The thing I love most about yoga is that it teaches you everything you need to know about life. Both the important and the seemingly insignificant aspects.
Let’s take painting your nails. Yoga teaches patience and precision in movement, essential skills if you’re really going to get a nice sheen on your fingers and toes (and a nice touch for neighbouring yogis who might chance a glimpse at your nails as you swing elegantly into headstand)…
And then there are those big life lessons. For me, the most life changing of these has been the teaching that what happens on the mat, happens off the mat. When you really get this, not as a platitude but as a literal statement, it will tell you everything you ever need to know about yourself.
In this morning’s class, we explored one of the basic tenants of yoga as laid down thousands of years ago by Patanjali. It is this; the physical postures in yoga should be steady and comfortable, or put another way, one’s connection to the earth should be steady and joyful.
The thing about such a lesson was that the class was noisy and potentially, quite distracting. The garbage truck on the adjoining street seemed to be reversing (with its accompanying beep, beep, beep) for a very long time. A gardener started trimming a hedge along the fence of a neighbouring house. A builder started using some very noisy machinery to remedy a problem on the side of a nearby building. Hardly the peaceful environs we might normally expect in a yoga class and which some of us may have come to think we ‘need’ in order to access peace and tranquility. And yet, as is always the case, things were exactly as they should be. (more…)
