I so appreciate your openness and honesty around your journey and how you travel. Odly i have always found that when my teachers are open about their struggles, then I can connect and be inspired by those stories, and yet so often the perfect practitioner is presented both textually and in my experience ..... my teachers. Perfection is not really being presented so much as messy and human, rather than miraculous experiences that show a level of realisation.
I am always interested in how we travel differently, and upgrading our addiction surely has its relevance as far as the path until the addiction itself no longer has its grip or one moves on to the next addiction hopefully in a direction that is taking you along the path to addictionless, even if we are walking round in circles again and we come to be bored irritated or some catastrophic occurance happens in our life to show us there are other different ways to travel.... I am curious about how many of us in our search for enlightenment/authenticity/or just a bit of peace actually change through 'nice' experience or a no-choice situation that one is trying to work out? It would be an interesting piece of research.
I am really glad I came to yoga from a very traditional meditation training, so I took care to look before getting involved, and with the Mohans, right from the beginning, I had no feeling the physical yogic side was about what you could do posturally, but using asana, etc., to clarify perception. In my yoga teacher training, there was one lady who couldn't and wouldn't be able to ever do the postures, and that was fine. Curiously, the saying from Krishnamacharya I saw so much was 'The yoga must fit the individual and not the individual the yoga', and yet this is so different to prescribed forms of yoga (or meditation for that matter) that are attributed to him. I have come to the conclusion (which may change) that prescription has its place, as does the anti or outside tradition, and the play of both is necessary for our world/practice ....and if that view becomes too fixed,d I am heading for a fall.
Thank you, Yeshe - I wholeheartedly agree about striking a balance - in all sorts of ways. I don't think I'd have learned much if I'd stayed stuck in my teenage arrogance. So suffering may have plenty to teach us about being imperfect and that being OK, much as the alignment freaks helped me to realise I wouldn't get enlightened by doing all the poses as well as the frightening Mr. Iyengar... Yet a river needs banks to flow as opposed to being a flood, so there's a place for a system and discipline of some kind - it just needs to be stay flexible (though not in the pretzeling way...). That's a lot of opinions from me in one comment, so perhaps enough for now. More power to the idea of yoga as clarifying perception! 🙌😍
A book of good hope.
Indeed! A classic 🙌
I so appreciate your openness and honesty around your journey and how you travel. Odly i have always found that when my teachers are open about their struggles, then I can connect and be inspired by those stories, and yet so often the perfect practitioner is presented both textually and in my experience ..... my teachers. Perfection is not really being presented so much as messy and human, rather than miraculous experiences that show a level of realisation.
I am always interested in how we travel differently, and upgrading our addiction surely has its relevance as far as the path until the addiction itself no longer has its grip or one moves on to the next addiction hopefully in a direction that is taking you along the path to addictionless, even if we are walking round in circles again and we come to be bored irritated or some catastrophic occurance happens in our life to show us there are other different ways to travel.... I am curious about how many of us in our search for enlightenment/authenticity/or just a bit of peace actually change through 'nice' experience or a no-choice situation that one is trying to work out? It would be an interesting piece of research.
I am really glad I came to yoga from a very traditional meditation training, so I took care to look before getting involved, and with the Mohans, right from the beginning, I had no feeling the physical yogic side was about what you could do posturally, but using asana, etc., to clarify perception. In my yoga teacher training, there was one lady who couldn't and wouldn't be able to ever do the postures, and that was fine. Curiously, the saying from Krishnamacharya I saw so much was 'The yoga must fit the individual and not the individual the yoga', and yet this is so different to prescribed forms of yoga (or meditation for that matter) that are attributed to him. I have come to the conclusion (which may change) that prescription has its place, as does the anti or outside tradition, and the play of both is necessary for our world/practice ....and if that view becomes too fixed,d I am heading for a fall.
Thankyou agai,n Daniel.
Thank you, Yeshe - I wholeheartedly agree about striking a balance - in all sorts of ways. I don't think I'd have learned much if I'd stayed stuck in my teenage arrogance. So suffering may have plenty to teach us about being imperfect and that being OK, much as the alignment freaks helped me to realise I wouldn't get enlightened by doing all the poses as well as the frightening Mr. Iyengar... Yet a river needs banks to flow as opposed to being a flood, so there's a place for a system and discipline of some kind - it just needs to be stay flexible (though not in the pretzeling way...). That's a lot of opinions from me in one comment, so perhaps enough for now. More power to the idea of yoga as clarifying perception! 🙌😍