Let it in...

Experiences are what define us. I'm not one who is a proponent of speculation, often to me it becomes over thinking something.

If you're all in your head about something are you feeling it in your body? If you're not feeling it, or rather feeling the repercussions of the experience of it, how do you know what is actually happening? You can think about something, even invoke the ideas of the feeling of the situation, but until you've actually had the experience of said thing you cannot invoke the feeling of it again.

I wanted a practical experience of something and yet for years, even decades I was self medicating which dulled the sensory systems to such a level that I almost completely had to relearn how to feel how things felt viscerally again. Self medicating was alcohol mostly for me, and at some point that stopped working, thankfully around the same time I started yoga. The alcohol and the yoga fought in my body for some 9 years, one dulling the sensations, one reactivating them, before I quit drinking and began the path to relearn how things felt in my body when experiences happens.

So when the yoga finally started to work I found myself emotional a lot of the time. And if I'm honest each time I go through a new layer of veils between me and what I think of as me I get a new level of emotional.

Recently I've been having that happen again. It's also affected my willingness to practice and changed my relationship with it. Practice is what brought me to the realisation that I was covering everything up and that I needed to maybe start shedding some of the veils of reality that were covering the real me up. So now I've found a new appreciation for my practice, maybe even just this week again lol.

Of course this started in this last trip to Mysore to study, I felt the shifts happening and would skip a day here and there. But one thing that also became known to me is that practice to me was cemented in me as being so much more than just asana. I need the asanas, and even the sequence we in the tradition of K. Pattabhi Jois use them. I believe it set up to open up the energy channels systematically, from bottom to top, open up the spine the same way, and the musculature. So to me it's the best method. So I need this part of the practice and when I get too far removed from it, which I believe I was beginning to do a few weeks back up until last week even, things shift, the other parts of my practice don't work so well. They do still work on their own, but when all aspects are put together, then I'm the best me I can be.

Pranayama, I was taught the full Ashtanga sequence of pranayama some years back as I was learning the third series, before I took my break from Ashtanga and came back. So yes, I still do it a few times a week, there's nothing like it. But also the simple alternate nostril breathing in the way Sharath has taught us works so well too, that I often use just it for a few rounds and have great results. But one or the other has to be a part of my daily practice for it to feel complete.

Also I've chanted for years, but mostly began with kirtan and would chant along with a cd periodically at home. Once I finally made it to Mysore and took the chanting at the shala, then studied Sanskrit and philosophy with Jayashree and her brother and eventually learned how to systematically chant the Yoga Sutras and quite a few other mantras and songs with Ranjini, I realised that this needed to also be a part of my daily practice. So I devised a routine of regular mantras that I chant each morning, even a few that I do throughout the day with a mala, 108 times. But lately, with my deep interest in deity worship, I've begun to deepen that even further with an evening puja that again employs chanting in Sanskrit but feels more authentic, like the way they do it in India at a Kali temple. Almost tribal, and that feeling is something I'm glad to have.

But when I was just thinking about each of these things, pontificating if you will, they were just ideas and held little value. But bringing the experience to life for real has made me realise that I'm a tactile learner. I have to be the one to turn the page, the one to speak the word wrongly a dozen times before I hit it just right and feel the vibration I'm meant to feel where I'm meant to feel it, I have to eat the food, like the incense, burn the candle, ring the bell. I have to feel these things in the temple well of my pelvis and the burning in my solar plexus, and maybe even hundreds of times, to be able to determine what its like, how it feels to me, will it work for me, can I share this with another so they can also use it to help themselves?

Do you dig in and get into the nitty gritty of things, or do you sit at home thinking about it in fear of what it will really be like? There of course are many things in between those two ends of the spectrum. Where do you fit within it?

Are you letting it in, or are you holding it at bay?