Enjoy Your Practice

October 14, 2021

Recently, after class, I was asked what I meant when I said that the over-arching goal of yoga is to achieve freedom. I hadn't realized how much the word freedom is an ambiguous word, an ambiguous concept.  Like most practices and religions. yoga recognizes that suffering is what keeps us from experiencing the fullness that life has to offer. Still, suffering, in this context, is kind of a foggy notion .

As in many postures and alignments, it is useful to cultivate the opposite engagement. What would it mean to cultivate joy in our yoga practice? How we respond to difficult or uncomfortable postures may be a way to cultivate the ability to find joy even in adverse situations.

If we see the greater scope of our yoga practice as more than posture, then finding joy in yoga is practice for finding joy in all areas of life. In this way, developing a deeper relationship with joy is muscular. In fact as far as the brain is concerned, it may be that enjoying a posture is as much about alignment as muscular engagement. It is an interesting idea that the way we perceive the world may be how we choose to engage our experience.

On a side note, hate and bigotry, like joy, is held in our nervous system and in our tissues. The more these kind mind states are reinforced, the more likely we are to embody them in our life.