Yoga as Nourishment for the Soul

In both yoga and cooking, the better your skills, the better the results. Discover how both yoga and food challenge you to find full expression and accept what is.
The ancient hatha yoga texts are like cookbooks. They are full of recipes, descriptions of procedures, lists of ingredients, and notes on what results to expect. A yoga practice is a process just like cooking a meal is a process. Both can have a clear intent at the beginning: In cooking, a nourishing aesthetically pleasing meal; in yoga, a state of mind that can see the truth without wavering. In both yoga and cooking the better your skills, the better the results.
One important skill in cooking is the ability to understand the nature of your ingredients. All the ingredients have their basic character. From peppers, to potatoes, to pomegranates, each ingredient has an essence that has to be honored if the dish is to attain its ultimate expression. In real cooking there is no such thing as the perfect ingredient. We are constrained by the availability of what we need. We can't expect the world, nor ourselves, to produce out of season.
In yoga we wish to liberate the truth of ourselves so that we can taste our own beauty. The ingredients of an asana practice are flesh, mind, and breath. Your flesh and bones have a basic nature, they have a genetic and personal history that must be honored. Your mind has a quality different than other minds. The voice in your head is heard by no one else. Your breath has a character.
In your practice this week take some time to just savor the fact that you have what you have, and you can do whatever you can do. Tell yourself as you do poses that your legs have what it takes to support you, your arms and chest can be free and expressive, your breath can be one with the breathing of the planet. Do not bemoan the nature of your ingredients, for within them is the true flavor of who you are. You are a sacred chef involved in the feeding and care of your spirit. All that you need is within you right now. Just start doing poses, and if you are breathing, your cupboard will not be bare.

Sound and Silence

We can approach the making of our postures as a creative act, bringing them to life with our breath and our intent, just like a musician brings music to life. A musician sits in a silence that holds only the intent to play before she brings the music up out of that silence with her muscles and breath. The sounds of the music unfold through time until at some point the musician lets the silence return. But the silence is different, deeper. It holds more.
We start our poses from a place of stillness. Our postures unfold through time as movements of flesh, bone, and awareness as we move through many different patterns of being, experiencing different aspects of who we can be, like the different sounds of some internal orchestra. As in life and in music there is an end to the process of a posture practice. Traditionally it is the pose of stillness and silence: Corpse Pose.
In Savasana, we allow the sounds of our postures to fade away. We temporarily give up our power to create and set our instrument upon the ground. In the end all that remains is a great flying stillness. An abiding glory nestled inside the sweet sound of our breathing.
On your mat this week imagine that all your sensations in the poses are actually sounds. From your lower body bring up the base notes that come from the earth beneath you. With your chest and arms let out the melody of your creative expression. Allow your head to be free, flowing with the score, as you adjust, watch, and surrender to the beauty of the music being created. Relax all your muscles. Imagine yourself a musician in a great and sacred hall. Your time of play is done. You are resting. All heads are bowed in reverence to the silence.

Walking that fine line

Reality is vast and ultimately unknowable in it’s entirety. It is happening everywhere throughout the universe all at once at every moment. To perceive the world our minds must make choices about which aspect of reality we will notice. Through yoga one can begin to see how our past effects our perception of the future. This is not inherently a bad thing. If you have burned your hand on a hot stove, it can be helpful to hold that lesson in your mind when cooking. Unfortunately, we often allow our past to inhibit our sense of possibility about our selves and our future. Yoga involves self inquiry. Am I deluded? Am I fooling my self? Am I really seeing the situation without bias?

It’s a fine line to walk. It takes Practice.