Why I Practice Yoga
harry on 10:10 am October 5th, 2011 / 2 Comments »
Sometimes, making my way through daily life, it’s easy for me to forget that our beliefs are added onto us from the outside. We aren’t born with them. We are born with a basic humanity that can get lost over our lives as we settle into containers from which we see people with whom we agree and people with whom we don’t—people we call allies and enemies.
I think that if I were to sit in complete silence for a day with someone whose views I find abhorrent, I would forget to hate that person and he or she would forget to hate me. I hope we’d see that basic humanity in each other in the space our silence might create and we’d learn to be compassionate toward each other. The seeds of anger, mistrust, and even hatred are planted deep through this life, but we are not necessarily stuck with them forever.
Practicing yoga gives me the opportunity to exist in silence with those beliefs within me that I find abhorrent, and to allow myself to move towards the realization that they have very little to do with who I am as a human being.
On November 2nd, 2011 at 8:48 am Layne Said:
Really? I practice yoga because it tones my abs.
It is so hard for us, inculcated from birth with the Descartian “I think, therefore I am” to consider self, Self, humanity, being that has nothing to do with thinking!
But, was I born with Descarte in my head?
On November 2nd, 2011 at 10:17 am harry Said:
Hmm, Layne…maybe it’s a professional thing–all the graphing?
Descartes would say that you weren’t necessarily born with him in your head, because you can’t really be certain that you even HAVE a head!
He’d say, if he still had a working body that could say things, you can only be certain that you have a mind ’cause that’s where your awareness lives. Except it’s not a “where.” Your mind, being immaterial, has nowhere to go. Your body has some where. It can move around, but it can’t think.
Maybe this doesn’t seem so different from a body being a manifestation of the Self, but there’s one big difference. If we accept that the body is a made of the Self, just like everything else, it’s not a huge jump to accept that the body, being part of a really big Consciousness, has consciousness. So, in reality, there’s no separation. Body and Self are the same thing and the Self doesn’t believe in containers. So we can remind ourselves of that on the mat–and off, I guess.
Besides, I think that you know in your gut that your toned abs are thinking.