First, Reverential capitalization is the practice of capitalizing words, particularly pronouns, that refer to an aspect of the Divine.
In my recent Teacher Training with Elena Brower, I learned ... I say learned, because until then I knew this by rote, but not by heart), that yoga is the practice of stilling the mind, of calming the fluctuations that veil our True Nature.
I learned that yoga is the "complete mastery over the roaming tendencies of the mind", or said another way it is "the intentional resolution of all self-limiting, self-defeating thoughts, patterns, and tendencies within our personal energy field."Said yet another way, "Yoga is the uniting of consciousness in the heart."
We utilize these shapes that we make to mirror the situations in our lives that disturb us the most. The practice of yoga is a training ground, where the only true challenger is our own minds. Yoga is a state, where our minds are luminous reflections of the beauty, peace, and good that we all posses.
It takes a minute. I'm nearly 2 decades into this practice and I just learned ... learned... this. The yoga sutras say that yoga is the practice and the state. They say that Yoga is found in the stillness of the mind, but that the mind can never be stilled - let that land for a second ..
I believe that the point is to practice, to observe, to surrender and do it again. I believe that we hold peace ... and our task is to string moments of peace together until eventually we are more Light than dark, we are more at peace than at war, we are more relaxed than anxious, more loving than cruel, more sane than not. Through our practice, and especially our breathing we remember who we are. Then, we can meet each other in reality. As Rumi (my soul brother poet) says, there is a field beyond wrong-doing and right-doing, meet me there.
With Love,
Kat