Thoughts From Space

I love teaching yoga.

And I also love space from teaching yoga. It allows me the chance to digest and process the collective energy of working with people. When I’m on break, as the days pass, I am lighter on my yoga mat. I’m less occupied by individuals. My mind grows quieter. Themes effervesce and coalesce. 

Practicing yoga continues to resonate for me as a way of both expanding awareness and shifting its seat. By expanding awareness, I mean opening the scope of my attention to include something more than my thoughts. If I am not careful, the thinking mind is an insidious force that crowds both my attention and my experience of life. By shifting the seat of awareness, I mean relocating my attention —cultivating an unrelenting habit of tuning into my breathing and the inner space of my body (both on the yoga mat and beyond) provides an alternative seat to that of thought. And when I remember to sit there, it is blissful.

BUT!

The bliss is only possible when I’m curious. If I am with my body and my breathing with a sense of curiosity and openness, then I can become present to what is. I can even ask my body what it has to say. If there is pain, tension, emotion, or injury, I can ask, what would that pain or tension like me to know? 

Without curiosity, the whole enterprise shifts. Practicing yoga becomes something I accomplish rather than something I inhabit. I might tick it off a list, feel virtuous about showing up, but never actually arrive. The body becomes scenery I move through rather than a place I dwell in.

And when pain or limitation appears—as it inevitably does—curiosity makes all the difference. With curiosity, sensation is information. Maybe it's saying "my heart hurts" or "I need gentleness" or "I’m overwhelmed." Without curiosity, sensation becomes an obstacle, a failure, a reason I can't do what I used to do or what I think I should be able to do. I meet it with frustration instead of listening.

Preference—for how a pose used to feel, for what my practice looked like last year, for the mental image of what a "real" yogi does—closes the door that curiosity opens. When I'm attached to preference, I'm not listening to what my body has to say. I'm telling it what I want it to be. And that's when yoga stops being a practice of awareness and starts being just another place where I perform.