Yoga

Namaste, the light in me sees and salutes the light in you
Hatha yoga nushasanam YS I.1

NOW is yoga, wrote the great sage Patanjali. Not later, not when we make enough money or find the right partner or maintain a particular weight or perfect a challenging asana. Now. Here. This moment. This breath.

You are already perfect, whole, and enlightened. Yoga will not give you anything that was not already so. What we can do is remember. Remember with each breath that we were never ever anything less than love, light, and divinity itself.

Yoga as a term is defined in many ways, and that is the beauty of it. It is no one thing, and it cannot be reduced to one form, style, theory, or interpretation. Perhaps a better question to consider is, What isn't yoga? Yoga is vast, all-encompassing, and expansive. It does not make us more narrow-minded, collapsed, or rigid. Yoga invites us to keep growing and growing. As my beloved teachers Sharon Gannona and David Life say, you cannot do yoga...you are yoga. Yoga is our natural state. What we can do are various practices--from asana and meditation to devotion and selfless service--all of which help reveal to us where we ourselves are resisting or blocking the natural state. The term "yoga" is derived from Sanskrit that means to yoke, thus we think of yoga as union. Union of all our fragmentation is one goal of yoga; the body-breath-mind-spirit is one, and that one is joined to the divine/higher Self. But a yoke also suggests a burden, and anyone who has delved into the practices knows that this isn't easy work. Still, it can and should be joyful. Our natural state is bliss, free from the want of anything...this is sweet indeed. The hard work is really a peeling away of the stuff that mires and weighs upon us.

Ultimately, we practice to find freedom from fragmentation, separateness, and smallness.
Yoga is truly the realization--making real in the WHOLE self through the lived and embodied experience-the one-ness of being. It is all one, it is all here. It is all yoga.

I look forward to seeing you in class, workshops, retreats, and other events.

Please click on the specific event for information on registration.

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