I remember sitting on the beach a couple years ago with Amma one afternoon for meditation and satsang. Someone asked Amma a question about yoga. With precision and focus, Amma simply lifted her arm and told all of us gathered around her that day, “Yoga is awareness in every action.”
Before I had practiced yoga at Amma’s ashram, I had gone to some classes in the US, and having a background in gymnastics I simply enjoyed the physical challenge of these classes. Naturally I eagerly signed up for one of the courses offered at Amritapuri and I immediately learned how wrong I was about any notion I had about yoga. Mostly I saw that I had barely touched the surface of a beautiful practice. It was this inspiring depth that captured and ignited my interest in a sadhana of yoga.
During the classes I was struck by the awareness assigned to each and every pose. It was quite a challenge to get both my mind and body alert in new ways. It became less and less like sport and more and more like self-study. The yoga class became like a container where for that period of time I had to pay more attention to my thoughts and to this whole new language of asana. I don’t mean to make it sound dreary or terrible – on the contrary, it’s really quite lovely.
What I mean to say is that there are definite benefits to this new way of paying attention. I’ve had on and off back pain for several years. The pain didn’t go away overnight but yoga has helped me unravel it by paying attention to the subtlety of each posture. Over time, I’ve tried to sort out where my own limits are within each asana and what I need to do to keep my back pain in check. Perhaps a better way to describe this is that yoga has given me the tools to sort out my back pain through sustained efforts of simply becoming aware.
I have also seen particularly that the benefits are more subtle as I learn to develop yoga as a sadhana. I feel tremendously privileged to practice yoga at Amma’s ashram. In the abode of a living Master, everything we do, slowly, slowly becomes as an offering to the Divine – including our asana practice. In this way, I have come to a new way of seeing that Amma most certainly had not been talking exclusively about asanas when She told us about yoga that day on the beach. Of course, I am thankful for the heightened awareness I feel in my yoga practice when I roll out my mat. Most of all though, through any opportunity we have to do sadhana or seva, Amma is guiding us towards a Yoga in its truest, most authentic sense.
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