"To practice is to pay attention to your whole life: your thoughts, your bodily sensations, and your speech and other actions. As you do you will discover that nothing is separate from anything else. Thoughts are the sensations of the mind just as sensations are the thoughts of the body. Each moment of your life is a moment of potential practice." Judith Lasater, Living Your Yoga
Recently I have been learning about elbows. I have tendonitis in my right elbow. So poses that I normally do, that I have loved and practiced for at least 15 years, are out, at least temporarily. And I am again reminded that yoga is not about the poses. The poses are maps. I need some different maps right now I guess. No Plank pose, no Chaturanga Dandasana, no Upward Facing Dog .
SIGH...
So the other night, I did a practice around poses I do not like that I could still do. It was very interesting and felt good. One pose was pigeon pose.
Walking is one of my favorite yoga practices that I can still do right now. Of course some days as I walk my mind wanders to my surroundings. That of course is the practice, to train your mind to focus over and over again.
I know I need my walking practice when I am starting to feel overwhelmed and like I have more things to do than I can possibly do. Sometimes, I suppose this becomes less a practice to invoke a meditative mind than an opportunity to step away from what I am doing. Just getting out of a thinking mode, getting my blood flowing, heart pumping and muscles moving, magic arises as an insight into a problem, or a realization of what I need to do next. I like simple magic, I guess. It's really magical when I am fed up with my children and feel unable to deal with whatever is going on with them. Walking probably makes me a better parent.
So the yoga part of all of this, for me, is that there are lots of ways to get out of our habitual mind and habitual patterns of thinking and to move into spaces where we are completely present to our lives and in a sense of equanimity with it all. Like Judith Lasater says, "every moment is a moment of potential practice."
