Tag Archives: pranayama

Yoga comes to you when you need it. It’s like a fine fuel, my teacher said;
it can last for months, getting you through the hardest moments.

The Yoga exists in service to you, my next next teacher said;
We do not live in service to yoga, configuring ourselves into shapes.

No, the shapes come to us, the way fog seems to drop down out of the sky,
the way it comes together, level with the earth,
the way it pillows on the blades.

It is a way we move like babies in the womb and outside the womb,
the ways we pandiculate upon waking.
It is a way we notice we’re breathing and unbreathing.

Writing is like this, coming to us the ways leaves come,
budding out of branches, soft and bright,
falling off the trees, hard and true.

They are connected, this moving and writing;
they are expressive of our natural ways of being –
attentive, expansive, budding out of ourselves
the prana flowing upward and downward, toward and away from, in and out,

a fine fuel pulsing soft and bright, hard and true, inside, outside,
expanding and contracting, the spanda, the life.

Don’t you feel you would die if you didn’t write,
my teacher asked me,
like you can’t breathe?

What is it to feel full, to feel empty?

I woke this morning and realized I haven’t felt like my true self for months.
Has my yoga not lasted long this time, this phase of circling the sun?

Is it only in contraction, my yoga, my writing, getting ready to burst from the world into the world? Can I not breathe? Am I not breathing? Am I unbreathing? Is this what it is to die and to be dying? An unknowing? An arresting of the pulse, a cessation of the turnings of the mind stuff? Is Yoga the end of this iteration of me?

Do my words fall hard and true, having lived their time insulated deep in the cortex of my life, swaddled and fed by the sensations of opening and closing, stretching and squeezing, the spanda coming to me, in service to me, rising like sap ascending from my roots to the tips of my tree?

___

I feel the July fog around my skin this morning while the pillows of dew break against my toes.

All of life falling and rising, coalescing and dissolving, expanding and contracting, and me, noticing, playing yoga the way we cover and uncover our eyes, peek-a-boo-ing with oneness.