This passage speaks so beautifully of our yoga. It is taken from Jon Kabat Zinn's book, Wherever You Go There You Are
"There is a particular feeling of time stopping when you get your body down on the floor, whether it's to practice a lying-down meditation such as the body scan or to systematically work the body gently but firmly toward its limits in first this direction, then that, as we do in mindful hatha yoga. Maybe it's because being on the floor is so foreign to us that it breaks up our habitual neurological patterning and invites us to enter into this moment through a sudden opening in what we might call the body door.
In hatha yoga practice, the idea is to be fully in your body as you bring awareness to the various sensations, thoughts, and feelings which come up while you are moving, stretching, breathing, holding positions, reaching or lifting with arms, legs, and torso. There are said to be over 80,000 basic yoga postures. One won't quickly run out of new challenges for the body; but I find I keep coming back to a core routine of maybe twenty or so postures, which over the years just keep taking me deeper into my body and deeper into stillness.
Yoga folds movement and stillness into one another. It is a wonderfully nourishing practice. As in the other forms of mindfulness practice, you are not trying to get anywhere. But you are purposefully moving right up to the very limits of your body in this moment. You are exploring a terrain where there may be considerable intensity of sensation associated with stretching or lifting or maintaining your balance in unusual spatial configurations of limbs, head, and trunk. There you dwell, usually for longer than part of your mind would like, just breathing, just feeling your body. You are not looking to break through anything. You are not competing with anybody else's body or even aiming to improve your own. You are not judging how your body is doing. You are simply residing in stillness, within the full range of your experiences, including any intensity or discomfort (which should in any case be benign if you have not forced yourself to go beyond your limits), tasting the bloom of these moments in your body.
All the same, for the devoted practitioner, it's hard not to notice that the body loves a steady diet of this and changes on its own. There is frequently an "on the way to" quality to this practice at the same time that there is the "just as it is now" feeling as the body sinks more and more deeply into a stretch or into letting go, lying on the floor between more effortful postures. Not forcing anything, we just do our best to line up with the warp and woof of body and mind, floor, and world, staying in touch."
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