What I’ve got from Weightlessness with Almog Loven
 
I have now had the privilege of attending two Weightlessness weekend programs with Almog Loven in London, 2018 and 2019. Both times, I organised/re-arranged work and international travel commitments so as to be able to attend. Both times it was more than worth it. 
In 2018, I signed up for the course as soon as I saw the video which was posted with the announcement. (link at the foot of this post) I had a very strong sense that the program would be something I would enjoy and gain a lot from. My instinct was accurate. Nonetheless, I had not imagined just how nourishing and enriching the program would be.
 
What did I get from studying with Almog? Affirmation of:
- Be yourself, trust yourself, accept yourself, love yourself. There are infinite ways to do this, always available. You are enough already.
- Whatever you have to do, do it as far as possible in such a way that you allow every cell of your body, every pore of your skin, to smile.
- Meet what arises with a smile. You’ll be able to meet if more fully, more skilfully, and you’ll be able to navigate/inhabit the situation more joyfully.
- As a facilitator: once you’ve developed your toolkit and you know it works, once you’ve thoroughly tested it in the arena of your own life and teaching: then get out of the way and allow yourself to be a conduit for the tools to serve their greater purpose and help us access more of our underlying wholeness and joy.
 
Both occasions from the Weightlessness weekend, I feel like I received a huge dose of deep nourishment, so affirmative and resonant that it supports me to move more fluidly and efficiently in all the interactions of my life and in my relationship to myself and others months after the program.
Over the years, I have attended some great ‘movement’ programs with really solid, scalable methodology, with safe, inclusive instruction and a great ethos. Almog’s work stands out because it works at the level, I would say, of more of the whole human being. It really does invite us deeper into the recognition that we are enough, and that we have such depths of resources to help and support each other.
For me, this type of work is a way of waging peace. Inviting people to experience how we have such rich resources within is a way to dissolve some of our fears, to peel away some of the weight of our limiting conditionings.

From my perspective, the energy that Almog embodies and shares is a key element here. I would say that Almog is able to graciously offer this invitation because he clearly works from a place of lively presence. He is not forcing an agenda or a particular flow or structure to the sessions. Rather, I witnessed a skillful and courageous facilitator ready to meet the group as we are. From this place of honest presence, Almog invites us into the lived, visceral experience of our own ‘enoughness’. Without forcing anything, the work invites us to experience deeper layers and unfoldings of ‘weightlessness’. For example, at an immediate, physical level, we experience how we can allow functional, beautiful movement with minimum effort and maximum nourishment. At a more holistic level, we gain lived experiences of how we can give, receive, invite and allow support.

Both years, I was hugely impressed by how Almog guided us through the weekend, building a stronger and stronger container in which it was easy for us to dive deeper as a mutually supportive group.
The first year I learnt some new elements that continue to enrich my movement practice. The second year, the movement was not dissimilar, drawing from the same palette, though not the same. What was the same was the spirit of the work. I would describe it as the same river. It has just flown on, gathering greater, nourishing force.
There are some types of workshop programs that one can return to and feel like you didn’t get much compared to the first or last time. This can be the case when the teacher’s work is mainly about sharing nuts and bolts techniques.
However, when the work is about deeper principles which impact all aspects of our life, it can be the other way: each return is an opportunity for deepening. This was my experience my second time with Almog and Weightlessness. The first was easily one of my all-time favourite workshop experiences as a participant. The second one topped it.

I carry with gratitude the gifts that have come to me from my work with Almog. I hope to study with him again and wish that more and more people can experience his great work. To me, it feels like Almog’s work is part of a new paradigm, beyond compartmentalisations and narrow labels. This is not a dance workshop. This is not a movement training. For me, this is about how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the environment. To my mind, Weightlessness extends a beautiful and highly effective invitation: to skilfully peel away the burdens of our conditioned ideas so we can inhabit our here and now with deepening awareness of the true weight and real light of our conscious human presence.

Link to Weightlessness trailer video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K51B-Qwqg-o

The yoga method: Some notes to self September 2019

Cutivate the medi-state as best you can.
Whenever you come away from the centre, patiently, kindly, invite yourself back to the centre.
Pay close, honest attention to what draws you away from the centre and what helps you stay centred.
Take full responsibility for your experience.
Recognise that how you meet life affects your experience.

Do what you are doing with all of yourself.
Make the action its own reward.
All the time.

