Uradiance: Wildflower Yoga

There are 196 verses in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.
Only three of them deal with asanas.

No one teaches yoga to a flower.
Learn bending from her stem,
the supple power of green no hurricane can crush.
Breathe from the seed.

Abandon every sequence and routine.
Your body is a river of postures
flowing toward the ocean of repose.
The petals of your flesh unfold.
The sparkling zephyr of this breath
come to rest like a feather on your belly.

After all these years of practice, can you
give up your poses and move merely
to the rhythm of begonias in October?

Rooted like a weathered oak, valiantly sway
to the seasons of inpouring and outpouring.
A starry wheel rolls out of your chest, the axis
of our galaxy poised between your nipples;
your muscles bathed in the ghee of attention,
ligaments dissolving in the golden void.

Can you dance with the Beloved
even when you are alone, your spine
Kali’s wand, your pelvis her boat,
laden with its cargo of moonbeams?

From the baby’s soft spot in your crown
to the sap-dripping sacrum, runs a nerve,
down whose hollow liquid lightning hums,
a silken thunderbolt all the way Om
to your toes.

What Goddess spins your flesh from threads
of pure perception on her glistening whorl
of stillness? Keep it soft, friend, like
the mystery of gristle in a fontanelle.
This is the door you leave by, made whole
by lost drops. Your eyes tell beads of gratitude.
And the fierce silence of your breathing
is the Mother's name, protecting you
from shadows of false light.

Dear one, there are intricate miracles
of awakening woven in the sinews
of your quivering heart, each neuron
tangled to a certain ache of sweetness
in the meadows and the woods, each proton
twined by love's silk to its native star.

Let your body happen. The dance is yours.
Learn bending from her stem, the supple
power of green no hurricane can crush.
Micro-movements invent themselves,
majestic spirals of molten grace.
Breathe from the seed. No one
teaches Yoga to a flower.