It’s so common to romanticise this whole journey of yoga and liberation seeking, thinking that unless we gain all kinds of powers, see all kinds out out there visions, achieve all the yoga postures, we haven’t quite made into the heart of Truth.
These traps of illusions are so easy to get lost in, having us hooked on the story of it all.
Here’s something to check in with… How are your relationships? That’s where the deep yoga is. Sure, I can sit in supreme bliss and enter all kinds of beautiful unified states when I’m in solitude, but put me in front of ‘that particular person’ or ‘that thing that pisses me off’ and the yoga is gone. That’s where we practice. Otherwise all this Union talk is just talk… Whether it’s forgiveness, acceptance, boundaries, non judgement etc, what’s the medicine you can bring into those parts of your life to cultivate yoga then and there, here and now?
I say this, because people often don’t get it when I talk about, “Yoga without the sticky mat,” and “Yoga beyond the poses,” and I often see people becoming unhealthily obsessed with perfecting all of the various poses, actually just exacerbating their inner stress. In our culture we’ve been so conditioned to think that yoga is just like another exercise class. Here’s an example of a common conversation I hear:
“Today I’ll do pilates, tomorrow I’ll do pump class, Wednesday I’ll do yoga, then Friday I’ll do boot camp.” With the yoga in the same kind of cateogory of most exericise classes.
Saying I’m going to do yoga is kind of like saying, “I’m going to do Zen, or I’m going to go do the Tao, or I’m going to go do enlightenment.”
Just like compassion, we can’t do compassion, we can only be compassion. Yoga is a state of Being. It’s a brillant, open, grounded, quiet and radiant state of presence embodied. The doing of the yoga practices and exercises can potentially open us up to the state of Yoga.
So… one of my intentions of these ‘Flow from the Heart’ events is to bring Hatha Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Nada Yoga, Tantra Yoga, Jnana Yoga and Karma Yoga all together, to embrace all of the equisite paths, methods and approaches to yoga and then break through the conceptualised doing of yoga into raw immediate Being of yoga.
Come flow with us and let’s continue to walk each other back to the Heart of Truth.