Beyond a Fixed Pose

Statue by Constantin Brancusi

Yoga is transforming pain into healing energy via movement and breath in the body.

Yoga: rooting the palms, the whole of each palm into the earth, like energy beams. Or the feet.

Yoga is pressing through the chest in a backbend, radiating your heart out in front of you. And it is letting the heart be higher than the mind in a forward fold.

Yoga is.... what you need it to be. It adapts to you.

For me, yoga is a buoy since last of life-saving surgeries in September (2016). By late October I found myself on the mat. Looking down at it quite intently.

Yoga is the lighting in any film. Surtout dans les vieux films noir et blanc.

La Fontaine de Narcisse by Constantin Brancusi

Yoga is trying to see more correctly, removing illusions, reconsidering perceptions - seeing ourselves compassionately as well. Illusions (maya) are plentiful, and yoga helps us go inward like a turtle to refocus, and come out with a more reflective path.

Yoga is bending over the mirror of self, looking into the pool of water that fills the fountain.

The breath reminds us of the constant rhythm of patience - the breath is in no hurry.

Statue by Constantin Brancusi

Listening, we feel the mechanisms of life at work in our body as we become still and as we experience sensations during (or following) kriyas and asanas. One has an aide-mémoire to return to for calming the mind. It intimates the plausibility of divine intelligence through the miraculous configuration of the body - which houses our life.

We need no reminder to breathe, to pump blood or lymph. A healing presence within allows, with time, wounds to close.
Observing the life-giving forces of nature helps us to respect, to appreciate, to silence the mind's thoughts. We can find ways - via asanas, the breath, stillness - to allow us to let go of what no longer serves us.

As my teacher Gopi would say as we came into another deep pose: Let go of what no longer serves you, and know that what you need is provided for. Those words are hard to forget, and very powerful.

Silvia Mangano with statue
by Constantin Brancusi

As Gopi would also say, We do not just get into a pose. We pranify the body through the pose. The pose serves the breath.

Love can be felt and more freely given through a regular yoga practice. It is a path, a means of unifying. It is a window to appreciating something of the magical, the mystical, the ancient wisdom, and the very real present. A day with yoga, is a lighter, brighter day: within, and thus all around.

It also offers helpful tips. Patanjali taught many years ago in the Yoga Sutras: By cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous and disregard toward the wicked, the mind-stuff retains its undisturbed calmness (Verse 33).

Here's to more friendliness, compassion, delight, and... disregard.
Namaste.