19.8.2008

Everyone wants to move forward…

For the past few days when I join John in the yoga room at 6am to meditate I find him sitting with his notebook and using the time and space to create, to generate ideas. Last night I read a beautiful passage in my book about Stillness and wrote down a few inspiration points for john to read this morning. It was about what we can find in stillness and how in order to find ourselves we really need to lose ourselves, getting rid of all conditioning, patterns, beliefs…

John has been a great observant, not only how his students move in the yoga class but also their mindset, and applies a lot of things to the world around him. He has studies babies develop their movement patterns, how they become bipeds slowly, and he has observed elderly people, particularly Guruji who is now 93 years old. But John studied how Guruji moved up and down to the floor, how he adjusted his students in the class.

So I didn't know that John was working on his new book, looking at where astanga yoga really starts and the building blocks to a safe, stable practise with foundation and fundamental openings. So in a way when he said to be this morning "when people get on their mats they want to move forward, no one is interested in taking steps back" and this is exactly what he is trying to bring to people. Taking step backs to an unconditioned body, full of potential, full of good space and steady!

I have been thinking about this a lot today…Why is it that we are so keen to move forward, living in the future and missing the present moment? And the only time we revisit the past is in unpleasant thoughts or pleasant thoughts that now make us feel unpleasant. Why do we think that taking steps back is regression? In order to take steps forward sometimes we have to take steps back, because the new steps will fresh, full of awareness, new…

And we have a living example in the class this week, a girl who is so conditioned not only in her body but in her mindset that any new concept John and Lucy try to give her creates turbulence, a struggle as she tries to put things in logic rather than in experience. And she often misses the point. However both John and Lucy try with love and compassion and if all fails I guess we could say "not ready yet".