The Yoga Blog

on being original

kelly on 11:46 am October 11th, 2011 / Be the first to comment! »

Thanks, City Paper.

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.