Asana is to yoga, as a hammer is to a house; a useful and necessary tool, but it is not the house.
Just something I have been recently discovering about my personal views of physical yoga practice. Finding myself over time caring less and less about asana and simply using it as a physical practice. I don’t care about fancy postures and or pictures of me doing them, I care about fancy enlightenment, breath, meditation, quality of life, and how I am to serve in this lifetime. Loving watching my students become more flexible, stronger, and powerful humans and not just little asana machines.
Truly it will be very different and personal for everyone who has ever hopped on the path, which is part of it’s brilliance! I am personally realizing that asana practice has become something very different for me these days. Asana practice for me is just a framework to challenge my ability to focus, relax, and breathe in the physical world. It is the element that invited me in the door of spiritual and philosophical change, however it has become the least relevant part of my overall philosophical view. The above statement was relevant to me BECAUSE the hammer becomes less of a focus once the house is built. Yoga is so closely tied, if not completely married, to my Buddhist practice that it has become a different animal all together. My goal… I will veraciously settle for nothing in this lifetime except enlightenment, OR die happily knowing that I have tried my best. Facebook Stati are cheap, getting the most out of every breath I have is expensive!!
AND it has been a challenge for me as a teacher of physical yoga to realize and admit it! So many of us get caught up in the fancy postures, showing students in class or pictures what our abilities are. It is inspiring to show others what we have achieved with so much work, but I am finding that what inspires my students on a deeper level, is not what I can do… but who I am become! I think it is socially expected for teachers to be very Asana based and I am trying to break away a bit. I want my students to find that yoga is way more than postures and warm fuzzy soundbites. I very much love teaching the postures and doing them still, they just mean something very different to me than they used to. I assume that can only be a sign of change and growth. Maybe I am just getting old and lazy?
I am also realizing that as far as blogging goes, I have never been interested in writing about specifics and tricks of asana practice. I AM interested observing my deeper thoughts, changes, and experiences; and keeping tabs on them over time. But who knows how I will feel about it all a year from now?!! If I always felt the same about it, I would be observing very little progress methinks.
