Looking up at the stars, i know quite well....

I have had the idea for this post for a while now. It came to me when I was practicing in my terrace late one evening - it was a full moon night, I think somewhere around the first week of March. as I lifted up into an Ardha Chandrasana, I found myself shaky. In spite of doing the exact same thing, and balancing the exact same way and using the exact same muscles to remain in that balance and stretch, I was swaying, back and forth. Trying my best to get a grip with my standing leg, I asked myself what was happening today - why was this asana that I had gotten into a million times before and was quote confident of holding for long periods of time, was suddenly a challenge. A part of me was shocked, but a part of me was also quite pleased that I could work on simple asanas again. As beautiful as it is to advance in your asana practice, it takes away the magic of your initial years of getting into a consistent yoga asana practice. The thrill of working through simple asanas and cracking them and understanding the subtle dynamics of strength and stretch and effort and letting go - it's mesmerizing. Or at least it was for me. I do not mean to say that any of these aspects become any less important as you travel from being a beginner to an intermediate to an advanced asana practitioner. But these details become tools that you use to get into deeper backbends or more strenuous and delicate arm balances. Of course that is exhilarating as well - but it is more goal driven and not a discovery that makes your mind go "boom!". So a part of me was actually quite thrilled that I couldn't seem to hold ardha chandrasana - half moon pose.

As I finished my sequence and was in shavasana, my mind drifted as it always does, to other thoughts. I opened my eyes and decided to do an open-eyed shavasana looking up at the vast sky and wondered at it's expansiveness and then directed my gaze to the moon and wondered even more at it's brilliance. But as I was lying there staring up and being lost, for a change in the silence - min devoid of all thoughts - my mind slowly pulled me back to my shaky ardha chandrasana. Almost as if the sky were offering an answer, a tiny thought entered my mind about maybe the fact that I was out in the open and practicing with a limitless sky above my head was what was making me a bit imbalanced?  And of course my mind didn't stop with that one thought, it went onto apply that logic to a bunch of other things happening in my life and in the world.

Now, I am also learning the magic of Bhagawad Gita and trying to apply it's vast knowledge to our daily worries, sometimes mundane but sometimes immensely profound, existential questions on dharma, karma and our roles in this life. While explaining one of the chapters, our teacher said to us, the essential idea of Advaita philosophy is that God exists within you - that you are not different from the Divine, that you are made of the same stuff and matter that She/He is made of, that we are all connected in that manner - because we are all made from the same source and derive our energies from that one source. He went onto say that this idea of advaita, of identifying ourselves, our human lives, with God [or Brahman/ Reality as the philosophy calls it ] is not something most people can grasp. For many reasons. One, the sheer vastness of the concept of brahman is unfathomable for most of us, it's easier to see gods and goddesses in statues and pictures with forms that make sense to our human minds. How does one conceive of a Brahman, which has no beginning, no end, which has always existed and will continue to exist. Two, even if we were to kind of get our heads around that idea, to think that we are in connection with that Brahman, that it is not different from us, is an idea that is not easy to digest. There are no boundaries or no rules and no support, that can help us imagine. This is hard. Three, it takes a lot to even begin to start thinking, contemplating, meditating about this concept and then maybe somewhere in this lifetime, we might feel like we understand it, somewhat. Most of us do not have the time or inclination to indulge in that when there are other pressing problems facing us. So, to quote my teacher, we sink back from imagining that reality or trying to even take our minds in that direction to explore that aspect of life, and therefore we continue to remain limited, as individual beings, with a strong sense of "I", while also continuing, ironically to appeal to this Supreme God to assist us in our daily lives.

Vastness scares us. Having no boundaries to limit our thinking or our being in some way, scares us. It scares me for sure. That is exactly what dawned on me as I lay on my mat staring up at the boundless sky in Shavasana. My ardha chandrasana was shaky only because i was staring up at the sky instead of the limited ceiling of a room or studio. To suddenly have this immense spread on top of me shook me a little bit, I did not know how to process it immediately. In fact I do not know if I still now how to process it, I still shake when I practice on the terrace.

I then started thinking about what we are all facing in the world right now. We have all scaled back our external activities and have been asked to stay in. Without commenting on those who are in deep hardship right now, who have lost jobs and incomes and are struggling to move from one day to the next, i will focus my observations only to those that I have had the opportunity to speak and interact with -  mostly middle class folks like me, who are safe and secure in our homes, but just aren't allowed to go out. We have always been telling ourselves and anyone who would listen - if i had the time, the things I would do with my life...- & here we are with time on our hands, time in our lives and yet we are at a loss for what to do with the vastness of time and space that life has suddenly accorded us.  There is a quote by Rainer Maria Rilke, that touched me when i chanced upon it ~ "I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spent in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days. In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir, are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot."

I wish we knew how to sit idle with confidence and use the last few seconds of silence to spur our further moments. But the vastness of that time scares us, we do not know how to even begin to approach this gift of time we've received.

Lastly, my mind that night wandered to the idea of self love, and maybe love in general and the happiness that rests in loving and being loved. We all have ideas about what love will feel like, what will look like. And when love arrives, announced more often than not, we are taken aback by its simplicity and its profundity, it's all encompassing nature, it's blissful energies pervading through all aspects of our life and we are left staring agape at it's brilliance. And it either scares us or it makes us shaky, confident feet that have been here before, find themselves unsteady. Again, the vastness of the feeling, and in this case the depth of it, make us hold our breath for a bit. Just as i did in my ardha chandrasana. In spite of cueing my students to always breath through their practice and never hold their breath in asanas, I found myself holding my breath to get a grip and get my wobbly feet and being back in balance.

Lessons. All of them. To notice vastness as an opportunity to expand even more instead of letting fear shrink us back into our shells. To go out and look up at the sky more often, do many more ardha chandrasanas out with my foot and hand reaching up to the sky. To invite love in all it's glory and letting it wash over you and flow with it, to any destination it takes you. To sit still in our idleness without anywhere to go and anything to do. Thank the lord for the luxury of being able to do that and not waste it. Invite vastness always. in Everything you do, in all that you are. Because it will show you all that you can be.