Embodied

If you've ever watched a baby who's just discovered her fingers you'll know right off what I'm talking about. Have you seen the complete, absorbed attention with which she stares at these fascinating appendages while making the neural connections needed to move them? She's puppet and puppeteer in one. This is yoga. This is life.

I will not apologize for the fact that yoga to me is a physical practice because the split between physical and whatever we mean by spiritual is an artificial one in my mind. In my stumbling, bumbling way I tried to convey this to the yogis who showed up on their mats this morning for Sunday practice. When I practice yoga if I can come anywhere near to that beginner mind--the mind of an infant so curious about this thing she'll later label and call a body--then it's a good day. I asked my students and myself to hold each posture with some curiosity. What is this thing we're moving and bending? What happens when I draw my navel in here. Ohh, interesting. Suppose I lengthen my neck here. Ahh, OK. And we start to make connections that are as valuable off the mat as they are on. Let's say I find myself in an interpersonal conflict. Things feel tense. Fight or flight reflexes kick in. What will happen if I consciously breathe here for a few seconds? Oh, my enemy is a human being, too? Interesting.

We are our bodies and I think that often in our quest for something transcendent we ignore this at our own peril. We become these disembodied heads thinking perhaps elevated thoughts but the real stuff is happening in the world of bodies, things, atoms, energies, whatever.  We discuss an idea like compassion as though simply saying it and feeling warm about it will magically make it happen. This is like trying to place a Band-aid of kindness on a gushing wound of suffering. What happens when we talk and attempt to summon compassion may be something, but it is also something physical. You feel excited. You feel motivated. This is a chemical process taking place in your brain, in your adrenal glands, or in places I don't even know. This is not to say it is only or merely atoms moving in response to a stimulus--or that if it is this means it is any less miraculous, but ultimately the heart of the matter is matter. Maybe it's more--but the more is mystery

I watched a movie called "The Age of Stupid" on Netflix the other night. Not unbiased, of course, but then what is? The protagonist played by Pete Postlethwaite is a man of a future after the planet has been devastated by the effects of global warming. Humans are pretty much on their way out if not extinct. He is preparing a video signal to send out to the universe and recaps how we in these decades know what's happening and do nothing to change. I'm reminded of several things here. First, Leonard Cohen's "Everybody knows":

 Everybody knows the boat is leaking,

Everybody knows the captain lied.

And then a clip of Jiddu Krishnamurti I once watched in which he asks, "Why don't you change?" Well, why don't we? Yeah, the answer to that question is complex, but I think one avenue to a conclusion is be be physical--be in this body, in this world right now. There's nothing better to bring you back to the present moment where your actions happen anyway than to breathe and be this body, see what you see and hear what you hear. Really look at another person and let go of your ideas about him. Be here now. What is this? Hmm. Interesting. Postlethwaite asks at the end of the movie why we did nothing to save ourselves. "Is it because we didn't think we were worth saving?"  There may be something to that. There is suffering. We might be the cause of much of that. And yet, there is that baby rapt with attention on her fingertips. Wow! What is this animated matter? What a miracle.