Permission
There is no way of knowing, the first time you step on a rented mat and feel your shoulders burn in warrior two, or the first time you pop in a Rodney Yee DVD, that if you’re up for it, life can change. Really, there is no magic to the postures – they are just shapes- and it doesn’t ever have to be more than simple physical exercise. Unless it does.
There is this funny perception of yoga people, that we are these spacey hippie folks, out of touch with the world. The opposite is true. In the practice, if one chooses, one finds permission to feel things deeply, fully, and authentically, in the way that one can only feel when one knows with absolute certainty that it must change. That is where the mellowness comes from. It is not born of detachment from the world, but rather complete engagement in it.
This paradox is the heart of the practice. Yoga exists at the place where things become their opposites. Yoga is in the blurry, gray space where yang becomes yin, where pleasure becomes pain, where fragile becomes indestructible, where discomfort becomes release, where the struggle becomes freedom.
As one of my fellow teachers has stated more succinctly and perfectly than I could put it, “I’m always teaching yoga.” I AM always teaching yoga. There is the practice on the mat, and there is the practice off the mat, but really there is just the practice. Just yoga, yoking, union. Just life, fully present in that blurry space from which everything becomes clear.
I no longer worry about making space for the practice in my life. My life is the practice.
Even teaching itself is a paradox, communicating that which cannot be communicated, only experienced. Words make a shape around the essence of the experience, like a wax mold, but they are not the experience itself. As the words draw near, the essence drains out, leaving just the shape of it.