more sage wisdom from the lovely Rachel Scott Ill be honest with all yall. I love to live in my head. Analyze, consider, rationalize, lather, rinse, repeat. And what sucks - and is also highly praised -is that Im pretty good at it. Ask me to do a task, put my head down, and Ill be your happy computer minion. Email, tweet, google, respond, read, project, visualize, text...Ill play in this virtual world, make it spin, and then pop it into an excel doc and deliver it via dropbox. Our culture is becoming increasingly virtual. Communication happens via email rather than face to face. Friends text more often than they phone. Even our popular dating sites - POF, Match, Tinder (god help us) - encourage us to judge, visualize, imagine, swipe, dismiss. Thank the sweet little gods for yoga. When I come to my mat, I am reminded to be a full human again. To take a deep breath, to make a transition from thinking to sensing, and to feel. Through feeling, I can practice returning to the present moment...to actually see what Im see...hear what I hear. Our senses - god bless them - pull us out of the imaginary world and bring us back to the present. Part of old school yoga was to control the senses (pratyhara). Yogis believed that the senses were like wild horses, dragging us hither and thither after yummy objects (ice cream, pretty ladies), and that they needed to controlled. But in our culture, I declare that we actually need to reclaim the potency of our senses in order to become alive and awake to the present moment. As Jon Kabat-Zinn writes, we must com[e] to our senses. For us, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling, seeing..all provide us an avenue back to Reality and What Is. To the Now. Then, we can see the people in front of us, be in Reality as it actually is, and savor the sweetness of our feelings and our relationships. Real. Not virtual. Embrace your senses. Live in your sweet animal body. Come home. You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. -Mary Oliver
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 06:47:23 +0000
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