Joy In Repetition

'Through repetition, magic is forced to rise.' - Sharon Gannon

On your mat, and in your class, you are not practicing yoga.  You are practicing ease.  Ease with your body, ease with mind, breath and emotions... The yoga practice is the vehicle that helps you to deepen the awareness of when you are connected to that ease, and when you feel separate from it.    The asanas are metaphors for the many different situations that we encounter in life.

 The challenge of the yoga practice is intentional.   You put yourself in a challenging series of poses or a situation like meditation, and you have to summon as much steadiness and ease as you can under the circumstances.   It's good training for life.

 Inevitably, we are going to fall out of balance.  On the yoga mat, yes, but in the everyday too.  How will we know what balance truly is unless we occasionally lose it?

 How do we get up after the fall?  A powerful point in your spiritual practice is the moment that you have fallen off.  It's when you go off balance that you have the opportunity to do something really radical.  You have the opportunity to just simply return.   Return to your breath.  Return to your body.  You just keep going.  It's in the returning with grace that you form a new habit and pattern in your mind.  It's where you become free.

 So you repeat these shapes, the asanas.  You fall, you get up.  You fall, you get up, and as the process goes on, it gets easier and easier to return after the fall.  It slowly becomes part of the whole incredible continuum.  You are living the metaphor - the balance of effort and grace, and it's only through repetition that we can gain a depth of understanding of that.

 - Lesley Desaulniers