Posts Tagged ‘worship through yoga’

Yoga and Prayer: The Psalms of Ascent

September 11th, 2008

For yoga today I did a sequence of poses and had a verse from the Psalms of Ascent that went with each pose. We got into the pose and then I said the verse that went with it. A lot of the poses were repeated throughout the sequence and each time the same verse was read with them. For me there is something very powerful about hearing a verse and also feeling that verse as your body is in a specific position and having that same experience over and over again. In a way it’s like the verse begins to sink into more than just your conscious thoughts, it starts to sink into your muscle memory and your psyche.

For music today I used the cd, Rounds, by Four Tet

So, here’s what we did today:

Mountain Pose - “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.”

Upward Salute - “I lift up my eyes to the hills – where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

Standing Forward Bend - “Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy”

Low Lunge (right leg back) - “I lift up my eyes to you, to you whose throne is in heaven.”

Downward Facing Dog (bend each knee one at a time like you are walking in down dog) - “Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways.”

Low Lunge (left leg back) - “I lift up my eyes to you, to you whose throne is in heaven.”

Plank Pose - “If the Lord had not been on our side – let Israel say – If the Lord had not been on our side…”

Child’s Pose - “…the raging waters would have swept us away.”

Upward Facing Dog - “We have escaped like a bird. The snare has been broken, and we have escaped.”

Downward Facing Dog - “Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

Standing Forward Bend - “Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy”

Upward Salute - “I lift up my eyes to the hills – where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

Mountain Pose - “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.”

Warrior I (right foot back) – “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mountain Zion, which cannot be shaken but endures forever.”

Mountain Pose - “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.”

Warrior I (left foot back) – “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mountain Zion, which cannot be shaken but endures forever.”

Mountain Pose - “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.”

Warrior II (right foot back) – “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mountain Zion, which cannot be shaken but endures forever.”

Extended Side Angle Pose (right hand over head) - “The Lord watches over you – the Lord is your shade at your right hand; the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.”

Mountain Pose - “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.”

Warrior II (left foot back) – “Those who trust in the Lord are like Mountain Zion, which cannot be shaken but endures forever.”

Extended Side Angle Pose (left hand over head) – “The Lord watches over you – the Lord is your shade at your right hand; the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.”

Mountain Pose - “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.”

Wide Legged Forward Bend - “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchmen stand guard in vain.”

Mountain Pose - “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.”

Tree Pose (right leg up) - “I rejoiced with those who said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’ Our feet are standing in your gates, O Jerusalem.”

Mountain Pose - “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.”

Tree Pose (left leg up) – “I rejoiced with those who said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’ Our feet are standing in your gates, O Jerusalem.”

Mountain Pose - “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.”

Chair Pose - “My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen wait for the morning, more than watchmen wait for the morning.”

Mountain Pose - “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope.”

Hero Pose - “The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.”

Bharadvaja’s Twist (to both sides) – “The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.”

Seated Forward Bend - “Put your hope in the Lord, for with the Lord is unfailing love and with him is full redemption.”

Bridge Pose - “Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like streams in the Negev.”

Half Shoulder Stand - “The Lord will keep you from all harm – he will watch over your life; the Lord will watch over your coming and going both now and forever more.”

Corpse Pose – “May the Lord bless you from Zion all the days of your life… Peace be upon [you].”


Peace be with you.

If you live in Prague and you are at all interested in joining us in this Prayer and Yoga experiment please let me know :)

Rejoicing in the journey -
Bethany Stedman

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Yoga and Prayer: Breathe

September 4th, 2008

So, off and on for the past few weeks I have been doing yoga and prayer with a few other women (see Here for more on the original idea). I am still figuring out how to do this and what’s really going to work but it’s been a wonderful experiment for me so far. Over the next few months I will be leading yoga and prayer for women (everyone’s invited, so if you are in Prague and would like to be included in this please let me know). I would like to share on this blog what we do each week and a little about how it goes. So, here’s a little about today…

Today’s yoga time ended up just being me and my good friend, Carrie, which was a little disappointing for me, but God knows what we each need. So, I stuck with what I had planned and we had a nice time of reconnecting with our breath, our bodies and our God.

