & Niyamas which involve becoming a disciplined, moral person.  Step three, Asana means posture, but in Raja yoga there was only one posture,  a seated posture called padmasana or lotus.  Step four is Pranayam or breath exercises.  Step five is Pratyahara which involves learning to turn ones attention inward.  The sixth through eighth stages are Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi or concentration, meditation and self knowledge.  The practice of these three is what results in Moksha or liberation. Everything beforehand is prep work.    

At a certain point in Raja Yoga's history there was little revolution.  Some yogi's (yoga practitioners) believed the Brahmans (the priesthood caste in Hinduism) had become a little corrupt.  The Brahmans, by insisting upon the system of Raja Yoga starting with the very difficult stages of Yama and Niyama, made yoga the exclusive domain of aesthetics.  These were the very severely disciplined practitioners who would abstain from all indulgences.  We are talking about people who would live in caves with no possessions, relying on alms to survive so they could spend all their time meditating.      
Some yogis believed Raja Yoga excluded normal house holders from practicing yoga.  They branched out, creating a seven stage system of yoga that deemphasized the Yamas & Niyamas in favour of a practice that had a lower bar to entry and was more physically tangible.  

Philosophically Raja Yoga was very reality negative and the physical body was seen as something to be transcended.  One was trying to escape reality and the body through the practice of Raja Yoga where as Hatha Yoga was far more reality affirming.  One could practice Hatha Yoga and hope to achieve liberation while holding a job, getting married, having children and all the other activities that make up human life.  

In Sanskrit the word Hatha breaks down into ha and tha which mean sun and moon.  The sun represents divine masculine while the moon represents the divine feminine.  Therefore Hatha Yoga is about uniting the masculine with the feminine.  

Going way back to Samkhya, another of the six orthodox philosophies in India, the two irreducible elements that gave rise to all manifest reality were purusha (consciousness) and prakrti (matter), also represented as divine masculine and feminine respectively.  In Hatha Yoga the practitioner achieves liberation through the pathway of prakriti (matter) or the body, uniting it with consciousness.          

In Hatha Yoga the first stage is Shatkarma or physical purification.  Many of us in the west are now familiar with the Netti pot for cleansing the nasal passages with salt water.   Jala Netti is one of the Shatkarmas.  Stages two through seven are Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana & Samadhi.  

The manual on Hatha Yoga, called The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, gives the first mention of yoga postures (or asanas) besides padmasana but lists only fifteen, non of which are standing postures.  Another text on Hatha Yoga called the Gheranda Samhita lists only thirty two asanas.  This is a far cry from the thousands of asanas we have today in modern yoga practice.  Bear with me a moment longer as I explain how that all came about.   
          
All the countless styles of yoga that we practice today in the west came from Hatha Yoga.  Hatha Yoga developed in India between the 600 CE - 1500 CE but fell into relative obscurity for a long time until a remarkable Indian master practitioner named Tirumalai Krishnamacharya taught a small contingent of students who went on to popularize Yoga in the west.  Please note that there were other teachers who brought yoga to the west whom I do not have time to go into detail about.  However, because Krishnamacharyas impact was so extensive, we can understand the evolution of modern yoga almost exclusively from his teaching lineage.  

Krishnamacharya was a remarkable scholar and renown healer in India who lived in exceptional health right up to the age of 101.  He taught B.K.S. Iyengar, Indra Devi, Pattabhi Jois, and his son T.K.V. Desikachar.  These four teachers developed their own schools of Hatha Yoga that emphasized slightly different aspects of the practice.  Many students of these four teachers went on to create their own styles of yoga within the school they had been certified.  The students of those teachers went on to start brand naming their unique spins on the styles of yoga they had been certified in.  Along the way, the practice of Hatha Yoga has been the subject of constant evolution in the absence of regulation.  Therefore, modern yoga practice in the west is the result of countless teachers putting their own unique spin on an ancient psycho physical spiritual practice.      

In this blog series I will be talking a lot about modern Hatha Yoga as it pertains to improving the health of a Skier, and by extension, skiing performance.  Through the practice of Hatha Yoga, skiers can improve their physical conditioning, prevent injury, refine kinesthetic awareness, accelerate learning movement patterns, and better cope with stress.  

However, when it comes to The Spiritual Skier, I am talking about skiing as Karma Yoga.   Skiing as Karma Yoga elevates skiing to an art.  For those who have dedicated their lives to skiing, it is a sacred duty.  Skiing as Karma Yoga becomes an end in itself - meaningful, purposeful and the access point to awe.  I will have the opportunity to elaborate on what Skiing as Karma Yoga means when I get to blog entry on Flow.  

