Yoga is the practice of joining all the different parts of ourselves as we explore what it means to be one.
Sure, we are physical beings.
We are also spiritual beings.
We are mental, emotional, social beings.
What fascinates me is the provocative idea of learning to live in a Both/And relationship with things that seem otherwise at odds, different, or opposite.
Such a mindset and awareness for life opens us up to the truth of who we are as part of Source.
After all, in the wild road trip of life, aren't we are all balancing paradox while sitting at the corner of Human and Being?
Here's a poem that I love which speaks to this paradox perfectly
All the Hemispheres by Hafiz
translated by Daniel Ladinsky
Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out
Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.
Open up to the Roof.
Make a new watermark on your excitement
And love.
Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.
Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.
Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.
All the hemispheres in the heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
One of the things I love about this poem is that normally a hemisphere means exactly one half of some larger whole yet this poem plays with the notion what we are in truth cannot abide within a realm of binaries, this or that, right or wrong but in some larger whole.
It also suggests that the more we come to know ourselves better through practices like yoga, meditation, and in Hafiz's case ecstatic poetry, the more we will break down these binaries and "stitch ourselves together into the Great Circle."
This idea reminds me of the line in a poem I shared a little while about, "A Great Wagon," by Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, that says,
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
Surely, this playful invitation defies our tendency to feel separate from each other and separate from source.
And surely, this is what we practice each time we do either an asana class or a Yoga Nidra class, because after all, we need tangible a way to help such ideas make sense and to figure out how to live them in our every-day lives.
May it be our life-long practice to celebrate all the many hemispheres in our own lives.
