Vastness and Sensations

Reading from Tuesday November 29, 2011 yoga class

The following piece appeared in the November 2011 Yoga Journal, written by Matthew Sanford, a paraplegic yoga teacher

"If I were to ask you to bring forward the very best part of yourself right now, how would you do it?  I am not asking you for a psychological insight about yourself.  I am not looking for a thought, or even an intention.  I mean: What does your best self feel like, as a sensation?  How tangible is that sensation?  How do you access it? 

Your yoga practice offers a methodology for reaching deeper into the subtle nature of your experience and your sensation.  Lift your chest and feel how awareness flows more gracefully through your limbs.  It lightens the quality of sensation within you while distributing subtle awareness throughout your body.  This simple action can be found in almost every one of your poses, and it fundamentally changes the way you interact with the space IN and AROUND you.

Realizing the transformative power of a lifted chest requires you to listen to your experience BEYOND the muscular actions.  It requires sensing and connecting to the subtle parts of WHO and WHAT you are. 

I am completely paralyzed from the chest down.  On a purely physical level, I have no sensation below my chest.  Instead, I experience a resounding silence.  But when I go deeper into that silence, into the parts of me that I cannot directly feel or control, I discover that my inward silence is itself a sensation.  It is not as tangible as flexing a muscle.  But the sensation...in the silence...is refined by the yoga asanas.  When I lift my chest, I can feel my inner body move through my paralyzed limbs. 

Your situation is similiar.  The heart of yoga does not reside solely in the strength of your muscles, ligaments, and tendons... not even in the best version of your self.  Yoga asana combines the sensation of what you can feel and can control with the inner awareness of what you cannot tangibly feel and cannot control. 

Think of it this way:  What you feel and experience of yourself in the present moment is only the tip of the iceberg.  The majority of you resides below the surface, out of sight and IMMEASURABLE.  You will never know the precise contours of what lies beneath from purely tangible evidence.  But you are vast, and you can open to this vastness as a sensation.  Stay patient and listen to the subtle sensations of the inner body.  When you connect at this level, wonderful things begin to happen, and not just in your asana practice.  You will open to and believe in the vastness of who and what you are."

Matthew Sandford is an amazing human being. He has been a paraplegic for the past 32 years.  I read his book, "Waking: A memoir of trauma and transcendence"  where he tells about how yoga changed his life.  I love when he says that the majority of us resides below the surface and that we are IMMEASURABLE.  We are so much more than our bodies and we are all capable of so much more than we can ever imagine.   As Carolyn Myss says... the world behind our eyes... it is vast.  I believe it.  Yoga helps us tune into our bodies and the longer we practice the better we are at listening to our bodies and to the more subtle sensations, just like Matthew is talking about.  The power of yoga is bigger than you and me.