It’s about an hour past dawn-a bright low sun is illuminating the blackwalnut tree beside our house. In a light breeze the walnut is losing yellowing leaves that are slow-motion falling and twisting onto the grass in helices. Cardinals and jays and robins are at their morning practice.
I’m at mine: after morning zazen and a workout, I’m onto my yoga mat. On a good day with enough time, that means running through a full cycle of the Ashtanga Primary Series; on most weekdays-there’s never enough time-it means a cycle of sun salutations. It’s a work in progress that my 60-year old body always at first resists and then settles into.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with slowing things down, with letting as much breath and air into my movement as possible. What that’s meant in practice is that the transitions from pose to pose-the vinyasas, which are regulated by breath-are starting to emerge more distinctly as I let the movements and my breath slow down. At the same time, paradoxically, it also means that the transitions from vinyasa to asana are blurring. The more I let the movement slow down and open, the more fully I enter the flow-the more seamless the practice feels. I’ve become much more aware of how I hold my body in tension in the vinyasa and in the asanas, that awareness enabling me to embrace the air and space that’s shot through my breathing and body as I move.
What I’m finding in the slowness-which over time has dissolved into a kind of playful lightness-is a fresh appreciation of how yoga practice-my body, really-is it’s own expressive language. By slowing things down, every gesture is radicalized, points in space appearing smaller and smaller until the distance between each point infinitely bends into a continuous flow. Spaces between poses that seemed distinct from each other emerge a single movement evolving through space and illuminated by breath and air across those stretched, slowed points. Transition and pose and breath merge.
I’ve never been a dancer-but in the slowed-down vinyasa and asanas I discover maybe I’ve always been: my body learning to speak its own language in the practice, uncovering its improvised language as it speaks.
Expanding that specific awareness of my body, those infinitely bending arcs, there’s no point where vinyasa ends. My expression of raising a cup of tea to my lips is it’s own asana, it’s own vinyasa. My body moving through space and expressing itself in breath and movement whether I’m awake to it or not. Everything is yoga.
The deliberate slowness floods into a cascade of awareness: where am I rushing to all the time? Where’s my awareness of my body in space and time along that infinitely bending arc, along these dissolving points when I’m at my desk, when I’m driving, when I’m taking out the garbage?
What happens if that slowed down awareness expands to embrace the wholeness of life? isn’t that the point of practice? To experience this moment in its own infinitely bending arc, seamlessly dissolving into the next moment, and the next?
Where do I locate this moment? Is there even a moment to locate, or simply the expanding arc, bending an ocean of time and space in every direction, just the expression of an infinity of points dissolving in every direction, bursting with life.
Slowing things down, how does attention widen to embrace the expression of this morning: the bird’s chattery practice, the slowly twisting leaf in a helix of breeze?
This bright sun breaking through the blackwalnut’s canopy, light bending infinitely in point and wave. This sip of tea.