THE SCIENCE AND ART OF YOGA, May 2005

I thought I'd share with you some ideas from my teachers, Don and Amba Stapleton ( www.nosarayoga.com ).    This excerpt is from a piece entitled "Our Philosophy: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Yoga."

"In our view, yoga is an inquiry. The practice of yoga in your life begins with asking yourself the fundamental questions of meaning and purpose.

What is the relationship between your mind and body?

What is your capacity to gain consciousness of your experience?

A yogic inquiry will carry you on a journey into the unknown.   Notice a place in this moment that feels unfamiliar.   The unfamiliar little edges of our reality form the tributaries which lead to the great river of the unknown.   Mystery is the fundamental nature of the wisdom of the universe.   Yoga is a way of pondering the infinite wisdom of the universe through your own experience. It is in examining the little places in your experience that an opportunity arises to encounter the mystery of the universe. Mystery is what you don't know that you don't know. What you know that you don't know, you can bring into the known through effort and practice. Yoga helps you to pause and leave a little possibility that there Is something you don't know that you don't know.

The inquiry of yoga begins by slowing down and becoming aware of your awareness.   Awareness equals energy.   Energy equals awareness.   It is also true from an interdisciplinary vision of yoga to say that awareness follows energy, and energy follows awareness.   Where awareness goes, prana (life force) flows.   You literally and energetically create the world you live in through your awareness or lack of awareness.   Awareness can be practical when the logical mind is trained to witness sensations and to study cause and effect relationships in time.   This practical awareness from the logical mind forms the basis for yoga as a science.   Awareness also comes from the wisdom of our organism and interacts with the subconscious mind and thoughts hidden deep within our ancestral memory and encoding.   The subconscious and superconscious levels interplay to create your moods, your creative desires, and your need for self-knowledge and self-expression.   These domains of your experience from the foundation for living yoga as an art."

This is the beginning of my teachers' philosophy, which is the basis for my own personal practice and teaching.   I like to think of yoga as both an art and a science, as the last paragraph quoted above talks about.   Yoga is a way to balance out where we put our time, efforts and energy.   For those of us living our lives in the scientific realm, I invite you to think of your yoga practice as your art.   How can you draw on the creative side of your brain and inquire into the art - the dance, the song, the sculpture - of your yoga practice?   For those of us living lives full of artistic pursuits, then I invite you to find the scientific rigor contained within the practice.   Whether from a physics perspective, an anatomical perspective, a mathematical perspective -   how can you use the logical mind to catalog the interplay of movement, breath, sensation and awareness?

Hence, the scientific art of Yoga.

Namaste!

Barrett   5/15/05