my take on my truth about yoga - through the lense of this moment

I don't want to get into any kind of discussion about what is right and wrong. I would love to just talk to a feeling of common sense in all of us.
I am reading Matthew Remskis "Threads of Yoga" right now which is his ponderings on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, whoever that character was, more likely than not a conglomerate of people and their more or less selfcontradictory philosophy collected over time. Remski calls it a remix and though I don't always follow him and sometimes I downright disagree with some of his points, I like this idea of remixing, of breaking free of the mold and daring to think in a creative way and in a way that has the perspective of the needs of our present culture and the rapid development of something that before was only kept for the few.

The yoga community today is huge and many people contribute to the creative pondering, therefore unity is impossible; maybe that is a good starting point for a discussion.
Let my post here just be one voice amongst many, no more but also no less valid.
And because "I" am not static, but always changing, my take is taking out of the whole at this point of time, as though it was fixed, which it is not. Becoming fixed, frozen in time, not honoring the changing quality of nature, there is always the risk of becoming a bit (or a lot) of a fundamentalist And who wants to be rigid and stuck and opinionated. This is just my opinion, at this time.

So I tend to think of yoga as doing what is needed, and to be able to do what is needed we need a certain amount of clarity, seeing things as they are. This is where practice starts, and where practice for a long time unfolds...seeing things more clearly.
To be able to see more clearly, we need to slow down and simplify. At least in the start, but probably it's a good idea to counter the strong tendency in our culture towards speeding up and cramming more in. So ... if we can (sometimes we have to think fast and act fast, and that is fine; The more grounded we are in the clarity that comes from slowing down, the more precise and intuitive we will become, and the faster we can act...over time) we slow down as a rule. Take our time to be mindful and caring in our actions, not just on the mat, but when we do the dishes, when we go shopping, when we have a conversation, when we make love. There is nowhere to go, so why not just be here. Then we start seeing our impatience and our restlesness. It only surfaces when we slow down...and then we start to investigate what lies behind this restlesness, this impatience. How does it feel? And to just begin to notice how often we space out. How often we are not really, truly here. And to begin to ask the question: Where am I, when I am not here?



Ww may discover that when we are not truly here, we are busy commenting on our lives and talking to ourselves about it. Incessantly. With small pauses, maybe, of presence, that we may not even be aware of.
So a yogapractice invites a lengthening of those pauses. A break from our ever talking mind. A mind that goes on in a seldom very creative way. Yoga practice unfolds as we begin to dive into the realm of the physicality of being us. Not the story, but the felt sense of being. As we slowly begin to break the mold of identifying ourselves with our heads ... having bodies rather than being bodies, we also begin to uncover an intuitive intelligence. A bodily intelligence. As we begin to move with awareness. Slowly moving with breath. Exploring that felt sense of expansion on the inhale and contraction on exhale. Discovering that we can not hold on to experience. Discovering the stillness of moving and the movement in holding a pose. Discovering that being still is never static and that moving can come from a very still place in ourselves.
That exploration and discovery of something that is our birth right, a natural bodily intelligence, can teach us something, that if we let is can turn our lives around completely.


One of the things that may surface for us born in this western culture of deep rooted individualism is a feeling of lack of self love. When most of us begin to look closer we realize that a lot of our actions, come from fear of not being worthy of love and belonging, so we are struggling to prove, that we belong. That we are good enough. We may feel that we are only good enough if we are slim enough, fit enough, young enough (growing older may feel like we are somehow flawed and despite the fact that a lot can be done today - if we have the money, even looking like Dolly Parton will not change the fact that we can not avoid old age and death). We may feel that we are only good enough if we are flexible enough and so on. It can make everything we do add to a very basic western problem. Self obsession. Everything we do adds to the feeling of disconnection and isolation and the more we feel disconnected the more we struggle, with all the tools we are taught from we are very small, to connect.

So what of it? How is this important when we talk about yoga?

Well, there are two basic ways of being in the world: Fear and Love. Fear. Love.
Yoga is the path of love and the path to love. To feel in our bones and our tissue, that we have always been of this world. That we can stop struggling, because we have always been worthy of love and belonging. We are of this world. We belong.