Yoga 101

It's an early Thanksgiving morning, but I'm up. Slept about 5 hours.
It is now, from what I have gathered through some reading, the optimal time to do yoga - around 5:30-6:30am.

I did it on Sunday morning the 13th after a tense (for various reasons) Sat night in which I felt like I could not really BREATHE. Nothing asthmatic or even physiological per se. I could breathe in, I just didn't feel like I could get it ALL in. Nothing was wrong with me, but nothing was right either.

I don't really get that "walls are closing in on me" feeling - very often. But when it breaks down like that I have to just break IT down and take stock.

And the place to begin?

The breath.

And the best way, that I have found, to look at that?

Yoga.

I know atheletes will tell you that they are in that zone when they are pumped and moving. Having had a few pretty exhalted runs of my own in years past, I can see their point.

But the advantage Yoga has for me is that it addresses not only strength, flexibility, energy, metabolism, and cardio (and some of these on subtle, mysteriously effective levels), but also that still point - the center of the spokes' wheel, around which the chaotic, ceaseless flow of things, people and ideas radiates. And right next to which you can always find yourSELF quietly breathing.

This is important because our breathing follows - as if tethered to a chain - our emotional state. It mirrors it. If you have ever been panicked for whatever reason, you know of what I speak. But it can also work in reverse order and the focus on the regularity of breath can create its own state, it can literally calm yourself down.

Now, everybody KNOWS this, if only instinctively. The trick is the application of the knowledge. It is the gleaning of wisdom out of the information. This is why it is easy to misunderstand yoga - because we THINK we know what it is. Better to say you don't know - as I want to say here.

This what I'm typing? They are just impressions.

So anyway, the 101 part of the heading was for me, not for what I can offer.

Because I learned again how powerful and centering and generally good the asanas are. And the breathing with them. The perfect symmetry of 6 seconds in and 6 seconds out...

And so I did it again on Thursday last and now it has been a week and I am missing the daily, or near-daily practice.

Why I am not IN that daily, or near-daily? The inscrutible mystery of my life...

But everyday is an oppertunity not to be lost and afterall, it is the perfect time.