By this I mean that there is a lot to do in the practice.
Sometimes we are doing a Tibetan practice called Tong Len - which involves giving away specific qualities to another person - while we are taking different asanas.
Other times the physical postures are paired with deep introspective meditation on certain topics.
I was drawn to this particular style because I had, for years, practiced a version of yoga and meditation that was much more simple and pared down - "just experience whatever you're experiencing, just return to the breath."
Doing this style of practice opened me up to deep levels of relaxation and the insight that can arise from letting go of having to mentate and conceptualize everything in minute detail.
But then at some point it just wasn't enough. This doesn't mean I was "bored" - we're supposed to watch out for that in our tradition of practice - it just meant that my intuition said something that should be there (for me) was missing.
Conveniently (as such things tend to happen), a whole new stream of Teachings arrived in my life that started to put the missing pieces into my yoga practice. Things have really started to speed up and get very interesting for the last few years.
Last week, in my Teacher's friday morning class, I noticed a lot of emotional discomfort seeming to arise from my body. It was a struggle to keep up with the Mantras that we were toning, and the intentions we were sending forth to the world. Don't get me wrong, i felt the value of those practices - i just couldn't DO them!
So there i was, mired under a feeling that I was doing my yoga somehow "wrong" - and I remembered... from somewhere back in the past... some tool I had for just this occasion.
And then it hit me - "come back to your breath - be with whatever is arising for you". So I settled in on the sound of my Ujayii breathing and all of a sudden, things became spacious.
This is not to say that everything in my whole world suddenly became peachy-keen..... because if I slipped out of that mindfulness, i was in a state of deep (yoga induced!), emotional distress. But what did happen is that I moved from a place of powerlessness into a place of power. What Eckhart Tolle calls "the power of now".
I had gotten lost into some picture of how my yoga was supposed to look and feel and it took the distress and magnified it all out of proportion. When I was able to settle into the moment and simply be with what was happening, the distress was still there, but i wasn't adding more stress on top of it.
Our tradition does not hold that "everything will just work itself out - so relax" - in fact, the ancient masters of yoga have taught that everything can work itself out, but it takes deep participation and enthusiasm from the practitioner. At the same time though, if we get stressed out - we are no longer actually practicing yoga - we are practicing stress.
The Yoga Sutras mention that we must balance out Abhyasa - intensive efffort, with Vairagya - dispassionate letting go of results.
For me, i found a balance in my own practice by doing the work - keeping up the postures, toning the chants, visualizing the meditation objects - and then just getting real with what was going on with me. Not wishing to be somewhere else. Oddly, the moment i stopped wishing for things to be different was the moment they started to change.
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