What’s Yoga Got to Do with It?

 

Note: Everything I write here is deeply informed by my long study and embodied practice of Taoism, Shakta–Shaiva Tantra, Anusara Yoga, and Katonah Yoga.

Form
Form, by its very nature, is not perfect. By “form” I mean bodies, plants, and all of creation. And even the form of my daily schedule.

 Purna

Great Nature—God, the Universal—is said to have the nature of Pūrṇa, a Sanskrit word meaning “fullness of perfection; wholeness; undivided love.” This pūrṇa takes form and becomes you, me, cats, trees, frogs, and so on. But to do so, it must become partial. As Leonard Cohen writes, “We are one in the higher eye. But down here where we live, we are two.”

Individual nature is part of Great Nature, yet also apart from it. Knowing this—and learning to live well with it—is what my teacher Lee called enlightened duality.

So—what’s yoga got to do with all of this?
Personal, individual form tends to be deformed, malformed, misinformed, leaky, diminished in potential and efficiency.

But because we are part of Great Nature, form also has potential. It can be re-formed and transformed toward greater capacity to hold information, to receive and transmit currents of intelligence and grace.

The practice of “good” yoga is formal precisely so it can transform and reform us. The intelligent principles of alignment in yoga—both physical and esoteric—are formal in nature.

The big goal of postural yoga is to use physical techniques, alignment principles, shapes, and movement patterns to cultivate:

• Strength
• Stamina
• Stability
• Fluency
• Mobility

I think of these qualities as ways of praise: the individual form emulating, performing, and gradually—perhaps inevitably—re-forming, drawing nearer to union (yoga), to remembering we are made in the image of God/dess.

Living “down here where we live”
In daily life, good mental, emotional, and relational health means cultivating options and “workarounds” (much like epigenetic theory) for my less well-formed aspects. This consolidation of center allows me to radiate more fully and evenly, becoming more efficient, refined, reliable, and capable of participating in the well-being of both my inner and outer worlds—family, community, planet, and cosmos.

With this, I am better able to “stay with the trouble” (Donna Haraway) as well as with the ineffable gift of being embodied here on Earth, in this "mess-in-the-muddled-middle" time of history.

So I remain perpetually interested in the techniques and practices of body, breath, and mind that help me measure up—to be useful first, and then beautiful—infused with mind and spirit, a container for universal spirit, a spirited containment of joy.