Have you ever walked along the beach and picked up a souvenir? A perfectly smooth stone or iridescent shell and tucked it into your pocket to pull out at another disconnected time. Bringing you into remembrance and experience of that moment beach-combing; a sensory flash of recall and connection. I salvage stones and often use them as part of my practice. I call them my touchstones. For me they create dimensions to my yoga practice that enable it to go beyond the physicality of keeping this body moving and strong. Beyond the gifts of my yoga practices ability to regulate my nervous system and energy; down regulating as an antidote to pressures or up regulating to bringing me back into owning my space. These stones connect me to the heart of my practice. Like a child touching something to ensure it is real, they anchor me.
This relationship to the essence of yoga practice can be thought of as the relationship between prakriti and Purusha. Indian philosophy classified the material world; prakriti, and our experience of it, in terms of the elements and subtle energetic forces. With Purusha being described as everything that prakriti or the material is not. Beyond the material and the physicality of nature, its change and flux, the shifting nature of my thoughts and feelings, to a place of sureness and knowing. Of clarity and connection to our unchanging true nature from which we witness our changing environment. This connection to true self, my yoga practice makes more accessible.
I hold the stone in my hand and I like to feel its solidity and weight. Of course like any other material it is open to erosion and damage but I like to feel it as if it has arrived in its final form. It helps me to connect to the experience of Pursha residing in my body. A call to acknowledging human existence that goes beyond biology to something intangible but felt and described in differing ways in cultures and countries. Pursha for me is a connection to a thread that connects us all to both the ordinary and extraordinary. This sometimes has confused the practice of yoga with religion and god. Your yoga practice may support your faith but it is not a religious practice, it is a philosophy and a framework of making sense of our extraordinary lives and experiences. A path home to yourself.
To experience this support and depth in our practice it can be useful to think of rituals and rhythms. Practices both off and on the mat that connect us to this philosophy but ultimately bring an experience of the heart and a little magic to our practice.
We all have rituals in our lives, some perhaps unobserved and mundane such as brushing our teeth, putting the cat out. Pay day, bin day, changing winter clothes for summer. Maybe you have your own unsung rituals at this time of year. The first time you notice a bee or butterfly. Shelling the first fresh broad beans to arrive in the shops. Buying daffodils, spring cleaning, planning an adventure. We are in the season or renewal and birthing ideas and change.
We have a long history of rituals based around the seasons. A historic need to experience joy and light in our lives. Dawn and dusk, the everyday miracle of the sun rising and setting. Rituals often around nature and seasons, but also lifecycles, relationships and community. Birthdays and remembrance days. Of notes tucked in wallets, of beads kept in pockets as talismens against any journey. Our ancestors had a way of bringing heart and soul into the everyday.
Each cell in our body is following a circadian clock. Each organ its own ritual of function. We are in relationship with heat and light, ingested energy and eliminated waste products. Women’s hormones follow the cycle of the Moon and our drives shift in compliance and rythmn with circumstance and stressors. Despite our attempts to go beyond and against the mundanity of this magnetism to nature we are all to aware of our growing dis ease from our overriding behaviour. Air conditioning has robbed us of our siestas, electric light pushed our productivity into the night. We are often in ritual deficit.
In our yoga practice this ritual could be placing a found object before us a we practice and welcoming the bhavana or feeling associated with that object into our practice. It could be offering an intention through words or mantra to focus our thoughts and feelings. The way we clean and care for the space we practice in. How we decorate it with a picture, plants or flowers. How we ignite candles or diffuse smells. How we can explore signifying a moment before and after the time we carve out, however small, to practice. How we choose a tea and its vessel to pour warmth into a cup, then our bodies at pausing moments on the mat. In my practice I am often drawn to placing hands somewhere significant on my body as a reminder of what I’m trying to support with my practice. A hand on heart for compassion, finger tips on my throat for verbalising and honestly, a palm on my belly for comfort from change.
Let there be a ritual of listening, not diving into influencing and change, but seeing what organically presents and bringing noticing and curiosity about the body, breath and senses as we practice. How do we begin or end our practice? I have a Journal and fountain pen with chosen shades of ink that have become precious as the instrument of recording the words and queries that come at the beginning of my practice. The ritual of annually disposing of these pages, honouring the moments held on the pages but that are no longer about the here and now.
I increasingly pay attention to what is accessible for all, in the desire to make meaning and purpose and to experience a sense of beauty in this extraordinarily ordinary life. I mark the full and new moon on the mat. I think of my nonagenarian student who is only able to lie on her bed and watch the moon from her window, recalling childhood memories of watching this same moon in her adventures of youth. The suns seasons, equinox and solstice, observing them not as counter culture but in the everyday as a thread connecting me to it and shortening the distance that a materialist life has widened.
Patanjali describes in chapter two of the yoga sutras, Kriya Yoga. Kriya yoga has the elements of tapas, svadhyaya and ishvarapranidhana. Tapas is practices that create change, discipline, heat and transformation. Like any good recipe the additions that bring the taste buds alive. This is the glue, these are the small actions, this is the stone placed on the mat that breaths life into the practice. Svadhyaya, the practice of listening and creating relevance from this listening in our yoga practice. The Journal, the paying of attention, the curiosity, the learning the language of you. Ishavarapranidhana, the intention and the practice of yoga being more than a soother or strengthener but that we create rituals and intentions that are beyond a singular individual experience and that offer our practice to something beyond ourselves.