Breathing fast and slow

I started practicing ashtanga yoga unaware of the rich tradition I had suddenly stepped into. Like a river, ashtanga had been floating all around me when I put my toes in to test the waters. Like the ocean, those waters ran deep. This was yoga, but nothing like the yoga I had been accustomed to practicing. Soon enough, I came to recognize ashtanga as an elite practice, and it suited me well with my athletic bent. Maybe too well. I became obsessed, which seems to run counter to the nature of yoga, but, then not at all counter to the nature of being imperfect and human. While I would naturally prefer to describe my ongoing ashtanga practice entirely in terms of devotion and loyalty and steady advancement, now, six years later, I can also say that I have experienced my share of drama and disillusion and disappointment. Of course, the late Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, the father of ashtanga yoga, would say that all of this is going as planned. I am where I am meant to be.  "Practice and al...

"Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences." Robert Louis Stevenson Robert Louis Stevenson, confined to his bed and recovering as a young child from his first brush with tuberculosis, watches as the lamplighter lights the street lights as night descends. Stevenson turns to his nurse and says, "Look, he's punching holes in the darkness." Following President Obama's inaugural address in 2008, one of the many inaugural day commentators made the connection between what Stevenson said as a young child from his sick bed and the job that lay ahead for the first African-American president of the United States. The anecdote and its underlying metaphor have stayed with me in the same way that Bob Dylan's song Blowin in the Wind has stayed with me. Their messages are haunting and persistent because they feel eternally true. In our lifetimes, we will inherit many consequences--we will be blown by many a wind--and if we're lucky and ev...