RESTORATIVE-YIN YOGA involves supported body/mind relaxation. This is gentle, gentle yoga that promotes deep relaxation for stress reduction while also stretching and rehabilitating connective tissue.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Yoga-No: This Single Grace Persisting


Copyright Lance Kinseth, Aiki Flow, 2012

THAT WHICH IS said to be “yoga” or ‘tai chi” or “aiki” is likely constrained by our willingness to be constrained.  We are social animals.  Buddha people might wear Buddha clothes and eat Buddha food.   Birds and mountains do not follow a list of admonitions, and yet they are said to have Buddha-nature.

This is not to say that there is no benefit in subscription to a system, but the system is not the thing persisting.  

There is a place in body-mind where yoga, tai chi and aiki fade away, perhaps sustaining as guideposts along the way but not as the essence of these practices.

Yoga, tai chi and aiki can provoke a lot of chatter—endless styles and variations.  The calmness of restorative-yin practice likely appears to offer a profound gateway for listening, opening, fading away…

When doing the yoga that you know, perhaps try doing the yoga that you do not know.  Try to do what you are not doing.  What might begin to appear?  What is in between?

Perhaps NOT giving up body-mind practices so that there in no yoga, no tai chi, or no aiki, but rather,  a yoga-no that reaches beyond style and variation, and asks again and again,

What is This Single Grace Persisting?

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