Yoga & Just Plain Relaxation ~ San Juan Islands ~ Things to Do
savasana
there is so much more to yoga than i thought when i sheepishly snuck into the corner of a popular san juan island class a couple of years ago. the activity and intensity levels of my life were both on a steady upward trajectory and i could tell that i needed something, anything, to prepare my body for the rigors my mind was planning for it. i watched this class from aboard the treadmills, through the glass window, for a while and it seemed like a reasonable place to start. it helped that the yoga teacher was hot, but that’s another line of thought. today i’m obsessing about savasana and the unexected mental impact of even the simplest practices.
our minds are like magnets sweeping up and relentlessly attaching to endless shards of random input. downturn. stimulus. love. fear. hope. dispair. anger. resentment. cheese. sex. music. that funny noise my cell phone makes when someone posts to my facebook page. we gather it all as if that was our true purpose. when my mind gets reeling there is no room for joy plain and simple. there is no space for the universe to fill my soul with how truly fantastic it is just to inhale, to exhale and to do it again as if i’d never experienced a truly full breath before.
any practice that encourages me to train my mind on a simple, singular focus creates the cool, expansive wonder of a clear, starry night in my mind; all thoughts and possibilities are available to me in that moment. i kayak increasingly difficult rivers because the lip of a waterfall is no place for distraction. all my ridiculous obsessions, petty fears and ego-driven distortions vanish against the reality that focusing on anything other than what’s directly in front of me would be pointless and self-destructive. everyone who puts themselves on an edge like this has the same moment. and we’ve all had the realization that life is really just like this. there is exactly one moment and that moment is now. nothing else exists like now. if i spend now thinking of cheese then cheese is now. if i spend now thinking of fear then fear is now. i can spend now thinking whatever i choose. and if i spend now thinking of joy, then joy is now. it really is that simple. try it. for just one day, commit to experiencing whatsoever presents itself as a source of joy. in just one day, what do you have to lose?
yet we all forget. it’s almost like it’s too brilliant to focus on and we must turn away. perhaps it would be different if i could huck a 20-footer each day before work, but only my friends in hood river get to do that. the rest of us need to continually create and re-create access points along the paths of more conventional lives. enter yoga. yoga can erase the mistake of assuming that ‘mind’ is not ‘body’ and encourage the ability to step away from ‘mind’ and observe with fascination the gymnastics of your whole being. as i move through the poses of a class, my body learns to work as a whole system, rather than a collection of movable parts struggling to coordinate actions mental, physical and emotional. then it’s time for savasana, corpse pose, a time to let the effects of the practice settle into the entire being, resonate within the space created by the practice and begin to radiate an authentic focus into whatever i may experience that day.
i set about my yoga practice thinking about joints and muscles and range of motion, thinking about my physical body as if my mind was something separate. today i am obsessively grateful to have an entirely different kind of practice, and to have a teacher on san juan island capable of animating this difference.
shantaya yoga center: re-create your life in the San Juan Islands.