I started the yoga time by sharing what I’ve been calling God this week, “God who is”. That’s who I needed God to be this week… I needed him to just exist, to be. I needed to know and experience that God is. I needed Him to be with me and in me and with those I love and in them.

Then we watched the Nooma video, Breathe, letting the thoughts sink into our minds and our bodies with each breathe. Breathing in the blessing at the end, “May you come to see that God is here right now with us all of the time. May you come to see that the ground you are standing on is holy. And as you slow down, may you become aware that it is in ‘Yod,’ ‘Heh,’ ‘Vav,’ ‘Heh’ that we live and we move and we breathe.”

After that we did this yoga routine with a the cd Sigur Ros ( ) for music. (Disclaimer: I made this one up and I have no formal training or teacher’s certification. I researched the poses and did the best I could putting together a sequence but if you choose to use this sequence on your own do so knowing that it was not made by a certified professional):

Skull Brightener Breath

Mountain Pose

Upward Salute 

(Repeat mountain pose and upward salute 3 times – inhaling as you come into upward salute and exhaling as you come back into mountain pose)

Downward facing dog

Upward facing dog 

(Repeat downward facing dog and upward facing dog 3 times – moving smoothly from one to the other as you breathe)

Chair pose  

Upward Salute on an inhale

Mountain pose on an exhale   

Eagle Pose (without crossing the legs)

Upward Salute on an inhale

Mountain pose on an exhale  

Garland Pose 

Upward Salute on an inhale

Mountain pose on an exhale   

Gate Pose

Camel Pose

Hero Pose

Lion Pose

Childs pose                                                  

Bharadvaja’s Twist to the right

Staff pose

Bharadvaja’s Twist to the left

Seated forward bend

Bound Angle pose 

Revolved Head-to-Knee Pose with right leg straight

Head-to-knee forward bend with right leg straight 

Half Lord of the Fishes Pose with right leg over left

Staff pose

(Repeat last 4 poses on left side)

Fish pose 

Pull knees to chest and rock back and forth

Happy Baby Pose

Corpse pose

While lying in corpse pose I read this quote from the book With Open Hands by Henri Nouwen:

“The man who lives from God’s breath can recognize with joy that the same breath sinks into the lungs of his fellowman, and that they are both drawing from the same source. At this mutual realization, the fear of another disappears, a smile comes to the lips, the weapons fall, and one hand reaches out for the other. He who recognizes the breath of God in another can truly let another enter his life, too, and can receive the gifts which are given to him.”

Peace be with you.

Rejoicing in the journey -
Bethany Stedman

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3 W’s – Workout, Worship, and Women

July 9th, 2008

 

Ok, so I think I’ve finally gotten up the courage to share this new idea I had. I’ve shared it with a few friends and even sort of tried it out once but I wanted to put the process of coming to the idea and the idea itself up here as a way to document it for myself and also as a way to open the idea up the community around me….

First, I’ve realized that I’m really out of shape. I would like to be able to be as flexible as I was a few years ago and I’d like to be able to walk uphill a few blocks without being totally out of breath – both things I can’t do at the moment. I used to dance and work out regularly but lately I spend most of my time working in front of a computer and I feel like my body is beginning to feel that change.

Second, I’ve realized (or maybe I should say that I have been realizing over the past few years) that there are a lot of different ways to worship and connect with God. Along these lines I’ve come to enjoy even more deeply things like form prayers, meditating on scripture, taking long walks through creation, and in general acknowledging that God can and does reveal Himself and allow us to connect with Him through anything – movies, music, the arts, and even our physical bodies. For the last few years I have off and on done yoga for much this reason – I feel like putting my body in the various postures has often caused my heart and soul and mind to worship and connect with God in a new way. I’ve also come to realize and learn that we can indeed act ourselves into a new way of feeling quicker then we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. If I bow down before God even when I don’t feel like it I find that the physical act results in leading my heart and mind to a posture of bowing down as well. When I lay in corpse pose (stretched out on my back on the floor) in a posture of exposed openness I find that my mind and heart become exposed and open to what God wants to tell me as well.

