Two Reasons to Practice Yoga

...gorgeous afternoons...rumbling Wissahickon and gently rippling Schuylkill reflecting vibrant greens and blues as the bike floats past with minimal effort, beyond sculpture garden and gilded greco-roman art museum, all the way to the studio...cheerful vinyasa and laughter with teachers and students, all friends...then fueling up at the Indian buffet place with samosas and malai kofta for the ride home...

...and those other times...grey and cloudy outside, but even moreso in....roll out the mat for lack of any better idea, thinking maybe just maybe this’ll get me through the day...and, somehow, it does....not so much providing an esoteric heightened state that can only be described in Sanskrit or with reference to something some semi-mythic incredibly enlightened person wrote in India or Tibet three thousand years ago....and not a spiritual orgasm to be translated into new age positive affirmations or old time religion or a marketing campaign for the latest Yoga for Rich People With Big Houses and Nice Butts© DVD series....but revealing at least a window...some little bit of space...not much, maybe, but enough...that didn’t appear to be there before...

Another 108 Sun Salutations...with a side order of that curried cauliflower and potato stuff...

...this is the 216th Yoga for Cynics post...making it...kinda, sorta...like finishing a second set of the 108 sun salutations that make up a yoga mala.....which means...yeah...some o’ that esoteric yogacentric kinda content...which, no doubt, is utterly baffling, irritating, anachronistic, alienating, stupid-seeming, and/or simply boring to the 47.3 %* of readers who know eka pada rajakapotasana only as that curried cauliflower and potato stuff at the local Indian buffet place...

...then, I can relate...it was twenty or so years ago when I first met people who talked about yoga...along with positive attitudes, compassionate lifestyles and related topics...and was massively turned off by all of it...particularly as this more enlightened consciousness tended to be expressed through passive aggressive rage and harsh judgments toward anybody whose lifestyle was deemed less compassionate...which, as it turned out, was just about everybody...

...it’s only recently, though, having met lotsa people who do a bit better with that living your yoga thing...including my very nice blog friends**....that I’ve starting to see that all my grousing...see above...about granola nazis isn’t exactly dripping with compassion, openness, or positivity, either...

...yoga studios tend to have special deals for new students...so, I’ve tried pointing out that, thanks to my Zen-like cultivation of beginner’s mind, I’m always a new student...dying as an old student with every out-breath and reborn as a new student with every in-breath... which gets laughs...but has yet to garner me an actual discount...


* statistics are made up

** such as Brooks, on whose blog much of this post started out as a comment...