Practice joyfulness.
Practice gratitude.
Practice presence and celebration.

Questions for inquiry:
From Captain Bill Whorton from Acharn Cha: ‘Where am I in this?’
From Erich Schiffmann: ‘What’s the truth here really?’
From my own practice/investigation:
- ‘Where am I acting from?’
- ‘What is my motivation?’
- ‘Why am I doing what I am doing?’

Bhakti yoga is the yoga of devotion. It is associated with practices of singing, dancing, with selfless service, with the dedication of one’s actions to that which one considers the highest, with the consecration of everything we do.

The word bhakti is from the root bhaj, which means to ‘approach with reverence’.

Bhakti plays a central and foundational role in the yoga method.

Bhakti, together with jñāna and karma, form the three principal mārga-s, or ‘ways’ of cultivating and revealing yoga.

Sometimes, people misperceive this and think that one can choose a path: the karma path for the active, socially minded; the way of jñāna for the person of inquiring, intellectual, reflective and meditative persuasion; and bhakti for those of devotional proclivity. Or: karma for the active-pragmatic, jñāna for the intellectual, bhakti for the emotional.

However, these three ways can also be seen as the interwoven, mutually supportive and enabling foundations of the ‘one true way’ of yoga, that is, the all-inclusive way that invites the whole human being into oneness.

I would say that we will be hard pressed to come to any degree of realisation without a good degree of bhakti.

For example, I have a friend, Bill, a former US Marine Captain. In Vietnam, Bill experienced all manner of horror, and it had a deep effect on his life. Decades later, Bill told me that it was the study of philosophy that saved him and helped him to continue a sustaining inquiry into meaning and reality in the wake of the soul shaking, life changing experiences he lived during the Vietnam war: the horrors and privations, and the extraordinary love and comradeship he had experienced on the exacting field of examination that is the high-stakes arena of battle.

When I met Bill, we were both teaching English at the same university in Thailand. At that point, Bill had already been translating Confucius with one of his Chinese colleagues for more than twenty years, and had been translating Japanese Zen texts and Thai Buddhist texts with colleagues from those departments for years, all while tutoring students in some of the Greek and Latin classics. In the more recent years though, Bill had got to the language and the text that had long fascinated him, with its most celebrated philosophical treatise delivered in poetry of jaw-dropping beauty and perennial acuity - on the battlefield. Bill had started studying Sanskrit with another senior faculty member from the Sanskrit department. After some formative years to gain some familiarity with the grammatical foundations, Bill’s Sanskrit master had granted that they begin work on the Bhagavad Gītā. Bill was thrilled.

Often when he was working on this text, Bill would comment to me on the soul-shaking beauty of the verses, on the potency of Kṛṣṇa’s teachings, and on the unmistakable ‘rasa’ or flavour of the battlefield that the opening chapter evokes, and how that brings a man into the present moment like nothing else.

As Bill was advancing through the text, he got to the twelfth chapter, devoted to bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, in which Kṛṣṇa also describes the devotee who is dear to him. When I called in on Bill in his office, he straightaway commented on the beauty of the verses, but then went on to say:
‘But I have a problem James… ‘
Now Bill knows that I like to sing ‘kīrtan’, that I enjoy some of the practices that are immediately associated with bhakti yoga…
‘I just don’t have a bhakti bone in my body.’
This did not land very convincingly with me. I knew the tenor of Bill’s days. He would rise at 4 o’clock (‘Well I was a Marine, what other time is there to get up?’) and go for his morning walk, during which he will do 100 push ups (‘I’m a Marine, I learnt certain habits’).
And after this start to the morning, Bill will spend most of his day studying wisdom texts, otherwise teaching language, as a means to facilitate more effective communication, in other words as a means to facilitate more penetrating and revealing inquiry, to peel away, as Bill would put it, his highly practised and refined capacity to delude himself; in his ex-Marine’s lexicon: his inestimable capacity to mindf*** himself.
So I said to Bill,
‘How can you say that? How do you spend your days if not soaked in devotion? Is your whole day not devoted to your search for truth, to come out of the mindf***? If you were not dripping in bhakti, I don’t see how you would possibly be able to do what you do every day.’
And Bill said.
‘You know what James, I went to see one of my monk friends the other day, and he said the exact same thing.’