Third, and very closely related to the second point, God has been challenging me to accept and rejoice in that fact that I am a physical being. God created me as a physical being and He declared at creation that the physical world and beings that He created were GOOD. Yes, I do know though that I am a broken and sinful physical being but I also know that God didn’t choose to save me by separating me from my physicality. He instead chose to save me by Himself entering into our physical world and becoming a physical being Himself. God incarnate redeems the entire physical world He created. God has been challenging me to look at the world and my life more holistically. It is not that the spiritual (mind/soul) are good and the temporal/physical is bad. All of me is a good creation of my God and all of me is broken and in need of redemption.

Fourth, this may sound odd, but lately I have been coming to accept more and more my femininity. There were a number of years of my life (mostly quite a while ago, back in High School) when I secretly wished I had been born a boy instead of a girl. I didn’t feel like I fit with most of the girls I knew – I didn’t want to shop and talk about boys I wanted to think deeply and discuss theology and social sciences. And in the circles I ran in I was told that some of the things I wanted to do with my life I wasn’t able to do because I was a girl. Eventually I stopped wishing that I was a boy and came to accept that I would always be a woman and even began to delight in some parts of being a woman. But, I think even after that there was a bit of bitterness still in me against some of the things that I had been taught and had heard all of my life growing up in conservative Christian circles. So, I think over the last two years especially God has been healing me in some of that bitterness and showing me more deeply some of the beauty and strength and grace that belongs to woman alone.

All these things were bouncing around in my head when a dear friend of mine sent me this quick email from China:

I went out early onto the plaza/square here in Chongqing.  And there I saw the most delightful scene….hundreds of women gathered together for their morning dances!!  There is something RIGHT about a country where women congregate in the morning to dance!  And the steps don’t even have to be perfect… I thought out of all my friends, you could appreciate this the most!! May you dance this morning, my friend!!

 

All these thoughts, and this email, and a few other conversations I have had lately has gotten me thinking and I came up with an idea…

I’d like to get a group of women together at a consistent time once a week (though I would expect that not everyone would be able to make it every week) to work out together but to do so in ways that would also be to worship together and walk along side each other through the special trials and triumphs that the female sex shares. Here’s what I envision… Ideally I would love it if we could all trade off leading so that each time we meet a different person leads out of their own unique strengths and the place that they are personally at with God. So, for example, if I’m leading the first time I would maybe start by leading everyone through a Celtic prayer from the prayer book and then lead through a yoga exercise and some mediation on scripture. Maybe someone else would want to take us all on a walk their week so that we could all just talk and connect and pray while also getting some exercise. Or maybe another week the person leading would feel too tired to work out and would just want to pray together or lead us through a physical prayer that we can do as well as say. Or maybe another week the person leading would feel like celebrating and really praising God and we would all just put on some loud music and dance together. I think ideally I would love it if anyone and everyone would lead at some point in some sort of way but, I also don’t want people to feel that they have to lead if they don’t want to. Really, I envision it being a place where we can stretch and strengthen our bodies as well as our minds and souls and a safe place where we can come together and “dance” together as beautiful uniquely created women – A place where we can discover truth about God and about ourselves. I would want this group to be a place where we can explore God and our physicality and ourselves as being created in God’s image in an open and generous way, and also a place where truth is spoken into our lives and lived into our lives.

 

Rejoicing in the journey -
Beth Stedman

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First “Setkani” of the New Year

January 7th, 2008

For those of you who don’t know Bryan and I have become involved with a new church here in Prague. Over the course of the last year they have been having meetings at someone’s house once a month and then doing service projects once a month together as well to begin to build a community. But, this year we will start meeting regularly every Sunday – one group will meet at Craig and Sarah Springer’s house for a gathering in English and another group will meet at Saša Flek’s for a gathering in Czech and then once a month we will all meet together at this art gallery/pub. So, tonight was the first combined gathering at the Nova Síň (the gallery/pub). I want to write about and document the evening but I’ve been having trouble figuring out how to write about it… should I just share what happened, what it looked like? Should I write about what I felt during it? Should I write about what Saša and Marek talked about? Or about what their talk got me thinking about? I’m not really sure… I guess I’ll just start writing…

