Yoga

Anyone who practices yoga knows of the amazing insights and inspirations which can come to you while on the mat.  This is one of the best parts of the practice.  Open body = Open mind.  Or as we say in yoga, "create new spaces in the body," which then can allow insights in the mind.

I figured I'd share with you one of my recent revelations. 

Yoga is symbolic of life. 

Each individual yoga session represents your life.  You start out in child's pose, which is the fetal position, and then move into any number of other poses which represent the activities and variety in daily life.  Sitting into Chair pose, bending into Downward Dog, standing in Mountain pose, arching into Dancer, lunging into Warrior, stiffening into Plank, and so on. 

A vital part of the practice is breathing.  You must breathe in order to oxygenate your muscles and body to have a fuller practice, and you must cultivate conscious breathing, otherwise it is easy to hold one's breath while doing the poses.  Breath is also vital to life, it can be described as "the breath of life." 

Then you move into the standing poses, symbolic of a child or person standing, but also active and upright as you move through your life with the energy of youth and early adulthood.  As you move through the practice, you eventually tire, and wind things down.  You move down to the sitting poses, then down to the floor poses.  In life, we slow things down as we age, we sit down more, and towards the end of our lives, we lay down more, for example, to take naps or if someone is bedridden. 

At the close of the practice there is Final Resting pose, also known as Corpse pose, in which you lie flat on your back.  The coolest part of this is that you continue your breathing, while absorbing and integrating your practice into your body and your mind.  You have the wisdom and experience gained from each practice, just like the wisdom and experience gained throughout one's life.  At the end of your practice, as you transition into the next part of your day, you are conscious and fully alive, even more than before.  And at the end of your life, as you transition into the next realm, you are conscious and fully alive, even more than before.

Your yoga practice, in general, represents your life, too.  In yoga, as in life, you must cultivate the literal and figurative qualities of flexibility, balance, strength, perseverance, tolerance, wisdom, serenity, joy, and so on.  In Forward Fold, for example, we practice flexibility.  The more flexible you are, the easier it can be to transition and change into different poses, and then to achieve them fully.  We need flexibility in life to help us to change, to ease the transition during changes, and then to appreciate where we are.  In Tree pose we practice maintaining our balance while our branches (our arms) blow in the wind.  We practice weathering the storms of life.  In our arm balancing poses, we practice strength in order to carry the entire weight of our bodies, just like having the strength to carry the burdens in life.  We persevere in our practice and try to move forward, but some days we are working to maintain the practice, just as in life we sometimes achieve, and sometimes plateau.  In so many of the poses we practice just holding them and breathing, being able to tolerate the discomfort of the pose.  This helps us learn to tolerate the difficult times, and difficult emotions, in life.  Serenity and joy are the rewards of a fruitful and successful practice, and also the rewards of a fruitful and successful life.  Heart openers can release emotions, in both the yoga practice and one's life. 

Yoga flow, or vinyasa flow, is when the poses flow into one another, but it is also more than that.  Yoga means "to yoke," or a union, and it's purpose is to help us unite the mind, breath, body, and emotions.  When the mind, breath, body, and emotions flow together, or are united, things intuitively and effortlessly fall into place.  It lets us know we are doing things right.  This is the meditative, and even transcendent aspect of yoga.  In our lives, finding flow works in the same way. 

When we can unite our mind, breath, body, and emotions in ourselves, we are able to connect and unite to our highest, or divine state.  There is a little bit of the divine within all of us.  When we can unite with our own divine state, we can then recognize the divine state within others, in order to connect and unite with it.  When we can connect and unite with others' divine state, we connect and unite with more of the divine.  In other words, once we can learn how to be in the amorphous and divine state of flow, it becomes easier to flow into others, to accumulate and build more divine flow, until we simply exist within the divine.  Analogous to how multiple drops of rain accumulate and flow to build a river, until the rain simply exists within the river, or becomes the river.  This is the beauty and symmetry of yoga.