Okay,
I'm going to talk about a concept and I'd just invite you to listen and think about what I'm saying and then respond in your own way if you feel like it.
The concept is yoga off the mat.
This is a phrase that you hear a lot from yogis and there's probably a hashtag on Instagram.
It's a phrase that's out there and it means different things.
So what does it mean?
Yoga off the mat.
It means that what we do outside of the studio is yogic,
Can be yogic and has nothing to do with what we do inside the studio.
And at the same time,
It means that what we do outside of the studio can have everything to do with what we do in the studio.
That is that hopefully these practices are building up some sort of awareness,
Some sort of sensitivity to how you're moving through life and maybe how you're moving through the world and the earth and how you're interacting with other people and how all of those influences are having an effect on you,
Having an effect on your body,
Mind and spirit.
So we say body,
Mind and spirit a lot referring to yoga because it's a useful framework.
But even in saying that,
It implies some sort of division between body,
Mind and spirit.
And really the point of yoga is to find the integration of those things where the boundaries sort of blur.
But for the sake of this topic,
Let's think about those separately and think about how those all show up,
How they all activate when we say something like yoga off the mat.
So body,
Yoga off the mat.
Well,
It's really just about an awareness of how your body is moving through the earth,
I mean on the earth and how,
You know,
Your posture is and your steps are and your breathing is and your very sort of fluidity of movement or not.
It means how you might be holding your shoulders and your spine when you're sitting.
It means the awareness of the tilt of your pelvis when you're standing.
It means just finding a neutral back.
It means just the way you might lift something or reach for something.
And most of all,
It means your breath and how your breath is sort of integrated into your everyday movements.
So we could probably go on and on with different examples of this,
But it basically means the awareness of your body as it's moving through,
I would say space and time.
Mind,
Yoga off the mat.
It's basically noticing what you're thinking about,
Taking moments to really notice what your reactions are to things,
Your likes and dislikes,
Your aversions and attractions to all of the stimulus that you're presented with every single to every single second.
And also what part of your personality really is ego.
Basically that's about how you are holding on to,
Attracted to the senses of accomplishment and defeat and how you might presume or think that defeat,
Whatever that is,
And accomplishment are somehow a reflection of you are somehow about your true self.
When in fact these are not your true self,
Neither is your personality.
And so mind then and yoga off the mat is really trying to calm down the inner voice so that you might connect to a higher wisdom.
And there's certainly ways of knowing going back to the body that can be felt throughout your body,
In your stomach,
In your heart,
In your head,
When you can connect to a part of your mind that is not so much personality,
Not so much ego,
But is wisdom.
Wisdom comes and it's always there ready to talk to us if we can calm down again the ego and the personality.
And spirit,
Yoga off the mat and what does it mean in relation to spirit?
Well it's a lot about how you're moving through the world with empathy,
How you're moving through the world with a sense of connectedness,
How you realize that there is something probably binding all of us and that could be any sort of life force that you imagine.
It could also be divinity.
It is purely interpretive,
I would say,
Of what you believe spirit to be and I don't think that yoga and the writings that I've examined have very much dogma at all about what this might be.
It is purely an individually felt force and it is definitely available to us all the time.
So it is just about pausing and queuing into,
Tapping into some sort of great energy field in yoga texts.
It is called Purusha.
That is a Sanskrit word that comes from Samkhya philosophy and it doesn't really matter that much to this discussion but just simply knowing that there is a construct for this which separates all that you are physically from some sort of greater connecting force.
I might call it divine intelligence.
So yoga off the mat means that you can connect to this in some way.
So that's a little bit about how we experience or we can experience.
We are invited to experience our body,
Our minds and our spirits completely outside of the studio.
In fact,
The studio might just be like a little tune up shop for the body,
Mind and spirit.
It's in the way that you might take a car into a shop to be tinkered with and sort of optimized but certainly the job of a car is not to be inside of the shop.
The job of the car is to be moving through the environment and transporting.
So these great physical beings that you have are chariots,
If you will,
Of your body,
Mind and spirit.
