For me, yoga is my moving
meditation. It is a dance. It is the moment in every class when I smile from a
room of people moving together in unison from posture to posture. In this
dance, we embrace the beauty of our differences and imperfections. Through
yoga, I understand the energy of a group of people and how that can lift up,
up, up.
Yoga is knowing that I
cannot make it through an om without
my happiness breaking through into a smile. And yoga is that smile expanding to
a laugh, because sometimes a smile isn’t big enough for my type of happy. And yoga is letting myself laugh during that om, because I think that maybe somewhere
in that first sound of the universe, it included the sound of someone smiling.
A great yoga class gives
me a happy that makes me skip home, and a great yoga teacher is one who
inspires me, and who inspires me to teach.
Practicing yoga is a
greater connection to a positive community. The desire to smile at everyone,
and have them smile back, and then I smile. Again. In return. And so do they,
and we walk away having seen a beautiful part of each other’s soul and feeling
closer to something for it.
Yoga is the readjustment
at the grocery store or sitting down to dinner where I roll my shoulder blades
down my back and exhale, and pull my
pelvic girdle in a little closer to my spine. And when I pass my reflection in
a window, I think (no matter how much chocolate I’ve eaten that day), “This is
how my body—my strong, resilient, imperfect/perfect human body—is supposed to
look.”
Yoga is (I’m going to say
it, because we’re all adults here) great sex. Because, for once, it makes sense
how body and breath are connected and how beautiful it is when two people dance
in intimacy together with one breath,
one movement. Whether they even
realize they are doing it or not.
Yoga is having the breath
to hold through the Eisenhower
Tunnel, but the knowledge to release
and let it go in moments of my life where things seem too big to overcome.
My yoga mat is the place
that I go to get out of my own head. I lay or stand or sit, with my back on
this earth, or the soles of my feet pressing downwards to ground me, or my
palms facing up to receive. And for sixty minutes or ninety or a hundred-and-twenty
I think of nothing except,
I am here.
Here.
Here I am.
