The True Meaning of Asana.

It’d be easy for us to agree that our society has a preoccupation with bodies; their shape, size, age, strength, flexibility. This fixation seems ever present even when wrapped in the context of our Yoga practise. Put it to the test for yourself - type ‘Yoga’ into any social media platform and you’re undoubtedly met with a barrage of pictures of half naked people twisting and turning themselves into weird and wonderful shapes.

And yet the deeper we explore the practise and the longer we commit ourselves to it, if guided by the right teacher, we find that in the grand scale of how Yoga can impact your life the actual execution of asana means very little; rather it is the inside job of being in the practise that impacts our ways of being and our sense of basic order within.

So what is the purpose of practising? What is the purpose of moving our bodies in this way? And what sets the physcial expression of Yoga apart from something like Calisthenics, or Pilates?

I like to think of Asana as a microcosm of life. Each time we arrive on our mat we are given moments of stillness, moments of intensity, sometimes even a little chaos. We are challenged to stay when part of us tells us to leave, invited to remain kind, asked to be curious, to offer compassion.

Above all we are asked to notice. Notice what arrives for us in each posture, notice what is triggered, what is released, notice what is held onto, notice what is ignored. We start to notice habitual behaviour and in the container of a formal practise we’re invited to either lean into and nourish the qualities the true self (the part of us we’re born with that is naturally curious, innocent and playful), or overcome the patterns that are led by the false self (that is, the self that emerges as a strategy to deal with pain, trauma and loss).

The practise then is one of discovery, facilitated by the movement of our bodies but never determined by our ability.

This is why I so often speak of the postures having no inherent meaning. Instead they have meaning for you alone in the context of your life, your day, your hopes and your fears; each posture is a tool by which to more deeply understand yourself and to find some freedom, eventually, from the ways of being that are not your truth.

“The body is not loved for it’s own sake, but because the Self lives in it.”