i crave them like tastes

I’ve had to back away from my advanced yoga class, which is hard enough. And today, in the class I now take–still not a prenatal yoga class–I laid on the floor at the end of class, exhausted, and watched as my fellow classmates did pindasana and then its twist.

Ideally, the yoga practitioner, in my case a yogini, observes the fluctuations of the mind as they pass by the observing eye. In this particular case, I now observe and express the craving that came into my mind as I watched these practitioners do a pose that not too long ago, felt safe, comfortable, and challenging for me. I sought poses like this, in fact, because they quieted my mind and challenged the physical body simultaneously.

This experience led me to think: Surely we know now, as a yoga “culture,” what we know intuitively. Yoga is not about mashing the body into a shape for that goal alone, but rather, to stay in the pose and watch the reaction(s) of the mind. In my case, until the end of 2009, I will be watching my mind as I watch others’ poses. I post this reflection in honor of the attachment–ones that surprise me daily as my body swells and the lil’ lady grows–to what used to be “my practice.”

Yoga is indeed about letting go.

1. 
   On August 7th, 2009 at 6:54 pm carolyn Said:

   Kim
   I do understand that envy and attachment and sense of loss. As I have gotten older and as I have worked with injuries, I have “lost” poses. A way of working with my envy of others “having” poses I cannot “have’ came once while I was in class next to John Schumacher and while my knee would not let me do lotus, John was in a beautiful lotus pose. I thought: there is my lotus pose, he is doing it for me, for all of us. I no longer felt bereft and discovered in myself that when I have that kind of envy it comes from a contracted sense of self. Not only was I able to enjoy the pose in John, I was able to feel the effects of groundedness and release that I would have felt had my own legs created the pose.
   My yoga again and again asks me to open and expand that sense of self.
   Carolyn