"I don't know exactly what a prayer is.I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,which is what I have been doing all day.Tell me, what else should I have done?Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
-Mary Oliver From A Summer's Day
One of the biggest surprises during my past 12 years of coming to know yoga is that yoga has slowly became my path for worship. According to Dictionary. Com, the word "worship" can be defined as "to feel an adoring reverence or regard for..." Let me preface this by quoting Swami J and I must fess up that I know nothing else about Swami J except that I stumbled upon some quotes of his while surfing the Internet. Still...I liked what he had to say. "There is no religion in yoga but there is yoga in some religions." So I am not speaking dogma here but I believe I am speaking a truth that I have experienced and continue to directly know through my practice of yoga.
I first discovered yoga at my Unitarian Universalist Church. What started out as the need to have a single two hour period to myself each week to reconnect with who I might be beyond my all encompassing role as a mother to a newborn baby girl turned into a blown out love affair. What began as forcing myself out my front door became a gentle entry into getting to know myself better than any therapy or self help book had ever done. It only took a few short weeks and I began to look forward to rolling out my yoga mat on the hardwood floor. The late afternoon sun would display it's glory through the floor to ceiling main window above the alter shining in chinks and patterns that gently played upon my body as I surrendered into forward folds, child poses, knee down twists and eventually corpse pose. I was quieted and soothed by my yoga instructor's English accent and his Ujjayi breath. When I closed my eyes I heard only the ocean- loud and rhythmic, ever present, dependable, and complete.
It was in that familiar room of reverence that I learned how to really breathe. Not the shallow breath that I had unknowingly come to embody; a shallow breath that is all too familiar to most Americans. a limited way of breathing that is encouraged by our stress producing yet sedentary culture. Like most of us, I spent many hours of each day sitting at my desk and computer, behind the wheel of my car, and sometimes in front of my television. I also spent many hours of each day obsessing on things that created angst such as piles of unopened bills, difficult relationships and appearances. My tendencies of body and mind had created a slumped position with rounded spine-physically and mentally. Making it almost impossible to fill the lungs with sufficient breath. Like Tinker Bell needed the infusion of children's faith to bring back her vitality and make her light shine, we too need infusions. Yoga recognizes that the breath is a major pathway for bringing dynamic energy into our bodies. Retraining ourselves to breathe deeply can have many gifts including renewed energy and a healing effect.
Twelve years ago I had to relearn how to breathe. Only when I could sufficiently take a deep breath could I learn how to be present for each moment. To be truly happy one must directly know how to be with what is in each moment of our lives. A lack of trust in the process of life and a need for perfection leads to disappointment over the past and a hard knuckled grip on the present in a unrealistic attempt to control one's future. For me, learning to truly accept each moment as it comes was another one of yoga's life lessons. We need little else--praise, material possessions, status, etc.- when we are directly in touch with life in each moment.
To this day, contentment is still slippery. A lifetime of negative thinking and never feeling good enough is a difficult thing to undo. Consider a seed in a crack of a pavement that grew into a tree that tore up the sidewalk. It is difficult to remove such a tree but my yoga teaches me that it can be done. The tree's roots begin to shrink in a brief and fantastic moment of self awareness combined with an intention of observation from a place of compassion and self-acceptance. This is what I need to bring with me to the mat when I practice. This is what I need to bring into everything I do.
The laws of yoga teach that our thoughts are the seeds of our actions and ultimately of our own future. What happens to us by events, nature and others can hurt us deeply but how we react and process these moments of our lives are what ultimately creates our own suffering or happiness. It is up to us whether our reality is harmful or healing. How we interpret and how we attach to situations in our lives all serve to create the amount of energy we give to events, things and others. When we come to understand that we ourselves are responsible for what happens to us, whether or not we can understand how, then it follows that we can change what happens to us by changing ourselves. We can take our own destiny into our own hands.
To be in the moment is the practice of contentment or santosha. Maybe this is why I feel that my yoga practice is an act of worship. A way to open up wide to the gifts of the universe, to connectedness, and maybe even to god. In the practice of santosha we get to decide that in this very moment we will be contented no matter what storms are threatening. As an adult, I have come to learn that there will always be storms. None of us can escape this. If we wait for things to become as we demand them to be in order to be satisfied, we will always be waiting.
Contentment can be enjoyed in small bites. On the worst of days, it is possible to pause and look at the world through the eyes of a child if only for a moment. See the sky, hear a bird, get lost in a loved one's face. We can say, "For this tiny moment, I choose to be content." Begin to look for these moments. The more you seek out contentment, the more it will show itself, the more you will worship life- especially your own life. The more you will feel an adoring reverence and regard for everything
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