Yoga is a Beautiful Thing

“You’ll meet your neighbours tonight.” The teacher means we’re so close to each other that we might touch, even though we're mostly strangers. At the very least there will be eye contact.

Lying on our mats, we perform a twist. A young man in my eyeline gets perilously close to a young woman - just a stretch of his fingers and...he touches her ass! In the muted amber lights I see the young woman reach back to caress the young man’s hand. Of course, they are a couple.

As we roll over to stretch our other side I say hello to an elderly woman as my fingertips brush her shoulder. Here in our yoga class this kind of contact between strangers is alright, it’s part of the yoga, just as the pranayama is.

Simply put, pranayama is the yogic practice of focusing on the breath.

I’ve been doing yoga since before I knew the name for it. Which is nothing unusual: as a kid I did what all children do - roll and leap and twist into asanas without knowing there were verbs or nouns for these movements and positions.

I can't remember when I first learned the word yoga, but as I grew into adolescence I searched my school library for books about the ancient art. In those days yoga was so uncommon in my neck of the woods as to be suspect, an activity only for freaks or hippies or beatniks. I may have been one or all of those things but labels did not affect my love of bending and stretching and breathing into poses.

Through all my journeys in life so far, whether usual or not so, yoga has been a constant. It’s been with me through three pregnancies and three children. I’ve practiced with baby in lap, toddler in tow and kids alongside parroting me. I’ve stretched and posed in community centres and studios and basements and hotel rooms, on planes and trains and boats, on docks and beaches and cliffs, in oceans and rain and snow.

Hemingway wrote that Paris is a moveable feast. I would say the same thing of yoga (which I’ve also done in Paris) with the accent on "movable". Yoga is not a thing outside of yourself, not a thing that you "do", so much as it is a part of you that goes wherever you go, just as your legs or your smile do.

It’s inside you just waiting to be freed - and that can happen anywhere, anytime and under any circumstances that you choose.

One night when my first two children were small (and the third was but a twinkle in my eye) I put them to bed, then went into my room and lit a candle. In naked lotus I breathed and relaxed and let the day go. When I opened my eyes I saw my daughter, then five, standing in the shadows. As I put her back to bed, she told me: “You look beautiful doing yoga.”

It’s not hard to look beautiful doing yoga, even if you are limited in your movements, for the essence of yoga is grace and ease and strength. Even for challenging poses one aims to achieve the difficult on a breath thus facilitating more ease in the movement than strain. Like a child you let your body roll and glide and reach. And like a grown up you gently guide it, breathing with the motion, sometimes pushing to the edge, but always dancing the dance of the pranayama.

After class, I watched the young couple roll up their mats, laughing and kissing. My yoga pal and I head out. On our way out we stop to chat with the teacher, who tells us she overextended herself this past week and is tired as a result. She doesn’t seem especially tired to us but then she halts in the middle of her narrative to explain that that’s how she manifests fatigue: too much talking. We laugh and then she talks some more: a story about the price one pays for letting one’s logical mind override one’s intuition.

My friend and I head out into the cool night air. We butt each other playfully then settle into talk. I tell her about my own progress in acting from my intuition. “Perhaps I will even learn how not to regularly overextend myself,” I conjecture. My friend pats my head in the quiet of the spring night and all seems right with the world.

And that’s a beautiful thing.