Now Bill himself had pointed out to me, earlier in his work with the Gītā, how he knew first hand the difference between habits and discipline. He owned quite openly that the getting up at 4 o’clock, the walk with the hundred push-ups, and the always carrying his wallet in a waterproof plastic wrapping (‘A Marine is prepared’) were not so much ‘discipline’, just well-established habits, known in Saṃskṛt as ‘saṃskāra-s’: ways of operating that are well-formed, well-made, well-established. (Just as Saṃskṛt refers to the language that is well-structured, well-codified, well-arranged, well-ordered, well-made, so saṃskāra - another form of the same word - refers to a habit that is well-made, well-established. Well-formed.)
However, Bill had also owned that the commitment to keep exploring, to keep inquiring, to not settle, but to keep fathoming the depths of one’s almost - as one keeps looking - unbelievable capacity for self-delusion, for willful blindness, for tricky, refined, polished mind-f***ing, well, that takes real discipline. That requires courage and commitment. Other things that Bill learnt from his years of service.

The fact is that real practice, on any particular personal path requires courage, heartfulness, requires devotion to the cause. It is so easy to settle into the ways of denial, delusion, of wilful blinkeredness. A practitioner needs qualities of a warrior. But a warrior needs love to stay true to the cause when the real duress comes.

From the outside, Bill’s path might have seemed like one of jñāna, of the intellect. He was spending time at his desk, in searching conversation and applied effort with other ’students’ who were also Professors. He was thinking, reflecting, re-formulating. However, how could he have continued his efforts without devotion, without bhakti? For Bill, his inquiry into Truth was his ‘Highest’ and it was to this that he was dedicating his efforts. His ‘Highest’ or ‘God’ might have taken a different ‘form’ from that which people more typically think of, but his devotion to it was real and sincere, illustrated irrefutably by the way he dedicated the currency of his life force.

Sometimes people think that one can just do karma yoga. ‘What’s the point of this meditation and study (jñāna), of this singing and dancing (bhakti) when there are people hungry? When there are bridges and schools to be built? But again, how can one work effectively, efficiently without inquiry and attention (jñāna) and without dedication, commitment and devotion (bhakti)?

As so often in modern times, I feel that people often reduce the meaning of terms, wanting the security of compartmentalisation and of easy ‘tick-box’ assigning of big concepts to convenient and non-threatening little boxes. This is particularly problematic when it comes to yoga. Because yoga is about coming out of all limitations, freeing ourselves from all limiting beliefs and ideas.
Consequently, genuine yoga practice demands that we go into the unknown. Yoga practice can only begin, or proceed, when we own that we do not know. The delusion and self-deception of ‘I know’ will block it. The slavish ‘believing’ of ideas, theories, systems - scientific or otherwise - will block real practice. The way of yoga is to wilfully step into the unknown, honestly, with our awareness and our discernment as our companions. Whether we are of the intellectual (jñāna) or practical persuasion, this is impossible without bhakti, without heartfulness, and courage. Only with bhakti can we approach our activity and our inquiry with the attitude of reverent presence that will most empower it.

There can be no practice without bhakti. It is the enabler of karma and jñāna.

Similarly, there can be no practice without karma, the action that enables bhakti and jñāna; and there can be no practice without jñāna, the attentive inquiry that enables and checks that our karma and bhakti are actually inviting a deepening of yoga.

The way of yoga is the way of the whole human being. Yoga includes.

I heard an interesting story from one of my Sanskṛt teachers, let’s call him the Professor. This teacher is a resident of Mysore, a seat of traditional Sanskṛt learning, and also in recent times a place where at certain times of the year concentrations of foreign yoga students come to study and practice at schools in the city. Some of these students are keen to explore teachings of yoga as they are encoded in Sanskṛt texts. And some have found their way to Mysore-resident Sanskritists who can help them gain closer access to the teachings enshrined in the glorious poetry of the Bhagavad Gītā, or the ultra pared down Yoga Sūtra for example.

One such student who had found his way to my teacher was particularly interested in prāṇa, and in prāṇāyāma. This term prāṇāyāma, like āsana, is intrinsic both to the classical, holistic path of Patañjalian yoga: what we might call the yoga of the whole human being; and to haṭha yoga: which we might consider the Tantric technology which seeks to harness and harmonise the potential and energy (prāṇa) of the human bodily vehicle so it can most effectively and efficiently help us move towards yoga, integration and the ultimate aim of life.

