We live in the material world. Every day we think, do, eat, sleep. Yet everything we achieve is inspired by an intangible eneregy.
Whatever one’s faith or belief, scientific or experiential based conviction, disbelief, cynicism, gullibility, there can be no denial that our lives are influenced by factors seen, and factors unseen. Our body parts are visible, our thoughts aren’t. Our physical actions can be seen, not the energy that powers them. We live on this planet, with its own eco systems, yet these systems are influenced by the cycles of the moon and does not function independently of the sun. Our planetary system is in turn part of a massive system of galaxies that mind can hardly comprehend.
There is a lovely realization that comes with the regular practice of yoga – the discovering, the real-I-sation – an understanding of who and what we are really are. Our dreams or ambitions are only realized when we materialize them, in the here, in the now.
Reality depends on the dream, and the dream on reality. There is energy and matter, we are body and spirit. Not either, or, but both. This is the beautiful thing, the fact that both aspects co-exist, and always does, that the whole is there/here, all the time. Yoga practice takes us into the zone that connects us, cosnciously, to the space where body, mind and spirit unites.
This is the eternal, the here-in-the-now.
In this great yin and the yang of all that is night flows into day and day into night, birth to life and death, allowing spirit to once again merge with the whole.
When practicing yoga with a metaphysical awareness perspective one can experience, in the postures, and meditations, all aspects of the whole, at the same time. Paradoxical focus and expansion happens at once. All is always one, yet not always in view. When we look through the lens of such wholeness the infinite comes into view through an inner scrutiny of the finite. What a lovely thing to do: to touch the divine within, to experience the blessing of spirit, the bliss of prana, the essential universal life force.
In yoga the lower areas of the body utilizes gravity to ground the upper body in a stable, connected structure to the earth. Then the upper half of the body becomes light, open, divine, it moves towards heaven. Heaven comes to Earth, Earth to Heaven.
I wrote this little piece just before Christmas 2010, with the intention to add it as inspiration for my students for their new year pratice.
P.S. This note is an extension of an email conversation I recently had with Mark Paver from whom I recently started to collect haiku-like musings from that I regularly tweet and publish on my Being Yoga Facebook Page
Here are two of his inspiring verses in the spirit of Christmas:
A cross the son’s plight
Stuck between heaven and earth
Bringing down the light
Where there’s gravity
I am humanity
Where there’s levity
I am divinity
