How are you?

In contrast to the lockdown months, I’m finding life more hectic than ever – the roads and streets are busy and our family diary is full of activities and events. While I wouldn’t want to return to lockdown times, I do miss the stillness and silence.

In our culture we seem to value ‘doing’ over not-doing (or ‘just being’). Often our ‘doing’ is habit or routine, carried out without reflection, almost as if we’re half asleep.

When we manage to strip away our habits of moving, breathing and thinking – ‘going through the motions’ – we can be awake to the present moment. As we ‘empty out’ we notice what arises (sensations, thoughts and emotions). We watch these things arise and we watch them disperse, like ripples on a pond, returning to stillness.

A goal of the yoga tradition is to experience emptiness. When you hear the word ‘emptiness’ it may conjure up thoughts of something bleak, desolate, lonely and lifeless. But in yoga, emptiness equates to openness, potential, receptivity. And emptiness (pure consciousness) is something far from lifeless – it’s a totally alive, vibrant stillness that’s full of energy.

When we make room for emptiness we can notice what arises from the stillness at the centre of all our ‘doing’. In the words of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, we can ‘rest in our essence nature.’

As the Christmas frenzy starts to build, you’re welcome to join me for a rest from all your habitual ‘doing’. Sometimes in class we move, sometimes we’re still. We’re always shifting sensation, thoughts, emotions, energy (which are all different aspects of the same thing) to shake off those habits that get us stuck, weigh us down and cloud our perception of the world around us.

What happens when we practice yoga?

We start to notice how we are – not just physically, but also energetically, mentally and emotionally.

Because we’re all unique, we each engage differently with a physical sensation or an instruction/suggestion. We all experience life through the lens of our own conditioning. Our habits affect the way we move, the way we think, how we interpret how we feel.

But despite our differences, when we practice yoga we all drop into a shared experience of letting go. There is nothing to fix. The goal is not to somehow craft a ‘new you’, but to strip away – layer by layer – our habits, the weight of our identity, our sense of being separate from the world around us. In the words of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, we ‘still the fluctuations of the heart-mind’ and ‘rest in our essence nature’.

These moments of connection can be fleeting. Other outcomes of our practice are more constant – maintaining a functional range of movement, calming the nervous system, releasing feel-good endorphins, improving circulation and releasing toxins.

Yoga is best approached with ‘a beginner’s mind’…empty of expectation, as if we were coming to the mat for the first time. As we surrender to the experience our inner landscape begins to open up.

“Practice yoga…all is coming.” Pattabhi Jois