Blog

In a time when the primacy of experiencing the world as a human being has long since given way to a doctrine of the supremacy of humans (and especially certain sub-groups of humans) over all other beings in the world, yoga has, at least in certain sectors of society, become increasingly popular.  Is this a coincidence?  I believe it is not.

Advanced as our modern technologies have quickly become, the bodies we inhabit have not changed very much since the advent of industrial and then technological civilization.  Although we hear that full fledged artificial intelligence is just around the corner, promising to bail us out of current crisis of all kinds, if not replace this hopelessly flawed race of humanity all together, many therapists still place in there offices those little fountains which continuously produce a delicate sound of running water. Why? Well, probably because that sound, even if you are not directly aware of it, produces a calming effect on your nervous system, and thus upon your mind and emotions.  The sounds which water makes speaks directly to our bodies on a pre-verbal (e.g. the trick of turning on the tap when potty training a young child) and even elemental level.  After all, our bodies are composed of half or more than half water.  So?  Our bodies are still in touch with and respond to the raw, elemental aspects of the natural world, because these elements still make up us.

When we practice yoga, we can establish a more clear connection with and awareness of our bodies.  By connection with, I mean having the experience of being a living being, even a living creature.  This can happen because we invite the mind to follow and experience what the body is doing, instead of the other way around.  Of course there are many reasons which bring people to yoga, but a common thread among these is that it makes us feel better (after all the sweating and grunting, perhaps, if you’re a ‘power yogi’).

I want to suggest that yoga has this powerful effect of making us feel better because it returns us to a way of being that is closer to our origins, closer to the way humans functioned when we lived in and with, rather than apart from wild nature.  Our bodies reward us for allowing them to be bodies, to be sentient and alive.  There are many styles and approaches to yoga, but the fundamentals of yoga were developed in a time before human civilization had lost touch with our natural origins.  Hatha yoga  and Ayurvedic medicine see the body as a composition of the elements of earth, fire, water, air, and aether (now I am generalizing, I need to look this up), and health as an optimal balance between these forces in the body.  Just as yoga can help to cultivate balance  within the body, I suggest that it also opens a doorway to cultivation of a balance between human and nature, and to uncover the assumption that we are something different and apart from nature.

In a time when the force of technological civilization is endangering its own and all life on earth, most of us recognize that something has gone wrong.  It’s not just the news papers, or our financial crisis that speak of disaster.  We feel it fundamentally, like our heart beat.  As individuals we either seek to numb ourselves from awareness of our plight, or we must seek our own medicine to counter the stress of life in this dire global epoch.  Yoga offers a visceral experience of those aspects of being a living being which are most marginalized in corporate, materialistic culture.  These living, elemental aspects of ourselves are what call us back to our origins, to the living earth herself.  It is, perhaps, upon our entering, individually and collectively, the full embrace of belonging to life that the future of life itself now depends.

 

 

 

I have been thinking about what it means to have a home practice.  What makes my practice a practice, and not a routine?

I think it comes down to how much I am paying attention to what I am doing.  Routines just seem to happen almost on their own.  I am scarcely conscious of how I brush my teeth, or drink that glass of warm lemon water first thing in the morning.  Sometimes I can’t remember whether or not I have already done these things.  But when I practice, be it yoga, meditation, or prayer, this is the time I endeavor to bring my full attention into the present activity, or non-activity, as the case may be.  My goal might ultimately be to bring this attention into everything I do, all the time.  But I find it helpful to have a more specific place to start.  In my daily practice, I build a pathway in myself of how to get present, how to “be here.”  I can, for instance, send my awareness into my body and out into the space immediately around my body.  I immediately feel more “here.” Having this pathway, perhaps, is its own kind of habit, but it is a habit which allows me to connect at will to any one of my” nows,” any time I remember that this is where I want to be.