YOGA - DAY 2!

There's a scene in a movie called "What the Bleep do We Know" in which an old Indian shaman is standing on the shore of an Island looking out into the water at a fleet of ships (Columbus' ships) coming in. He sees the water begin to ripple, but he can't see the ships, not because they aren't there, but because he has never seen a ship before. He doesn't have an idea of "ship" either in his cognitive nor semantic vocabulary. He can't see the ship because a "ship" is not a part of his reality. After staring out to sea for quite some time, however and committing to step outside the realm of the reality that he had become accustomed to, he was eventually able to see the ships coming in and go back to his tribe and tell them about the ships. His tribe trusted him as their leader and thus trusted that these ships were real.

Today, The Shaman was Katite and the ships were Bikram Yoga.

When Cindy and Greg introduced us to this training program yesterday, they told us to "trust the process." They assured us that we wouldn't like everything that we had to do, that there would be some days when we would want to quit and some things that would come easier to us than others. I've never done yoga outside of Yoga to the People. Granted I've spent my entire lifetime in gymnastics/dance, I move pretty fluidly and am strong and flexible. Bikram Yoga, however, was astonishingly difficult. At first I was annoyed at the rapid pace that didn't allow for meditation, at the new form, the 45 degree angle of the back foot in the warrior poses, pushing up instead of the fluid, slow, transition from plank into up-dog. But then I began to embrace it, to let it all go. I let Katite fulfill her role as Shaman... she was doing it before, but I let her do it for ME! This is the "intent," the Sankalpa that I think Sam was talking about yesterday. When I resolved to allow Sankalpa to guide my practice, a whole new world emerged.

In yoga, believing is seeing. Elsewhere, seeing is believing.
yoga is love! This shapes the way we see the world, the way we practice, and the way we will eventually help others practice. When we see with our hearts instead of our minds then we are able to see so much more. When I stopped getting annoyed at Bikram yoga, and just went with the flow, even though i percieved it as a tumultuous flow, my practice went a lot smoother.

This exercise was SO IMPORTANT! It reminded me that I was a beginning yoga student once, too. That at one point in my life, I had no clue what downward-facing-dog or plank or cat/cow even meant! It reminded me that I used to get annoyed with the flow that is now so second-nature to me! Everybody has to start from somewhere and as eventual teachers, we will inevitably have to deal with students at all levels and from all backgrounds who will hopefully embrace the yoga that we offer them as their own ships and the teachers as their Shaman.

In Love,
Leila