This student was already teaching prāṇāyāma. He had studied it with various Indian teachers, and knew that prāṇāyāma was not merely breath control, or breathing exercises, but the refinement and extension of the very life force itself. He knew that prāṇa is not mere breath, though breath is one of the mechanisms through which prāṇa, the vital force, the sap of life, moves and circulates in us. He also knew from his experience that some of the breathing excercises that are included under the banner of ‘prāṇāyāma practice’ had certainly helped him refine his understanding of his own life energy. This had also caused him to feel that he was in a sense extending his life. Even if these practices were not going to postpone his death, they were already helping him live each day more richly and fully, with greater appreciation for the amazing opportunity of being alive as a human being, with greater relish for the myriad, subtle flavours of life experience. 

However, this student also had an inkling that these prāṇāyāma practices could actually extend his physical lifespan, perhaps even dramatically. He had heard stories of ṛṣi-s, yogic seers, who had mastered prāṇa and were as if immortal. So when he heard of this great Sanskritist dwelling in Mysore, who had a real problem saying no when someone asked to study with him, he thought he should approach him. If this Sanskrit teacher was as great as people whispered, if his knowledge of the Sanskrit tradition was as mind-bogglingly vast as rumoured, then surely he would know of passages that spoke of the secrets of prāṇa, perhaps he would even be able to decode them for him.

This student was no newcomer to India either. He had been coming and studying with Indian teachers for over a decade. He knew they operated differently from teachers in some other places. He knew for example, that rather than avertising their knowledge or expertise, the real pukka pundits often shrouded the depth of their learning. He knew this was especially the case around esoteric matters and all the more so if the subject in question could at all be seen to be personal, as prāṇa, the question of our life force and how we relate to it, undeniably is.
So, the student chose to approach the matter ‘from the side’ as it were, a tactic he had found could bear rich fruit when interacting with some of his previous Indian teachers. He arranged to meet the Professor, and asked him if he might help him read Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra in the original Sanskrit.

So far, the rumours proved true. The Indian Sanskrit expert could not say no. Even though he clearly had all manner of demands on his time and expertise: people asking him to translate books into Sanskrit from the local language Kannada, from Sanskrit into English, to write editorials and educational stories for Sanskrit magazines and newspapers, to write textbooks for university courses, he agreed to read Patañjali with this foreign seeker.
They began to meet three times a week. The foreign student was thrilled. The text began to take on new significance as the Professor unpacked it, and on days when he was feeling ‘higher energy’, when his prāṇa was circulating with greater efficiency, he would illustrate the teachings with all manner of compelling and often colourful story. The student also found that he could influence the pace with which they moved through the text by how much curiosity he showed in certain words and concepts presented in the Sūtra-s. Of course, what he was most interested in was asking the Professor about prāṇa, and prāṇāyāma, which Patañjali mentions some eighty sūtra-s into his work.

As they approached this section, the student felt his excitement mount. He felt that he had now won, as far as was possible in the circumstances, the confidence of the Professor, and that he would be able to draw from him any secret knowledge of prāṇa.

When they reached the relevant section of the text, the student was quite direct. He asked his teacher what he knew of the mysteries of prāṇa. The student had heard of yogic masters of prāṇāyāma who lived for centuries, millennia even, who breathed just a single breath of Himālayan air a day, who could burn up and digest mountains of rice and dal, and just as easily live hale and hearty for years without any physical food at all. Did the professor know of any such yogis?

‘Well, I don’t know, but I can tell you a story’. For the student, the professor’s stories were almost always his favourite part of their classes together, and he leaned slightly forward as if to be able to more deeply absorb whatever riches the Professor was about to share.

‘So it is said that there are these Himālayan yogi-s who live for ages, who know the secrets of prāṇa. One time, such a yogi visited Mysore. He was to give a talk, on the wisdom of yoga. Now being an ancient Himālayan yogi he knew no modern Indian language, and spoke only the language of mountain ṛṣi-s. However, he had a young assistant with him, who knew the ṛṣis’ tongue and translated his speech into Sanskrit, which I then translated into our local Kannada. After his speech, he asked if there were any questions. One man in the audience piped up immediately:
“Er, well, sir, that is all very interesting and I’m sure we are all very grateful for the master sharing his insights, but what I want to know is… is he really one thousand two hundred and seventy three years old?”
I translated the question, putting it to the young assistant in Sanskrit. And do you know what he said?
The assistant didn’t even put the question to his master, he just said:
“I don’t know, I’ve only been with him for the last three hundred and forty-two years so I couldn’t say.”
Which brought the student to laughter, as it did to some in the audience that day.
And hopefully it made you laugh too, and perhaps also raise a question: why do some yogi-s want to live so long? What is the point of extending the life force like this?
 
