The Juiciness of Yoga

The Juiciness of Yoga

Yoga outlines a path to self-caring through movement, breathing, meditation, and philosophy. While the discussion often centers on physical alignment, it’s also the internal state of alignment where the juiciness of yoga can lie. Cultivating the tools and techniques of caring practices for yourself, and then watching them ripple out across your communities, brings you into alignment. You can live in inner and outer harmony.  

We call living in alignment by many names, such as “living my best life” or “in the flow," to name a few. This isn’t a new concept. Philosophers, writers, practitioners, sages have been writing for centuries about ways to cultivate this state. Socrates wrote, “may outward and inward man be at one.” One of my favorite inspirational authors, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, called it the state of being “in grace”.  I love how she describes being in this state as “one seems to carry all one's tasks before one lightly, as if borne along on a great tide” as opposed to being out of grace, which she describes as “one can hardly tie a shoe-string.” The juiciness of her message resides in her explanation “that certain environments, certain modes of life, certain rules of conduct are more conducive to inner and outer harmony than others”. 

Yoga offers a pathway to this state of grace, in its teachings, techniques, and practices. On the most outer layer of the practice, you work with alignment to move the body in a safe way. You build strength, increase flexibility, and create space in the body. Physical alignment also asks you to place your emotional and mental awareness on the body, to move with intelligence. A skillful teacher enhances physical harmony by using functional alignment in order to adapt the pose to your body. A well-thought-out physical practice can return you to a “state of grace” by asking you to make conscious choices involving moving or conserving energy, aligning the body to experience the energetic effects of the pose, and allowing tension or tightness to be broken up.  This is a holistic approach to caring for your body that is sustainable and nourishing. 

There are many ways to map the interior through Meridians, Nadis, or Chakras. A very accessible inward diagram is the Koshas, or sheaths. They’re the five subtle layers of our being that encompasses our physical, energetic, mental, intellectual, and bliss bodies.

Koshas are often represented by circles within each other.  I think of them like Russian nesting dolls. At first, they look independent of each other but they aren’t. Rarely do you work with just one. Even on the physical layer,  you are working with that space of energy and consciousness to see how it relates to the other layers. They are interconnected, one layer affects another.  

In Flow class, you experience the physical layer and how it impacts your mental and energetic bodies. In Restore class you explore how your energetic layer impacts your mental and physical bodies. In Sit, you look at how your mental layer impacts the physical and energetic. 

The beauty of the Koshas is, when you begin to bring them into harmony, you experience how they interconnect. Through Yoga, you cultivate a greater awareness of how exploring one Kosha can have a powerful impact on your whole being. 

With Yoga and Meditation, the inward journey becomes the outward experience. You use skills developed in the practice to cultivate curiosity, acceptance, and compassion toward yourself and then towards others. 

My dear friend, Karina Ayn Mirsky, believes that the roots of love lie in curiosity, acceptance, and compassion. From this base, she builds her transformational work. I’m not a math person, but the following "love equation" seems pretty simple:

Curiosity + Acceptance + Compassion = Love

It particularly strikes me because all of February in class I’ve explored the themes of love: caring, self-care, and living in grace. These actions ask us to love both ourselves and others.  The equation reminds me of the lyric from "Under Pressure," when David Bowie sings:

And love dares you to care for

The people on the edge of the night

And love dares you to change our way of

Caring about ourselves 

When you step into a place of curiosity about yourself and accept what arrives, you can then offer yourself compassion. You can see yourself fully and truly, and accept what you find.  This ripple of love flows outward from yourself to your intimate relationships, colleagues, and communities.