Innate Yoga

The science of Yoga - which is infinitely more than a sequence of physical postures - is a systematic attempt to recover the inseparable wholeness of consciousness and creation, that each of us practiced spontaneously when we were One.

Yoga was innate before the mind invented the traumatic myth of a separate "I," standing outside the cosmos. And soon after we invented the lonely "I," we invented a lonely "God," standing above and beyond the cosmos: because the lonely "I" needs a friend to talk to. But as entities who are independent from the continuum of the present moment, "I" and "God" are both imaginary.

Who can say when this traumatic separation happened, shattering the whole into "I," "God," and "World"?  Perhaps it happens when the infant was weaned? Yet it happens to us all as our inevitable "fall from grace," producing a tragic rigidity in both body and mind. Our body's rigidity reinforces "ahamkara," the "I"-thought. And this "I"-thought reinforces the rigidity of the body. The more we cling to fixed concepts and beliefs in the mind, the more tense the body becomes. True believers - either religious or political - are the most tense bodies of all.

The practices of Yoga are a response to this perpetual cycle of contraction and rigidity in mind and body, our "fallen" condition. When we bring expansion and space into the contracted places of dis-ease, we recover our Original Ease. We remember the grace of Innate Yoga. Let your own breath be the guru of your body, and let your own body be the guru of your mind. That is how a mind become a soul, and a body becomes the incarnation of the Spirit.

Your body and soul are the Lover and Beloved whose wedding has been sung by the greatest poets of the world: in the Song of Songs, the Gita Govinda, the ecstatic poems of Rumi and Mira Bai. Who did you think they were singing about if not You and your paramour, your body?

As mind expands body relaxes; as body relaxes mind expands. The link between them is the pulsation, the "spanda," of breathing. Yoga, then, is the embodied breath of life without mental or physical rigidity.

Yoga literally means "union" - the state of at-one-ment where "I," "God," and "the physical world" dissolve into inseparable wholeness, one vibrant continuum in which there is no gain or loss, only a whirling stillness.

The essence of Yoga is simply to breathe the divinity of awareness through the divinity of the body. It sounds too simple. Our mind wants to believe in something more difficult, full of strain, work, overcoming. Our choice. If we prefer, we may choose a thousand more lifetimes of strain, work, and overcoming. Or we can start now to awaken the miracle of Awareness, in the Body, through the Breath. Which is the real meaning of the Christian "Trinity": God, embodied in the Christ, through the Spirit.

Usually we breathe in the body without awareness (God), or we think in the mind without a body (the Christ). But when we link body and awareness through the breath (Spirit), mind becomes a field of diamonds, breath the nectar of eternity, and flesh the grace who remembers how to dance.

A talk on SoundCloud: LINK

Photo: Freddy about one, before the traumatic
separation of  'I,' 'God,' and 'the world.'