I’ve practiced yoga off and on, mostly off, for the past 20 years. During those times of what I will gently characterize as dismay over the shape I was in, when everyone had a suggestion about how I could improve in this area, yoga was often offered as a thinking person’s alternative to weights, running and the rest. And that’s how it has been through the years--yoga as a break from whatever regimen I was into at the time.
As is the case in all exercise, though, I’ve harbored suspicions about whether I have been getting as much out of the discipline as I could. I’ve used yoga as a stretch, with a hint of muscle-building in the process. What I’ve wondered about is the mind-body connection, the idea that putting myself in or near ridiculously uncomfortable postures called asanas could somehow increase my connection to my Creator, the Great Spirit or whatever we’re supposed to connect to. Just what did flexibility have to do with god, even one of my own choosing?
And then my daughter invited me to attend a class with her yoga instructor, Matthew Koder, Central Iowa’s Yoga Teacher of the Year, the young protege of master James Miller. And that’s where I experienced the link between what happens on a yoga mat with what’s going on between my ears, with the life I lead between awakening and going to sleep.
Like all things profound, it came in the form of a simple lesson, one I’d heard before. The way we do anything is the way we do everything. The 28-year old devotee of Adamantine yoga opened me to the idea that poses become difficult when I lose focus.
That my mind is willing to quit long before my body is. That sometimes a simple shift in the way I place a hand or turn a knee--the tweak of a seemingly inconsequential part on an integrated flow of movements--can make all the difference in the world. That the will to complete an asana is more important than what I think my body will do.
Today on a semi-crowded elevator a woman asked nobody in particular how she was ever going to get used to Iowa’s cold after spending the past few months in Florida. I recommended yoga. With a look that suggested she wanted me to address her tan more than her predicament, she confessed to owning a mat that she never used. Quoting from Matthew’s website, I told her what the mystic Pattabhi Jois said . . . Body is not stiff, mind is stiff.
As is the case in all exercise, though, I’ve harbored suspicions about whether I have been getting as much out of the discipline as I could. I’ve used yoga as a stretch, with a hint of muscle-building in the process. What I’ve wondered about is the mind-body connection, the idea that putting myself in or near ridiculously uncomfortable postures called asanas could somehow increase my connection to my Creator, the Great Spirit or whatever we’re supposed to connect to. Just what did flexibility have to do with god, even one of my own choosing?
And then my daughter invited me to attend a class with her yoga instructor, Matthew Koder, Central Iowa’s Yoga Teacher of the Year, the young protege of master James Miller. And that’s where I experienced the link between what happens on a yoga mat with what’s going on between my ears, with the life I lead between awakening and going to sleep.
Like all things profound, it came in the form of a simple lesson, one I’d heard before. The way we do anything is the way we do everything. The 28-year old devotee of Adamantine yoga opened me to the idea that poses become difficult when I lose focus.
That my mind is willing to quit long before my body is. That sometimes a simple shift in the way I place a hand or turn a knee--the tweak of a seemingly inconsequential part on an integrated flow of movements--can make all the difference in the world. That the will to complete an asana is more important than what I think my body will do.
Today on a semi-crowded elevator a woman asked nobody in particular how she was ever going to get used to Iowa’s cold after spending the past few months in Florida. I recommended yoga. With a look that suggested she wanted me to address her tan more than her predicament, she confessed to owning a mat that she never used. Quoting from Matthew’s website, I told her what the mystic Pattabhi Jois said . . . Body is not stiff, mind is stiff.
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