Our yoga sessions seem to be arriving at a balance between your needs for an open session that you can come to anytime, and my need for a way to teach what yoga is. I want the yoga sessions to be an experience in themselves, and not a series of classes where one builds on the previous one with some take home information or knowledge. This is the place where I find myself and this yoga that is unfolding.

Yoga, to be yoga, must be a living thing, like a flower unfolding in its own way and adapting to the conditions it finds itself in. Yoga is a transmission of the seed of life. We all have the soil for this seed, but not every soil is ready. If you have expressed an interest in yoga, then your soil is coming out of winter and is ready for spring. How your flower of yoga grows is entirely up to you. Some flowers bloom early, some late (like mine), but bloom it will. That interest is all the water it needs.

As I mentioned in the beginning, our world will want to fill in any space we try to make for a yoga seed. Look on our personal world as if it were a government agency (to switch metaphors, if I may) with a new director who has new ideas. How soon he discovers that the agency will only change directions in very small stages, if at all. A sudden spin of the steering wheel will cause such an opposite reaction that hope for change gets dashed on the rocks of internal conflict. The same forces are at work in the practice of yoga. One has to be gentle, but persistent.

So you want to find inner peace? So you want a healthier and younger body? So you want to find some meaning in existence? So you want to discover your purpose, to experience the divine within?....”So what,” says our personal world (which includes our own mind, by the way). “What about your promises to me?!”

You see, we are our world, and our world doesn’t want real change, because real change is an unknown. Our world only functions in the known with what is predictable and the illusion of change. Even suffering is better than the unknown, because at least suffering is familiar. Both pleasure and pain are the same in that they are both part of our known world. Love, peace, and joy come from life, and life cannot be predicted or conditioned.

Yoga is saying to you on one shoulder, while your world is talking in the other ear: “Listen, what you are really looking for in life can be found only in the unknown. If it were in the known, you would have found it by now. So why keep looking where it is safe? Why do you keep looking where you have already been?”

Yoga and meditation (they are both the same) point to the undiscovered country of our self, but only a few are willing to go there because we can’t take our world with us. Yoga is a rabbit hole in our conceptual world of habit and conditioned thought where only the curious drop in.

But only the brave stay.

Thank you,
Om Peace
Ed Conley

12/06/06

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