A good yoga practice steps up to greet you and gently pulls you into a place of awareness. It is intelligent, kind, steady, and pushes you to listen, respond, and end with a full appreciation of who you are. Somewhere along the line you gain strength, flexibility, capacity and confidence. Your awareness grows and extends into your toes, fingers, busy mind, tender heart and all points past and present. Each pose, every movement is an opportunity to skillfully manage the many details of your being.
At every moment every part of you has the chance to show up. There’s the one who remembers to eat a healthy breakfast, be on time for a meeting and pick up the milk. There’s the one that said you’re too tired to practice, and the one who knew you really weren’t. There’s the one who thinks you can’t do something and the one who says you can. With every practice you have the chance to meet your naysayers and your champions for joy and gratitude.
In every pose you have the ability to perch somewhere in the center and ride out with breath and awareness into every corner of your amazing self. The ride is complex and spectacular. You might even get lost along the way caught up and fascinated by how moving your leg one way or another changes the sensations in your hips. And then at another moment you realize that you are simply enjoying the peace of breathing steadily into a longer held pose. Yes, there are times your body is tight, ornery and sometimes injured. Your mind and emotions may tangle themselves in endless knotted loops. Stay with it, stay committed and available and eventually once again your practice guides you to a place of clarity. Sometimes that means you feel content, loving and full; sometimes just less sad, stiff or cranky. At the end of the day the practice pulls you into your center; embraces you with the comfort of a good night’s sleep and points you toward the sunrise of your potential.
In our yoga practice we take time to assess and be with everything that is showing up. We make decisions about who takes center stage in every moment. The practice itself is a petri dish; a controlled experiment and a consistent backdrop, against which you repeat, calculate, readjust, absorb and continue following the scent of your best self.
Step on the mat and see who is showing up for you today.
