YEM: Life Within the Sacred Whole, by Parvati Devi

Image credit: Alice Popkorn

Breathe in. Feel the aliveness in that breath. Exhale and feel how, through your breath, you are vastly interconnected to all of life. Through your breath, you quickly can feel profoundly interconnected with the dance of life.

Every breath we take is in harmony with a breathing universe that pulses and flows just as our in and out breaths do. It is as if everything that is exists within one giant lung. The pumping of our hearts and the shifts in the tissue that makes up our bodies are in sync with the ebb and flow of ocean waves. The synapses in our brains that go off and on to create thoughts are like the sparkles in the stars that light up the night sky, or the auric field that shimmers to make a tree or a flower look so alive. We are literally one with everything that is.

Through my Hatha Yoga practice and teaching, I have come to know that any form of movement that arises from wanting is one that perpetuates or creates karma. Whether we push into a pose and reach for some elusive sense of externalized perfection, or move out of a pose feeling uneasy or even repulsed by what we felt in it, we are acting from an unyogic, that is, non-unified or divisive, state of mind. This will only generate suffering for ourselves and others. At its heart, Hatha Yoga is not an end in itself, but a powerful alchemical crucible in which we can witness the transformation of our consciousness from wanting to presence, from brokenness to wholeness. Yoga poses are a metaphoric training ground for the positions in which we find ourselves as we go about our lives.

Though the hare that I mentioned in my meditation article was able to do all sorts of fast and fancy footwork, ultimately it was the tortoise that won the race. A turtle moves with a quiet assurance along its path, without fight, without resistance, in humble surrender to what is. He is like the karma yogi that Krishna describes, seeing all that comes before him as an aspect of the divine.

Every action is part of a whole. There really is no starting and stopping or beginning and ending. We exist within one flowing continuum.  We see our actions as finite, but everything we do affects a greater whole, beyond what we could ever conceive. Our place in this universe is perfect, precise, and interwoven into a fabric of existence that extends beyond our perception of a finite self.

This world is a reflection of the Divine. What we perceive, we experience as solid. Yet all that exists is dancing light energy in constant motion unrestricted by form. We experience reality as a reflection of our perceptions, what we want to see, until we learn to see through the grip of our ego into what is.

Beyond our ego is the dance of pure consciousness arising, which manifests all that is as a cosmic dance of which we are a part. We see ourselves as finite, but really we have no beginning or end.

May we meet each moment, as it is, with mindful presence and with a heart willing to humbly serve.

EXERCISE

I encourage you to take a moment of pause with the yoga practice we have explored together so far. String each pose together as one flow. Allow the breath to guide you from one physical position to the next, without pushing, without wanting to be other than where you are. Feel each inhale rise effortlessly out of the exhale. There is nothing that you have to do to make it so. Just as you are within an intelligent whole, the very force of life will move towards the inhale. There is nothing that you have to do in that process, other than witness. Feel the same in the exhale, how through it, you effortlessly release back to the sense of whole.

Notice any tendency to want to control your breath or movement. Allow your yoga poses to be guided by your breath awareness, so that action arises out of a deep sense of stillness and interconnection rather than wanting to be other than you are.

Parvati headshotParvati Devi is the editor-in-chief of Parvati Magazine and an internationally recognized Canadian musician, yogi and new thought leader. As a chart-topping touring musician, Parvati spearheads the Post New-Age musical genre with her independent success hit single “Yoga in the Nightclub”. She founded YEM: Yoga as Energy Medicine, a powerful yoga method that combines energy work and yoga poses. Her critically acclaimed self-help debut book “Confessions of a Former Yoga Junkie – A Revolutionary Life Makeover for the Sincere Spiritual Seeker” is currently in its third edition.

For more information on Parvati, please visit www.parvati.tv.