The more you stretch, breathe, and sit on the mat, the more tools you gain for life beyond it. That’s because practicing yoga is a powerful and effective way to practice life. Yoga isn’t about what you are doing, but how you are doing it. Yoga spotlights the quality of your life through the only actual perspective: Inside and Now. As much as you pretend other contexts matter (or even exist), there is only the experience of your internal universe. And there is only one moment to experience it. Depend on yoga, it will draw you inside now.
Yoga shows you how you are doing life, so that life isn’t doing you. Stretch by stretch, breath by breath, moment by moment, yoga expands your experience of yourself. It simplifies the illusion of complexity. It clarifies confusion. It untangles the binding knots of your own limiting personality.
I can’t help but laugh! I know I’m promising a lot, and I learned in Consumer Education class (let’s hear it for the 70’s!) that if something seems too good to be true, it is. But I’m not selling anything. I’m just stating the obvious: life only happens inside and now. Focusing outside yourself, or trapped in any other moment, is not a functional or healthy approach to your one and only life on planet earth.
When you shift your attention inward, you discover that many of your thoughts, emotions, mental habits, opinions, and reactions are negative. Fear-based. Confining. God-awful, in that they are awful, and you are the God of it. You are allowing it, by your negligence and ignorance of “inside”. It’s not your fault, of course. The way of the world is outward.
The more you practice inward awareness, the easier it becomes to choose open, easy, courageous, satisfying, healthy, kind. You will do anything to release yourself from the burden of closed, difficult, fearful, dissatisfying, unhealthy and unkind—even if it means facing all the negativity and fear that you’ve been avoiding your life long. Yoga guides the challenging activity of facing yourself by providing all the support you need in the process.
The postures are just one of the eight limbs of yoga, but most people only think of the poses when they think of yoga. I did. The poses are a great place to start because they lead to all the elements of the other limbs. They all work together, guiding you back to inside and now. As you practice poses, you practice breathing. You practice kindness and non-violence towards yourself. You engage in self-study. You increase your concentration and focus. You remember relaxed, open and easy.
By showing up on the mat, you show up for your life, as each stretch, breath, and moment provides an opportunity to see how you open or close, flow or obstruct, observe or snooze.
Practice yoga and you will practice life, and how you are living it.
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