Sarah P-C and Georgie's lovely class

Some may wonder why Vayu and I were on for teaching yesterday, and Sarah P-C and Georgie taught today --- it's because Georgie was with her family over the weekend and couldn't come back until early Monday morning.

Anyway, they taught a very inspired class this morning, including a "round of OM's," that really drew you in; at least, it seemed that everyone was "in" to the vibration of the sound, listening, participating... not with their minds somewhere else.  It's a very powerful experience when the people doing it have been together for a while.  

Morning class included a bit of discussion regarding a book Georgie had brought to share with us, called Breathing (I'll get the author's name later - couldn't find it on Amazon.com).  John read a bit to us, including a bit about David Bohm, the physicist.  He wrote a book on the Relativity of Physics and a book on Quantum Mechanics, and at the end of both, he "surmised that he really didn't understand" these two fields of study.  Both books were staple texts at most major universities.

So, we all understand what we understand right now, for now, right?  What we understood 10 years ago was different, and what we'll understand ten years from now (or just tomorrow, or in the next moment) may be quite different from what we know right now.

There was another bit of class on "tripping up."  For example, we all have times when we have difficulty, or difficulties... our "humanalities" show, or become blatantly clear, to us and/or to others.  We're not as strong, patient, centered as we thought we were, or as we think we could be.  We're only seeing things from our side, and not from the the other side, or from many other sides... or from THE thing's side.  [From a fantastic yoga-oriented book I've mentioned before, How Yoga Works:  a bamboo pen in Tibet is a pen to the person writing with it, but to a cow, it's food --- see it from the human side, and see if from the animal's side.]

Yoga - eg., our mat, our practice - gives us something to get back to (ie., to get back on the mat), a philosophy, a tool, that is a discipline, and it is how you discipline yourself.  You may get on your mat feeling like crap, or you may go to teach a class, feeling like crap, when your personal world is crashing down around you, and yet, if you've practiced often and consistently, you have a technique (or many techniques) to go back to, to help you have self-compassion, to firm your resolve, to start to see things from many sides, to see old, repeated conditions in a new way, in a new light... and to be able to work back to center, perhaps with more clarity, more stillness, more Presence.

When you're feeling "the opposite," you'll start to be able to feel the attraction.

It's not just "on the mat," either... it's taking the yoga off the mat, the discipline and practice off the mat in to every day life.

As Pattabhi Jois, says, "Practice, and all is coming."