Next Week:  How Yoga Saved My Life  

"In the perfect moment, I was.. Or, I felt to be, a little superman." ~ Stefano De Benedetti

Conscious of it or not it seams most of us are compelled to test our limits for reasons that are hard to articulate but just as critical to our health and wellbeing as breathing.  The quest to know ones limits is one and the same with coming to know ones self.  It is a journey full of obstacles, challenges and sometimes it is down right heart breaking.  However, when these obstacles and challenges are met with conviction and will power eventually they are overcome. 

There is a reason the epic has been such an enduring story format throughout human history.  We all resonate with the plight of the seeker who sets out to overcome a seemingly insurmountable obstacle and in so doing learns what he or she is made of.  The qualities of human beings most universally prized tend to reveal themselves during these journeys to seek out boundaries and transcend them.  The attributes of discipline, conviction, tenacity, passion and heart are nouns we use to describe the larger than life individuals who are the protagonists of these stories.     

The sport world is full of epics.  We are fascinated by individuals who pursues perfection in sport and becomes a fully actualized masters.  One such individual is Stefano De Benedetti, the first man to descend Mont Blanc's East Face.  In the extreme skiing documentary Steep De Benedetti described his journey towards becoming one of the pioneer extreme skiers as "his way of becoming a man." 

In the seventies and eighties as De Benedetti and others were first attempting to ski massive perviously un-navigated peaks the technology was not nearly as advanced as it is now.  True grit of character, iron thighs and a fiery drive to learn what is possible on skis compelled these athletes, in spite incredible risk, to push themselves beyond what was considered possible.  

We admire individuals like De Benedetti even though we can't completely understand why they do what they do.  Even when we are pursuing our own passions we can hardly articulate ourselves what our own quest to transcend is about.  We become spiritual when attempting to describe our it because it is a process richly textured, so beyond the mundane as to completely defy language.  All we know for sure is that we need it.  If we are lucky enough to be on such a quest we tend to rank it above all things in spite it's intangibility and regardless the risks involved.  If we have not yet found it we ache for it deeply.  That seams strange doesn't it?   

The Indian yogi mystic Sadhguru in an interview with Oscar winning filmmaker Shekhar Kapur proposes a very elegant explanation for the origin of this compulsion towards transcendence.  "There is something within you which cannot stand boundaries. Or, in other words, there is something within you which wants to become boundless. What can be boundless? A physical form can be small or big, but never boundless. There is something within you which is longing to touch a dimension which is beyond the physical."     

Somehow it is in the pushing of boundaries that we find ourselves in the realm of living meaningfully and with purpose as we are fulfilling that most lofty of human needs, the need for what psychologist Abraham Maslow called self actualization.  Evolutionarily this makes sense.  A species that has an inborn desire to push boundaries will be innovative and ultimately adaptive to change.  Change appears to be the one constant in the universe so the compulsion towards transcendence is humanities and by extension life's instrument for propagating into a vast inhospitable universe.  

Remember how I said the Ski Bum will be the hero of this blog series?  It can not be underestimated how important it is to follow the compulsion towards transcendence or put another way follow your passion, no matter what that looks like for you.  What we are really talking about is nothing short of the survival of our species.  

I can appreciate how that statement sounds a little grandiose.  But consider how out of harmony with our very nature we now feel as a global civilization when we have built a system where we do things we don't like for stuff we don't need.  Look at what that system has created.  Think of the tremendous potential discoveries that are being lost because so many of us have to commit time and energy towards basic survival rather than the pursuit of passions.  Just as tragic think of how many of us have the capacity to pursue our passions but don't because our priorities have become so messed up.  It's not hard to see how the system we have created will ultimately destroy us because it is so fundamentally out of touch with what we are. 

There is something within all of us that does not like limits and this compels us to push through boundaries even at our own individual peril.  The ancient yogis thousands of years ago concluded that this is because our true nature is actually limitless.  True or not living from that paradigm makes us more adaptive as a species to the natural pressures of environmental change.  Therefore it makes sense to do crazy things, push your boundaries, follow your passions not on an individual level but on a species level.  Dare I say following your passion in life, no matter form it takes,  is what you have evolved to do and is your greatest contribution as an agent of the process of life.      

Next Week:  Yoga, Not Exactly What You Think It Is