John’s Sunday Blog

Coming Home

The body, what is it for? Ever ask yourself that question? It may be a little unsettling at first because we are so busy doing, and becoming, fixing and arranging our life circumstances we forget about the very thing that makes that possible; your body. Could it be the body is simply part of its environment and you are here to simply experience that? Have we lost contact with the raw sensations, the bodies language? Original environmental factors create how skin color, eye and nose shapes, even hand and foot sizes all trace back to the environment from the genetic line which that body originated from. Those bodies habituated to that place. Now, how one moves, what one thinks about and puts into the body has a huge effect on how the body functions. But, let’s just look at the body first. Because if it seems to be failing you, one might want to ponder how to make things better.

Let’s approach the body yoga style.

And how’s that? Find union with the original. Now this can go to the highest height of liberation from suffering. But, what is the original of you? You could say it was when you were a child, soft, supple, yet strong and stable - pain free. And to be realistic, that may not be fully achievable. However, progress in that direction brings a freshening to your existence. So how does one go about getting stronger, more stable, and reducing pain? Well in yoga we take the gentler approach. Nature moves slow and no amount of motivation, will power, or intention is going to speed nature up. Oh, you can try with pills, fixing, and forcing, but in yoga we follow nature. You see, it’s a balancing of sun and moon energies that we are following. Sun - think heat, movement, transformation. Moon - think cooling, water and restoration. They both have their detriments when in excess as well. Sun - burnout and breakdown. Moon - stagnation, rot and stiffening.

How to begin a yoga practice: Learn the language of the body. It speaks through sensations alone. And in yoga you come as you are. You are not required to have flexible joints and a matching outfit, or find perfect alignment. The perfect time to start is now. Most people want to increase their motivation, make intentions, and more. But what’s at play here? Nature! And the funny thing about nature… it does better when you observe it, and leave it alone. And what else is nature?

CONSISTENT AND STEADY.

So what is consistent in you? It’s not motivation, intensity or intention because, face it, sometimes your up, sometimes down.

It’s the habits. Yes, the day to day habits engraved in our minds and bodies and it shows, does it not? Gosh that can be a letdown, huh? No big revelation just HABITS.

How to make that change. Slow and consistent. Use the 10% rule. Subtract 10% from your habits that are slowly killing you. And add 10% of practices such as yoga to regain some balance. See, your body does not like super abrupt changes. All it knows is that there is pressure and this causes imbalance. That body is only trying to balance and one way it does that is by moving through its range of motion and it can only do that if you tell it to.

It will take care of the rest.