Fourth Form of Madness

After yoga class today, one of the ladies took me aside and confided that she found the rest and relaxation class that I take the hardest of all yoga styles.  I understood where she was coming from, this very gentle, very grounding, minimal movement orientated yoga is indeed hard for many people to embrace.  There aren’t any tricky, taxing movements to be accomplished or to distract the mind away.  The mind is laid out bare, stripped of all pretences and stories or rabbit holes to slip down and away into.  Just the breath and the joining of that rhythm to the rhythm of existence.  It’s not for everyone and yet it is there for everyone.

There were many ways I could have answered her admission of her struggle with breath and movement (with innate peace) – I chose to listen to her story and hear her story as the story of us all.  We hide behind so many aspects of our lives.  There are our social roles of mother, father, daughter, son, wife, doctor, teacher etc.  Our achievements and statuses, our identities we create, that we cling to.  Sometimes, to me, it seems that yoga can just become another one of the things we hide behind, that we use as a buffer between us and reality (what ever the cool kids are calling reality these days).  Mistaking our social creations for the non-social, the innate and enduring.  Do you think a dog knows it is a dog?  A label that we have created in a language, our language not the dogs.  I don’t think so.  Do you think the dog knows it is alive, living and breathing and chasing cats – this I think it experiences these things which becomes a sense of knowing.  I think our existence can only be known in a similar manner, free of labels and beliefs of what we are what we call ourselves, free of everything but the experience of it, the pure experience.

I hear so many different styles of yoga being mentioned now and yet when I am asked what yoga I want to teach or actually teach, I am a little lost to reply.  Not because I am ignorant of the many different styles or beliefs that are out there about yoga but because yoga to me is simply matching the breath with movement (no matter how minimal or maximal as the case may be) so you become so absorbed in this that you simply can not differentiate between what ever so called labelled style of yoga you are doing.  It is the same process, absorption into breath and body movement, focus on just that, free of beliefs and labels.   However, I am quite possibly mistaken as I am about so many, many other things these days.

The other day I wore some rather figure hugging yoga gear.  The whole time with the fabric gripping my body and a generous handful of flesh overhanging the top of my pants, I felt  I was enormous and like the mid morning and mid afternoon chocolates had finally caught up with me.  Then the very next day I wore a pair of work pants that were clearly purchased when I was going through my donuts for breakfast stage.  They swam around my body and my belt had a hard job keeping them up.  I felt very thin and frail and felt like I needed to nourish and nurture myself with food.

Unless I am Alice in Wonderland it is highly unlikely I shrank so dramatically in just one day.   So how could I feel so bodily different from just one day to the next?  After some contemplation I realised it was my clothes, an external factor that had the power over me to make me change my internal experience of myself, my embodiment of me .  I was gauging and orientating my experience of myself around a factor that changed daily rather than the only constant in the picture, me.  Then I started thinking, if this is the effect of my clothes on my experience of being, imagine what other people and their words and actions are having on me!

We are social beings.  We belong to, contribute to and get influenced by the social every step of the way.  And yet we often love to think we isolated islands, uninfluenced and unaffected by all that unfolds around us.  Unique individuals with our own thoughts and opinions of the world.  But are we?  A wise woman once said to me “Your thoughts are not your own, you don’t own your thoughts.  They are a foreigner in your body that you need to befriend but not followed blindly”.  To be honest I didn’t really understand what she meant at the time. In fact, I think I even remember nodding my head in agreement but thinking “My thoughts are me, you don’t get more me than that”.

However, over the years, I have often returned and contemplated what was said to me and have arrived at the conclusion that we not only are submerged in the social externally through our participation in society, but we are also emerged in the social internally.  The social lives within our heads, our thoughts, our opinions.  From the moment we are born, we are being taught  the societal beliefs and opinions, the moral judgement codes that belong to our society that allow us to make an assessment or whether we think something is right, wrong, good, bad etc etc etc.  We internalise the external, repackage it in our thoughts and label it “my ” thoughts, “my” opinions, me.  But is that you?  Are you just a regurgitation of the masses?

What if we stopped identifying ourselves as our thoughts?  Is it possible or even reasonable to think we could be something other than our thoughts?  If we leap into this void, then what replaces the constant chatter of us, the constant reaffirmation of our existence?  This reminds me of one of my favourite Japanese koans – if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound.

Arh that’s what I love about life, so many questions, often unanswerable but nether-the-less , good questions to ask and explore.