“Until I Wake Up”

Lucky me – I have done two amazing yoga study trips to India. On one six month soujourn I met and then shared a home with a rather quiet man. A Canadian ex-pro ice hockey star who, on becoming a buddhist monk years before, had taken a vow of silence. (Funny aside: Chatty twenty-something me blustered in this terrific yoga room on the ganges just this one other person intent on his practice. Having no inkling of his silent mode, we got chatting. I am still very grateful to him as he guided me to a wonderfully long Iyengar yoga intensive which endd up suiting me much better than what I had planned for the holy city of Rishikesh. So that’s how I ended up sharing a retreat house with him for a month. And chatting a whole lot more as he had given himself permission to communicate with the group while on our course.)

Anyway, when I asked him how long he thought he would stay on the silent path, his answer was, ‘Until I wake up.’ Then it was my turn to be silent.

The idea is we are asleep to our pure divine spirit and live in a state of lack of awareness. He wanted to spend his days both moving and sitting in silent meditation to liberate himself from the small stuff and be able to focus fully within, heading toward his goal of attaining enlightenment.
And that’s where yoga fits in for me. Yoga to me is about waking up the body. Waking up our awareness. Becoming alert to our mental state. And in this way we can flood our cells with consciousness. And this gives us too things: It makes us feel really alive. I mean ALIVE.  As in all caps shout from the rooftop ALLLIIIIIIIIIVE    YEAH!!!  Aliveness rocks up with those feelings of lightness and purity that we carry with us when we have connected deep withing and then step out the door of the studio.

Awake vs Asleep
But what about the things we want to put to sleep? The discomforts of the physical aches and pains. The emotional lows, inner voids, aching lonelinesses. The grief of past losses. The anxiety about the future. Then there is the  mind that never stops. That inane chatter, as eloquent yoga writer Donna Farhi describes it is like having 1000 monkeys all with megaphones  chattering  non-stop inside our brain. These all would be lovely to put to dampen down to sleep wouldn’t they?
Well the good news is that while we can’t always find a simple ‘off’ button, what we can do is a clever sort of bait and switch. We can turn the amplifier up on the present moment awareness. Things like noticing stretch sensations in the muscles during yoga, directing the breath into odd parts of the body, altering the breath with pranayama practice, whether formal seated or during yoga postures. Focusing on a particularly strong muscle squeeze during Pilates. Letting our attention rest on parts of the body we usually don’t consider.
It’s why yoga is so uplifting. It tricks you into becoming present moment focussed. The teacher who asks you to engage with the webbing between your fingers in downward facing dog. That’s present moment awareness. The time you move your breath into your armpits. Ditto. The practices of counting the lengths of your breath. Same thing. All techniques to quiet the stuff which doesn’t enhance our life and therefor elevate the mind, heart and soul instead.
So the good news is that unlike our Canadian monk friend, you don’t have to move to Rishikesh and silence your tongue for the foreseeable future. And you don’t have to give up your BFF coffee chats either. You just need to make time to commune with your yoga mat or meditation cushion (or for that matter, a slow focussed muscular squeezes in one of our Pilates classes).

So, with Christmas approaching, don’t put off your development and happiness. Don’t wait until life is less busy, you have completed your Christmas wrapping, and your turkey is in the oven and your guests are arriving. It’s actually really simple. It’s just about starting. After all, Buddhist style self-liberation might take a while. But your life will be considerably enhanced from just with a few baby steps.  So start now.

Season’s Greetings and to you and yours in joyful and peaceful awakening,

-Christina