Or Maybe Yoga Is ALL About The Poses? Let’s Explore This Thought…
“The success of Yoga does not lie in the ability to perform postures but in how it positively changes the way we live our life and our relationships.”
Many people come to Yoga looking for a “practice” to work their body into fitness, maybe to get stronger or more flexible. Yoga is their physical fitness practice.
I will confess, I did the same, or so I thought. At 35, I gave up weight lifting* as I was bored and tired of it. I wanted something else to occupy my daily fitness time. A daily Yoga practice seemed like a fine space to explore. I had, at that point, been practicing certain Yoga techniques for 9 years, see below, but had not yet embarked into the realm of daily asana, Yoga poses.
I have written about the endless benefits of Yoga. Scroll to the bottom of this page, type in Yoga on the search bar, and explore my many posts on this life changing gem we call Yoga.
A historical fun fact about Yoga is that most of the poses of Yoga are only a couple hundred years old, some only a couple of decades, and others maybe just years old. British colonization of India was the spark that added poses to the spiritual practice of Yoga. English culture, at the time, was obsessed with fitness and gymnastics as a manner of attaining fitness. As the British sought to make India’s spiritual practices their own, they added to the practice of Yoga. Prior to the addition of gymnastic like poses to Yoga, most poses of Yoga were basically seated postures for meditation.
Yoga poses have suited me well. I am a very energetic person. Sitting for hours (Seriously, who am I trying to kid? Sitting for minutes used to drive me crazy) in meditation would have me climbing the walls inside of myself. With Yoga pose practice, I have gotten much better at being still.
Yoga poses, the physical - moving meditation of Yoga, work for me. I can do poses for 5 minutes, or 45 minutes, of complete peace even when the world around me is spinning with crazy. And the world has been spinning with crazy for over 18 months now.
Yoga starts to happen as we begin to explore and experience the physical body (*asana, poses) in its manifold connections with the energetic, intellectual, and blissful bodies. -Mark Stephens, Teaching Yoga
*I added this for clarification of the physical part of Yoga moving the spirit back to the divine wisdom of the subtle bodies. The Magic of Yoga!
I do Yoga poses / breathwork / savasana / meditation-journeying daily, at my home. I am a sole practitioner preferring to sink into the quiet calm of my own practice. The chaos of life disappears when I am on my mat or out in the woods. Sometimes my ‘mat’ is the mossy pine needle floor of the woods. The poses are a “vessel” for me to be the hollow bone. As I am doing poses, I am creating a Sacred Space for Divine Consciousness, the Collective Soul, to flow through me with each and every breath. Yoga poses are my moving breath and body awareness meditation.
As humans, we are spiritual beings. Our bodies are the hollow bone, the hollow reed, for Divine Consciousness to flow through.
Most of us live at frenzied paces and have little time to be aware of our connection to everything; that we are everything and that everything is us. Moving into a pose, holding the pose, and moving out of the pose with complete breath awareness is my gift of slowing down. My gift of being in the flow of the Universal Energy.
Meditation in motion, Yoga Poses, is a gift I give myself every day when my mat gets rolled out.
Yoga is a mindful tool and a meditation tool in my self-healing medicine bag. Mindful is being present, right now, in the here and now. It is the little practices we do that keep drawing us back to the “now” moment. Being mindful, in your every day life, makes meditation accessible.
Meditation is a practice to train attention and awareness to calm and still the mind. When the mind is stilled, we can connect with our true self. Not that we are ever really disconnected, because that is impossible, but life and experiences layer over our true self. Meditation helps us to polish those layers and peel them off so we reconnect with our inner light.
The practices of Yoga work to peel back those layers and reveal the light shining at heart center, your Sacred Heart Space.
How Yoga poses work for me:
Yoga asana creates a focus on my physical self. I have to let go of the rest of the world and feel, deeply, what I am asking my body to do, how I am doing it, and how my body feels inside and out.
Poses create a mindful container, my body, where I also just focus on my breath flowing in and out.
The world around me fades away as I simply move and breathe with awareness and focus.
yes, yoga is my moving meditation: body-mind-spirit self healing medicine.
I used to blow off savasana. Savasana is that end pose, corpse pose, lying on the mat just doing nothing. Who had time for that bullshit? I had more important things to get to. Several years ago, knowing I needed to be a more relaxed person, I gave up multi-tasking on my Yoga mat. I took to lying in savsana. I forced myself to stay still for 2-3 minutes just breathing. Slowly I worked up to 5 minutes, then 10 minutes. Some days I lie there for 20 minutes when I have the time.
Savasana relaxation has been a huge thing for me. One day, while in my asana moving meditation, I got this big message. My inner wisdom was chatting at me about deep rest and DNA / RNA repairing during this deep rest. Yup, the deep rest of sleeping and Yoga relaxation (there are many ways to go about this). I now think my favorite part of Yoga “mat work” is the savasana at the end. All those years I missed out on this nectar of the Gods and Goddesses. It is probably the Fountain of Youth and I nectar bypassed 15+ years of taking a savasana. My first 9 years of Yoga were guided visualizations, progressive muscle relaxations, and a practice that would now be akin to Yoga Nidra. This was 30 years ago, I’m not sure Yoga Nidra was even talked about. But, here’s the but part… maybe those 9 years of Yoga relaxing practices gave me a leg up on blowing off so many years of savasana, DNA repair, and self-healing Magic!?
Easing into the practice of Yoga, not just the poses, has supported my creation of inner calm. This means not allowing triggers, past traumas, to set me off on an emotional spin out of control. I can be right here, now, in the moment breathing and thinking about how to act in a situation… as opposed to an emotional knee jerk reaction.
Have I perfected this? Ha, NO! Today, as I was unsuccessfully trying to remove the stove pipe cover so I could clean the chimney, my dialogue went something like this:
“Why does this BS have to happen every year? Why do these GD screws have to be so hard to get out? Why does a simple task have to be so hard and take 10 times as long as it actually should?” Add in a few more colorful words as you see fit. I probably said them.
Then, as I sat there on the living room floor, I started cracking up. New dialogue:
“Great Yoga Paula! You have been doing this Yoga practice for 30 years and you can’t practice what you teach about peacefulness in the moment? You are allowing yourself to be triggered by the same damned screw that sets you off every Autumn?”
Ah, my Yoga practice kicked in. I calmed down and laughed some more about catching myself being triggered. I brought myself back to a calm space instead of heading off the rails even further.
Next year, I will deep breathe 10 times and remind myself of the cantankerousness of the pipe screws, and get through the process without a triggered hitch. Yes, I put a note on the chimney cleaning brush, a neon sticky note, to remind myself September 2022. Complete with a winking happy face to make myself laugh before I start swearing at the screw.
May your Autumn be filled with Peace, Love, Connection, and Vibrant Health.
*weight lifting, practiced with the same mindful attention to breath, body, mind, and spirit is Yoga. As is doing dishes, laundry, stacking wood, mowing the lawn, or any activity. Life’s activities unfolding are the practice of Yoga… to be present and mindful in all we do.