Tias Little

Tias Little

Tias Little synthesizes years of study in classical yoga, Sanskrit, Buddhism, anatomy, massage, and trauma healing in his dynamic, original style of teaching. One of the foremost yoga instructors in North America, he offers intensives at all major yoga conferences and institutes, including the Yoga Journal conferences, Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, Esalen Institute, and Omega Institute.
Tias began studying the work of B. K. S. Iyengar in 1984 and in 1989 moved to Mysore, India, where he studied Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois.

A licensed massage therapist, Tias has in-depth training in craniosacral therapy. His practice and teaching is influenced by the work of Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Thomas Hanna. He earned a master’s degree in Eastern philosophy from St. John’s College in Santa Fe in 1998.

In addition, Tias is the founder of the Prajna Yoga school in Santa Fe, where he hosts retreats, workshops, and teacher training programs year-round with his wife, Surya. He also offers online classes through YogaGlo and teaches internationally. For more on Tias, visit www.prajnayoga.net.

Tias Little

Tias Little synthesizes years of study in classical yoga, Sanskrit, Buddhism, anatomy, massage, and trauma healing in his dynamic, original style of teaching. One of the foremost yoga instructors in North America, he offers intensives at all major yoga conferences and institutes, including the Yoga Journal conferences, Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, Esalen Institute, and Omega Institute.
Tias began studying the work of B. K. S. Iyengar in 1984 and in 1989 moved to Mysore, India, where he studied Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois.

A licensed massage therapist, Tias has in-depth training in craniosacral therapy. His practice and teaching is influenced by the work of Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Thomas Hanna. He earned a master’s degree in Eastern philosophy from St. John’s College in Santa Fe in 1998.

In addition, Tias is the founder of the Prajna Yoga school in Santa Fe, where he hosts retreats, workshops, and teacher training programs year-round with his wife, Surya. He also offers online classes through YogaGlo and teaches internationally. For more on Tias, visit www.prajnayoga.net.

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GUIDES

Always New

The following is an excerpt from

The Practice is the Path

By Tias Little

The Practice Is the Path

Practices for On and Off the Mat

On the Mat

Be All Ears

Begin in child’s pose (balasana). Set your knees hip-width apart and stretch your arms straight out in front of you on the floor, in the same way you stretch your arms in downward dog pose. Either support your forehead on the floor, or rest your head on a block or blanket. Enter the pose with beginner’s mind—that is, “be all ears” and listen to the small, ongoing shifts that take place in your body. Note that every breath, every sensation is new. Scan your body for sensations and note whether your sensations are intense or mild. Observe where in your body you feel restriction. Explore the limitation or barrier within the stretch with a spirit of curiosity. Then note the places in your body where you feel ease and space. Where does it feel pleasant? Allow your awareness to absorb into the region of your body where you feel a positive sensory response.

Ask yourself, How does the interior of my pose change?

Note the feeling in your front hip crease, lower back, shoulders, arms, and hands.

Sense and feel any ongoing shifts within your breath, in the stretch of your fascia, the weight of your bones, and the contact of your skin. Be like a meteorologist, observing the changing “weather” in the pose; notice places of high pressure and low pressure. As blood infuses into your tissues, sense changes in the humidity levels of your body. Note any atmospheric changes in your neck and skull. Stay here for two minutes.

Now lie on your back in savasana with a blanket folded to a height of two inches tucked under your head. As you rest in stillness, note the pulses in your hands and wrists. Like a doctor of Ayurveda or Chinese medicine, take your own pulse by observing the pulses in your right and left wrists. Are your pulses more rapid or amplified on one side? Do they feel shallow, thin, wiry, flat, or thick? Note the way the back of your body drops into the floor. Imagine that your organs are like small water balloons, spreading as they release. Listen to the rise and fall of your breath and the weight of your ribs against the floor. What sensations can you feel in your chest? Sense the dance between your respiratory rhythm and your heart rate. Can you feel any pulses within your cranium? Visualize your brain suspended in fluid, held in place by sturdy ligamentous moorings. Sense the biodynamic pulse of your brain tissue as it continuously expands and narrows in response to the craniosacral rhythm.

Be like an ocean and sense the perpetual sway of circulating currents in your bloodstream, lymphatic channels, and nerve endings.

Sense the fluid potency of all the cells and tissues of your body. Be all ears as you listen inwardly to the vital flow of prana through your blood and nerve channels (nadis)—circulating, evanescent, motile. Note the rise and fall of the waves of your breath. Absorb into the interior of your body that is always changing, always new. Stay here for five to ten minutes.

Off the Mat

At the Trailhead of the Eightfold Path

In the early Buddhist teachings, the path of the mind-heart is mapped with eight distinct routes. Each trail guides us from the ingrown, obsessive, myopic city of self into the raw power of the wilderness. On the trail we are not meant to fret about whether we have the right gear or ample food or worry about whether there are deadly snakes on the trail.

This path is about being fearless in the open air, under the big sky.

