This is truly my favorite topic of yoga.  With the extensive wisdom that is available to us from yoga and other traditions around the world how do we go about not just knowing this wisdom intellectually but living it?  What I love about yoga the very most is that it is not about thinking, or figuring something out but being in the world.  On the mat, wisdom that is known in the mind can be enacted in the body.  My challenge to the yoga world, practitioners and teachers alike, is to ask ourselves what it means not just to pay lip service to concepts like compassion, balance, flow or grounding but to find ways to communicate these concepts into living realities.  It's been my experience that there can be a clear disjunction between talking or thinking about compassion in class or practice and feeling for it's influence (or absence) in each movement, breath or asana.  For me to offer a poetic soliloquay about compassion at the beginning class only to lead students into sequences that encourage forcing or straining disregards the "yoking" of mind and body that is the definition of yoga.  In practice, as in life, ideas like flow, balance and compassion can become something other than disembodied "niceties" that float around in the ether of the mind - they can become living experiences. 
The most clear example where this can be felt is in implementing Patanjali's suggestion that posture be a balance of shtira and sukkha or effort and ease.  For example, in Warrior II there is effort required in the legs to maintain their alignment, the same goes for the shoulders to lift the arms and keep them extending out from the shoulders.  It is a posture that can require a lot of energy, but within that we must be reminded of the seed of ease that is always present in effort.  Ease reminds us to soften the ribs and chest, remaining breathable in the upper body.  This opening to the breath in turn serves to feed more oxygen to the efforting muscles.  There is a meeting of effort and ease, a balance point, where these two embodied energies are suspended in a creative dialogue, and a sense of space emerges.  This is the embodiment of yoga's philosophy.  But it need not end here.  We can embody other forces such as compassion, flow, grounding or balance in the same way, entering a living conversation with the concept, inquiring into the nature of each of these as they show themselves in our practice and our lives.  In the next few blogs I will offer ways to integrate some of the key concepts of healthful living into a practice which can help make them more tangible.  In this way, we can honor what it means to "yoke" the mind and body and know that we are not just "cliche-ing" our way into an enlightened life but enacting it.