Be the Flow

Someone asked me to send them a yoga sequence for them to practice on their own, and I might have gotten a little carried away. After 12 years of teaching, I still find it a bit strange to plan a sequence for someone else. Your body knows the practice you need better than all the books and the most experienced teachers on the planet. Finding a yoga practice that feels right to you is a lot like finding your new favorite song. You probably weren’t out looking for it, but it hits the spot and meets you exactly where you are at this particular moment. It has you swim into the current of your aliveness, your life force, what the ancients called Prana. In my experience, what the practice looks like becomes less and less important the more I tune into the energetic quality of the asana and listen for the subtleties in the river of sensations that is the human body.

This unfathomable human body, so in tune with the present moment when you let it be and listen. Give the breath and the body some consistent, loving attention and they open up to you the sensual and psychedelic intensity of the most mundane-seeming Thursday afternoon. Wasn’t it Yeats who said the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper?

If you ask me, a great way to find your practice is to show up for it, be open, present and listen. Your practice will emerge out of your inner landscape, like the spider weaving her home out of her insides. How would your deepest grief and your most exuberant joy (and everything in between that no one but you can know) move their medicine through your body today?