Lessons from 20 years on the mat: #5 There is MORE

This summer marks my 20th year practicing yoga.  What started in the basement of an office building has become a journey that I never could’ve imagined . In celebration, I’m sharing the biggest lessons that 20 years of yoga has taught me in the hopes that they support you on your yoga journey.

Lesson #5  There is More

I was a pretty mystical child.  I was always drawn to nature, ritual, imagination and the arts.  They made me feel like there was something more going on than the simple life I was living.  So I often touched aliveness and interior depth that my siblings never seemed to experience.  Everyone told me I was an old soul.  

So then, when I first started learning yoga philosophy I experienced a deep sense of recognition.  Though I’d never been formally taught any of it, I felt like I already knew it.  Like it was something I’d known in childhood only forgotten when I became an adult.  Learning the teachings was less an introduction to something new and more a reawakening of something forgotten.  It felt like coming home.  

What I recognized in the yoga teachings is the something MORE that I experienced as a child.  The language was different, but the experience was the same.   

UNIVERSAL INTELLIGENCE

What yoga has highlighted for me is that there is an intelligence in the Universe that has nothing to do with book smarts.  It is the same intelligence that invites plants to grow and dead things to rot.  It is the intelligence that turns on genes and enlivens your body.  It is the intelligence that keeps the seasons cycling and makes your paper cut heal.  

It is mysterious.  Unfathomable.  Unexplainable.  It is the vast wholeness that try as we might to study in parts cannot ever really be taken apart.

It is that MORE-ness that is bigger than all the smaller distractions we get so caught up in as we move through daily life.

 WE NEED MORE 

Unfortunately, most of us spent many many years being taught to ignore it.  We spent countless hours investing in intelligence that has something to do with facts, figures, and ‘rational thinking’.  These things while, useful in their own way, distract from the vibrant aliveness of Universal Intelligence.  

And so, for many people, it’s hard to make mental space for ideas that aren’t already spelled out and proven by controlled studies.  Anything else is just fluff.

But, then, how do you account for wonder? How do you account for the calm presence you feel when you’ve cried yourself to the bottom of your well of grief and know that you’re being comforted by some unseen force.? How do you account for the mystery of existence? 

We humans need that something MORE.    We need Universal Intelligence that has nothing to do with book smarts and everything to do with all of life.  

IT’S IN YOU

The intelligence of the Universe is not separate from you.  It is in you.  As you.  It takes embodiment as you. The only reason you do not know this is that you have forgotten.  Your awareness to the intelligence of life is what determines how much you experience it.  So you can either stay caught in the small dramas of your life.  And stuck in facts, rationality, and limitation - or you can open yourself to something MORE.  

I think one of the simplest ways to reacquaint yourself with Universal Intelligence is by re-inhabiting your body.  Because, if that intelligence lives in you, as you, certainly your own flesh and bone are infused with it and therefore direct inroads to connection with it. That’s part of why physical yoga can be so transformative for people.  

If you pay attention, you can come into contact with the pulsation of aliveness in your body.   And yoga class is one of the few places where modern folks slow down and pay close enough attention to feel it.  Can you feel aliveness in your feet right now? 

The more you come into relationship with aliveness, and the more conscious of it you become, the more you start to experience Universal Intelligence.  As your connection grows the more you learn, not from the outside, but from the inside.  Eventually deep truths start to be revealed to you.   Synchronicity and knowing things you have no reason to know become more common.  And there’s a sense of a veil being drawn aside so that you see life more clearly.  

(They say that ancient yogis understood quantum physics and were able to map subtle structures of the nervous system because they were so attuned to Universal Intelligence.)

 
LEAN INTO THE MYSTERY

I think that for many people, this lesson is more of a leap than the earlier lessons that I shared.  But that’s only because we’ve been educated away from our natural connection with life.  If you allow yourself the suspend rational thought and move towards the mysterious, you might find that there really is something more than meets the eye.  To me, this is one of the greatest gifts in the yoga practice: discovering and experiencing myself as a part of a much bigger, mysterious wholeness that is innately intelligent.