It’s April and it’s snowing. It’s that in between time when you think you are just about at springtime and wham! you have to take a step backward into winter. It’s unnerving. And yet it’s a necessary part of the journey we are all on.
Transitions are often overlooked in yoga. We are muscling our way into each pose, ignoring the space in between them. It takes patience and mindfulness to draw attention to those important moments. We are often imbalanced, unstable, and ungrounded, making our way to the next pose. When you slow down to experience the transitions in your practice it brings the flow into a kind of mental slow motion so you can appreciate the those spaces in between as their own meaningful poses. Sure, your core will be more fully engaged without all the momentum you’ve been using previously, but more importantly you’ll savor the spaces in between poses, and let’s face it there’s a lot of that in an average class.
This is an important lesson that like all lessons from the mat, translates so beautifully off the mat. We often are looking for the big moments in our lives, and disregard the little ones, the day to day that actually make up the bulk of our lives. How ironic.
There are so many of these seemingly insignificant moments in our lives. Rather than breeze through them, why not slow down and appreciate them? It’s the journey, right? not the destination.
From the ancient yogic text, the Bhagavad Gita:
“Yoga is the journey of the self, through the self, to the self.”