Felipe Adan Lerma

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“a beginner’s view : the intent of this blog is to incrementally build a body of thought that works toward integrating various topics, yoga, fitness, and the arts – it’s a process…”

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“a yoga teacher – a beginner’s view” (poetry)

featured in the ebook -

“Teachers Students & Education Specialists – The Poems“

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two distinct catalysts prompted this poem to finally happen

i say finally cause i knew from way back i’d eventually write “something” ’bout being a yoga teacher, just didn’t know what or when

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Roadside View, a Little Clearer

first catalyst was right before i began yoga-adan, and, in a conversation with nikki at live.love.yoga blog, who’d read some of my work, she asked when i’d have a yoga teacher poem

the question actually kinda shocked me -

i hadn’t planned on doing any yoga poem in the near term, much less a yoga teacher one

my process is to experience something to it’s natural flash point within me -

often times, the subject or activity, is something that, looking back and looking within, i see had flash-pointed long ago and i just hadn’t thought to write something on it

other times, as with yoga, despite explicitly yoga-ish experience dating back to the early 70′s, i clearly felt no flash point had been reach

nikki’s question, though, was the first flint that’d struck a spark -

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then, this past week, in an effort to answer himalayan institute‘s now closed twitter #yogais challenge, i created two responses, and my second effort drew fire, my heart’s fire -

“#yogais: yoga is the stillness of motion meant by kindness”

in the resulting poem, only one word changed in the phrase

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if the words endure, they do so because they link the links -

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A Yoga Teacher (a beginner’s view)

no nirvana’s escape here

this is

the yoga of connection

eyes meant for speaking

breaths

linked to living

touches are

the stillness of motion

meant from kindness

yes nirvana’s here

a whispered union

of communion

© adan lerma 2011

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my poetry writing process

this won’t be much a surprise -

some poems are born full-grown, hair shaved or with makeup, plus diet organically in place

others get tweaked -

and a few go through verbal boot-camp with enough revisions to make a tv series

i also frequently like to do variations, though some have strongly resisted any further mutations

this poem

“…a beginner’s view” is just that, a beginning, and just a view -

when this is the case, i usually have a more ambiguous, less concrete, rendition

it’s like an outline

i have images in mind, and tried, briefly, to go straight to that creation -

felt the outline flow into a sequence, like a newly practiced vinyasa, but knew it’s incompleteness by the silence in the sentences, there were none yet

so instead, when i have vagueness, in my imagery, i concentrate on rhythm, and stream of consciousness, from line to line…

“…speaking

breaths…

linked to living

touches are

the…”

the context cut short, the double meaning flowing from line to line is more apparent

but the links of meaning will still happen, to degrees, on a full reading

this is not magic, or unique to my work, but a fairly common form within poetry, a sort of stream of consciousness  [1]

stream of actualized consciousness?  hmmmm

that’s also not magic or unique within yoga, but is also commonly (more commonly?) formed within yoga

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the connectedness of human activities is everywhere, it’s like the tiny searching roots of the smallest plant, already reaching, and finding, what is needed…

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i feel, in time, i’ll have more yoga-teacher variations, but they’ll come, and until then, i have other things needing doing, then the new variation will be the thing needing doing

so i sense, and hope, for no one truly knows, this yoga teacher poem, my first yoga teacher poem, will not be an only bloom…

ps -

namaste – con dios – god be with you

poetry series

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footnotes

[1]  a google search turns up an interesting array of possible follow-up resources if one would like to learn more about poetry in general

there’s all kinds of ways to search, i used “flowing meaning in lines in poetry“

one link i liked, is to associated content’s post on poetry basics, this link is to page two in the article

[2]  though there is “tons” of really good poetry, one place i’ve found more recently, with lines i find interesting, is at magazine of yoga

this is just the results from a search for “poem” on the site’s search box

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INTEGRATING YOGA FITNESS AND THE ARTS

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Tags: National Teacher Day, National Yoga Month, Poetry for Teachers, Poetry for Yoga