Japanese Carpentry

Reading from Wednesday, April 29, 2015 yoga class

One day, I hope to get lucky enough to attend a workshop by Donna Farhi.  I think she is a fabulously wonderful yoga teacher.  The following is from her book, "Bringing Yoga to Life."

When we begin Yoga practice in earnest, we are signing up for a lifelong apprenticeship with our Self and to the Self.  I like to tell my own teacher trainees that Yoga is not Woodworking 101 but Japanese carpentry.  Our teachers may show us precisely how to bevel the edge of a table or chair, but there is only person who can bevel that edge.  No matter how clear the teacher's description or careful her demonstration, it may still take a hundred crooked, crude, and rough attempts to become proficient and produce that smooth edge.  Just as a poorly sanded surface will splinter fingers for years to come, false understanding will continually sabotage a life. What we produce through such patient artistry is a spiritual understanding of enduring beauty.

We may find that when we begin our practice we have a low tolerance for frustration.  We may use any slip-up as evidence that we have unwisely placed our faith in such a practice.  Through our cultural conditioning, we may falsely believe that things SHOULD come easily, that life should be as it is on TV: a series of climatic moments where everyone is having a birthday.  Or we blame someone else: "If the teacher were clearer, I'm sure I would get this."  But nothing can replace the minutes, hours, and days of practice, observation, and just plain old trial and error involved in a lifelong apprenticeship.  It is the very slowness of this apprenticeship that IS the healing, for in slowing down we fall into a more natural rhythm with life and with ourselves.  Thus we gradually change, gradually understand, gradually integrate the unconscious material of the psyche into the conscious mind.