I feel deeply grateful for yoga in my life. Yoga as a method, or perhaps as a practice, was first introduced in my life when I was not really ready to understand its profound layers of transformation. Slowly, yoga has been rooting in my life, and has driven me to search behind the method with the thirst to understand what yoga was for those who renounced to everything and lived in the forest, for those who wrote philosophical texts, for those in the medieval times of Hatha Yoga, for those coming from a devotional background, for those who interpreted these texts, and later on for those who brought those texts and practices to western world.
This search is still a small sprout within me for the more I learn the less I realize I know... though this thirst for understanding has made me acknowledge that the teaching I most appreciate (and perhaps the most difficult to incarnate) from Yoga is the practice of detachment, specially that one of transcending the tendencies of identification with our I-ness, which is the foundation for separation and all the pain we experience from it.
This realization brings me progressively to a place in my heart where I feel more and more appreciation for what Yoga means in my life: a lenses through which awakening from the dream of separation, from the dream of suffering... furthermore, recognizing it as a way or means to experience something which in yoga is also called the state of yoga, and in other traditions can have many other names... wether it’s through yoga, through the path of the Shaman, through a personal method, wether it’s called yoga or something else, we are all ultimately searching for the experience of love, the experience of feeling love throughout our wholeness towards everything and anything.
What we know today as Yoga (as a practice) has brought great and deep benefits to millions of people around the world, from a new awareness of the body, to a profound connection with the breath, from a relaxing experience to healing in many levels, releasing of tension, inner peace, support and improvement in one’s overall health.
I have greatly enjoyed many benefits through physical practice of yoga, which has been installed in my routine and teaching for years, though it has become secondary to the practice of self-observation. Many levels of separation we experience so we can exist as individual beings, though the more layers we add to our I-ness, the more separated we become.
So everyday I honor this path and the service it has brought to my life, and at the same time, I remove the layer of yogi or yogini from my skin, as I don’t want to be separated from those who are not wearing the same dress. I am grateful. I am one with everything, even if sometimes I forget.
So today I honor yoga, because it has contributed immensely in my life to learn to embody everyday a little more, the experience of love, the experience of oneness.