Ask Parvati 20 - Tantra: Yoga Is Everywhere, Part 2: Yoga Flowers

 

YOGA FLOWERS

(Continued from Part 1: Freedom in Freedom)

 

There is tremendous value in discipline. The riches found in yoga and meditation practices blossom with frequent watering. I had already established a wonderful rhythm now in full motion, which felt expansive, so I kept the momentum going. I began to meet my morning practice with a willingness to listen to and serve the still small voice within. By being quiet and receptive, I was open to answers.

 

Having become stifled by my rigorous Hatha yoga practice of “shoulds”, I went through a two-year period when that still small voice told me to lie there, every day, for an hour. Each day, during my regular practice time, all I did was savasana (lying on the floor, face up), allowing myself to dissolve into the ground, into my body, into the moment.

 

As I followed the spacious impulse that fed my yoga and meditation practice, I was drawn to express that same joyful expanse through my musical compositions and performances. I became clearer about the spiritual impulse and intentions that fed my musical compositions and performing.

 

At that time, I was also guided to take more modern dance classes. Though I had seen her perform prior to this, it was then that I came into contact with Margie Gillis, her teaching schedule and her immensely inspiring body of work.

 

In one of her workshops, I was arrested by the thought that I was hearing myself speak. At that time, I was regularly teaching yoga classes, using similar vocabulary that she now was using to teach me. In her, I saw an aspect of myself that had become bound by yoga routines. My world expanded exponentially when she invited us to begin exploring all of life as choreography, doing the waiting-for-the-bus dance, doing the sitting-in-a-chair dance, doing the getting-dressed-in-the-morning dance. Life is dancing, so dance it.

 

Margie’s spiritually and artistically integrated worldview helped me bring my already bursting-at-the-seams yoga practice even more off the mat and into the world. I translated her guidance to my yoga and meditation practiced and started doing waiting-in-the-supermarket-line tadasana (standing tall pose) or cleaning-in-the-shower tadasana. I began to see that wherever I stood was my yoga mat. Life became more of a fluid dance in which I could play, moment-to-moment with what is. The possibility of yoga, union with the divine, began to flower everywhere.

 

(Continues tomorrow with Yoga In the Nightclub)