yoga can be a fight against ourselves, to reach some distant goal , an idea of transcendence
or a doorway to re-membering who you really are, awakening to here, at the very heart of ordinary experience
Sound familiar, all that sense of not enoughness driving you away from what is already here?
the sensitivity that we are is our way in
when we know it as our friend
to welcome all that is here ,is to start waking up to what burdens us , the persistent beliefs of patterned thinking , our inner load that we carry of conditioned felt states, over and again triggering reactivity to life
landing into an awakening yoga practice, we create space for something else to open , in a deep inner listening. Like listening to the space between sounds , between sensation and thought , this opening allows an awareness to track and notice our reactive thoughts, behaviours, but it is the something else that happens wider than the noticing , a wider harmony that comes in from wide and we are touched by the calling edge of deep stillness …
How does your heel meet the earth and the earth sing back to it ?
Waking up, with a deep listening , meaning we meet ourselves , we are open to receive
so slowly what is actually waiting to be alive and expressed like a tender leaf can unfold, there is more breath, deeper ease in our deep skin
there may be moments in our practice where we are taken in, held in a wide harmony that comes, as though the whole sky might stretch open before our new seeing , a seeing from way deep , as the heel and the earth sing their intimate belonging , a bubbling up of ease , a whispering that says home
something happens; from this tiny sensation of the heel and the earth , the listening has become us
a yoga session ends with students feeling totally transformed in mind and body where they may have felt too exhausted to even get to class , at the beginning the mind and body felt closed, stiff and resistant , now there is a wider harmony , energy and clarity
landing back in our flow
slowing down is a very good way of allowing the body’s felt sense of what’s happening in our bodies to come to us , in a culture of speed and over stimulation , we drop down underneath
underneath what ? resistance to being in life’s flow and ease
the grip of what Eckhart Tolle refers to as the pain body, a resistance that confuses us in the minds convincing grip, into making change, taking decisions we think help us get out of here
in cultivating a meeting with whats underneath through a sensitive , listening approach to body/ mind , there can be a profound engagement with life, we allow life to move through us
often students feel anxious about letting go , to what might feel like a surrender to non doing , what is the point ?
we can practice shifting out compulsive thinking with a focus on material, consumerist reality and results and getting to what is next , and make choices about what is really important, out of the way of fixing, pinning down controlling . This controlling mind occludes the life flow with temporary feelings of having got somewhere and yet never feeling satisfied , what’s next arises, and so the cycle continues…
and so we see much of humanity cutting itself of from life , destroying rather than protecting life, the very life that is us, mistakening the anguish as the enemy , but its the way in
its exhausting , the reactivity,
minds stretching our hearts out of shape
yoga is a place for this deep listening to the knowing of the body , for our shifting out of being out of touch with reality
or
your yoga practice might be either an exercise work out to offer a temporary endorphine high fix or fuelling the self convincing strategies to fix it all , whilst you push and pull against your body to make it everything it is simply not ever meant to be
Acceptance is not defeat
when it comes through entering the doorway thats always open from the cage of the thinking and programmed beliefs
have you really felt the deep perfume of love in the feet
that have walked you through and know it , yes the feet know ,
in the space , in the waiting, in the allow body, it begins to take you by the hand and show you the way back – remembering
the feet, the body, know the remembering, they are just waiting for you to wake up
a yoga teacher and cranio sacral therapist , the way is, the body’s knowing , it not it’s own , you can’t pin it down.
There is an essential attitude of openness that inhabits us more and more on the mat as we cultivate this practice of deep listening .
so when the anguish comes ,
all our times of practice offer us in that moment the chance to not be it , to not believe it, the gentle arms of your inner knowing allow something else to happen , we are open
And the openness is not ‘ours’ either, nor a technique to grasp, it’s presence an ‘aliveness’ , the welcoming deep stream of life
the living presence of knowing emerges like a sweet perfume arising as many things like the clearing, the grounding ,the landing back into being here now
the knowing is like the hand of your heart gently letting you settle inside its wide palm , its roots going deep and wide , to we don’t know where , but there is a sense of a deep abiding place
the feet , the pelvis, the heart , the deep cranium somehow radiating from the deep inner coming home , a mysterious coalescing of the spine, this song of the bodies own inherent movement, a living process , that we can’t do , but that we are
here the posture is our home , and we are not imposing the posture onto our body , the posture unfolds from this movement that we are
we cease to go with the confusion , the mind’s movie
there can be rest , deep ease in the cells song,
a sense of deepening into stillness
a rich inner pool of living
touched by beauty
and wonder
our sensitivity
home again
Creating space in your week for a yoga practice that for fully living your daily life.
be life be joy
Yoga 