Sunday, September 26, 2010

Practice Yoga

It's not as though I have a corner on the market, a secret way of using yoga that can be had from only me, and at expense. Nothing could be further from the truth. Find a yoga teacher or borrow a yoga book from the library and be guided by two principles.


1. Feel your breath.

2. Create peace within your body within each pose.

The body speaks in its own language, sensation its mother tongue. Pain, pleasure and all between are dialects. We listen to our body by feeling it.

Feeling the sensation of breath links mind to body and creates an inner space in which sensory perception can grow. Moving out of the head and into the body comes naturally as we feel the flow of our breath.

Feeling the sensation of breath expands inner awareness to encompass the body as a whole, a built in safety mechanism while practicing hatha yoga, provided we honor the signals/messages our body communicates.


Follow your breath all the way in and out again, or narrow your inner focus down to the touch of your breath in your nostrils and simply feel it there. Feeling mind occupies thinking mind and because it is almost impossible to think and feel at the same time, we have immediate access one breath at a time to a quiet, peaceful, intuitive, perceptive, acutely conscious, feeling state of awareness and being.


Feeling mind resides in the present moment. Because thinking mind is predominantly fixated on the past or future, the common dilemma of the modern mind is that the present moment ceases to exist. We can be angry or resentful over some wrongdoing that happened yesterday, a week or ten years ago. We can be worried sick about a potential future problem which may or may not manifest, and not notice that right here right now the sun is shining through the leaves of beautiful old trees, dappling your face and the world around you with dancing light, as you wander lost in thought. In the present moment, usually for most of us most of the time, all is well and often is downright beautiful but we miss it.


On average we each take twenty thousand breaths a day. Feeling breath teaches the mind how to shift from the usually compulsive, non-stop verbal, often abusive chatter we call thinking... to the quiet peacefulnes of feeling. At first we may catch only fleeting glimpses of what is available but this is a powerful practice which leads eventually but inevitably to an authentic place of peace. Begin by feeling one breath now...

Then

create peace within your body within each pose/asana. Easy words. In essence, if you struggle, strain, force or fight with your body, and I'm talking about yoga here but there are far reaching implications, you are choosing war over peace, and you're risking injury. My teacher always says that if you're kind to your body it will remember and respond happily, joyfully and if you force or strain it will resist all the harder next time you try to pull that one again.

So, feel your breath and automatically you feel your body. Feel your body and automatically your capacity for sensuality, peace, joy expands breath by breath.



1 comment:

Honey said...

Your rules are very informative and helpful to practice yoga. I am about to attend the hatha yoga teacher training and I think this blog will help me so much in my classes.

Honey