In the Indian system, there are said to be four ‘aims of life’ (puruṣārthāḥ): artha, kāma, dharma, mokṣa.
Artha means ‘the means’, it refers to the material needs of life, food, shelter, how we make a living. Kāma in this context refers to pleasures and how we enjoy ourselves. It is said in the Indian tradition that it is our duty to enjoy this gift of a human birth, for when we truly enjoy, in a deep sense, we can learn more quickly. Dharma is the action which sustains and supports the wellbeing of the whole, it is sometimes rendered as duty, the law, righteousness. Mokṣa is the ultimate aim of life, liberation.

Another of my Sanskrit teacher’s gurus has said on this topic: ‘Do not focus on mokṣa; instead, focus on making your artha and your kāma dharma, then mokṣa will come by itself.’
But who is able to do this? It seems perhaps easier to meet masters of prāṇāyāma who have lived for centuries than people who have become truly free from conditionings and limiting ideas, or who know how to live always in dharma.
And this is one reason why some yogi-s place such emphasis on prāṇāyāma. This gift of a human life is so precious that we need to cherish it. They say in the Indian tradition that a body without a soul is a corpse, but a soul without a body is stuck. When the soul comes into embodiment, it can journey towards its deep longing: the return to wholeness, to freedom from limitation and conditioning, to remembering its essence. The body may be the vehicle for the soul, and the soul may be the underlying animating force of the body, but this bodily vehicle needs prāṇa to run. And so, Yoga, the practical school of Indian Philosophy encourages us to respect and cherish prāṇa, to develop and deepen our relationship with our life force and our understanding of how we can work with it skillfully. A long, healthy lifespan gives us more time to research the mystery of life, fathom the depths of who we really are and come perhaps to self-realisation. Āyurveda then, the Indian Art and Science of a long, healthy lifespan is a foundation and companion for Yoga.

From a certain perspective, any practice, observance or technique that helps us extend the life force, invite the breath into easier and more efficient patterns, that improves our digestive and assimilative capacities, that bolsters and sustains our energy can be considered a type of prāṇāyāma. Any technique that helps prāṇa circulate more efficiently, that encourages true balance and holistic health can be considered prāṇāyama and a type of yoga practice.

      Pain and Yoga - Note to Self
by James Boag www.jamesboagyoga.com
 
Pain is inevitable. Pain is an intrinsic and very necessary part of the human experience. Pain helps protect us. It can be our friend. Yes, pain and suffering can beat us down, if we let them, but by working with them skilfully, we can be less pained by the trials of life, and transform difficulty into opportunity.
 
Life is suffering. So have said the masters of many traditions.
Patañjali is very clear about this: all is pain to the wise. Life is change, and we humans know it, but still we get attached to things being a certain way. Deep down, even as we are savouring things we find pleasurable, we know that they will not last. So even that which brings pleasure carries the germ of pain…(Yoga Sūtra II.15)
In the Bhagavad Gītā, Kṛṣṇa also makes it very clear: the experience of pleasure and pain is inevitable. (II.14)
At first glance, this can seem rather bleak and even depressing. However, yoga is the practical school of Indian Philosophy. Patañjali goes on, right away, to make clear that we can avoid the pain that has yet to come. Kṛṣṇa goes on to remind us that we know that these pairs of opposites: pleasure, pain, heat, cold and all the rest; come and go. Our challenge as a human being is to be steady amidst it all. If you can find this steadiness, Kṛṣṇa tells us, you can reveal the deathless essence that underlies all the comings and goings, you can penetrate through your fears and savour this life, here and now, fully.
 
Well, that sounds alright, so how to go about it?
 
First let us not delude ourselves, pain is inevitable, part of the game. However, this doesn’t mean we are helpless and hopeless when faced with it. Yoga reminds us, when something is inevitable, don’t get upset about it, that’s a poor choice. Instead, be with it as steadily as you can, so you can respond to it as skilfully as possible.
Early in the Gītā, Kṛṣṇa distils the way of practising yoga in the world:
Sukhaduḥkhe same kṛtvā lābhālābhau jayājayau
Tato yuddhāya yujyasva naivam pāpamavāpyate (II.38)
 
Which I might translate as:
Practising evenness (yoga) in gain and loss, in triumph and defeat, in pleasure and pain: this is the way to act in the challenging world and not be tainted and bound by your actions.
 
