"Yoga off the mat"

(This blog post was created from a recording I made one day. I realize my speaking style is different than my writing style--I'm even more wordy! It came to me in meditation one day. I'll try to post the recording too.)

Yoga off the mat.

This is a phrase that you hear a lot from yogis, and it's probably a hashtag on Instagram. It’s a phrase that is out there, for sure, and it means different things.

So what does it mean to me?

“Yoga off the mat” means that what we do outside of the studio is yogic, can be yogic and has nothing to do with what we do inside the studio and at the same time it means that what we do outside of the studio can have everything to do with what we do in the studio, which is that hopefully these practices are building up some sort of awareness, some sort of sensitivity to how you're moving through life and maybe how you're moving through the world and the earth, and how you're interacting with other people, and how all of those influences are having an effect on you, having an effect on your body, mind, and spirit.

So we say body, mind, and spirit a lot referring to yoga, because it's a useful framework, it implies, however, some sort of division between body, mind, and spirit and really the point of yoga is to find the integration of those things, where the boundaries sort of blur. But for the sake of this topic let's think about those separately and think about how those all show up, how they all activate, when we say something like yoga off the mat.

Body

Well it's really just about an awareness of how your body is moving through the earth, on the earth, and how your posture, is what your steps are like, and, especially, how your breathing is—the quality of your breath.

And your very sort of fluidity of movement—or not. It means how you might be holding your shoulders and your spine when you're sitting; it means the awareness of the tilt of your pelvis when you're standing; it means just finding a neutral back at various times during the day; it means just the way you might lift something or reach for something; and most of all it means your breath and how your breath is sort of integrated into your everyday movements.

So we could probably go on and on with different examples of this, but it basically means the awareness of your body as it's moving through, I would say, space and time.

Mind

It’s noticing what you're thinking about, taking moments to really notice what your reactions are to, for example, your likes and dislikes, your aversions and attractions, to all of the stimuli that you're presented with every single day, every single second, and also what part of your personality really is ego.

Ego—big subject—is about how you are holding on to, attracted to, the senses, accomplishment, and defeat. And how you might appreciate that defeat—whatever that is—and accomplishment—ditto—are somehow a reflection of you, are somehow about your true self, when in fact these are not your true self. Neither is your personality.

And so mind then, and yoga off the mat, is really trying to calm down the inner voices, so that you might connect to a higher wisdom. And there are certainly ways of knowing—going back to the body—that can be felt throughout your body: in your stomach, in your heart, in your brain, when you can connect to a part of your mind that is not so much personality, not so much ego, but is wisdom.

Wisdom comes, and it's always there, ready to talk to us, if we can calm down, again, the ego and the personality.

Spirit

This is about a how you're moving through the world, with empathy, how you're moving through the world with a sense of connectedness, how you realize that there is something probably binding all of us and that could be any sort of life force that you imagine.

It could also be divinity.It is purely interpretive of what you believe spirit to be.

I don't think that yoga and the writings that I have examined have very much dogma at all about what this might be. It is purely an individual felt force, and it is definitely available to us all the time.

So it is just about pausing and cueing into, tapping into, some sort of great energy field.

In the yoga texts it is called purusha. That is a Sanskrit word That is comes from Samkhya philosophy, and it doesn't really matter that much to this discussion, but just simply knowing that there is a construct for this, which separates all that you are physically from some sort of greater connecting force—I might call it divine intelligence.

Yoga off the mat means that you can connect to this in some way.

So that's a little bit about how we experience, or we can experience, we are invited to experience, our body, our minds, and our spirits completely outside of the studio.

In fact the studio might just be like a little tune-up shop for the body, mind, and spirit in the way that you might take a car into a shop to be tinkered with and sort of optimized, but certainly the job of a car is not to be inside of the shop; the job of the car is to be moving through the environment and the transporting us, so these great physical beings that you have are chariots, if you will, of your body mind and spirit.