What is it about stopping that brings everything to you. In a yin yoga asana, you pull into a pose and stop. All the body and breath is right there, all you are is you now. Not the dreams or drearies of past and future. We aren’t stored in the future or past, yet when our brain is there, a part of us is not. So being all our is-ness, being all we are actually, it’s a very different feeling.
After an a.m. yoga class, it can profoundly change how I experience many hours of the day. Each moment I am more open and more present for others and myself. It is very interesting. A few hours after such an amazing a.m. class I saw a seagull soaring over the lake. Often I have admired the superficial beauty. This time I felt that was the moment in that yin asana this morning. That moment I was soaring. What was it, I asked myself? It was doing nothing and being everything.
We are all braver than we often know. We are moving in a world we essentially are not seeing at all. Where does the seat you are sitting on stop and the floor start? There are no clear boundaries, on a molecular level this “border” is a blur (and mostly of empty space). Everything is a part of everything else (Etienne Gilson‘s work helped me see that). We have great expectations given we are so blind. That is just the start of course. Dark matter is believed to constitute 83% of the matter in the universe and 23% of the mass-energy (Wikipedia on Dark Matter). Physicists call it Dark because they mostly have no idea what it is! That is a lot of matter to not get. It is a bizarre world. Quantum physics just makes my head spin. Still we walk on like oh well, its all the same.
We say, of course the grass is still green again today. Really its a strange miracle. Just because the laws of physics always did exist doesn’t mean they will always continue to do so (as my Greek prof. John Wyatt liked to say). And just now we seem to learn that light is no longer the fastest traveling entity. On some level we are just flesh and blood temporarily walking on an amazing planet. On some level, we are this amazing eternal part of the world. Our energy will continue to intertwine into it, our consciousness can go on forever. After reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying I realize I have no good reason to be so fixed in my thoughts about what happens, what consciousness is.
So we bravely walk on and knowing all we see is what is, as best as we can know, and being satisfied with this. What we sense, see and feel is what is. What we are dreaming about is a dream. It may have once been real or may become real. Still it is not what is, it has no is-ness. So it isn’t. Mindfulness is about getting in touch with what we can know. And that is very much what is real in this moment. And is less about what we dreamed the next moment would be. Although that dream is so important to note. Because our is-ness involves so much time spent in the thinking, the worrying, the storylines, the dreams. Mindfulness techniques allow you to be with that experience kindly and find moments of groundedness.
My first great yoga teacher told me when you first started here your head wasn’t even on your body! That is so funny, I know I was so full of dreams one time I simply fell right out of a standing pose onto my mat in her class. Our astonishment was funny. It was as though I woke up being splashed onto my mat. After completing over 300 classes in the past 2+ years, I can say, yoga first blew the door open to body sensation awareness I had been trying to learn by sitting meditation for many years. Next, more posture awareness came into my daily life and now more and more breath awareness. Yoga is a great place to practice mindfulness techniques. It is a great place to get grounded in your body. It takes you from that place where you are thinking so much you become a floating head.
Some moments in yoga can feel like diving off a cliff. Another moment in yin yoga can be like touching your deepest most comforting self. Like holding yourself, your real self, so deeply and lovingly, just as it is in that moment, with all its pains and aches and joys and blissful moments. Caressing and being with what actually is. Sans the dream of what should, would or could, just what is. With the yoga teacher reminding now: Stay. Breathe.
My Mindfulness Blog 