At the trailhead to the Eightfold Path, right at the get-go, the first trail posting is called Right View. Right View is perhaps better translated as Total View, or Big Vista—like a drone shot taken from above, you have to see the entire terrain. The first leg of the journey requires that you see all dharmas—all things—as impermanent, like drops of morning dew, flashes of lightning, or clouds. Each experience is like a cloud, gathering together and dispersing in time. You might recall cloud gazing and imagine seeing a seahorse, a gorilla, a young princess in the configuration of a cloud. The spectacle forms and within moments vanishes. In Total View, we come to see that everything is in the process of change. We realize too that everything is interconnected and that there is no such thing as a “me” separate from the ecology that surrounds me. In Total View we come to see everything anew.

As you set out on the path of your day, have the intention to live each instant with fresh eyes. This is the second trail posting of the Eightfold Path, Right Intention, or what I like to refer to as Yoked Intention. In your day have an altruistic motivation to be kind, to abandon negativity, and to practice nonclinging. Resolve to see every perception, thought, word, and deed as droplets of water, droplets of time, in the always new. In the Eightfold Path, each ensuing trail posting—Right Speech, Balanced Action, Right Livelihood, Balanced Effort, Total Mindfulness, and Yoked Concentration—leads away from habitual, self-centered, and neurotic tendencies. Move slowly, listen with care, and have loving attention.

Be open to the always new and to the wondrous and strange grace of the world.

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More About the Author of The Practice is the Path

Tias LittleTias Little began studying the work of B.K.S. Iyengar in 1984 and has been teaching since 1997. His teaching includes precision of alignment, anatomical detail, and meditative awareness. He is a licensed massage therapist and his somatic studies include in-depth training in cranial-sacral therapy. Tias lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he directs his school, Prajna Yoga, with his wife, Surya. He is the founder of SATYA, Sensory Awareness Training for Yoga, a somatic practice that complements yoga. In addition to leading yoga workshops and teacher trainings throughout the US and around the world, Tias currently offers online classes through YogaGlo.

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Snow Globe Asana

Sno-Globe Asana

At this time of a worldwide shake-up due to the great pandemic, we are all prone to mind states of flurry and worry. Given the crisis in the world economy, health care, and social networks, it is indeed hard to see clearly. When overwhelmed by chaos and unrest, I like to use the analogy of the snow globe to describe how it can feel as if a cloud of swirling debris is all around you. In this time of uncertainty, when cash flow, employment, future plans, and health are uncertain, both a somatic and a psychological settling are required. This is why a mind-body practice is more important today then ever. How do you settle the particles of prana inside? This requires dropping your bones, relaxing your gut, and making your eyes soft. It suggests taking time in meditation to release any clench on your respiratory diaphragm or grip on your jaw. This composure is hard to come by. Perhaps it is not only your own emotional dust getting kicked up at this time, but the dust of those around you. It may feel as if your spouse, your kids, or your step-mom are swirling in clouds of confusion. It may become so murky that you can’t see straight. The strain we are under is liable to stir up old, well-worn patterns of behavior. When everything is blurry and when in the “snow globe asana” we become habitually reactive. We blame, get impatient, lash out, or retreat. You might find yourself getting stuck in snowdrifts of frustration and distress.

In light of this, it is important to be diligent and not to get thrown into a tizzy. Take care not to project your angst, your psychic dust, onto those you live with. Move slowly. Quick and impulsive reactions only agitate situations and stir up your “mind flakes.” Be tolerant, be kind. Practice patience. The shake-up will continue for more time to come. More brouhaha. More fluster and bluster. With the world topsy-turvey, don’t get caught up in petty things that stir up further anxiety and irritability. Time to get into the deep river of your breath. Make your mind still and your heart supple. Don’t react to the next whirlwind that blows through. Settle inside. Penetrate into the marrow of your bones. Stay in your own still center, so that, come what may, you don’t get caught up in the flurry.

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Tias LittleTias Little synthesizes years of study in classical yoga, Sanskrit, Buddhism, anatomy, massage, and trauma healing in his dynamic, original style of teaching. One of the foremost yoga instructors in North America, he offers intensives at all major yoga conferences and institutes, including the Yoga Journal conferences, Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, Esalen Institute, and Omega Institute.

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Bearing Witness | Social Distancing and Beyond

By Tias Little, Author of The Practice Is the Path
soothing nature

We are committed to remaining the entire month of April apart from each other, practicing social distance. A lingering uncertainty remains—what about May and June? How can we see this through?

I feel at a loss myself, and wonder if I should while away the time playing Fortnite with my fifteen-year-old, working on a puzzle of the faithful faces at Woodstock, or watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island and Scooby Doo. I struggle to make sense of the shutdown, the distance, the enormity of the worldwide quarantine. How are others coping? Are people taking shots of vodka, getting high, sleeping late, eating more simply to get by? The medicine I have come to is a teaching I picked up from the street-wise, Bu-Jew dharma teacher Bernie Glassman. This teaching is on bearing witness.

