meditation

There’s strength in numbers.

I was so psyched to learn that my friends in @namastebookclub were doing a month of meditation. The energy of this network of friends all over the U.S. and Australia has already inspired me to sit and read and discuss yoga philosophy, at a time when I really needed to pay attention and turn inward. As we read The Heart of Yoga together, I felt accountable to someone, and stuck with it, and in the process, really felt I embodied parts of it.  And it feels time to go even deeper.

So again, having someone to account to is key. Also, just the energy of everyone’s intentions. Thank you thank you thank you, to Melissa, and Nancy and Jenny especially, but so many others. You boost me up and inspire me.

Today, day one, I just sat and closed my eyes after about 10 minutes of Asana. Thinking about Erich Schiffman’s discussion of meditation in Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness, I wondered: what came first, meditation or asana? He says that the primary practice in the early days, before poses were invented, was meditation, and through the centering of meditation the ancient yogis gained intuition, and the poses evolved from there, as an expression of what they were experiencing. And what they were experiencing was themselves, but also an awareness of the connection between the self and God. “The all-important revelation was that God and the Self are one, that the individual wave is the specific expression of the entire ocean, that you are I are God-identified, God-specific.”

I hesitated to say God for so long. After leaving the Mormon church and feeling used by religion, I, as one of my friends said, “threw out the baby with the bathwater.” She meant the good parts of the Church, I think. But really, i threw it all away. Any form of spirituality. Any trust in a higher power. Any trust in anyone or anything, really.

Yoga brought me back.

Now I see that the feelings I had as a child in the Mormon church, when I felt that I believed it, were the same feelings I get in meditation, or when I’m in my flow on the mat, or sitting on a beach, or watching my dog Pooka jump and smile. It’s that union, that communion of the self and everything else. The awareness that I’m not alone, that I love, and am loved.

Part of meditation is experiencing my truth.

Meditation is being wide awake.

Now if I can just sit longer. Today was only 7 minutes. But I remind myself that any time centering is a chance to experience that feeling, and remember who I am. Experiencing it is becoming it.

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• busy mind