the inner workings of a yogi

I’d like to acknowledge that when little things are taken up and made into big things, all of life changes. I can earnestly say that yoga and a healthy lifestyle are considerably different from the western perspective of medicine, but more specifically, to American culture. Being in Boulder and focusing on sports, physical strength, physical practice, and self-knowledge lands almost completely outside the American definitions of biomedicine. Yoga is a personal practice that will allow you to watch yourself take on a challenge. Physically, the practice regulates hormones, calms the mind, increases balance and coordination, re-patterns your experience with pain, and allows you to have compassion on yourself when you are in pain, and through it all, you grow. It will challenge you as far as you are willing to go. In principle, if you accept the challenge of yoga, you will benefit from it, and you will grow from it. The challenge is really the key. How far do you want to take yoga? Can it be that this is a practice that confirms you as an organism, and has infinite potential to allow you to grow? This begs the question, how much growth do you want to see in yourself? What do you believe yourself to be? The plan is to humble yourself into feeling small enough to desire to grow.

The interesting aspect of taking on yoga practice is, as you accept it as a priority in your life, the perspective on the rest of your life will begin to change. Take diet: fruit will become a sacred container for your own vital energy, vegetables will be prana-containers, and you will realize that in order to meet your challenge, you must use everything you can, and use it wisely. To cradle the spirit, to maintain the utmost interest in it, everything else must feed it. Or go. As a new order emerges within, you will be able to see yourself differently, and with that, the world.

Going to India was the very beginning of my change. To see the devotion of people to culture and transmission and attaining something, something very tangible and useful, makes one a little shy of the mark. Yoga is definitely about the bullseye, and the intensity it requires to hit the bullseye. It is very much the foundation to a beautiful feeling for being.

It all started in college for me. I was very interested in biochemistry, physiology, naturally, the foundation of my own being was as the core of this interest. And when tested with medical school, and the option to go out there and prove that I could take on a specific role with specific prescriptions for people, I failed. I knew something original, organic, free-thinking, and possibly challenging lay ahead. And to simply go into the world as an MD didn’t sound appealing to me. So here I am, being invited to invent my being. To practice health and happiness in a way that not many people have a chance to do. With a practical application not of harvesting crops, or sheep herding, or churning butter, but to be aware of challenges, and how I respond to those challenges. It is a very big deal to have awareness and understanding at the core of your life. I don’t think I can claim that for myself, but I’d like to consider it a competing priority.