I first practiced yoga in college during the late 70s. It was offered as a one unit PE class, and was taught by a gentleman I will always remember, Professor Ken Ravizza. My fellow yogis and I did not see Dr. Ravizza as our professor, and, no, he was not seen as a peer. Rather, he was a beloved leader--a guru, if you will, though we did not address him as such--intent on bringing the practice of hatha yoga into our lives. And bring it, he did. Thirty-five years later, I am still practicing yoga, and, although the journey has not been one long bliss-fest, I recognize it as mine, a living, breathing human adventure that I continue to wake to.
In the thirty-five years since I began to practice yoga on a mat on a concrete floor in a university gymnasium, the discipline has become practically mainstream. It took a couple of decades, but now elements of hatha yoga, which is another way of saying the postures or asanas or the physical limb of the yoga practice, show up as standard routines in many athletic disciplines. For years, I devoted myself to other athletic pursuits and reserved my yoga practice to intermittent half-hour routines of self-selected asanas taken from Swami Satchidananda's book Integral Yoga, which I practiced alone on my living room floor. It took some time, but I eventually followed the flow of humanity out of my living room and into a yoga studio. And there I have met many teachers and many other practitioners, but more importantly, I have met myself over and over and over again. I am learning that this encounter--or re-encountering--is the essential journey of this physical practice. The funny thing is, it never grows old. As my current teacher reminded us last night, "we are developing sensitivity" to our bodies, to our breath, to our lives.
The French word for sensitivity is sensible, and I like it that the orthography of this word translates as something different in English. I do think it's sensible to be sensitive, and I have learned that sensitivity, like any art form, must be practiced and polished, and continually. It is not perfected overnight. Little in life is, really. Sensitivity leads to awareness, and whether we like it or not that is the face in the mirror we are in search of. Awareness. Patanjali, the great sage and author of the Yoga Sutras, instructs us to seek ourselves in the practice of yoga, in our journey of life: "Seek not to learn the sutras, instead seek to learn who is the one who studies the scripture."
At the end of that one unit PE class when I first began this journey with yoga, Professor Ravizza asked us to consider what one word we learned that semester of practice that summed up our experience in his class. I remember joining two words together to make one long word, and that word was this: love and self-identity. All these years later, I recognize the prescience in this label of mine. For me, yoga continues to be a journey of the heart. As writer and Buddhist Alice Walker once noted, life breaks our hearts...open. If we are lucky, and open to it, our hearts open up like a suitcase, filled with our stories, our sorrows, but always ready, like a suitcase, for the next adventure.
In the thirty-five years since I began to practice yoga on a mat on a concrete floor in a university gymnasium, the discipline has become practically mainstream. It took a couple of decades, but now elements of hatha yoga, which is another way of saying the postures or asanas or the physical limb of the yoga practice, show up as standard routines in many athletic disciplines. For years, I devoted myself to other athletic pursuits and reserved my yoga practice to intermittent half-hour routines of self-selected asanas taken from Swami Satchidananda's book Integral Yoga, which I practiced alone on my living room floor. It took some time, but I eventually followed the flow of humanity out of my living room and into a yoga studio. And there I have met many teachers and many other practitioners, but more importantly, I have met myself over and over and over again. I am learning that this encounter--or re-encountering--is the essential journey of this physical practice. The funny thing is, it never grows old. As my current teacher reminded us last night, "we are developing sensitivity" to our bodies, to our breath, to our lives.
The French word for sensitivity is sensible, and I like it that the orthography of this word translates as something different in English. I do think it's sensible to be sensitive, and I have learned that sensitivity, like any art form, must be practiced and polished, and continually. It is not perfected overnight. Little in life is, really. Sensitivity leads to awareness, and whether we like it or not that is the face in the mirror we are in search of. Awareness. Patanjali, the great sage and author of the Yoga Sutras, instructs us to seek ourselves in the practice of yoga, in our journey of life: "Seek not to learn the sutras, instead seek to learn who is the one who studies the scripture."
At the end of that one unit PE class when I first began this journey with yoga, Professor Ravizza asked us to consider what one word we learned that semester of practice that summed up our experience in his class. I remember joining two words together to make one long word, and that word was this: love and self-identity. All these years later, I recognize the prescience in this label of mine. For me, yoga continues to be a journey of the heart. As writer and Buddhist Alice Walker once noted, life breaks our hearts...open. If we are lucky, and open to it, our hearts open up like a suitcase, filled with our stories, our sorrows, but always ready, like a suitcase, for the next adventure.
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