Our accommodation is decorated in a way that reflects our likes, dislikes and our needs. Another reflection of our character is to what extent we keep our accommodation clean and tidy, if we make sure we have fresh air and if we have plants that are given enough water and light. In the course of a life time we move to other accommodation, even to other cities and countries.
Yet there is one form of accommodation that we keep for the duration of our life, and that is the body we were given by birth. It has no need of a postcode, but you and everybody else can find it easily. Yes you are the sole occupant of your body and as such your feelings and sensations are only able to be felt by you.
If you have taken the time and energy to make your accommodation clean, tidy and to conform to your notion of comfort, it would seem obvious that your life time accommodation, that is to say your body, should not only be decorated and clean on the outside, but also healthy and comfortable on the inside?
Whilst you will not be able to walk through the wall after a Holistic Yoga class, you experience a different state of consciousness!
This knowledge is based upon your awareness of feelings, on the cognition of your body and according to that you take action and make decisions. But what happens if there are feelings and situations in your body that you are not aware of?
The majority of people begin yoga classes owing to something that they wish to improve, change or cure.
But what everybody discovers during a yoga class, are the mental and psychical areas of which we were previously unconscious and this can be surprising and confronting.
So yoga reconnects you with the body you live in, or let us call it the "house". Should you not be happy with something, it is important as well as easier to improve communication and comfort in your ‘house’ than by vacating the body in which you live! After all you cannot swop it for someone else’s body.
The attitude of the health authorities and the politicians who shape our society, is to wait until something goes wrong in the body and only then take measures to fix it. 99% of money and resources are used for this method of symptom fixing, which is becoming more and more expensive to finance and this is how we have all been taught to behave.
Yoga and other "alternative" methods of healing place 99% of their efforts and time in finding the root cause (awareness, or mindfulness in modern jargon) and in prevention in order to cure ‘dis-ease’.
If you want to clean your accommodation, you take the vacuum cleaner or whatever else is needed and you do it yourself. Alternatively you can hire somebody to do it for you. One method involves taking responsibility yourself, the other in paying somebody else to take that responsibility. It is the last attitude that the majority of us adopt when it comes to the body we live in.
Awareness of the physical body serves as the beginning of deeper, more subtle and greater awareness of other areas of your being. In time we begin to feel the energy that sustains the material body and we experience things that go beyond the confines of the pre-conditioned mind. I am describing the individual spiritual journey from the gross to the subtle, from the material to the non-material levels of experience.
During the Introduction classes this process begins to germinate. During the Going Deeper classes we begin to further understand ourselves and to feel the benefits of yoga more fully and more deeply. Eventually we begin to express and to live that which we have learnt and to help others lead a more aware, healthy, positive and contented life. Procrastination or pro-activity, the choice is yours!
"Yoga is our heritage of yesterday, the need of today and the culture of tomorrow" ≈ Swami Satyananda, founder of the Bihar School of Yoga