Bryan and I arrived early tonight to help out and so that Bryan and two other gals could practice to lead worship – Bryan had agreed to play the bongos, which was fun.  It was weird because when we first got there with only a few people there the place felt like sort of a hole-in-the-wall kind of place but as people started to arrive and fill the space it seemed to just come alive with character and energy. The place was set up with a large entry way and then off of the entry way there were two rooms one was filled with modern art sculptures (that room stayed closed most of the evening) and the other room was a small pub with a bar and a few tables. Off of the pub there was another long room that had a number of tables in it and at the end of the room there was a piano and a little sound system. As people started to arrive they filled the pub and soon the small room off the pub as well. Little pockets of people formed – some speaking English, some speaking Czech. If you stood back and stopped focusing on one particular conversation you could hear the two very different languages as if they were blending in musical harmony. There were kids running around as well – some shy and sticking closer to their parents, others excited by the people and running freely between the legs of older adults. The children may have been one of my favorite parts of tonight – no doubt they made the night messier – the teaching as well as the socializing afterwards was sometimes interrupted by children talking or laughing or even babies fussing or talking in their own little language. But, there is something about having kids around that I think has a tendency to keep everyone humble and to remind us that life with God is not always simple and clean sometimes it’s messy and uncertain – and that life with God is not always about knowing, sometimes it’s simply about being. One thing God has been bringing up with me a lot is the idea of delighting, and enjoying and playing. I think that is something I’m not so good at…playing with God…delighting in Him…just enjoying Him instead of trying to figure him out. Kids are a good reminder to me to relax and play and God used the kids tonight to remind me of that again. I think another thing that tonight got me thinking about more (well, it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately and a little about for maybe even a few years now) is the idea that God can and does speak to us WHERE WE ARE and in ways that uniquely fit who we are and what we are doing. Saša talked tonight about the wise men coming to see Jesus. He touched on a lot of interesting points but the one thing that stuck out to me and got me thinking was when he was talking about how the wise men were astrologers who studied the stars so God spoke to them and called them to Himself through the stars, through what they knew. One thing I have been thinking about lately has been how I relate to God and how I allow God to relate to me… I’ve been thinking about what it looks like to have a relationship with God in all four of the relational spaces (public, social, personal, and intimate) as I shared in a previous post. And I’ve also been thinking about letting myself relate to God and God relate to me in different ways, ways that fit me and my interests and needs and lifestyle – I think sometimes I have been taught or have felt like the only way God can relate to me and speak to me is through the Bible and prayer but it is interesting and freeing to think that God is God of everything and He can speak to me through anything and in any way that He sees fit in order to get my attention.  This morning I really felt God calling me to worship and speaking love to me while I was doing yoga – it was sort of a weird experience actually and as I felt God’s presence I responded by changing my routine a little and doing more backbends as a way to physically exhibit the opening of my life and heart to God – asking Christ Jesus to come and be involved in my life. It seems like a odd way to experience and relate to God and there may be those who would discredit it but for me it was a very powerful experience of connecting with God. Tonight God reminded me that he can speak through anything and anyone and tonight He called to me through the kids who were present, especially Marek and Elaine’s little girl, Julia, and the joy and delight in life that emanated forth from her. I’m curious how God spoke to others tonight. Was there something that Saša or Marek said that stuck with them on their way home, that challenged them or encouraged them, or drew them to worship like the wise men at Christ’s feet? I’m excited for this new year. I’m excited to get to know the people in this community better this year – to hear where their journey with Christ has taken them and to experience that journey along side of them as a fellow companion with Christ.  

Lord, come among us. Lord, may our eyes be open to see you, our ears be attentive to hear you, and our hearts be soft to receive you this year. Lord, may we not just look for you in the normal places this year but may we be open to experience you in all things and all places and through all people. Widen our horizons this year. Lord, may we be a people who are open to you, a people who do not put you or your Spirit in a box, but who allow you to work freely among us and in us and through us. And as you do so, Lord, I pray that you would draw us to one another. That this would be a year when we would gather unto you and gather unto each other – when we would encounter you, and encounter the people around us in significant and life altering ways. Make us a community where people would experience a sense of connection and belonging. A place where people can come and encounter and experience what it means to belong to you and to belong to each other. May we be a community that is marked by its open arms and its authentic demonstrations of love. To the Glory of God the eternal Father of all and to Jesus Christ His gracious son. Amen.

Rejoicing in the journey -
Beth Stedman

PS – pictures from tonight will be posted soon at www.bstedman.com

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