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.

I Know What It Is To Practice

I know what it is to grieve in a practice
to prepare for new life in a practice
to let go in a practice
to build again in a practice
to recover in a practice
to be inspired in a practice
to resist in a practice
to be distracted in a practice
to be curious in a practice
to sit in pain in a practice
to sit in luxury in a practice
to be completely absorbed in a practice
to be in love when I practice
I know what it is to be broken and made whole again in a practice
I know what it is to be free in a practice

And then I know what it is to do all of these things as a person, a woman, an adult, a mother, a lover, a wife, a daughter, a friend, a citizen, a driver, an ally, an opponent, a stranger, and as all the other ways I am in my life.

And I have sweated, injured myself, healed myself, lost weight, gained weight, gotten limber, gotten stiff, ended with my heart pounding, ended with my body still cold. And sometimes it's like gardening where you planted a seed and three years later you see this thing maturing in ways you didn't expect. And in each practice I am home in myself; I am where I need to be, and everything that has happened, is happening, will happen is in its right place.

There's nothing to achieve. It's about taking my time, inhabiting my body, embodying my life. Sometimes it's glorious and wonderful, other times plain as toast, and then other times a terrible mess, and then everything else too. What's wonderful about it is that I can explore and give something to myself that no one else can when I practice yoga.