All These Places

The other day I was thinking about yoga.  OK, so this doesn’t come as much of a surprise because yoga is a big part of my life.  But I was thinking about the fact that when one does yoga, when one takes a class, it’s referred to as a yoga practice.  So what are we practicing for?  When we do other sports, our practice refers to the fact that we are getting ready for a game, for the real thing. I took dance lessons when I was younger and all of our practices led to this final moment when we were all on stage, dressed up and made up and under bright lights performing.  So what is our yoga practice getting us ready for?  Well, I think it gets us ready for life.

                There are so many ways in which what we learn on our yoga mat can extend into the world around us.  The most simple of those is this:  just keep breathing.  It’s amazing what simply focusing on the inhales and the exhales can do when you find yourself starting to lose sight of things.  I often like to begin my yoga classes with extended child’s pose, in which the forehead is connected to the ground.  I tell my students to imagine that with the inhales, they are pulling in the strength and energy they need from the earth beneath them; and with the exhales they are able to release what is no longer needed into that same earth.  And though we can’t live our lives on our yoga mat, we can always breathe, right?  Stuck in traffic, faced with difficult coworkers, or dealing with the challenges that must come with life we can always inhale the good stuff and exhale the bad stuff.

                In yoga, you are forced to deal with the fact that you will never look just like the person next to you in class.  There are poses that you can rock out and poses that will continue to elude you.  But that’s cool.  How boring would it be if we all looked the same?  The important part is that we keep working on those poses that are difficult for us, because it’s in these weak parts of our life that we learn the most.  Yes, love that strength that comes when your warrior couldn’t be fiercer and you feel like you’re flying in an arm balance.  But also be gentle with yourself when you butt right up against that edge.

                One of the most powerful moments I’ve ever had in a yoga practice came on my second to last day of teacher training in Costa Rica.  We were instructed to stand in mountain pose, with one arm extended overhead, reaching for energy, and one arm extended out to the side, releasing that energy.  We were asked to hold that pose for a full five minutes.  Try it…it’s not easy.  But our instructor reminded us that we’d been through things much more difficult than that in life.  With that reminder, there was no way I was putting my arms down.  In yoga, we learn that we are capable of probably more than we thought we were.  That feeling when you get a pose that you previously thought was impossible—man, that’s like nothing I’ve ever felt.  It’s a pride and a confidence and a lesson of resilience that has somehow carried into every other difficult situation I’ve faced in life.

                Practice makes perfect, goes the old saying.  But in yoga I think that our practice will always make us acknowledge our imperfections; and our imperfection makes us human.  We will never have a yoga recital, with applause at the end of the number.  We will never ‘win’ yoga against the other team.  It is a practice that will always provide a promise of more practice.  It will continue to teach, we will continue to learn, we will continue to roll out our mats and let the lesson unfold.  We will practice life.