Bearing witness suggests to be with what is, as it is happening. It is a practice in a kind of presence that doesn't deny, reject, or ignore the way things are. As witness, we are not separate, remote like a satellite, observing from on high, but rather smack-dab in the middle of it all. By bearing witness we feel whatever is arising, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. We come to witness not only the harmonious and the sublime, but also the loss, the hurt, and the fear. Bearing witness requires inner reflection and a capacity to behold the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

In the Buddha’s teachings on the Four Noble Truths, the first tenet is that suffering is inherent to being. Questing on the spiritual path necessitates a face-to-face encounter with deterioration and loss. Thus we bear witness to the suffering of the world. Daily  on CNN, NPR, or Twitter we bear witness to trials of tragedy: the infected man dying alone without the comfort of family, faces of fear at the window, lovers separated, strained marriages crumbling, coffins stacked high in the morgue. In bearing witness we attune to a living tremor of sorrow. As a result, we build a kind of staying power to be with the trauma and the tears of our time.

In this strange time of social distance, we do not go cold. We do not turn away from the world, dispassionate and aloof. Rather, by bearing witness we proceed straight from the heart. Our hearts bleed concern, loving kindness, and nurturance. We acknowledge our own vulnerability and the vulnerability of all we love. In bearing witness we garner resiliency to see us through the time we are in right now and, fortified with kindness, to persevere in the time ahead, come what may.

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Related Books

The Practice Is the Path

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By: Tias Little

Yoga of the Subtle Body

$18.95 - Paperback

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Yoga of the Subtle Body

$209.00 - Online Course

By: Tias Little

Tias LittleTias Little synthesizes years of study in classical yoga, Sanskrit, Buddhism, anatomy, massage, and trauma healing in his dynamic, original style of teaching. One of the foremost yoga instructors in North America, he offers intensives at all major yoga conferences and institutes, including the Yoga Journal conferences, Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, Esalen Institute, and Omega Institute. Learn more.

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Realigning to the Cosmic Order of Things

By Tias Little, Author of The Practice Is the Path
Climate Change

The Christian mystics talk about “fasting of the heart” in their postures of solitude and time in communion with a divine order. Removed from the bustle of the marketplace and in isolation, this “fasting” is a time of reflection and being in the presence of a great wonder. Now, as the hubbub of the world’s commerce stands still and we distance ourselves six feet apart (at the very least), how can we turn this global adversity into gain? We are indeed in a kind of bardo state, a limbo-land where the streets are vacant, coffee houses are deserted, and the runways are silent. Like riding the tube in London, this is a time for us all to listen to the big PA system caution, “Mind the Gap.” If we do not take heed at this time it is possible that we will end up six feet under.

For the world is, quite literally, on fire. You know this if you were in the land Down Under this summer, as 2019 was the hottest year on record in Australia with temperatures above 107 degrees and nearly 13 million acres of its real estate scorched. You know this if you were part of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, measuring arctic sea ice that shriveled in 2019 down to its lowest level. Solar bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, the oceans polluted with plastic, monarch butterflies disappearing off the coast of California, the likely extinction of the magnificent elephant. In light of all this, what is really thriving? The coronavirus—microscopic, bombproof and death doling.

In some of the earliest yoga teachings, the rishis, bestowed with cosmic vision, spoke of a divine order called rta. These seers intuited a universal order that included the movement of the stars, the path of the sun and moon, the cycle of seasons, and the migration of the soul. Now that the high-speed train of our bustling lives has come to a screeching halt, we must wake up. Like the verse, repeated often in Zen:

Great is the matter of birth and death,
Life slips quickly by.
Time waits for no one.
Wake up! Wake up!
Don’t let this moment slip by.

In the bardo state of social distancing, with the stock market down and time “on our hands,” we must now commit to every possible measure to combat global warming. Since the onset of the pandemic, scientists have recorded a 50% reduction in C02 emissions. Meanwhile, as fear breeds in the hearts of many, people are buying everything off the shelf, stockpiling their ammunition, and, if they can afford it, retreating to secluded islands. But this virus gone viral is really not just about me and my safety. This is about rolling up our sleeves and making a commitment to protect the whales, the bees, the cod, the rivers, and the chestnut trees. As we abstain from social contact, as we fast from travel and commercial activity, we must look to the Big Picture. We must cast our vote to vaccinate our beautiful blue planet that's infected by toxic emissions and running a high fever.

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Other Resources

The Practice Is the Path

$16.95 - Paperback

By: Tias Little

Yoga of the Subtle Body

$18.95 - Paperback

By: Tias Little

Yoga of the Subtle Body

$209.00 - Online Course

By: Tias Little

Tias LittleTias Little synthesizes years of study in classical yoga, Sanskrit, Buddhism, anatomy, massage, and trauma healing in his dynamic, original style of teaching. One of the foremost yoga instructors in North America, he offers intensives at all major yoga conferences and institutes, including the Yoga Journal conferences, Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, Esalen Institute, and Omega Institute. Learn more.

...
Continue Reading >>