Hiking at Ruffner Mountain a few weeks ago, I saw my first flower of the season. The tiniest flash of white. So small and close to the ground, it’s a wonder I noticed it at all. I think that’s because it is sometimes more difficult to notice what is in transition than to see the full expression of something—whether it’s spring in vibrant bloom or maybe an arms wide and sky-lifted expression of Vriksasana (Tree pose) during class.
In nature and on the mat, the transitions and the quiet beginnings can get overlooked as we speed ahead to the “real” thing. Which makes sense, given the fast-paced, output and outcome-obsessed world where we engage our off-the-mat practice. It can seem like the messages coming from all angles celebrate productivity and result, the grind and the hustle.
It’s easy for those characteristics to spill over into our yoga. Am I getting stronger, more flexible, more centered, more balanced? Is it happening fast enough? Can I speed it up? Are we there yet? When this mindset takes the driver’s seat, things might begin to feel excited, and at the same time we may feel one step behind where we want to be–where the ego says we need to be. By constantly seeking the end result of a pose, our practice can begin to feel like it’s never enough.
On the mat, this could take the form of comparison–why doesn’t my Dancer pose look like so-and-so’s? I’ll never get this right. And on and on. The mind seems to have no limit on creativity when it comes to self-criticism. Given enough attention and attachment, these thought patterns can even lead to physical injury on the mat.
Encountering Noise and Listening for the Impulse to Slow Down
By the simple action of stepping onto our mat–in the yoga studio or at home–we’ve dramatically reduced external distractions. This includes reducing our impulse to engage in whatever pattern or habitual action emerges in the mind: check the phone, make a grocery list, call so-and-so. Instead, our ability to do is confined to the dimensions of the mat.
However, once we turn down the volume on the external world and our wild assortment of diverse desires, aversions, and attachments out there, we often begin to encounter a new set of challenges in here–an internal noise usually relegated to the background. This coming face to face with our own internal chatter, our always-on narrator, can be unsettling.
Maybe we drift to something we said or did, replaying an encounter from earlier in the day; or maybe we drift farther back to a month, a year, 5 years ago. Or maybe we drift to what’s coming, narrating stories and building all sorts of possible futures or relationships. Churning and churning in the endless stream of our stories.
Finding respite from that seemingly ceaseless churn of story and emotion–whether excited, dejected, anxious, joyful, or any other tone–can start in the same way that our harbingers of spring, those early spring Rue-anemone start, so quiet and unassuming in the landscape. And the act of noticing those first flowers gives us a new orientation to the entire landscape.
Sometimes this respite can arise when we become present with the breath during a pose. Sometimes it is catching the mind wandering, and the recognition, the noticing, changes the quality of awareness. Or maybe it happens in the act of noticing a part of your body that you never noticed before.
Returning to the Body & Breath
In practice, cultivating awareness on the mat might look like oscillating between the stories of the wandering mind (impelled by desire, attachment, and aversion) that occur throughout a practice and the moments of return.
For instance, I might begin travelling a path colored by worry and then experience noticing the worry. Ah, there is the upswell of worry here. By not trying to suppress or change that feeling, the possibility arises for the attention to move back to the body and the flow of the breath. And in a way, it can be likened to the “first sign of spring”–a moment that signals our practice is working, that presence is here and more is to come.
One transformative realization that yoga teaches is that no matter how involved and entwined we may be in any given story we’ve begun to spin, there is always a pathway of return. In this way, our yoga practice helps us to recognize the choices available in our field of awareness and experience.
In fact, it’s exactly this recognition of choice that we are cultivating on the mat. I notice, for instance, that my core is not engaged in plank, so I pull the belly in, that I’ve forgotten about my feet, so I send energy back through the heels, that my neck is doing way more work than it should, so I soften. At the same time, I may notice a distracting pattern of thinking and choose to interrupt it by shifting attention back to my breath.
At the level of an entire practice we’re doing this hundreds of times. We’re practicing aligning ourself with the present moment and with what is, and building something real from there, a connection with the energy and with the feeling of the present moment. Instead of hurrying to the next movement, the next pose, the next practice, we are relaxing and expanding into the quieter moments and the moments of transition, connecting to that part of us that can, for instance, celebrate and praise spring’s wild effulgence in the first flowering Rue-anemone.
