Co-Participation

I am in love with yoga, because yoga helps me fall in love with myself and my life every day. My first attraction to yoga is indescribable; I can't recall the precise moment. But yoga remains my siren singing me to sea. And I can't help but hear and appreciate the song every day. I believe we are all born with an understanding of what we are. What it means to be human - to have a journey that is unique, special, one of a kind. But to also have our breath, which ultimately chooses and governs us and links us to the greater whole. When we accept this love affair between our individual self and our Universal self we find the space of shanti (peace) and ananda (bliss). The practice of yoga is listening to the siren's call (the Universal), and realizing that she is guiding us home.


Yoga reminds us that we are both individual and Universal. Our lives are real - with all their joy, pain and the wide spectrum of experience in between. Yet there is also a part of each of us which we do not control. Consider that if you hold your breath - inevitably you will pass out and respiration resumes. You can't control this, as much as you may try. As a result, each time we roll out our mat it is important to consider the following. Since birth each living creature has countless life experiences, which overtime shape that creature's response to stimuli and situations. The creature's response to the twists and turns of life create a physical, mental and emotional imprint or conditioning. This conditioning causes the being to exhibit certain responses to situations. The sanskrit word for this conditioning is samskara. Samskara means: sams (complete or joined together) kara (action or doing). Here is a beautiful explanation of samskara from a yoga teacher and psychologist.

As a psychologist, I'm aware that the repetitive behavior students exhibit during yoga class originated long before they stepped onto the mat; the classroom is simply the arena in which we can witness our deeply ingrained habits in all their glory. According to yogic philosophy, we're born with a karmic inheritance of mental and emotional patterns—known as samskaras—through which we cycle over and over again during our lives.

In addition to being generalized patterns, samskaras are individual impressions, ideas, or actions; taken together, our samskaras make up our conditioning. Repeating samskaras reinforces them, creating a groove that is difficult to resist. Samskaras can be positive—imagine the selfless acts of Mother Theresa. They can also be negative, as in the self-lacerating mental patterns that underlie low self-esteem and self-destructive relationships. The negative samskaras are what hinder our positive evolution. ---End Quote---

When we experience pain in our physical, mental or emotional body- on some level - we are noticing samskara. We may not be fully cognizant of the origin of the pain (the pattern or traumatic event, cause of pain) - we can only describe it for the way it manifests in that moment. In example, "my groins have hurt for a very long time." We move forward and attempt to correct this pain and it lingers for days, weeks, months or years. We cannot heal until we are conscious of the pattern or event that has created the pain in the first place. Once we can be fully aware of the pattern then we must change that pattern in a skillful way. We must move from our individual samskara toward the Optimal Blueprint.

Answer to correct pain and remove the rut of samskara? Enter the Optimal Blueprint - a map of anatomical position. This map can be routed in your body via the Universal Principles of Alignment as codified by John Friend, founder of Anusara Yoga. Limb three of yoga is asana, which means connection. Therefore each yoga asana is an opportunity to more intimately understand the connection of all components of the physical body; the place where your individual self meets your Universal self. When you succeed in seeing yourself as you are with full acceptance, and you choose to shift in a positive, life-affirming way your experience is an indescribable, yet familiar feeling - you are home. This is the process of realizing and willingly releasing samskara.

When our bones are more optimally aligned our connective tissue relaxes. This sends a message to our brain that reads, "Fear not, all is well." Finally our emotional body is more tranquil as the former bodies are in a state of health and peace. The deeper we go with our practice the more second nature the Optimal Blueprint becomes. We can get there faster in each pose.....we learn how to chase the optimal in each practice. What follows is a more comfortable physical state, which allows our body to sit for longer meditation. When we can sit longer we penetrate the deep ripples of samskara that lodge themselves in the layers of our physical, mental and emotional bodies.

When we release samskara it is expected that students may weep, laugh or experience a wide spectrum of release, as the samskara rises to consciousness and then melts away. The more we release negative samskara the more intimately we know our Universal self, and the more reluctant we are to betray ourselves. Because we realize how perfect we are. How complete we are. Therein we love ourselves so fully that it is exactly like the love a mother feels for her child - this love is boundless. When we practice this co-participation we see ourselves so clearly for our amazing beauty and light that we become our own idol. We awake to the siren's song. We feel the tenderness of our muscles and the stiffness of our bones. We slide into a gentle twist, allow our ribs to open and we receive the Universal. We smile and enjoy our co-participation; our embodiment. It is the pain that teaches us to chase the alignment. When we realize we need both the pain and the pleasure we have mastery in some great way.

To the journey of going home and the subsequent hit of bliss.

I get hits of this every once in a while, so I know it is true. Do you?

We have so much power and talent that we can use yoga and meditation to trace the pain of our past, let it go and move into our future with lightness and freedom. We must begin with a commitment to become a student of our individual as well as our Universal body. We approach each practice with an intention to find the meeting ground for the two sides of this coin. Therein we harness all wisdom, we unveil. We become acquainted with what is ours to control and shape and what can be released. Herein lies peace.