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.