Last weekend I went to a yoga class in Edmonton with a lovely yoga friend.  I knew going in that this studio was known for its physically challenging, vinyasa flow style.  Eternally - and obviously morbidly - curious I decided to explore the class despite it being significantly different than my usual style of yoga.  I spread my mat out near a window overlooking a construction site that was surrounded by various tributaries of traffic and pedestrians.  The room was already hot from the sweaty class before ours and I thought opening the window may offer some much needed respite in the coming hour - I was right.  The studio was a spa-like masterpiece draped in all the most aesthetic garb one could expect from a such a space.  Hardwood, high ceilings, mellow colours and statues of Hindu gods punctuated every direction I looked.  The studio filled almost to capacity with 25 young, fit and lululemon sporting yogi's.   The teacher was lovely and articulate, and the flows of movement were endless.  ENDLESS.  From Sun Salutation, to long hold standing poses, through vinyasa, headstand, arm balances and all the way around again.  I was amused by the metronome like dropping of sweat beads onto my mat about 30 minutes into an hour and a half class. I was even more amused by the literal moat of sweat that was forming around the guy in front of me.  I caught myself wishing for a squeegee at one point as his puddle began to encroach nearer to my sacred space.   

I was at purple-face point when two things floated through my awareness:

1.  What's the point of this?
2.  Why would I choose to continue?

I kept hearing the words of a Hindu friend cycle through my mind:  "Yoga is the uniting of the atman (individual soul) with Brahman (Spirit/Ultimate Reality)".  As I continued to move I kept this notion held close, and worked to find the connection between this definition of yoga and the experience I was having.   Our movements were so rapid, and so taxing, that my attention was required just to keep steady and therefore became trapped in the physical.   I think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's hard to self realize when your just trying to survive!  I wondered about the rest of the group.  I wanted to stop, turn to the whole class and ask "How is this taking you closer to Spirit?" "What makes this yoga?".  I may have gotten some great answers, and I understand that Ashtanga yoga (on which this is based) is focused on asana as a practice to make the body strong.  The philosophy is that with "the body and sense organs thus stabilized, the mind can be steady and controlled" (Jois 2002 16).   I get that, but I didn't see a lot of stabilizing going on.  A lot of over-stretched joints and frantic shaking yes, stabilizing, not so much.  What does it mean for the body to be stabilized?  How is that facilitated?  

I was hovering in what had to be my 43rd downward dog and wondered "if this isn't serving my soul, why continue?".  I realized then that what was serving my soul was not the class, but my awareness of all the reactions, emotions and thoughts I was having.  The truly spiritual act was the moment when I realized I could leave, or stay - what mattered was that I chose it.  I think we often don't choose, but comply unconsciously with deep seated beliefs about what we should be doing.  The question of "why am I doing this" must pervade every moment of practice.  Do I choose it, or did some media machine entrance me into believe this is what I need to be "ok". Ultimately, I stayed.  And dedicated the rest of my practice to respect.  Respect for the teacher, my body and my fellow practitioners. 

The lesson I learned was threefold:  First, Consciousness is available in all situations.  Despite the fact that this yoga felt more like a work out than sadhana - awareness is always available. Second, it was reinforced that some situations are better for me than others for cultivating a relationship with Spirit.  I love a good challenge, but even more I love the opportunity to spend time with my self pose by pose, to dig deep into the experience like a potter digs into clay.  I don't want to do poses for the sake of poses, I want to be in poses for the sake of revelation.  And finally, this was just my experience.  There may have been a great deal going on under the surface for the other practitioners in the room - I must always remember to temper judgement with one of my favorite aphorisms - "there's space for it all.....". 

Today my daughter woke up at 5:50am, underslept and overgrumpy.  Schlepping our way through our usual morning routine my first glimpse outside revealed a gray, drizzling day.  I know. It's good for the farmers. But I still felt a little oppressed by the weight of the clouds and had a hard time lifting my spirits to meet the day.  That is, until the duck costume came out. My daughter has a duck costume -  which she regularly calls a chicken -  that has a hat, webbed feet and a large puff for a butt that wiggles when she walks.  In all seriousness she struts around the house going on with business as usual, except as a duck/chicken rather than her usual persona.  Needless to say this little yellow ball of sunshine lightened my mood.  

Mid-shampoo I found myself feeling relieved that she requests to dress up as animals and not as a princesses, pop-stars or beauty queens.  I have a particular aversion to her playing roles that traditionally reduce women to superficialities and I haven't introduced her to much in the way of princess attire or media.  And then, I had to question myself.  I realized that my greatest hope is not that Rowan will grow up to be independent and non-conforming and resist traditional female stereotypes and roles.  My greatest hope is that she will grow up able to be anything and everything.  I pray that she will grow up able to befriend and express the awkward duck, the fierce lioness, the wise goddess - and, the princess.  I realize that we have all of it in us, many characters and innumerable archetypes that can add dimension and richness to our lives in countless ways.  Can I offer my daughter the fertile soil where on one day she try on the animal in her, on another the divine - pig and angel alike?  Can I help her see past the superficial associations of the princess and instead claim her royal specialness when its important for her to do so? 

This thought comes on the heels of the realization that in my yoga practice, for many years, I have been favoring particular angles of movement.  Instead of exploring my full range of motion or lack thereoff I was consistently repeating only a few ways of moving, paying much less attention to other "vectors" of movement.  I had been preferring hip openers and inversions because I have flexible hips and strong arms while avoiding back bends and standing balance poses to reduce feeling my weaknesses.   For about the last year, however, I have been intentionally probing the lost angles of my movement and it has meant that I have been able to expand spherically into more expansion and tone in all directions.  Where there was once was atrophy, now there is strength, where there was tension now there is openness - and there's no end to this spherical expansion.
  
My point?  Don't just be duck.  Don't just be a flexy hip person.  Tone your hips and your rock star, expand your spine and your princess.  Live from all angles, in your practice and your life.

Warrior III.  I watch my mind resist, and my body tense.  I have struggled with this posture for a long time because my hips are very flexible but lack stability and it makes this pose very hard.  But it also makes it very necessary to bring a balance of tone and openness to this region.  I enter the pose and automatically feel compensations arise:  tense jaw, thwarted breath, locked standing knee and unsquare pelvis.  Emotions arise:  irritation, resistance, confusion.  My mind begins to judge:  How long have you been working on this?  Why isn't this getting easier?  What's wrong here? 

I see my physical, mental and emotional patterns play themselves out in the container of this pose. "Make space for it all" becomes my mantra and I stay just a little bit longer, in my weakness.  As the proverbial knots of my conditioned response to this posture untie I am ushered beyond the experience of only weakness into something else.  I am reminded that my weakness is simply the edge of my strength and my stamina is renewed.  I cannot be only weakness, if I were I'd not be able to stand, steady myself on one leg and approach a horizontal experiment in any way.  Weakness is not opposed to strength but in fact highlights it. 

At this point I wonder if I can not only experience the binary sensations of both strength and weakness in an oscillating dance between the two, but begin to let them merge.  What's at the mid-point?  Presence.  My mind ceases it's movement between the poles and suspends itself in the gestalt - the whole that is larger than the sum of its parts.  It is momentary, but I have a glimpse of what it is like to be held in paradoxical place between two sides of a coin. 

What is it like to be strong?  To be weak?  Both?  Neither?   Like a Zen koan of the body this is the questioning that evokes breaking down of illusion.  That which is identified with weakness or strength in us is called into question and we are liberated - if only for a single miraculous moment that has been divinely designed to make you ache for more.