Yogaexpress’s Weblog

It sounds very impressive when someone says they have been doing yoga for 20 years, or anything in fact sustained for 20 years even marriage these days! But what does it actually mean? If someone says they have been skiing for 20 years when in fact what they really mean is that every year they take a one week skiing holiday and have done for the past 20 years, does that amount to a more advanced skier than the one who took it up 6 months ago and has been skiing everyday since?! Sri K. Pattabhi Jois says: “99% practice 1% theory” so this suggests to me that it’s the mileage on the mat that counts not the years clocked up in between the practice! Having said that, I do look forward to the day when my yoga mileage clocks up to 20 years but it just might be that I’ll have been doing 40 years and only 20 of those amount to actual practice on my mat…who knows!

I have days when I get frustrated if I haven’t been on my yoga mat and done a practice. I try and remind myself the relevance of yoga off the mat as well as on it but Sri K Pattabhi Jois is right, it’s the practice that counts, and I’ve yet to advance to a place whereby yoga on my mat translates perfectly into life off the mat! Although I must admit I’m quite good at taking my life onto my yoga mat and into my practice! Hence, I consider myself a work-in-progress with the eternal optimism that I’ll get there in the end….whatever ‘there’ really is!?!

So what’s my point?!

I think what I’m actually saying is that fundamentally yoga is yoga and there is nothing to score it against except the practice before it whether that previous practice was yesterday or a year ago. And I think it’s important to add that there is certainly no value in judging your own practice against somebody else’s. I love what David Swenson said to a group of us at a workshop I attended last year; as we were leaving he added “and remember it’s just yoga!”. We can get so caught up taking it all so seriously and trying to be taken seriously that we forget to smile and just enjoy it.

Making a Difference

If you could make a difference in the world, what would you do?  I believe if we can make a difference in our own lives first then from there it can filter out to those around us, and then those around them and so on. It doesn’t have to be a big grand gesture, but if we all made a small difference it would lead to a worldly big difference! For example, the world is filled with angry people, I can’t change that. But maybe the difference I can make is not to fuel anger in my own life. Perhaps that could contribute a small difference. If the difference I want to make is to change people, control situations and relationships then I can only fail for that makes me no different to any extremist, and it is only driven by arrogance; a presumption that my way is right, that my way suits all.

Don’t we all actually want the same things in life fundamentally, regardless of how we may choose to live that? No one wants to suffer and we all want to be happy. Therefore, making a difference involves these two components. I make a difference to my life, to my son’s and to others in my actions which reflect that I don’t want to suffer, I don’t want my son to suffer and I don’t want others to suffer. I also want to be happy, for my son to be happy and for others to be happy. Therefore the only difference I can make is to choose the action, the response and the journey which produces the most happiness and the least suffering.

That all sounds very ‘nice’ though doesn’t it, and rather idyllic. But at our low points in our day, the stresses and challenges we face, to the bigger world picture of poverty, child abuse, the environment etc, seeking to make a difference seems either far from our thoughts or else an impossible feat. I have a postcard on my wall that reads: “It is your mind that creates this world – The Buddha” If this is true then it says a lot about the mental state of the planet! Yet I have to admit that it is in my yoga practice that I find the profound truth in these words and then also in meditation. The joy is that in yoga and meditation one begins to turn towards the lesser known places of our inner world and work through them. This can be frightening but our yoga practice not only makes our bodies strong, it also makes our minds stronger. Thus the world we created before, changes for the better. This is the making of a bigger difference!!!! J

If we can remember that our lives start with ourselves as we approach our yoga mat today, then surely there’s hope. Using our practice on the mat to make a difference to ourselves and then off the mat using it to make a difference to someone else, surely leads to a meaningful difference and one that can potentially extend universally if we let it.

What is real?           

I look out and watch the branch of a tree swaying in the wind. The leaves blur and I can see different shapes as the leaves lose their presence and faces emerge instead. A puppet show emerges before my very eyes until I remember that I’m actually looking at leaves of a tree swaying in the wind and then, I see the leaves again. This makes me question, what is real? The tree and its leaves? The puppet show? What am I really seeing? How can I trust what I see?

Life and death are distinguished between the solidity in life and the disappearance in death. We think we can see life in our surroundings, in our identities and our ego. We see death in absence. The absence in death makes it appear and feel so unreal, and the materialism in life makes it appear ‘real’. Life is tangible, we hold onto it in our relationships, in food, in our jobs, in photographs, in memory, in planning and in fads and fashion. Death can not be clung onto in the same way, we know it only because it is the lack of all we identify life to be. There are no photos of ‘death’. Are Life and Death really different? Or do we have a preference for one existence more than the other, and so we cling to this existence we call ‘Life’? Are we neither alive nor dead?

What’s the difference between fear and fearless? How does the fear of something liberate us? I’m afraid of spiders, in fact all insects. I hate them. Is my fear real? It’s real to me in my thought bubble but the insect isn’t affected either way, it simply exists and my response to it is all that is affecting me, not the insect. Is the fear of death part of what makes life more real to us? Do our fears help create the solidity we find reassuring? And yet it must separate us from the connections of Life and Death, the connections of awareness and experience.

Life is beginning to seem to me one big thought bubble. And death seems so distant to me that I may experience the absence of someone close to me, yet I don’t have a concept to relate to my own death. I have no photos and no memory to solidify death, to make it real for me. It’s as though death doesn’t really exist all the while I’m living. Maybe life won’t seem real to me once I’m in death. In death there are no photographs of life. Therefore in death is life unreal?

All there seems to be is experience and maybe that experience be it in ‘Life’ or in ‘Death’ is neither real nor unreal it just is. And maybe in letting go of what we define ‘Life’ to be we discover that Life and Death are the same – no words, no concepts, no definitions and no identities, just existence and experience.    

It’s ten o’clock at night and while juggling to clean the house, get organised for a new week ahead, and settle my two year old son, it has struck me how life is yoga off the mat not just on it! Yoga means union or yoking, and trying to find the union of all the practical demands of life with the mental chatter and the endless distractions becomes a whole web of postures that internally tie me up in knots!!! In fact yoga on the mat seems easier in comparison!…?!?!… In reality, my son has spent the past three hours refusing to go to sleep in his own bed, the house is in a state and I feel somewhat frazzled!:) So how do I find the yoga/the union/ the yoking of life so that the flow is calm and centred? When practicing yoga for myself on the mat I always come back to the breath. With the breath the movement follows and reflects the quality of the breathing. The two are one. It probably says alot then that tonight I have noticed that I have mostly held my breath, or else been barely breathing! I believe that the answer to my question lies in the breathing. The quality of breath reflects the quality of life emotionally, mentally and physically. So while I can’t control everything in life, I can control how I breathe and so in turn the quality of life I experience. It isn’t easy though is it?! But maybe just noticing next time how my breath responds to any of the daily demands and stresses we all have, can bring a moment’s calm into my being so that it is with that same quality I can then respond. Just a thought, but one worth putting into practice tomorrow I think!