My favorite sutra of Sutras of Patanjali has always been the first one, “Now, begin the practice of yoga.” It just is so inviting, isn’t it? There is nothing about any prerequisites or any kind of state you need to be in, physically our otherwise, to practice yoga. Also, and more importantly, I think of it in terms of all of life. With any venture I think this sutra is giving permission to go ahead and just start. Go ahead and be the person you want to be.
So many times in my life I’ve thought about things that I wanted to do, and instead of doing them I created all these barriers about why I needed to do a bunch of other stuff first. So much so that I’d end up not doing the thing I wanted to do. This sutra, to me, is saying it’s ok to just start the thing that we feel will be of benefit to us. Don’t worry about it being perfect. Don’t worry that you might not be the best. Just go ahead and start.
Another thing I recently learned was the whole tantric concept of “now”. In the tantric view, “now” is setup from the past to benefit the future. And when you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. What we do right now, in this moment, is being done because actions from the past got us to this point. At the same time, if we really use the now to it’s fullest potential (like, possibly, practicing yoga in the now sometimes) it will be of benefit to our future. It’s just cool to think about how every single now that comes along we can consciously decide to use to moment be make our future more inline with the light of our True Self.
I hope you enjoy this free video yoga class I included about this idea.
John