Risking the threshold
The moment we choose to show up, something changes as the rituals work their way to us through soul seams that are so carefully guarded.
If we feel slow and yet keep plodding along, the lesson unfolds as it always does, and usually our efforts wake up. In my case, my breathing became more stable and the dull machinery of my internal weather reorganized into something like presence. The session loosened whatever was stuck in the mud, and by the time I left the parking lot and headed south in my car, the world had been rearranged. I had become the lotus that had risen from the mud.
And there it was, as I looked out the car window to the right at the setting sun, the cosmos spoke through a breaking sky that opened from the center of a dark storm cloud. The white edges glowed as if brushed by a master’s golden paintbrush, made of light, a bright blue leaf of sky among the glittering clouds.
In the presence of that air, everything inside me was suddenly okay. And this is the real alchemy of yoga, the subtle turning of the inner weather that we know so well. It happens again and again after we cross that threshold, and it reshapes us without fail and without ceremony. And at that moment I felt like we’re all looking for a lesson. . . ready for whatever came my way.
The second surrender, taking the risk to trust
But yoga not only asks us to take the risk of walking in and crossing an unknown threshold, but yoga asks us to take a second risk, and that is giving up control. Not a difficult question, but yoga requires a gentle, almost invisible release from whatever armor we have brought with us. If we can soften the heart a little, trust arises, not as an emotion, but as an attitude of willingness. This opening is the yogi’s first real step into presence.
Trust in yoga means letting the moment be what it is, without disguise or filter. It is an act of embodiment when we trust that our bodies will follow the old patterns of change, and when we do, we will change too.
We trust because we know that we are participating in life while pointing to something more. By giving ourselves to the moment, we enter the reality of our own experience with unprotected honesty.
Breath: Return to the Center
In our practice we eventually come home, and that is back to the breath, back to the steady drum of the soul. Breath is not simply air; it is the architecture of consciousness. With every inhale a new story becomes possible. With every exhale an old script crumbles. Listen to it carefully, you will hear the song of yoga.
This is where the yogi ‘kisses the soul’ and receives the full inheritance that lies dormant behind habit and noise. In breathing we remember how we are and who we are when the inner weather has cleared and we are careful.
Execution: movement as memory
Asana and pranayama herald a sacramental memory, a full one anamnesis. It is hard to believe, but very true, that movement and breathing combine in a kind of alchemy, a healing solution that links memory to movement, and mind to nerves.
By remembering a posture in our body, the yogi becomes both the text and the act of reading the text. We strike a pose – as a habit – and in that habit we remember the deep truth of our being. That at our core our center is soul coals, we are inner fire that is immanent and transcendent.
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