Self Unbounded

I've recently started reading a new book on Ayurveda, the Indian system of health and healing, often called the sister science of Yoga.

In her book, Absolute Beauty, Pratima Raichur gives a definition of beauty as "the experience of seeing/feeling the Self unbounded." I found this definition immediately resonated with me and I began thinking of times I'd recently been in the presence of "beauty". Hearing soulful music at the Arts Festival, re-reading one of my favorite Gary Snyder poems, watching the sunset over the Southern Alps. What was it exactly that made these experiences beautiful? The composition of sound, colour, texture, or light? All no doubt play a part. However, what I remembered most strongly wasn't anything external but how being in the presence of beauty made me FEEL inside....

A feeling of being bigger than myself. More vast, more free...and connected somehow to the larger flow of life.

In yoga, the essence of the Self is always unbounded. Always completely free and already completely full. It is known in Sanskrit as satchitananda--truth, consciousness, and bliss. As my teacher John Friend says, "There is no work to be done, nothing to be accomplished other than the true joy of existence itself!"

Yet, how often do we feel this way about our Self? It seems that part of our experience of being human is that we FORGET. We get cloaked, we have bad days, we argue with our partner, we hate our job, we're tired of winter. But these experiences, this forgetting, is not necessarily a bad thing. Because they allow us the bliss of getting to remember the beauty again. So we see the sunset, and we read the poem, and we kiss the loved one and we think....Oh, yeah!

On the mat as we move through our postures, we taste sachitananda in those moments when we experience the Self, OUR Self, completly unbounded. We must release the striving to achieve a "perfect" pose and the need to compete with the person practicing next to us. We can choose to occupy the space of freedom, the place that both opens and soothes, where we remember and celebrate the bigness inside. We can choose to practice in a way that reveals and enhances the beauty that is already present within us.