Monday, June 29, 2009

126/179 - Stealing the moment

Sunday 9:30 with Sherry --

Well, after the crash for the last two days, I picked myself back up. It wasn't a super class, but my stamina was back. I made it through every pose and managed to stay with the dialogue, mostly, and stay within my breath. My balancing series was pretty good, especially Standing Head to Knee, where I held for the full length twice, including one time kicking out.

It's still a mystery to me why we cycle between great classes and crashing. It's just part of the process I suppose. When it's this severe, it makes me understand why we long so much for purely linear growth. It's much easier to understand and deal with.

The day 178 meditation is about non-stealing on the mat. Gates says that non-stealing is acting in faith, and theft is faithlessness. I had already extrapolated this concept to generosity. And I sort of see the point of his shift from material theft to an idea that is based on faith. But its a big stretch, and I'm not really sure that I fully understand it yet.

He makes a really good point about how this works on the mat. We often start asking questions of ourselves: Am I doing this right? Am I working hard enough? Is it really this fricking hot, or is it me? But when we are truly in the pose, and flowing with the practice, none of these questions come up. We simply are the practice. So, the process of questioning itself steals the moment from us, it steals the feeling of truly being in the pose.

Good enough to know. Still, its purely descriptive. As Rohit said the other day. If you do something wrong, don't kick yourself for it. If you do kick yourself, don't make the mistake then of kicking yourself for having kicked yourself. You can go that direction for as many layers as you want, to the point where the original problem becomes forgotten or meaningless. The better course is to simply let it go, if you can.

No comments: