Day 238 – As a fitness professional and teacher, through almost 40+ years of experience in movement and physical fitness, I have learned through taking classes and mimicking my teachers, most of them masters of their craft:  dance, sports, and exercise.  I have learned about various diets, or nutritional regimens that help foster these, as well.  Only recently have I been curious about or awakened to what Rolf calls the “true nature of our existence.”  And by this, I mean the science, chemistry, and esoteric mumbo-jumbo of health and good work.  Indeed, Rolf explains this phenomenon, writing:  “We come to the mat with a narrowly defined physicality.  Our practice breaks down this definition.”

Today’s reading gives “food for thought” on what is really happening when we sustain a pratice.  Just so, in the opening quote by David Kennedy, Rolf encapsulates the idea of consciousness developed in yoga practice, recording:  “Millions of cells have come and gone, different food has been metabolized on all different levels, whether it’s food of thought, food of emotions, food of light and energy, food of relationships, food of organice substances…And then there is the beautiful metaphor of it, training consciousness to absorb multiple lifetimes within this lifetime.”

Indeed, some of my most skilled and wise teachers of movement intuitively understand and live according to the metabolism and metaphor, and quite fewer actually study.  As such, Rolf points out that our asana practice can provide us with a “steady place from which to observe the river and the vision to see it as it is.”  As we patiently and steadily create and sustain our yoga practice, from asana to meditation, each “new physical reality on the mat gives birth to a corresponding psychological and spiritual possibility.”  We “flow from birth to death, death to rebirth, endlessly re-creating ourselves, endlessly reinventing ourselves.”  Perhaps with each waking moment or realization of the sheer enormity of this that requires more practice and more study and more immersion into the veritable river we reinvent and recreate a better, more kinder, more patient self.