recently i was explaining my personal practice to someone unfamiliar with mysore. telling them i’m up at 3/3:30am these days - preparing, meditating, and sipping coffee before i head into the shala. that i practice alone for 1-1/2 - 2 hours before i teach. they replied, “so.. you wake up and you choose yourself? the first thing you do is orient towards tending to yourself?” it’s been a while since i’ve thought of it that way and i was grateful for the reminder. yes. that’s what i do. awakening and returning to greater capacities of focus, opening lungs, pores, joints, waking and quieting the senses, maintaining fire, listening, overcoming obstacles, dancing with fears, witnessing - all there in the very simple and straight forward moving and breathing routine. i’ve experienced consistently now for many years how that intense period of self love, care, and surrender extends out into all of the other ways i engage in my life. that relatively short period of prayer in the form of shapes and breathing completely shifts how i perceive the world, and therefore how i go about each day. each moment. there’s the immediate short term transformation that takes place daily and that is placed gently onto the pile of thousands of previous practices that have had an incalculable and subtle enduring transformational effect.
i’m thinking of a quote from lama rod owens: “if we don’t do our work, we become work for other people”. in lieu of this, we arrive on our mats for ourselves and whatever our dharma is with determination, consistency, and love - with all of our perceived successes and failures alike - to carry by our side as luggage, or to release, so we may be free. a huge part of giving to others is knowing ourselves well enough to be in integrity. herein lies the interplay of form and formlessness. if we explore the depth of the human experience within our own being, it’s not a far leap to have compassion for others who share the complexities of spiritual beings expressing themselves through human form. so, yes. we choose ourselves every day on behalf of something much larger and more profound than our likes and dislikes.