Fundamental Roots
What grounds us fundamentally roots our growth.
Whatever grows from our foundation essentially is our path towards the sun (knowledge).
We as a culture love beautiful things. So the glory of what is above the foundation tends to be our focus.
However,
Your bloom and color will only be as strong and lasting as your roots.
Do not break your stem. Do not fracture your frame. Or even strangle yourself with falsities.
Determined in life… living.
Find the tension to be firm enough in our integrity and yet flexible enough to also sway with the breeze, pelted by rain, buried in dirt… all the while continuously growing with determination and beauty.
To inhibit your growth, strangles our roots and virtually collapses our foundation.
This leads us to asana.
We love the beautiful, exciting things. We don’t put too much thought to what will safely get us where we would like to be. But its exciting, and we want to look/ perform and be what we see. So we might be willing to sacrifice learning and developing a foundation by just creating something and hoping for the best. We might not consider the dedication of years and amount of discipline that went in to developing these poses, or the ease that now presents itself within the images we now obsess over.
Above all else, value knowledge, learn everything, experience things through a new found dedication. Avoid the fast and easy, placing importance in substance. Look deeper into the shiny new thing, challenge your willingness to forever be a student, to stay curious, to be inspired by others and still be able to show up with a beginners mind!
Your physical body is important. As similar as we all are, we are also unique. Our tightness/ flexibility/ strength or lack there of is different than our neighbor. When we are able to learn how to be aware of our own uniqueness we can then fine tune our asanas to work for us instead of against us. Seek teachers with the ability to help recognize and teach you these things. Teachers that remain students themselves, with a disciplined practice so that they can share from a place of honest experience.
Remember your physical body is important. We want to function with a great quality of life well in to what we deem “old age”. A body that can function in a manner that will help us to achieve “health”, “optimal health”.
Our mind and body are intertwined. When we are injured physically and unable to function freely, our mind will also feel injured… sadness/ depression. Yoga is beautifully unique in that it teaches us this unity. We often discover asana first, and after a class we feel so incredible that we continue to return. Asana was developed as a tool to balance strength and flexibility so that we can discover “sthira sukha” (strength and ease) health and physical ability to then challenge our minds as we sit and attempt to quiet the mind for periods of time (meditation). So….. Value being a student. Headstands are cool and all, but if your foundation is built on water you may tweak or even break your neck, and we all would like to be able to walk out of a yoga class to then come back again. “wink wink”
written by jen knox