Yoga is not an escape
Yoga is not an escape. Yoga is meant to hold you in the moment so you can sit with all your issues, see them in the face, hear them in your heart, feel the pain, and learn to sit through it all, until one day it breaks and suddenly you are free. The alternative to that is to continue to create enough chaos, noise, business, entertainment to stay numb, until one day you drop dead. The day your body can't keep up with your mind, and your ego, the pain will break you. Choosing to let yourself be broken in a safe space, gradually as you build the needed strength to sustain it is what yoga is about.
Practice is for me a moment of reflection, sometimes it's inevitable for it to just be me on a mat going through the motions, but most days I try and wait for the space inside of me to widen enough that I can feel my heart, and in my heart feel the deep desire to connect with what's greater then this physical form. Then I light a candle and I pray with my body.
I make it a ritual, I try my best to respect it because it is trough practice that I've learned to not escape but stay present for the hard times, and let it teach me to pick myself up, because we all know we will continue to fall. A steady practice builds enough inner strength to learn to start over again and again many times. Forgiveness, compassion and strength cultivated on the mat, and repeated enough times teach that through reflection, patience and discipline we can pick ourselves up as many times as needed…
What do you do to cultivate a practice that is not just physical but that guides you towards a deeper connection with yourself, with others, with God, with universe?
Gandhi always said that "the body might be frail but the spirit is boundless". We are much, much stronger than we think, capable of great things, not because we are great but because there is divinity in us all. When we choose to stay present, to start again, to lean to fall we are looking for the inaction within the action. Looking for the stillness within the chaos. Looking for a place where our minds can rest so that we can clearly see what is here now and mindfully place our foot down on the path onto the next moment of presence.
As a community of practitioners that lives in this way we together we can choose to gather to offer Metta, or loving kindness in some way or form to each other.
Metta is an attitude of recognizing that all sentient beings can feel good or feel bad, and that all, given the choice, will choose the former over the latter.
Metta is a recognition of the most basic solidarity that we have with others, this sharing of a common aspiration to find fulfillment and escape suffering.
Metta is empathy. It’s the willingness to see the world from another’s point of view: to walk a mile in another person’s shoes.
Metta is the desire that all sentient beings be well, or at least the ones we’re currently thinking about or in contact with. It’s wishing others well.
Metta is friendliness, consideration, kindness, generosity. Metta is an attitude rather than just a feeling. It’s an attitude of compassion. Metta is the basis for compassion. When our Metta meets another’s suffering, then our Metta transforms into compassion.
Metta is the basis for shared joy. Metta is boundless. We can feel Metta for any sentient being, regardless of gender, race, or nationality.
Metta is the most fulfilling emotional state that we can know. It’s the fulfillment of the emotional development of every being. It’s our inherent potential. To wish another well is to wish that they be in a state of experiencing Metta.
Metta is the answer to almost every problem the world faces today. Money won’t do it. Technology won’t do it. Metta will.
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"our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world outside us –as most of us are led to believe –as in being able to remake ourselves on the highest model of human achievement we know of." Gandhi💜
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Practice and Travel with me:
