Life Lessons From a Yoga Mat (You’re not back at the same old place. You’re spiraling upward.)

As I recently lay in Happy Baby pose on my yoga mat with tears streaming down my face before class — my first studio class after 3.5 years away (baby, pandemic…) — had even begun, I chuckled to myself as these words streamed through my awareness:

“Now the practice of yoga begins.”

These opening words of Patanjali's first Yoga Sutra from 2,000 years ago probably hadn't crossed my mind since my yoga teacher training in Costa Rica 17 years ago.

But as I returned to this practice that has served as both sweet refuge and fierce alchemical catalyst for decades, I was both humbled and delighted to feel like I was coming to this practice that I'd spend thousands of hours practicing, studying, and teaching over the past 25 years feeling like a fresh-eyed, beginner's mind newbie. 

Every pose and movement felt new. And the core essence of this sacred practice — remembering the naturally united nature of mind, body, and spirit and returning home to the “seat” of our truest Selves as pure, loving consciousness  — landed within me with completely fresh resonance. It was like I'd never really “gotten” it before.

Hence the chuckle I felt rise up within me: “Ohhhhhhh. NOW the practice of yoga begins!!" 

This is how life at large is too, right?

We think we know ourselves and think we truly know what we know. We feel solid and certain in most aspects of our life and identity, are cruising mostly mindlessly along on auto-pilot…

And then the wind — sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce — blows through and, just like that, everything we thought we knew to be solid or true or permanent becomes illuminated to, in its true nature, be none of those things. 

So we can think of this phrase more broadly as our consciousness spirals upward through a daily intention to live our moments with greater presence, embodiment, and loving attention as: 

Now the practice of life begins.

With each new crack in a previously fixed sense of self and identity, with each painful rift from something we thought was stable or permanent in our lives, with every deep desire we've clung to that proves itself to, in the end, not be what our soul needed, we’re given the opportunity to start fresh in the current moment again and again.

Now the practice of life begins.

And now.

And now…

And now……

Lots of Love,

Melissa