Let me be honest: days 3 - 7 made for some good reading, beautiful highlighting in my Meditations text, and pranayama, either in the bathtub or propped up with pillows on my bed.
Points for innovation! The highlighters! The keepin’ it real of yoga in the bed, bath and great BEYOND!
More pages than ever before have now been read in this text. The opening section is about the Yamas and the Niyamas, what I like to call the “yeses and no-no’s of yoga.” They are the practices you should do, include, or use to guide your life. The Yamas and the Niyamas are thoughtful, similar to other tenets of graceful living, like the Golden Rule, the 10 Commandments, or the 5 Pillars, so they strike me as rules, which bores me to no end to get into while I am writing.
Also, slightly more philosophically and less lazily, I’d encourage other individuals to do their own practicing and sense-making of these big ideas, aka “rules” and guidelines, to check out their merit for their own lives and spirits.
The 8 limbs - Yamas, Niyamas, Asana, Pranayama, Pratyhara, Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi - are not linear or ladder-like steps; they are more like spokes on a wheel! They don’t feel linear when one calls them “limbs,” like of a body or a tree. But when one reads about them, they are inevitably numbered, and appear as a list. So 20+ years into my yogic path, and 10+ into possession of this book, I appreciate this synergy and new imagery - the old list of rules turns into a moving, familiar, and functional object of everyday living!
Additionally borrowed from the authors Gates and Kenison, which they borrowed from a song, which I cannot specifically reference because I can no longer locate my book , is the idea, “Your yoga is everywhere.” Thus, you can always be in practice of one (or several) spokes of the wheel, spinning rung to rung, moving forward, like a lithe and beautiful lumberjack-yogini, dancing atop logs, rolling across a river. The river is of unknown depth, ever changing width, and the logs drift downstream on a current beyond your control.
It can appear spectacle-ish from the safety of the banks, but what are those folks doing watching your show? They need to find their own show. And that is not your problem, Ellen, what they are doing and saying on the riverbanks of your one and only precious life. (thanks to Glennon Doyle and Sister for keeping this Mary Oliver ideal vivid)
You must focus, Lumberjack Lady (90’s leggings + supersized flannel + crew socks). You got this.
Breathe. Be. Move. With holy attention.
These are your limbs. Your logs. Your lungs.
They can be your landfill.
Or your legacy.