Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras teach us that yoga is both a practice with methods and tools as well as a state of being — more familiarly referred to as present moment awareness. Yoga’s tools and methods enable us to access our present moment awareness so we can respond to life’s events from a place of clear-seeing and calm-abiding. Without such awareness, our mind turns to distractions for seeming comfort. These distractions are often negative reactive triggers, patterns or habits that then run our lives. Interestingly, triggers, the OFF switch for awareness, happen in a nanosecond. Conversely, glimpses or glimmers take about 20 seconds to emerge and are awareness’s ON switch to clear-seeing and calm-abiding.
I wrote the poem below to illustrate my own experience of the transformative gifts that life and yoga provide for us in each and every emerging moment.
Blithe Spirit
A spirit of joyous abandon unfolds our wings
opening us to try everything.
Boundless curiosity embraces such magic
seeing beauty, joy, sorrow, as they are.
Before each new adventure, a glimpse is given.
Each emerging moment now becomes
an opportunity to fly beyond limitations.
Hesitation and inhibition fall away,
replaced with imagination.
To understand the mystery of being,
we must first lose who we are.
No longer recognizing our mirrored reflection,
we re-form with each piece of found wisdom
until clear seeing abides.
This poem appears in my soon-to-be-published fifth poetry book titled, Gone Girl.
For more yoga actions, readings and poetry, click here.
