Half-time

YOGA AT HALFTIME?(Couldn’t resist….)

I’m not a watcher of football myself; I don’t have network TV so couldn’t tune into Fox if I wanted.

But….I appreciate the passion and fervor people bring to their Superbowl Sunday gatherings, and the camaraderie it helps foster among families and friends. Ponder this during halftime this evening: it is also technically “halftime” for Winter. You have made it through half of this exhilarating yet undeniably challenging season. Those of us who choose to live in a climate that is in continual flux and has extremes at both ends of the temperature spectrum, we tend to identify this choice like a badge of honor. We defend our choice to live here, because we “love the changing of the seasons” (even if the seasons themselves are sometimes hard to take). If we do complain, we also revel in the excitement of knowing that just around the corner, things are about to change…

A yoga practice, like New England Winter, is not a static experience. At UVY we have a range of instructors, and “variety” in sequencing, in style, is part of how we explore. Even within the framework of Vinyasa Yoga, each instructor blends posture and alignment in her own, unique way. But, even if you practice a form of hatha yoga like Ashtanga Yoga, or Bikram Yoga, which follow the same sequence, the same postures, every single time; with experience you come to understand that no two practices are truly ever the same, no two Downward Dog poses are ever the same. Your own experience becomes refined over time. On any given day, you are influenced by so many things—how cold it is, how much sleep you got the night before, what you have eaten that week, what deep sorrows or joys have tugged at your heart, illness, work, and on and on.

We are constantly changing, as is our experience of a given pose, a given asana practice, a given Savasana. We bring to the mat all of our accumulated experiences, we hone our attention through the practice of the postures, we feel what we feel. Relief, fatigue, delicious comfort, invigorating challenge, all of the above. And then, if we are lucky, we slip beyond the experience of the physical body and what blossoms inside is the experience of Purusa: pure, unadulterated awareness. Even if only for a moment, we dwell in that place where we feel ourselves part of an ocean of consciousness, and we are at peace.I wish you a happy and peaceful Superbowl Sunday, and look forward to sharing the second half of winter with you!