– scorrere giù per la versione in italiano –

Ashtanga yoga intensive with David Swenson and Shelley Washington in Milano has started on Friday and I couldn’t miss the chance! 🙂 So, though a bit in a hurry, here a little from yesterday afternoon session.

Amongst the different topics, the discussion brought David to ask us: ‘when do you know you are practicing yoga?’. After a few answers from the students there, here a summary of his talk about the topic:

“Practicing yoga has nothing to do with how flexible you are. It is not that the more you are flexible, the more you are spiritual. Only the practitioner knows if he is truly doing yoga when on the mat. In some way, the greatest yoga is what you can’t see, though we are very attracted towards what we can see.

If somebody asks you ‘how was your practice?’ most likely answers will be: ‘oh, it was awesome / terrible BECAUSE’…. and than a list of items such as balance in this posture, touching the toes, grabbing the wrists in that other posture are brought forward. This has nothing to do with yoga. That doesn’t mean we’re supposed to ignore our body, though it has to be used as a tool, it’s not the end in itself. Yoga is about breath and mind control… Yogashchitta vritti nirodhah (Patanjali 1.2)… yoga is the mastery of the fluctuations of the mind… that is yoga.

In our life, we can’t control many things, such as economy or the weather. According to Samkhya philosophy, 3 different kind of miseries exists:

1/ adhibhotic: created by the elements;

2/ adhidaevic: created by supernatural causes (earthquakes, climate, …);

3/ adhyatmic: created by the self.

The only control we can have is on adhyatmic causes. How do we react to problems in our life, to those miseries? that is yoga!

The mat is a little sample of our life: the way we react to issues on the mat is the same we react to issues in our life. It’s ok to challenge ourselves with yoga poses, but keep in mind that when you attain to be successful in one yoga posture, there will be another one you won’t to be able to do. So, the point of yoga is to get a posture you are unable to do 🙂 And one day, if you practice for a quite long time, you will start asking yourself why you are doing all this. Before that, it’s only fun.

We all have asanas we like and asanas we don’t like. Ask yourself: ‘why I don’t like it?’. Is it just because you don’t like it or because it brings up certain emotions?

Often we can’t change circumstamces, nonetheless, you can always change our attitude towards those circumstance!”