How do you practice?

I hope you all had a great weekend. I talk all the time about how yoga is a practice. There is the on-the-mat practice and the off-the-mat practice. In time it becomes very clear how they thread together. When we judge ourselves on the mat, we judge ourselves off the mat. When we let go and surrender on the mat we often feel lighter off the mat. I am currently attending a 4 part writing workshop with Anne Cushman. She is a Yoga & Meditation teacher and an author. In one of her books she describes the choices we can make on the mat and how they shift us off of it. This became my message for the week. Here is the passage I shared:

“There’s one way of doing yoga that’s about perfection: polishing your postures until they sparkle like a magazine cover. And then there’s the yoga of the slipped disc, the blown-out knee, the bad-news blood test. The yoga that’s about holding in your heart your broken and bumbling human body, even when–especially when– it’s clearly falling apart. It’s this yoga that I’m turning to now- the yoga that teaches me that it is through my brokenness that I can touch my full humanity, the way I might touch the soft spot on the top of a baby’s head and feel the heartbeat.”

I love the image of tenderness and acceptance that this passage portrays. It is in the vulnerability that we connect to our deepest self– the self that struggles sometimes.

When I think about the description of the “sparkling” yoga practice on the mat; we often feel that same pressure off the mat– to make sure people only see the “sparkly” life without sharing the difficulties we all experience.  There is a freedom and authenticity that prevails when we allow ourselves to practice the yoga of imperfection off the mat as well as on. It helps us honor who were are. That is one of the gifts for me of 26 years as a yoga practitioner and 21 years as a teacher– to see the evolution of my practice from purely physical to mostly spiritual. It allows me to step out of myself and get perspective. Sometimes that happens after I have responded in reactivity instead of mindfulness but then I have to forgive myself and remind myself that it is “through my brokenness that I can touch my full humanity.