As I reflect on where I first began my yoga journey some 20 plus years ago, and think about what my practice looks like today, I can definitely see how much it has evolved. Like most everyone who steps onto the mat for the first time, I was swimming in a world where every pose sounded the same-blah, blah, blahasana. My practice was clunky and mechanical. The image I held of being a balanced and healthy person began to be shattered as I felt sensations I’d never felt before and was asked to stand still and gently focus on one thing. What was this all about? It took me several years before I began to gain some level of understanding as to the broad scope of what the practice of yoga and meditation had to offer.
And that’s the beautiful thing about it…it’s a living practice. As we journey down our endless rolled out mat, our practice tends to magically appear before us. At some point in the process, a shift happens away from the gross to the more subtle aspects of our experience. The more I learn on the mat the more I carry off it and into my everyday-ness. Just when I think I’ve got it nailed, an entirely new and seemingly raw experience explodes onto my horizon and, once again, I turn to the “what’s next” element of my practice. Being a perpetual student is the practice. Learning how to find ease in everything is the practice. Letting our breath become part of our consciousness is the practice. But the practice unfolds as we need it to unfold…there are no shortcuts. As our being is ready to learn, we learn what’s next…not sooner than what we are actually ready to understand and digest.
As Sue Flamm said, “yoga, is a lifelong study that continues to reveal itself with years of practice and dedication. Yoga is not perfecting positions, or yoga asanas; it is so much more. Yoga is a living practice. What is revealed to us on the yoga mat serves as a metaphor for our lives.” (Puja, Restorative Yoga 2013 p 13).
As we evolve in our practice, what rises to the surface are often things of which we were completely unaware. When my husband and I first started dating I had a habit of saying “ya know” at the end of or in the middle of sentences. I had no idea when I said it until Ed began to repeat “ya know” after my every utterance of “ya know”. It drove me crazy as I tended to say, “ya know” much more than I thought. But what happened was that it broke this long-held pattern of speech. What I wasn’t aware of, an ingrained habitual speech pattern rose to the surface and the pattern untangled itself. That’s becoming conscious. The awakening to unintentional behaviors that we notice and often want to shift.
In yoga, these are called “samskaras“ or what I like to think of as “brain ruts”. These are ingrained patterns of that we default to in certain situations. They aren’t necessarily good or bad unless we begin to notice that they really do not serve us. In that moment of realization, we have the choice to start digging a new groove of behavior. Over 10 years ago, I began digging my own trench of a meditation practice…every day making the conscious and intentional choice to sit on my cushion. I wanted to create a new samskara, one that would serve me in a way that was better than my previous pattern-that of a morning coffee and switching on the news. And it has served me better by setting my daily compass in the direction I which to point.
A good practice for this thought of the week is to notice if something doesn’t feel quite right in your daily patterns or habits. Ask yourself, “what would I like to have more of in my day? How would I like to support a sense of my highest self? Is there anything that I could do now to start creating a new way of being?”
Let me know what you come up with. It might just awaken my own old stuck patterns…ya know?
