There’s so much to learn in this life. How to be, what to be, when to be. It all gets a bit much. Sometimes we start down one path of being and soon discover that it’s the wrong way and we want to try another. But where to begin again?
The beginning, of course.
Our yoga practice has the ability to be a grand metaphor for life. For just like in our yoga practice, when something goes wrong – perhaps we get injured or we become over strained – we take things back to the beginning. Back to Surya Namaskar. Or even further, back to the breath. Perhaps further still, back to the intention.
There, at the root of all our asana practice, we learn the most. We come into contact with what it is to be. To notice how the simplest of things forms the foundations of our existence. How tiny impulses occur like stitches in time that eventually weave together to form the tapestry of our lives.
When we’re in a tough situation there’s often something deep within us that compels us to look at this intention. To look at it as if it were a grain of sand. To inspect it so closely that we might see how we ever managed to build up such a desert. The only problem is that looking so closely, so deeply, can be very hard.
What if we find something we don’t like? Something we don’t like that is of our own doing? We might end up having to make some big changes. We might end up having to move a whole desert of wrong intentions, misconceptions, mistakes. But don’t fear – we have the perfect tool. The breath.
Indeed, the breath has long been considered a powerful means. In yogic thought, by controlling the breath we can control the winds of the mind. And thus with time, we can move a whole desert.