GRATITUDE FIRST. Being 60 is like careening down a giant
highway, seeing loved ones veer suddenly off the exits, never to be seen
again. You have become intimate
with the random, mysterious nature of life. You know for certain that change is
constant, always reforming, tearing down, building up, dissolving, and
creating. Every time, every single
day that you have the opportunity to practice, you bow with great appreciation
for that.
YOGA REQUIRES ENDURANCE, a falling in love kind of endurance that gets you up in the morning
and on the mat. Or guides your
feet to class after a long day of work.
It's intuiting somewhere in the distance the form of yourself that you
came into this world with, your unique body mind heart print. Yoga mysteriously takes you closer to
that, as it fine-tunes the way your heart beats, the way the chemicals flow in
your bloodstream, the way you inhabit space, the field of your awareness. Love
is how you overcome obstacles.
PHYSICAL FLEXIBILITY IS OVER-RATED, and mental flexibility is too little cultivated. What use is the ability to put your
foot behind your head, if you’re snappish and impatient, judgmental and
unloving, with every little thing, including yourself? I’ve known yogis with bodies like taffy
and minds like blocks of stone, and newbies to yoga with their sweet stiff
bodies, untalented in the kinesthetic realm, yet glowing with sweetness and
open minded. Let’s use all our
practices to cultivate a mind that fluidly meets the daily round of life with
creativity and wisdom.
ASANA IS IMPORTANT. We do asanas to call
forth inside ourselves the archetypal energies and images that each form or
sequence brings to bear on our psycho-spiritual selves. This process mysteriously awakens our
blocked creativity, our insight, and our healing powers. Asana clears us, it opens the sky
inside us. With just a few
dedicated yoga practices a week, our wise and grateful bodies and spirits
respond overwhelmingly with increased strength, vigor, and clarity.
ASANA ISN'T EVERYTHING. We love our asana, and
it loves us, but it's only the tip of the yoga iceberg. The great texts of yoga are a vast
resource of the highest investigations of the human soul and mind on this
planet, a profound gift to the human species, from the Vedas to the Upanishads,
from the Bhagavad Gita to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and on to later iterations of these
traditions in the Tantric stream, like the Siva
Sutras and the Vijnanabhairava Tantra. Glittering gifts and endless pathways
of insight await any who delve with devotion into these living texts.
YOGA MEANS MEDITATION. If you step your toes
into the texts mentioned above, you will observe the primacy of place that is
given to the practice of meditation.
Meditation is the great, courageous, and intimate process of being with
oneself, an outrageously radical thing to do in this culture of stimulus,
constant distraction and external focus.
Meditation is developing a relationship with the eternal presently
abiding. It is making friends with
all the ways that life expresses itself in the form of you. Meditation is the great heart path of
the yogi, the way to walk in the sky, the way to your birthright of freedom.
May all of your
practices be blessed always with the fruit of inner recognition.
