Skip to main content

Ekam, inhale

Ekam, inhale
This is what we do first. We breathe. When we are born, our first breath sounds like a cry. Ekam, inhale, says the universe, and we come flopping out from a liquid home world into the air. Perhaps it's the lightness that startles. Or its vastness.

I am trying to recall the Periodic Table. Which is lighter? Hydrogen or oxygen? Water or air? Difficult to separate.

When I was snorkeling in Maui with my family for the first time, I understood, finally, that it was possible to live in a liquid realm. I understood the allure, in an instant, of freediving, wanting to get as close to survival in water as possible. No mechanism other than breath. Then, of course, there's all that silence.

Which is it that makes that happen: hydrogen? oxygen?
Ekam, inhale.

At the age of 12, after having watched a demonstration of ashtanga yoga by Krishnamacharya, Pattabhi Jois left his family and presented himself to the yoga master for lessons, for a life of practice and tribute to this art.

This is the story of how ashtanga yoga ultimately made its way to the Western world. In the beginning, there was magnetism and devotion. But, first, there was that magnificent breath. To watch an ashtanga practice is to witness that force in motion. The draw to get as close to that breath as possible is magnetic. It's irresistible, fantastically timeless and ethereal.

This is how it was for me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The dawn's early light

My husband is not a morning person. In fact, he would say that getting up early is for the birds. And, of course, he'd be right. Every bird worth its weight in feathers knows that the early morning is the best time to harvest worms and to sing its ode to the dawn's early light. While I have no interest in competing with the birds for their morning grubs--as long as they leave enough for the garden--I am, nonetheless, one of the flock when it comes to paying tribute to the dawn. According to the latest evidence in sleep research, this penchant for the dawn makes me a "lark," a morning person, someone who feels she is capable of her best work in the morning. Those who burn the candle at the other end of the day are known as "owls" because they, like their nocturnal namesakes, tend to be more productive in the evening. I imagine that if I talked to enough "owls," I would find that, like me, they have a special reverence for their particular time o...
3 comments
Read more

Yoga and Religion--Time to Weigh In

Robert Mapplethorpe once wrote in a letter to Patti Smith a confession--Smith's word--about what it felt like to create his art. "I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together." You see, to me Mapplethorpe's "confession" sounds like an act of prayer. Drawing was his religion. When the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh says that our life is a work of art, I think he is saying what Mapplethorpe saw clearly, that our life--what we do with it--is a never-ending prayer. This is why we try to write poems or paint pictures or take photographs or bake cookies or sew clothing or raise children who then want to create crayon-colored pictures of their own. Every act is an act of prayer because our actions, all of them, if practiced mindfully are that beautiful, that powerful, that divine. "Your daily life is your temple and your religion," said The Prophet to the people of Orphalese in Kahlil Gibran's book by the same title. So says many...
3 comments
Read more

A banquet of consequences

"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...
2 comments
Read more