Iain Atkinson

Crash course in yoga

Yoga means union: union between body and mind, initially, then union between this bodymind and everything else.

So we mindfully breathe, stretch, move, sit, prostrate, bend, strain, relax, exercise, and feel all the inner workings of the body. We mindfully feel how the body feels when the body is in various states of being mindfully felt.

This may lead to mindfulness in other circumstances, like sitting on the train typing on my phone, as I am now. My right nostril is twinging with what I was trained to call but now hate calling seasonal allergies. More like the seasonal call to rise in thought. My nose knows that my body speaks the unity of all things. This I have learnt in the blooming joy of spring.

My nose twinges, my skin prickles with yesterday’s now ripened sunburn, and the rest of my body flows with an easy bliss. I am deeply well, beautifully in harmony with the whole, which whole is as much a container of everything, a big bucket, as this word ‘bucket’ which is here a part of this writing, is here an entity in relation to more beyond itself. All is in all, call this Christ.

Yogis practice mindful acceptance of the body. Mind and body have been at odds. Our minds have been conditioned to ignore our embodied feelings, to push ignorantly through stress, to eat all kinds of food of which we were initially suspect, to “enjoy” sexual pleasures that more deeply revolted us. The “mind” is various habits and thoughts which we easily see to be enculturated and social.

It is also the individual, the little voice saying “I” in my mind. You now turn from reading and asking “what do I think of what Iain is writing?” Big I (the strong man) shows up and stands in distinction to immediate experience and speaks against it. Contemporary poetry introduced a nice little i. The little i more humbly knows that it is social, enculturated, created. It is older than I, the same i as my parents and their parents and … is animal life itself and material existence itself, and is even the “i am” of God.

So in yoga we process the trauma held in the body of how I have tried to stand against i. The body now aches, or screams in pain, and i mindfully accept it. The body has been rejected by I, but is also the embodied set of habits of that rejection. The body screams as rejected, and also as rejection. As i now accept it, patterns of My rejecting it are reworked, reembodied, refelt and reincarnated, and my bodily pain changes. i feel my body as this embodiment of all history, of my environment. i feel it as a record of all time past, and an intuitive sensation of all space present. The body that i have mindfully come to sense is one with all things. The mind that i have found in embodied mindfulness, the mind that i am but hated for no good reason, the great and humble mind, is one with all minds. It is one as whole and as harmonious part. It is equally and identically that one mind, and in harmony with all other incarnations thereof. We have the mind of Christ.

Right, some very practical yoga tips, according to my experience.

1. Surrender to the weirdness of yoga. The heart will race with the oddness of it all, with feeling out of place and incompetent at “it”, at “doing yoga”, at mindfully existing. Surrender by just thinking “I surrender”. Mindfully watch how this thought impacts the heart. Scares it, calms it, thrills it. Surrender to that process of thoughtful embodiment. Thoughtfully embody your surrender in a heart of flesh.
2. Endure the deep pain. Simply sitting in meditation, I kept encountering cramp in my feet. In no bodily sensation was it more immediately obvious to me that the pain was a reflection to me of my resistance. I was scared of cramp, and I cramped. I accepted cramp, and first the pain really wasn’t that bad, and second it simply subsided. Instead of stretching the calf out, instead of resisting its desire to collapse in on itself, instead of resisting its desire to hide and curl up in infant or even embryonic genesis, i let it do so and it really hurt a lot less. The transformation was immediate. Then I began to get cramp in places I had never experienced before – the soles of my feet, my toes – and the cramp became blissful, one of my favourite experiences.
3. Let the nose know what it knows. I hated being awoken from my deep meditations by sneezing. I examined how this much lesser “pain” than cramp may follow the same logic, whereby the pain embodies my resistance to it, it punishes me in advance for the fact I will resist it. So I accepted the sneezy feeling, I negotiated the frustration and even shame ahead of sneezing, and had an amazing blissful experience, the sense of needing to sneeze coming to its felt climax, but no sneeze happening, just an ecstatic release of energy throughout my face and head. Now I treat this feeling as a kind of spidey-sense, telling me to be aware of something subtle. I treat it like an angelic butterfly landing on my nose, like a divine prompt to pay attention.
4. Catch your ticks. Sneezes, yawns, gestures, words, the movement of gaze and attention, catch and see it all. Take every bodily movement captive to Christ.
5. Give up on a desired result of yoga. Be conscious of whatever icons or idols have served as your inspiration to do yoga, but in desiring them, surrender them. In fullness of surrender is the embodied experience of death. The tomb is a womb for resurrected life.