A Spherical Life

When my sister first asked me if I wanted to do a cleanse with her clinic I was hesitant. My primary concern was whether I would still be able to do a full, hard asana practice. She assured me that with this particular cleanse I could still eat full meals so there should be no problem with strenuous physical activity. Still a little leery, I decided to give it a try. I could always stop if it was affecting my practice negatively. After the first couple days I was surprised to find that my practices were actually improving. I was more focused and my asanas became more steady.

A few days ago I read the following words shared by my Master:

...When attitudes become steady and contentment is established, the body is ready to perform posture. When attitudes are not purified by Yama and niyama, posture practice becomes violent. This leads to increase of desires, frustrations and mind becomes the master of you...

Following the cleanse, though much stricter than a "yogic diet," added an element of the niyama Saucha - purity, cleanliness - I believe I had been missing. As my body become cleaner, there were fewer fluctuations of my mind. Through this process, something became very clear to me. Yoga is a spherical life. My mind has been educated in a linear style - do this, this, and this, and that will happen. But our true selves do not exist linearly. It is simply the delusion of time that makes our ego cling to this fallacy. All parts of the Ashta Anga - Eight Limb - path of Yoga coexist all around us. As we bring those parts into ourselves, our sphere gets smaller and smaller. Just as a decrease in volume increases pressure and creates heat in thermodynamics (still an engineer, sorry), our inner heat - Tapas - increases the closer we draw in our sphere; both the physical heat raised in asana practice and the heat of our zealous pursuit of liberation. This process continues until we are fully absorbed by the sphere, until we ourselves become the sphere.

Practice, Practice, Practice does not mean practice asanas only. Abyasa literally translated is practice but the word practice is not complete. Abyasa in its complete form means uninterrupted, continuous without gaps, doing of something with complete attention and awareness. So, for those who take the meaning literally are going to end up in the abyss as the sutra has been understood incompletely. The whole life will be spent on practice the wrong technique. - Master Paalu