The Yoga Loft

Yoga philosophy

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Being With One Self

It is hard to sit alone in the quiet, not attached to the social flow in any way. To sit, engaging in the layers of what "is", is an easily overlooked necessity to health.

In a way, yoga is engaged with changing things at the cellular level in our bodies. Yoga understands that we are walking memories, stored at the cellular level. Memories that make us move a certain way, or don't allow us to move a certain way. Memories that make us believe a certain way, or that hide us from our ugliness, i.e. ways we need to change. Memories that bring anxiety or perhaps memories that produce a feeling of loss or insufficiency. Memories, created by our past-living. The experiences and emotional interpretations, all stored. The images are all in our mind, sleeping folded under the brain's barely explored terrain. They are in our cells, in our little toes and in our thoughts. To sit alone, in quiet, is to allow the inside to come forward from the hidden fold. One has to acknowledge the challenge of feeling "good" in the present moment and the unconscious drive to engage with 'habit' feeling.

The propensity is to bring along all that one believes makes one self. To let go of these beliefs, to drain the cell of practiced memories, to make one self(cell) 'clear', brings forward contradictory experiences of desirability and that which feels undesirable. In clarity is emptiness, nothingness and freedom. All three are very frightening, huge experiences that seem to chuckle at the need to 'make something of oneself'. So hard it is to sit here and not make something, to allow the knowing of who I am to penetrate and refuse to cover it up. Falling deeper into the "Beingness" of life. The Beingness which is massive when compared to the doing, which is superficial and sometimes reflective of insecurity. Letting go in muscles, letting go in opinions, letting go in perceptions, worries, beliefs, breath, allows the openness of being to appear. Being, unfettered by story, words, linear perceptions scaled down into a two-dimensional flat, left to right telling. Life "is" when we sit alone, quiet, and there is much here to learn. All the important stuff is here, alone, quiet. If only I could remember that!