Going deeper

going stiller

Introduce yourself

What’s your name, where’re you from and why have you come today? In one or two sentences.

A little go-round to begin a new term, or a day retreat. Where’re you from so car-sharing might evolve but also, I’ve found, people relax better together when they can literally place each other.

My preference is to meet people at a deeper level. But we start with the things that define us, and our motivations.

Deeper

It was really gratifying lately in a go-round when a woman said something along the lines, I keep coming back because I’ve noticed it goes deeper. More and more is revealed.

As a teacher/facilitator this is all I could ask for. This has been my journey and continues to be my delight and reward in practice. This weekly yoga participant has been coming long enough to ‘get it’ too.

Ponds

When I visit my mum, there is out back access to National Trust land. It’s some plantation wood of high trees and a series of connected ponds. These ponds were widened from the stream maybe for fish farming in the middle ages and, in the early industrial age, were something to do with iron smelting and forging. Now it’s a lovely place to walk and dog walkers flock there.

The ponds are similar in length and size, maybe 100m by 30m and descend the valley in series. They are linked by sluices where the overflow continues in a stream to the next pond.

Last time I visited, the top one had the usual ducks quacking about. The next had developed weed on the surface due, I imagine, to hot weather and less rainfall. The third had water lillies. Water lillies do not like flowing water. The flow had stilled.

Likewise, walkers and their dogs rarely make it to the third pond. It’s stiller and quieter and a bit wilder there in this way too.

Stilling of the mind waves…

…is a classic definition - and translation - of yoga practice. And with practice - bear in mind practice means simply having a go, nothing grand - but over and over our mind-body slows. Something deeper is revealed in the experience.

Recently, in a pop up class, for both regulars to top up over the summer and new folk to try out the space, the practice and me, there was an opportunity to notice how regulars are indeed able to slow. New folk were protesting they didn’t know which side they were on. Is it left foot by the right knee? What knee is that one?

Their cries were intrusive, if understandable: we’ve all been there. But it revealed just how much the regulars with their over-and-over practice have deepened the groove to go deeper, stiller, quieter. They are beyond technique (which those new people will get to grips with in the Newbies course) towards the source.

In the weeds, then like the water lily

The three-pond analogy rings true. From the ‘busy’ first pond (I mean, it’s relative: it’s dogs and their walkers in leafy Surrey) we go through the tangled weeds of the second pond.

The tangled weeds of the day, our preferences and our sorrows. Then somehow that all drops away and, not really knowing how, we sluice into something more still.

In this place the weeds are gone. The things that define us and our motivations drop away. We have an experience of all that dropping away and coming to this.

‘Spiritual’

I resist calling a yoga class ‘spiritual’, but this embodied experience can, if people want to make the leap, become the basis of contemplation. And so it becomes an understanding of the ‘True Self’ (as yoga terms God, and the little self in God); also to become who Jesus called ‘those who have ears to hear and eyes to see’.

My name and where I’m from, even that I have a gender or a number of years, are not ‘a thing’ any more.

And so it starts with lying down and breathing, and sensing how, in a safe place, the bodily and mental tension drops away. Through a sequence of testing and relaxing the nervous system (though it looks like some kind of twister, one limb over the other!) we still our body-mind-soul to get to a different dimension of being.

I’ll leave it there. The water lily part of the analogy can be for another time.

If you’d like to go deeper, with me at Viveka Gardens take a look at the current offering.