Out of Body

I didn't practice on Saturday, as prescribed, but I did today. I don't have a whole lot to say about it - it was one of those gorgeous, glorious practices where it slips past, breath to breath, and all you can say about it after is, "Stuff happened." Including another out-of-body Savasana where I wasn't asleep but I sure as hell wasn't in the practice room.
It was good.
I've been thinking about these lyrics from Epica in We Will Take You With Us - I'm not sure how they relate (as J. D. Salinger said, "I'm not sure what I mean, but I mean it,") but they seemed attached to practice today.

People

created

religious inventions

to give their lives a glimmer of hope

and to ease their fear

of dying. 

I think it's partially that I've heard people ask, 'what's the point of yoga, enlightenment?' as if sneering. For me, yoga has been learning to sit with things without fear - simply allowing them to exist, and myself to exist, and all to be still. I always want to turn to the people who ask that question and say, No. The point of yoga is to be able to sit with the fact that some day you will die - that everyone and everything you love will one day be gone, and if you remain at all, you will be alone. It is learning to sit with that knowledge without dissolving in mindless fear. I don't know if that's what it really is, at least in a larger sense, but for me, that's part of it. Yoga is about learning to face things with quiet courage and, moment to moment, push in deeper. Ha: I can end with yet another Dune nugget.

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear.

I will permit it to pass over and through me.

And when it has gone I will turn the inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone there will be nothing...

only I will remain.

This is yoga.