Hello from CK!

[brainofck]

Hey! This is a post about me!

I am so excited to get in on the ground floor of this new place, Dreamwidth. I'm an old LJ'er, and one of the things I tend to do in my RL journal is ramble at length about yoga. So I thought, hey! It would be great to do that with people who actually get it, instead of just being sweetly tolerant!

I started practicing yoga about five years ago. I was trying to lose weight and get into shape and I had been doing the same couple of aerobics workout tapes for about two months and was going crazy from boredom. I mentioned to a friend that I thought yoga sounded interesting, but that I didn't see the potential for calorie burn.

She said to me, "Two words: Power Yoga."

I took out some tapes from my local library and my alternate ego, Ms. Flexy Bendy, was born!

I consider myself an advanced beginner. I am totally self-taught from videos and DVDs and I had about a two year hiatus for a pregnancy and infant/post-partum period. I have a small collection of DVDs and tapes by various instructors and mostly am interested in vinyasa/ashtanga type yoga for purposes of exercise.

That said, I find that practicing yoga for the purposes of exercise is very different from doing my step aerobics. After all, I don't feel the need to comment in post after post in my journal about the joys of step-turn-down-tap.

I got Shiva Rea's Yoga Trance Dance DVD for Christmas. Shiva recites from The Radiance Yoga Sutras (Vijnana Bhairava Tantra) during Sivasana, and in particular, the last line of her selection struck me as being very much what I have been taking away from yoga during my exploration of it:

Contemplate the constituents of your body: muscles and blood, breath and bones, is made out of radiantly dancing emptiness. Attend to the skin as a subtle boundary containing vastness. Enter that shimmering and pulsing vastness. Discover that you are not separate from anything there, and there is no "other;" no object to meditate on that is not you.

There is a place in the heart where everything meets. Enter the bowl of vastness that is the heart. Give yourself to it with total abandon. Quiet ecstasy is there, and a steady regal sense of resting in a perfect spot. Contemplate the entire universe and your entire body is filled with inexpressible happiness.

Drink the ambrosia of that all-pervading joy from the radiant cup that is this very body.

So. I have never come to yoga seeking any particular enlightenment. But still. There's something different in yoga than in any other thing I have done before.

Drink from the radiant cup. There's definitely something there for me.