At Sadhana, we’re dedicated to all aspects of yoga
asana
Bringing asana (postures), chanting, meditation, and breath awareness together offers a clear path for enhancing health, well-being, and spiritual growth. Sadhana Yoga Hudson shares the rich history, philosophy, and teachings of the yoga tradition to students and teachers alike.
Focus of the Month
balance
I like the idea of balance as the focus of the month for several reasons. First of all, though, let me say that I don’t think that I am in any way searching for balance. I feel it’s an overrated aspiration, personally, but I will say that I want to notice it whenever it might be happening. I do, however, think there is a place, in-between things, and there are edges to things, and that getting stuck in the binaries (good/bad, male/female, rich/poor, fat/thin) is sort of like living in the hell realm, to put it in Buddhist terms. But balance, or this place in-between is certainly not a constant state, rather a momentary one, that slips away quickly. Kind of like a pendulum. I love the way a pendulum swings to one side and there’s this weightless pause at the top and then it swings down through balance and sails up the other side. Or like a roller coaster, how there’s this feeling of weight pushing against you on the way up, then a thrilling, floaty, balancing moment, and then a spilling, a rushing down the other side.
Back to why I like the idea of balance as a focus for a yoga practice: simply said, there are a lot of options, in terms of balancing poses. I will argue that the whole practice is a balancing act, but there are a few poses where balance is the intention. Tree pose, crow pose, half-moon pose, holding-your-foot-up-in-the-air-with-your-hand pose, for example. Another reason is that there’s something to talk about (as a teacher) and something to contemplate (as a person). It also does seem skillful to employ other words or images that point to some state of balance indirectly, such as attention, liberation, clear seeing, breathing, resistance, reparation.
There are many edge states in our lives, in our day-to-day. Grief, anger, heartbreak, definitely anxiety. If we can breathe into these, learn to love them, soften around them, perhaps that craving to turn away gets broken. We can go through these portals of extremes, our edges, and see that they are not an end point, but only a beginning, an arrival, a way to slide down and up the other side.
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