On The Mat.

My secret is out…I am a yoga junkie, and my new favorite person is my yogi, Nikki. Despite her attempts to make my body a human pretzel, I find her teaching insightful and her encouragement healing. One of my favorite sayings of Nikki is “use your mat as your own private laboratory; because how you do anything is how you do everything.” I took me a long time to understand the meaning of this statement.

During one session, I was trying particular hard to do a posture. I so wanted to get it right. I look at the woman next to me and she was moving in and out of this posture with much ease…That made me try even harder… Then my yogi saw me getting frustrated, she gently came to me and said…why are you trying so hard…remembering to breathe and letting your body surrender into the pose. Hmm…. Breathe and surrender…and on my own private laboratory, I got it! Breathe and surrender not just on the mat but with everything. My yogi was right how you do anything is how you do everything. So often I find myself trying so to make things happen, when all I really need to do is breathe and surrender!

Breath is something we take for granted, it the first thing we do when we are born and it is the last thing we do when we die…but yet, we hardly ever notice our breath. In yoga we are taught to consciously breathe. Consciously, we do need to be aware of breath, it is our life force; it is the very breath of God. In the Hebrew language the letters used to “name” God were unpronounceable; one particular adaptation to the unpronounceable was Yahweh. It is a name for God that is incapable of pronouncing with out breath. You have to breathe the word to say it! So as I breathe on the mat and move in and out of poses I remember to breathe in the very life force of God, to exhale all that does not serve us and to relax and let go…to surrender. In these anxious times let us remember to breathe.

Being able to surrender is a hard thing to do, trying to make things happen, moving in our own will and not God’s will is often our modes operandi, but it is exactly what God invites us to do! God invites us to surrender into the rest and into the peace of God. Too often we become human “doings” and not human “beings.” We don’t give ourselves the chance to just “be.” On the mat my favorite meditation mantra is the scripture “Be still and know that I am God.” The ability to quite our anxious spirit and our trouble heart is hard sometimes, we become distracted by what the problem, situation, challenge - looks like to the natural eye, we are distracted from being able rest in the assurance of Gods loving mercy.

On or off the matt, I think we all can take my yogi’s teachings to heart. When we find ourselves, struggling wit how to make something happen, let’s remember to step into breath and breathe consciously, allow God’s spirit to energize and gives us clarity and strength to let God be God in any situation or circumstance, and then just let go and surrender into the peace of God.