Friday, January 30, 2009

The Yoga Total Freedom Package

The Yoga Total Freedom Package

This year, with a heightened sense of crisis and opportunity in our land, I question myself, again: why do I find this path of yoga to be so compelling? Amongst so many possible choices, why do I keep doing it over and over? I come to the same conclusions I've come to before. What Yoga offers is unparalleled. Yoga's overarching aim is to deliver to the practitioner the following:
· peace within, regardless of fluctuating circumstances and the endless interplay of the three Gunas: Tamas (inertia), Rajas (activity, passion), and Sattva (luminosity, harmony).
· steadiness of being (santosha), through a deeper awareness of breath
· the capacity to take even pain (dukkha) as merely another invitation to practice
· a confusing new interest in the eternal; never to be understood, but to be forever esteemed
· finally, a severing of the attachment to suffering, and simultaneously, a release of the fear of suffering.

Subsequently, there is a billowing of love. And it is real love, not just the gooey, yummy kind, but the kind that holds up on its own, even under great stress, because it comes from underneath everything. Because with yoga, reality gradually becomes more palatable, more shimmering, more real and simultaneously more digestible. Yoga renders reality tastier, plus nicely liquified for human consumption. A reality smoothie. With endless refills.

The only difference between Yoga and a smoothie is that Yoga is a totally do it yourself job. Grace provides all the ingredients, but there is no one but the self to mix it all up and swallow it down. Although everything necessary is provided by some invisible means of support, we must collaborate, with our own willingness, our own efforts. In the words of the notorious Pattabhi Jois; "Practice, and all is coming."