Yoga Postures, Picking Locks, and Remembering Your Birthright

Most of the time when someone says they are practicing yoga, they are practicing asana, which is commonly translated as "comfortable seat." As beginners to the practice we think we need to break ourselves into poses like breaking in new shoes, to force comfort. But asana is about finding ease in the body no matter what posture we are doing and consequently, no matter the posture we take in our lives. Asana practice is about starting with ease, being in the middle of ease, and ending with ease as much and as often as possible with nothing forced about it. I knew a bank manager who once told me that yoga was like putting herself into a tight bind and finding her way out of it. In the first handful of years for me, I also saw asana practice as the ways we put ourselves into tight binds and was sure that Harry Houdini had practiced yoga.

But this approach only continues the tenuous relationship that we have with peace and generates an attitude that it can only be had if you give up just the right parts of the body for a moment in order to make the escape. In this way peace is something fleeting rather than inherent. There is surrender involved with every posture and for a time it may feel like you are picking locks and untying ropes, but there's more once you untie enough knots. Asana means comfortable seat, not problem solving, and the peace we find is actually part of our birthright that we forgot somewhere in childhood.

The next time you practice yoga, notice how you are holding your body. Are you performing, conquering, teetering on collapse? How we hold the body in asana reveals the way we deal with conflict. We deflect, fight, disappear, and abandon in order to escape the truth of a situation. But we can learn how to face our lives and befriend what is weak, undeveloped, stuck. Yoga moves us to a place that is complete so that we can hold what is incomplete with care. Practice yoga as a way to listen to the voiceless within and to give it the attention and care it needs to evolve.

Asana practice teaches us what it is to inhabit the body, as it is, and in all its landscapes of sensation and churnings that we cannot find words to describe. It softens our self expectations so that we can finally meet ourselves where we are in our own feet and hands and everything in between.  In this space being pleasing to the eye or making the cut doesn't matter. Nor does it matter how competent, intelligent, or strong we are. When you crave communing with yourself, it's about being in the dynamic of movement and stillness of body and breath. And when the rain patters on the roof, you see that your life, like all of life, is a gift.