In other words, pain and suffering are inevitable. Life is constant change and we cannot, will not, always get what we want. However, we do not have to be so pained by this reality! We can choose to suffer less in the face of life’s inevitable ups and downs.
How? By practising yogāsana. By this I don’t mean just going to yogāsana classes or dropping into a favourite yoga posture when pain starts to manifest. No, I mean by cultivating the attitude of yoga: balanced, skilful, pragmatic, open and responsive. I mean by drawing on all our resources, and so resisting falling into the easy but often counter-productive and self-sabotaging familiar patterns of our habitual reactions.
 
Mitigating pain with Yogāsana
- The posture with which we meet the world
- The attitude we adopt in the face of change
 
One of the Sanskṛt words for pain is duḥkham, literally: difficult space. Its opposite, sukham - agreeable space. 
In the Indian system, the kham, or space, we exist in is recognised as containing sound, movement and vibration. Sukham then can be understood as a space in which there is a good vibration; duḥkham, or pain, one in which the vibrations are somehow dissonant.
Yogāsana is defined classically as the state of awareness that is at once sthira - steady, and sukham - easy. In other words, the seat, platform or foundation state of yoga is when the field of our awareness is a place of sustainable good vibrations: a field of robust, resonant harmony that makes us less susceptible to being thrown up and cast down by the inevitable ups and downs of life.
 
So how to practice this?
 
Kṛṣṇa in the Gītā (II.47) makes this clear:
You are the sovereign of your actions.
Your experience is your responsibiliity.
You have no control over the outcomes of your actions.
However, you do know that certain types of action can be relied upon to bring painful results.
So, pay attention, notice how your attitude and actions affect your experience and do not be the cause of unnecessary pain. Perhaps you have been so unwittingly, blindly. And perhaps as you notice that you have been a major cause and contributor to your own suffering, this recognition itself is tortuous. But it’s also instructive, and it’s empowering. So take the opportunity it affords you, accept the gift it offers, and reform yourself: dig in, for the painful work of overhauling your habits, examining your belief structures and limiting ideas. And remember, it is worth it. And really, there is no alternative. The way out of self-sabotage is not avoidance. The way out is really the way through. As Kṛṣṇa goes on to say, don’t think that not acting, staying in your tent, or retreating from the arena is even an option. No, yoga is the path of the hero.
 
Yoga: the path of the hero - the way of the heroine
 
You are a human being, so you are going to experience hardship and suffering. But as a human, with your miraculous gifts of awareness, you can refresh your perspective, reset your ways of looking and recast your suffering into a means for useful growth. Yes, you do experience being torn and fragmented, yet you can muster your will, your insight and your diverse capacities to weave greater harmony into your life and expand its tapestry to include and reconcile more of who you really are.
But this requires heroism, known in Sanskrit as vīrya - the quality of a vīra. This word vīra is very beautiful, and of great significance in yoga. Vīra denotes both human being and hero/heroine. It means then, the human being who has the courage, persistence and fortitude to wrestle with all (including the painful, difficult parts) that it means to be human, and do so in a way that is merciful, pragmatic and wise.
So, practice vīrāsana - the posture/attitude/way of being that allows you to be fully who you are: to face and integrate all your shades, the whole spectrum of who you are.
And, practice how you want to feel.
Everything is training.
We get good at what we do a lot. So, when you take recourse to yoga technique, make very sure that you are not inviting unnecessary pain and suffering. Make sure that you are actually inviting what you really want to feel. When we take recourse to yoga techniques, we are practising for the rest of the day, for the rest of our life. So make sure you are setting yourself up to move through life in a graceful way, that will make you less susceptible to being ravaged by the vicissitudes of fortune. When you practice yogāsana, do not practice straining and struggling! Rather, practice that beautiful, balanced ‘posture’ that marries alertness and relaxedness. Practice the attitude that allows harmonious connection and communication between all parts of you. Practice reinforcing the ways of whole system integration and spacious awareness. Practice the heroic work of re-attuning your system to meet the reality of today as skilfully as you can.
Pain is inevitable. But you can work, with steady presence, to reduce the self-inflicted blows, and let the ups and downs of life teach you about the space of the centre and the vastness of the awareness you really are.