Page 30 - the NOISE June 2013

“Whatabeautifuldreamthatcouldflashonthescreen in a blink of an eye and be gone from me/ Soft and sweet, let me hold it close and keep it here with me/... Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all.”
— “Airplane Over the Sea,” Neutral Milk Hotel
have practiced and taught yoga for many years. I of- I ten get asked the question, “What is yoga?” My eyes glaze over in what seems like ignorance, and my mind draws
a blank.
Uhh, umm, uhhh...
But, thankfully, my heart starts to roll the film of experi- ence, projecting into my mind’s eye. Energy begins to vibrate through my body and a soft smile and glow come upon my face, as if I am thinking of a lover. Trying to define yoga is like attempting to explain falling in love, or orgasmic bliss. Words can give us an idea, ignite our imagination, but we can never truly know until we experience the mind bending, heart pal- pitating, all over the body tingling sensations for ourselves.
The root meaning of Yoga in the ancient East Indian lan- guage of Sanskrit is “union.” With the practice of yoga, we unite with every aspect of ourselves, bringing our being into harmony and balance:
“The yogi conquers the body by the practice of asanas (yoga postures) and makes it a fit vehicle for the spirit. She knows that it is a necessary vehicle for the spirit. A soul without a body is like a bird deprived of its power to fly...Where does the body end and the mind begin? Where does the mind end that the spirit begin? They can- not be divided as they are inter-related and but different aspects of the same all-pervading divine consciousness.”
— B.K.S. Iyengar, in Light of Yoga, A Yogi’s Bible
I realized this truth in a crazy twister-like pretzel pose, at the end of a body altering class. When the instructor said, “Move your left foot,” I blissfully couldn’t distinguish my hands
from my feet, let alone my right from my left. My body is truly a carrier for my spirit to reside in and play; we dance beauti- fully together. Most of the time.
Yoga postures are obviously physical. They bring us into the most ideal structural alignment; they exercise every gland, muscle, and nerve, preventing disease. But the full art is more about focus, intent, and breath. By practicing yoga, a purification process inadvertently happens — layers that bind us begin to peel back.
Cellular energetic blocks begin to move; we erase ev- erything that makes us feel separate. Yoga unites us with ourselves and our Creator. A student of yoga may realize through a strange emotional release, or a flash of a deep- ly seeded memory when tissues are moved — that there is consciousness far greater than ever imagined, alive in each and every one of our cells.
Yoga poses called “heart openers,” do indeed open your emotional center — I remember taking one of my first yoga classes in a YMCA gym. Bright lights. No yoga philosophy, just postures. Holding a pose where my shoulders were back and my heart was lifted, I embarrassingly burst into tears. When we hunch our shoulders, we are energetically protecting our
heart. And when we repetitiously take body postures like hunching over work at a desk, we are manually, unknowingly shutting down our heart center. Yoga remedies that.
The heart is where we take in and project our emotions. And the hips are where we carry them. With hip opener pos- es, we are able to release stuck emotions. Think of a mother whose hips have widened by giving birth. Forever will she be expanded emotionally by this process. Her capacity to hold and carry love (along with pain and suffering) increases. Hips of a man, woman or child, fat hips or ones of skin and bone, all carry emotional baggage and emotional capac- ity. Once, in a deep and involved yoga class, a very masculine, tattooed man let out an emotional whimper in a hip opener. Simply, thankfully, the baggage passed. Internal housekeep- ing complete.
Oh, we clean the outside of our bodies daily, habitually. Thankfully, we can cleanse our internal being as well. In a bel- ly dancing class, I once watched in wonderment as a fellow student, a girl of 17, moved her hips and chest with such flu- idity and freedom. “She has never been hurt. She moves like she has never known pain! I want to move fearlessly like that!”
Thank God I can get unstuck with yoga. Fluidity, freedom, and grace, grace which comes about through knowing, sur- rendering, and loving, even after life has treated us unkindly. Yoga brings us back home to the childlike purity of our heart, where we are fully open to Love.
One thing we must remember is that our body is a ma- chine. We can program it. After a devastatingly painful end to a soul-love relationship, I tried hard to become a woman of grace, and not an embittered one. I would take a hand mu- dra (which means “peace and happiness to all beings”), every time I thought of my lover or unexpectedly saw him. And then, strangely, my hand would instinctually do the mudra right before I encountered him. My mind, surprised, would notice the body knowledge spoken with this cute little yoga posture — a mudra. Ah, I would think, he must be right around the corner. And, he was. How magnificent the knowledge of our body is, how expansive the radar of our hearts.
The primary gift of being human is the ability to experience the physical and nonphysical all at once; to make the unseen world palpable, felt and seen. It is in our human form that we are able to show our heart, the spirit, on the physical realm.
“As large as the universe outside, even so large is the universe within the lotus of the heart. Within it are heaven and earth, the sun, the moon, the lightning, and all the stars. What is in the macrocosm is in this microcosm.”
— Chandogya Upanishad
So within, so without. So above, so below. The conscious connection is yoga.
| Elissa Abbott is an English teacher, yoga instructor, and part-time leather worker. lotusheart16@gmail.com
30 • JUNE 2013 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us