Yoga
Rebirth
At the end of most Vinyasa classes you find yourself lying still in Dead Man’s pose for a few minutes before being asked to turn onto your right side. You lay there in the fetal position, usually in a pool of your own sweat if it was hot yoga, and then come up to a seated position in order to bow, recognizing yourself and the others in the room. Then you go on about your day. Like everything in yoga this experience is increasingly useful to you as you bring the psychological components into conscious awareness and struggle with them.
Thinking about the life cycle of a yoga session can help you enjoy your life more. You will find yourself mindfully focused in the present during your practice and also outside of it. Yoga practitioners know that whether the spheres of experience under observation are comparatively large or comparatively small they are all governed by the same principles. What can be applied to the small can be applied to the big, and vice versa. In this way the spiritual revelations in the microcosm of your yoga practice can be used to understand the spiritual revelations of the universe.
Next time you are in the fetal pose at the end of your yoga sequence think about the glory that in this moment you are being reborn and can shape your attitude towards yourself and your life any way you choose. Regardless of where you are in your life cycle, you will one day have to confront real death, symbolized by the end of the session where you are laying flat on your back in Dead Man’s. Think about how expectant you were at the start of class, not yet having begun your asanas and still with the full hour in front of you. How quickly it flew by!
Time is relative. Viewed through the lens of the aeons, what is the difference between a one hour yoga session and a hundred year life? They are both tiny specks and seemingly inconsequential units. But time is made up of an infinite series of present moments, and without the present there could be no past and no future. It stands to reason that your present moment is just as significant as every other present moment since it supports and holds up the past while making way for the future. Your present can be infinitely more significant when you choose to inhabit it fully.
Considering the yoga sequence as a cycle of birth, growth, death, and rebirth will help you recognize the moment you do have right now as precious. Everything that has gone before you up to this point, including the last hour of asanas, is now in the past and can never be altered. It is set in stone. The present is yours though to do with as you please and the future is still pregnant with possibility. It’s a special gift we have been given to be symbolically reborn countless times during our lives rather than being physically born just once, going through nature’s mandated sequence of birth, growth, life, death, and rebirth. Of course we are bound to natural laws and must face biological death too.
This conversation is saying spiritually pretty much the equivalent of what Gestalt psychologists mean when they refer to the needs satisfaction cycle. In order to feel whole we must complete the areas of our lives that are left hanging. This gives us the ability to open up fully to the next stimulus from our environment that draws us forward. Without the ability to complete the cycle and withdraw we could never fully commit to whatever came next. Our energy and thoughts would be in two places, or multiple places as is so common for us in the modern world. The yoga session lets you become aware of completing a miniature life cycle. You will view your full life cycle in a different light after a few times of mindfully completing the process. You might be surprised by some of your dawning realizations that have been staring you in the face but were ignored or only half thought out. We are constantly making decisions for how we want to live our lives, whether actively or passively.
Time is not unceasing for any of us, even though it often feels that way. Just like every yoga practice invariably comes to a close, every life must one day come to an end. But next time you rise from the fetal position, let yourself feel gratitude that your larger journey is not completed yet and that you still have time to become the fullest possible version of who you know you are.
Related posts:
- Slowing Down Our Lives There is a kid around the age of twelve who has been giving Dharma talks. He has attracted large audiences. A British reporter followed him around for awhile, and whether this child is the second coming of the Buddha or not, a moment in time that really stood out for the reporter occurred while watching […]...
- Empty Cup We have been writing about some of the fundamental paradoxes of human existence and we want to briefly discuss another one that comes out of the Buddhist and Yoga traditions. It is the idea that you can only fill yourself up by emptying yourself out. The best metaphor I have heard to describe this concept […]...
- Do Walking Meditation During Your Lunch Break “You should sit in meditation for twenty minutes a day. Unless you’re too busy, then you should sit for an hour.” – Zen Proverb You might think you’re too busy to meditate but as the paradoxical quote above suggests it’s exactly when your life is the most hectic that the benefits derived from meditating will […]...
- Eye Of The Storm Many are content with yoga as just a great workout when it has the potential to be so much more. The lessons you will learn about yourself and your body can be applied to many other areas of your life. You have to do the work of consciously making the connection though. One way to […]...
