Hold your seat
“The practice of āsana is understood to be the refinement not only of how our body moves through space or how we sit or even what we sit upon, but the quality of our connection to the greater whole”
I just went through the longest period without practicing yoga since I started yoga almost 10 years ago. Today - 6 months and a half postpartum - I literally had a 15 min practice after co-napping with baby and sneaking away for yoga. I loved every second of it and yet I kept repeating to myself “I’ll be so happy when I can do this/that pose again”. For a while now, I’ve not been able to grab my hands and cross my ankles in tortoise pose, to come up into full wheel, or to revolve into standing hand-to-toe pose…. Lately, it’s just not happening.
But, even if I managed to perform these asanas, there would always be another pose, right? That’s what I love about the practice of yoga āsana. It shows us in such tangible ways how we resist enjoying where we are right now. So I recall my teacher’s words: ‘Hold your seat so that the need to move to something else doesn’t even tickle you’.
To think that yoga is āsana as in ‘a string of movements’ is like thinking that the rainbow is blue. It’s myopic. The word āsana has shades and depths.
‘In earlier uses of the word, āsana meant your seat, as in the way in which you chose to sit for practices like pranayama, meditation or chanting. At times it would also mean the object upon which you were sitting; a mat or some grass. The meaning eventually broadened to include a wider range of bodily postures’.
Underlying each of the yoga postures, a story can be found. From the monkey to the warrior, these stories are ancient myths that can reflect to us our own deepest drives, obstacles and desires. As yogins, we shape shift into these various forms of living things and legendary heroes to discover their secrets of wisdom.
Seeing someone ‘doing’ one of those impressive poses may capture your eye … but it falls short into capturing the essence or experience of the āsana practice. You can’t take a picture of someone’s mind and quietude. You can’t take a picture of someone’s breathing pattern. In the end, no matter how advanced the pose or the practitioner, one has to find ease, steadiness, awareness, equanimity. In the end, no matter how much you’ve learned, you have to find each āsana anew - in this particular body, on this particular day - every time you step on the mat.
Open for new private class bookings - Zoom or in Person (Ibiza). Email me !