When we come to yoga, we come into the body. We enter it and experience its physicality: its exhilaration and its pain, its limits and its potential. Yoga is really about body awareness. We are learning to feel deeper. To manipulate muscles. To expand the breath. Alertness to our body becomes our meditation.
After all, the body is where we experience this world. Through our yoga, we use the body as a means of knowing ourselves. And when we open the body, it's as a doorway into the process of achieving a fuller, more expansive self. We remove physical blockages, push back the boundaries of our muscles and ligaments, the boundary of what we thought was possible.
And we achieve freedom.
We begin by grounding. Without grounding in the body, we can find ourselves on shaky ground mentally too, daydreaming and lacking focus. We spend so much time in our minds, considering the past and planning the future, but grounding in the body, we root in the Here and the Now. Once inside ourselves, we draw from our instincts, our heritage, our culture, the memory of all we have learned. We tap into our own evolution to enter the collective unconscious, regaining the power of our roots.
In our minds, we live in our imagination. A vast potential, but all that can exist there is an idea. In order to make that idea manifest, we need discipline to narrow our focus, to gather our energies to that focus. We need to create boundaries and define a form for our mental energies--a project, a goal, a plan. Then we draw that energy into our bodies, draw it into to our hearts, our limbs, our hands. We move the energy, channel it. And it condenses and becomes manifest, because only by focusing energy can we create matter.
We turn our consciousness into matter, and our ideas take root and become real. We
create. The earth is our vehicle, carrying us through time and space, but our bodies are our own personal ride for this journey. They are where our life on earth begins and ends. They are the form through which we know what we know, do what we do. Thy are where we collect our experiences. Where we initiate action. Our bodies are the container for our spirit, for our mind, and the storehouse of our feelings and emotions and memories.
How can we expect to find understanding anywhere else but inside?
So when we come to yoga, we come to the body. Enter the body now and hear your breath. Sharpen your ability to listen to yourself from within. Let your breath expand you from the inside, in order to get ready to expand your potential. Find that what you thought possible has changed. Find that you too have changed.
Welcome to yoga.