- Time to Start Enjoying Life Now The downside of having goals and aspirations is that if you’re not careful you will get caught up obsessing over them and unwittingly take yourself out of the present moment, thinking of your life as on a holding pattern until you get to where you hope to go. People live their entire adult lives this […]...
- Present Many of us in the West have a hard time understanding what is meant by existing in the present moment. You are reading this right now, so where else could you be but in the present? Eastern masters and Gestalt psychologists would reply that of course you’re here, but you’re probably not fully here. Next […]...
- Don’t Let The Prospect Of Death Ruin Your Life Death is like a dark thundercloud on the distant horizon. You watch it moving ever closer, implacable, and you realize there’s nothing you can do to halt its eventual arrival. Sooner or later your sunny picnic is going to get ruined. But does that mean you should let it ruin your picnic right now, while […]...
- Coming To The Moment To Forget Your Problems In mindfulness trainings and yoga classes you’ll often hear instructors ask you to try to come into the moment as much as possible, leaving all the accumulated stresses and worries behind for that short period of time. They might say something clever like “Don’t worry, all that stress will be right there waiting for you […]...
- Returning to the Present Moment in Yoga Practicing yoga means you are supposed to be in the moment. But even when asanas are so difficult that being anywhere else seems impossible our minds sometimes wander. One of the reasons is that we make a few mistakes during a series or fall out of a pose and then ruminate upon these mistakes as […]...
- Mindful Depression “Depression is the inability to construct a future.” -Rollo May Time is a funny thing. On one hand you have Western psychologists shouting “It’s all about the future! You’ve got to have goals and aspirations!” and on the other hand you have Buddhists replying “The only thing that matters is the present!” The mindful attitude […]...
- Focus On Who You Are And Who You Can Be If you see yourself as a static, unchanging entity whose personality and attributes are set what you gain is powerful protection against existential anxiety but what you lose is the chance to become who you really are. If you focus exclusively on the future you gain the chance to grow but you lose the chance […]...
- Happiness Is Available In The Present Moment “Our appointment with life is in the present moment. If we do not have peace and joy right now, when will we have peace and joy-tomorrow, or after tomorrow? What is preventing us from being happy right now?” – Thich Nhat Hanh The irony of the Western attitude towards life is that we do want […]...
- Fear And Mindfulness When we consider just how many people spend most of their lives in a state of fear the need for increased mindfulness becomes obvious. The sad part is that most of these fears don’t come to pass, and even when they do all that time spent being afraid only adds to the cumulative misery. Of […]...
- Enjoy The Ride You can look towards the future with hope or dread, towards the past with nostalgia or regret, but in all these cases you’re missing what’s right in front of you, removing yourself from the present moment. Emily Dickinson wrote “forever is composed of nows” and of course the same can be said for the span […]...
- Rescuing Actions Into The Past We usually think of our actions in terms of their effects on the present and the future. Especially in the West, the mentality is goal-oriented, the focus on what comes next. We look towards the past not with hope but with a sense of finality that usually brings regret or nostalgia in its wake. This […]...
- Yoga And Comfort One of the best yet most overlooked side effects of practicing yoga is your increased desire for comfort. I mean this especially in a physical sense but also in a psychological sense. Lots of people live with aches and pains and simply believe that’s how their lives have to be. They manage the pain by […]...
- Your Presence is a Gift The greatest present you can give someone is your true presence. We recently wrote about overcoming loneliness and came to the conclusion that at the deeper level the only lasting remedy is to feel understood by the people who are close to us and to feel like we understand them too. But there is a […]...
- Wasted Years “The two main hazards of psychoanalysis: that it might fail, and that if it succeeds, you’ll never be able to forgive yourself for all those wasted years.” – Mignon McLaughlin What happens to a lot of people in therapy, especially if they start going later in life, is that they gain some important insights, which should […]...
- Discipline Especially when they are starting out people tend to place importance on getting through an entire session of yoga without having to lay down on their mats. There is an unconscious element of competition that shows up in just about every activity in our Western society and yoga is not immune to it. Having to […]...
- Yoke Yoga comes from the root word yuj, which means ‘to join’. The closest word we have in English to the original Sanskrit is ‘yoke’. What we are really talking about is joining together the mind and the body in order to achieve a definite spiritual end. In the Yoga tradition this means systematically moving closer […]...