"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting"-William Wordsworth
Who am I? Why do I do things I do? Why do I feel the things I feel? These questions and more have been with us since we can remember. It was that moment when we began to remember that we forgot. We forgot the oneness of ourselves. It was the time where we separated from the all of who we are to become a name that fragmented us in an environment of other names: Mom, Dad, apple, red, book, dog, cat. The words of our growing vocabulary and the approval we gained from them enticed us to look outside of ourselves more and more. The gap from who we are widened with age as we began to cling closer to our external world seeking more approval, success, and union with others. By the time most of us come into yoga, we are very detached from ourselves, with the weight of our language heavy with Chitta Vrttis, sanskrit for the ruminations of the mind, overwhelming everything we do. Random thoughts shooting across our brain with vigor, so much so that simply sitting still seems painfully impossible.
The instructor asks us to stand in Tadasana, mountain pose. Our ego tells us we know this pose, it's easy, we stand all the time. The instructor highlights the many actions involved in the proper alignment of the pose. However, our mind doesn't want to focus on keeping our toes and heels together, or equalizing the weight on our feet from heel-to-toe. It doesn't want to think about keeping an inward rotation of the legs from the root of the thigh, while keeping the lower abdominal muscles (and pubic bone) lifted. It doesn't want to focus on keeping the shoulders back and the biceps rotating outward; or stretching the arms straight down at our side, back further than we thought, palms facing our thighs, while holding our fingers and thumbs together. It doesn't want to think about pressing the outside of our heels towards one another to compact the hips (yes, while still rotating the thighs inward). It doesn't want to think about stretching the spine and lifting the chin slightly. It definitely doesn't want to sustain the actions in quiet repose without rigidity. It doesn't even know how to concentrate on all of these actions at once, much less do it with sustained effort. However, our mind flits over dozens other thoughts from a long grocery list to thinking about that coffee we haven't had yet.
A good instructor can tell our mind is wandering. They simplify the direction for us and ask us to concentrate on one thing. Not everything. Just do one thing with concentrated effort. Start from the ground up the instructor adds. You choose to concentrate on the weight of your feet. The instructor tells you to lift and spread your toes. You begin to feel more weight in the ball of the left foot. Your body wobbles. You concentrate of equalizing the weight on the feet as best you can. You relax the toes back down. All the while something is happening, the chatter in your mind is quieting. The moment you notice, the chatter starts again. Your body stiffens. Your breathing gets a little erratic. You punish yourself for getting off track then shift back to your feet. You notice once again the weight is back on the ball of your left foot. How interesting, you say to yourself, that the weight in my feet quickly goes back to the habit it had before I changed it. You set your mind to equalize the weight again, and realize if you hold your concentration there, you can maintain the action. The instructor may or may not notice, but you've noticed something huge. You've started the process of discovering yourself in a way you never have before...and you've only done one pose. That's the magic of yoga.
No comments:
Post a Comment