As I sit and wait for my private yoga student to arrive, I contemplated what this meant.
My student is willing to drive 40minutes to arrive at 6am, at crack of dawn, to leave her kids and her husband and have a yoga class with me.
What a privilege and an honor it is to be entrusted.
Another student of mine traveled all the way from another country to stay in this tiny quiet village in Japan to practice yoga with me. This is the second time she came back to Okinawa to do this.
What we do together in our private yoga lesson, SOMA YOGA, may look quite gentle and soft. But if you fall in love with this practice, it becomes essential and it lets you know you are loved. It is awakening and transformative, not in an outwardly, demonstrative way but deeper than deep, within, at core.
Regular modern yoga practice tends to work from outside in. SOMA YOGA starts deep within at core and we let it dissolve and melt to spread naturally without an effort to the other parts of life.
SOMA YOGA is practiced with a meticulous consideration on body’s angles in postures with an aim of nurturing our souls and releasing deepest muscles.
The overstimulated, busy lifestyles that we have created are mostly the causes of our anxiety, depression, lowered immune system, disrupted sleep patterns, lowered libido and deranged hormonal systems.
Clients often talk about how they don’t understand, despite their best efforts to stay healthy, they are tired and feel ungrounded, unsupported, unappreciated, frustrated and anxious.
We can do all the right things and it can be too much. Too much effort.
I asked one of students, “what is the one thing you can slack off?”
It’s a question I often ask many of my students.
We have been so tight. Tight in our bodies, tight in our hearts and spirits.
In this extremely dualistic world, we tend to think about everything in “either/or”. Anything from eggs to alcohol to a health routine and politics, we’re either 100% in or out.
And in yoga, Vedic text books are often written in extremes. It is the reason why Bhagavad Gita, the Yoga Sutras and any other scripts should not be studied without a proper teacher to give contexts.
When I introduce Jyotish, the Vedic Astrology, students ask me if they’ve been wrong about their signs all their lives. And my answers are always the same,
Words are symbols of symbols and they are not the things I am pointing to.
You might have been told that your Sun sign is sagittarius all your life and you may find that you are a Capricorn in Vedic Astrology. But that’s ok. These labels are helpful but not crucial. The crucial part is that it is helpful in understanding your habitual patterns. And knowing our characteristics and patterns helps us embrace our natural states of being.
When we get bogged down in labels, we are once again cornered in duality, “either/or”. Instead, how about we keep our aim and widen our peripheral visions to embrace “and/both”?
The natural states of being is our relaxed, soft and receptive self that has a widened peripheral vision with a soft gaze.
No more pushing and striving, no stretching to the limits, no more whipping into shape, no more doing so many things all at once.
Then we are free. Free of striving. Free of multi-tasking and doing things on the surface level. Be soft, be receptive, just be. Practice being simply being.
Then everything we choose to do becomes intentional, fulfilling, and soul-enriching.
Because then, you start to unravel things you no longer need. As deepest muscles and toughest knots start to release and untangle in our poses and breaths, our old hurt and worry, melt away.
And when you start to be used to just being, your healing starts. You start to feel the sweetness of life, the radiance, truth and ease.
