Savour the Sweetness

Sometimes intention is a tricky thing...

As I taught all of my classes last week using intention as my theme, you could say it has been definitely on my mind. In general, I would consider myself a fairly intentional person. Perhaps even sometimes a fairly intense person. A good many of us that come to yoga are. Brimming with passion, enthusiasm, dedication, and a healthy dose of discipline, we are very practiced at investing our actions with a certain level of meaning. But what happens when the intention (or perhaps, aka assumed result) we have placed on an action, or a particular set of actions, needs or is required to change?

Chaos emerges. Or so I discovered last Monday morning...

Being this fairly intentional person (yes, also a Capricorn), I plan all of my yoga classes in advance with postural sequences relating to theme, theme relating to the bigger picture, and the bigger picture keeping me in love with this practice that I teach and try to live. However, on this Monday morning, fifteen minutes before I left for class, I realized that I had misplaced my very intentional class plans...

My big picture went out the window!

What came in was anger, annoyance, and frustration. NOT the emotions you want to experience right before you go to yoga class. ESPECIALLY not if you are the teacher :)

What my well meaning intention lacked was the softness, the sweetness that would enable it to be adaptable. To be (no pun intended) flexible. Instead, my intention was rigid, fixed, immutable.

While I did eventually locate my notebook, I felt blessed for this gentle reminder that it is not just the making of an intention that matters but also the character, the “flavour” that it maintains. The Sanskrit word “rasa” describes this wonderfully. Rasa means the essential taste or flavour of a particular experience of thing. What sort of taste do I want my intention to leave in my mouth long after its made??

A sweet one!

In my yoga classes, I teach my students that we always want to find the sweetness in what we do. This applies to our asana! I’ve never valued the no pain-no gain model of yoga or life practice. If there’s no joy or sweetness in it, there’s something wrong. In fact, if there’s nothing sweet in it, why even bother?

At the same time, there is a formula or a structure to support our experience of sweetness in the fullest way. In every single pose, we use the Universal Principles of Alignment as a recipe to literally unfold the best and sweetest taste the moment offers. A formula you say? How “scientific”. Rather rigid, don't you think?

Exactly the opposite. Think for a moment about the difference between a large spoonful of raw sugar and a large spoonful or warm, cinnamon-y, homemade apple pie with ice cream. Both are obviously sweet but the experience, the rasa of each is radically different. One sweetness has been crafted by intention. And the intention is expressed in each spoonful through the language of a tried and true recipe.

On the mat, we build each pose from the inside out. Using the Universal Principles of Alignment like a recipe to creatively unfold more and more of our sweetness.

However having the recipe doesn't guarantee that you won’t drop the pie on the floor :) SO we practice with a framework, with a structure, with support but also always with softness and openness to whatever this life, this body & this mind, presents to us on this particular day.

Whatever deep intentions you set in class last week, whatever intentions you keep bringing into your life, I encourage you to make and hold them softly. Let their form frame and shape your actions but be open to the ways that life may compel us to change the form. Let go of the things that do not serve us. Remain open to all the blessings that life may present in its own mysterious ways.

“Soul drunk, body ruined, these
two sit helpless in a wrecked wagon.
Neither knows how to fix it...

But listen to me, for one moment,
quit being sad. Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms
around you. God.”

Rumi