This last weekend marked the end of the 3rd week of our 4 week intensive YTTP. It was a time to reflect back and to take stock, both in body and mind, of the progress/change/evolution that may (or may not) have taken place for me over the last 20 days of my life:
Days 1 thru 4 - I could barely produce a decent chaturanga.and I was almost entirely focused on bringing my body back into yoga shape, strengthening my core, getting my alignment right, building stamina to be able to get through two 90 min and one 60 min session per day with 6hrs of asana workshops in between. Very much a physical focus.
By the end of the first week - Lighter in my step, lighter in my vinyasanas, beginning to have fun on the mat, even though muscles were sore.I began to realize how little sleep my body was able to function on and how the energy that I was creating within my body was actually far greater than the energy I was expending. Beginning to harness life force beyond just oxygen and fuel.
Then, as we moved into Discussion Groups on the philosophy behind the practice, things started to take on a whole new dimension..the one that Dennis and Lawrence Fishburne/Morpheus had warned us about..the one where once you know/feel, becomes near impossible to deny. So here, at the end of Week 3 and embarking on the last leg of this short term journey that is the 20 day programme, I am finding it very difficult to divorce what I have learned at the studio from my everyday life. First my body, then my intellect and now my intuition have been exposed/awakened to a simple set of universal truths and processes. Being Hindu, I suppose I always knew of them, but the fact that I now ?know them', is making life feel a little like a 3-D movie (although in yogic terms, that would be 6 or 7-D, I suppose). For example:
I went to see a classical Indian concert with my family on Saturday evening by world reknowned percussionist, Zakir Hussain and 5 others, each playing different classical instruments.
Each musician took his turn to play a solo and began his individual set with a set of slow, deliberate notes in repetitive patterns with nothing fancy to punctuate the flow, just honest, hard work. This prelude would go on for a good length of time, and it was in that commitment to deliver the perfect sequence over and over again, that the music began to tell the story of the years of effort and commitment, or tapas, that the artist must have put in with his guru (Indian musical training, as in yoga, is also undertaken with Guru as Guide).
The pace would then hasten, chords would become more complex and suddenly but seamlessly, the lone musician would be producing sounds that one might have expected from a quartet. His hands would begin to move so fast that they were becoming indistinguishable from his instrument and you had to choose between focusing on this with awe, or on his face, with that serene smile and clear connection to bliss - so that now the audience was experiencing both awe and bliss.
Once each musician had completed his individual set, some would play in pairs - and here you could see how the connection between the two was not through scripted music (there was none) and not through improvisation (they were not jamming, but playing precisely the same note, simultaneously, on vastly different instruments) but through a channel of energy that they had built between themselves.and then with us, the audience.
The concert culminated in the 6 musicians playing, not as an orchestra, but as One..not playing the same notes now, but rather playing in such perfect Unity that the tunes of one flowed into the other like water and fire, earth, air and space coming together to form a complete universe of perfect sound. If I can ever claim to be Enlightened, I think this may have been the moment.late Saturday evening, when the house lights came up and I saw the yoga in the music and the universe in yoga..