when i talk about yoga…

I love old, immense ideas. Ideas that can and will encircle, embrace all that a human being ever was or could be. Ideas that wrap us like the sky wraps the earth, ever changing and constant, both, big enough to hold all the contradictions together with grace, beauty, and the great irreverence that marks all that vast. There, in the coldness of the immensity of it all, there I find love.
Yoga is to me one of these ideas. Old as human civilization? Some will say yes and others will say no and it doesn’t matter any which way. The scope of the idea itself is vast beyond history. A path designed to enlighten the one who travels.
Think for a moment. One, that humans are without enlightenment and that two, we know of it, and that three, not all of us fall wholly in love with the pursuit of the ultimate realization of being.
Life is complex now: tiktok, gen z lingo, wifi inundating us with notifications day and night, emails mostly from marketing and managers. But I believe too that life was complex then, no matter what “then” you are looking at. Think of the time before and after the printing press. Suddenly, an influx of books. What a time to have lived, I remember thinking in high school history class, in love with papers and words and knowledge even then, when it was not fashionable to love such things (is it ever fashionable to love such things).
Yoga is complex now: studios, gyms, memberships, styles of yoga teaching and the styles of yoga leggings all incomprehensibly entangled. And? And I believe it was not always so complex. I like to think of what yoga was before money got a hold of it, and by “it” I mean the pursuit of knowledge from a place of pure heart.
This I know for sure: people were always as complex as they are now. The desires and feelings, the stuff of human nature has forever been within us. The apes that chose to stand, to grasp at things, to hunt new horizons and gather new experiences into lineages, cultures, and yes technologies.
The “nature” aspect of human nature is what seems to elude so many of us. Life with a capital L is shrouded with schedules, commitments, plans that break up the grandeur of living into small bits of data, easily processed, too easily consumed and forgotten. And the lingering longing for that capital L kind of Life is within each of us.
And so back to yoga, which was always the back to the “nature” element of human nature. The concepts that transcend divisions of body/mind, the separations of in group/ out group that come with religion, nationality, gender, all those things that help us forget that to be human is simply to be human and anyone who can read this or think of yoga as a concept is bound by the irrevocable bond of being human.
Sometimes I think we have it backwards to call ourselves “human beings”. Can we not turn it around and be human?
Just the “being” aspect of human is profound. The beginning and the end of all the teachings I’ve encountered thus far. All the words point at the inexpressible knowing that you already know, and would realize that you already know as soon as you put down the million things you’ve picked up. The thinkings, mainly.
But how we love our thinking and our things.
We love it so much that we’ve created culture of consuming more and more things, finding ways to be more and more consumed by our thoughts, and then we consume things to help end the consuming thoughts. The anxiety and depression, solved with addictions and medications so we can return to life.
When we are brave and bold and something stirs the dreaming self that is dormant too much of the day, then we catch that feeling that underwrites every beautiful gesture. That sense of being alive, of wanting, needing, must-having of something worthy of life with a capital L.
I wish the world could forget, altogether, the trappings of all the smallness and fall in sync with the immensity. The big big ideas. The concepts of unity and harmony and the idea that being alive in this body, your body, is a great gift and there is only one thing to do with great gifts: open it, reveal what was hidden within the packaging, and enjoy it with great freedom.