Samadhi

My teacher Gerard once said something that resonates strongly within me, describing at once how yoga makes me feel and why i practice yoga.  He said during one of our workshops that the most challenging of all yoga poses we would ever experience would be sitting in stillness for meditation.  Padmasana, the lotus pose, is one of these traditional seated 'asanas' originating in the meditative practices of ancient India. The asana is said to resemble a lotus, encourage appropriate breathing and foster physical stability.

I have since often heard myself describe the final, universal objective of yoga to be 'stillness'. This describes in very few words, a feeling that is otherwise very challenging to explain - the feeling of being perfectly centered, or samadhi.

samadhi is, in the yoga tradition, the eighth and final limb identified in the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali.  It has been described as a non-dualistic state of consciousness in which the consciousness of the experiencing subject becomes one with the experienced object, and in which the mind becomes still, one-pointed or concentrated while the person remains conscious.

People often find certain yoga poses to be challenging due to their self perception of their physical inflexibility or lack of suppleness. I enjoy sharing Gerard's simple suggestion to illustrate that the poses are a pathway towards a greater objective, and to suggest that the poses are not the objective themselves but rather a passage or experience.  The poses are the actions that we practice, from the basic beginner postures through to the most challenging, advanced versions to prepare ourselves to sit.  To sit and breathe freely and to source stability from a physical lightness is a state of being, the poses are our journey.

This is my first memoir entry since May 2010.  In my next entry I will pick up from where i left off almost 3 years ago to continue sharing my own journey with samadhi, Yoga and Me.

Namaste.