6am yoga

Left 6am yoga this morning in complete bliss. My teacher does not disappoint. Just show up and let go. Reminded me how.... we don't come to yoga class to achieve the crazy and wildest poses. Though that's cool. We come for liberation. Our goal is to touch our true essence, our pure natural state, and that is one of bliss, anand. I am reminded this in class. Our focus is not on performing feats of the physical. In the west I remember that we are way obsessed with the physicality of yoga, to the detriment of the deeper parts of yoga available to us. Today we chanted, we breathed, we slowed everything down, "advanced yoga" my teacher calls it. In life we speed around, we move so fast, our intellect engaged. When we slow down, we switch the mind off, something else takes over he tells us. So turn off the mind, find your breath, slow down. As we basically did gentle yoga with breath, with exaggerated slowness, I snuck my eyes open and peaked around the room. I was wondering.... "what do some of these yoginis think right now?". It is the 500hr teacher training going on, so 36 of the 60 some odd people in the room were in the training and had been there only a week, exposed to my teacher's rather un-western approach to yoga. I wondered if they thought "what are we DOING? this is not yoga! This is like... so beginner yoga, I am not getting a good stretch on, i am not getting a good "work-out" in". I wondered if some of them would leave after the 4 weeks with a physical practice that was more rusty than when they came and wondering if they would pick up on the "other" that was being offered up instead. :) It IS so hard to put these things into words, but when I am there, I am reminded of it and it is so tangible, you feel it can be touched.