The yoga body?

“This yoga is not about gymnastics, contortionism or pushing, pulling and stretching the muscles. This yoga is about unsystematically undoing the tension in the body, so the body becomes freer and expresses an aliveness, clarity and beauty.” 

— Christine Borg

The moon, the moon, the moon…we have a super new moon on Friday and a whole heap of planetary stuff going on that is just adding to the general chaos of life lived at the moment.

The best thing I believe, would be for us all to retreat away for the rest of the month until the next full moon on October 31st has passed! Everyone is being squeezed a little, even us here on Guernsey who are fairly exempt from the covid and lockdown chaos seen elsewhere around the world.

I’ve talked to a few people who are all responsible for managing others and they all say it is a complete nightmare with anxiety and insecurity and depression running high and people sick and off work worrying about their potential covid symptoms and others just fussing, there’s a lot of fussing going on.

I’ve been questioning where yoga fits in all this because in theory it should have prepared us for this. Yoga teaches us how to be able to stay centred in the midst of uncertainty and wobbly times. It is a spiritual practice that helps to cease the fluctuations of the mind. Yet I have a sneaky feeling that much of the yoga that has been passed to us in the West is not really the yoga that the ancient rishis talked about and Patanjali codified in his Yoga Sutras.

I feel a bit peeved about this as many of you know, about the way yoga has become little more than an exercise class when it can be so much more than this if we allow it - if we allow ourselves to get out of our tiny little minds and see the world differently. The trouble is our education and society has conditioned us in such a way that it is difficult to see life differently, to let go of the rational mind as it has become and to access other parts of it that are not at all interested in what is right or wrong, but in something far more sacred and special and different altogether that cannot even be spoken of because it has a whole different language and vocabulary that is beyond our rational mind.

It’s even difficult to imagine this and I know that some who have come to class recently are challenged because the yoga that I practice and teach is one that is less driven or determined by the rational mind and therefore is not as rigid as it might once have been. Not to say that rational yoga is not without its benefits. It got me this far and I have definitely let go of many of the samskaras, the negative patterns and grooves in my mind that were there when I started, and I have managed to release the memory of trauma form my body so that i am able to enjoy greater intimacy in my relationships with others and with myself, and there has been a complete shift in the way I live my life.

But something still needed to change, and into my life this practice appeared that has been confronting and challenging and asks me to go deeper than I could have ever imagined and as difficult as this has been at times with the increased vulnerability and the need to let go of my notion of that which I thought was right (and many of my judgements along the way) there is something that keeps me attentive and engaged.

There have been a few times when I have thought, “to hell with it, what is this yoga anyway if it is not just postures for the sake of posture” and practiced in the old way and yet it feels so dead, so forced, so insincere and unkind to my body and to my soul. I lose my awareness drifting off, and while I might still rest at the end of the session, and there may be a sense of euphoria of moving energy and breath, the mind is not so free and calm and light, and the soul, hmm, the soul does not have as much expression, or room for expression as it might like.

Is this yoga?

It’s something I keep pondering on. We all have to start somewhere and anything that begins to tame the mind can only ever be a good thing. But when do we know that we need to move on? When do we know that we have gotten ourselves stuck? A student mentioned this week about taking a friend to class and knowing that he had a yoga body and that he would be good at getting into the advanced poses. Does that make him a yogi I wonder? If so are all the gymnasts in the world yogis?

I don’t think so. But I do believe that this is the illusion sold to the west and reinforced by all the many yoga images we are fed these days. Would a photo of someone attentively moving and connecting with that which cannot be named but is accessible though the body really help to sell anything? Maybe not, and yet to me it is the most beautiful thing, when you see someone moving in a way that encapsulates the ease of being in their own skin, or being in their own nature, of not denying this, of not pushing, pulling or forcing, of having no ambition beyond being their true self.

For the last few years I have been inspired by Christine Borg’s video called “Moving with Attention”, which is just beautiful and motivates me to practice in a way that allows more of my own nature, and to teach in a way that allows more of my student’s own nature too, that might make me appear to know very little, but allows me to access parts of the mind that at times makes me feel mad, but I know also makes me feel very alive and very much in my nature in a way that I haven’t felt in all my 17 years of daily yoga practice.

Just watch this, and right to the end too! http://www.christineborgyoga.com/practice/ It might just inspire you too!

This is what the moon is bringing up for me, this need to keep listening in and living from that space regardless of how difficult it can be because it means that life is often lived differently from the majority and that can trigger feelings of vulnerability and a little insecurity too, because there is nothing concrete to hold onto anymore…only more uncertainty in a life that is lived less and less in the right/wrong. Yet there is no other way, not when you have began and if madness and quirkiness is the result, then mad and quirky I shall become!

As Vanda Scaravelli said, ‘Yoga must not be practised to control the body: it is the opposite, it must bring freedom to the body, all the freedom it needs.’

Happy new moon!