Saraswati is the Word

One of the things I love most about my job is the chance I have to play with words. While so much of Hatha yoga in our culture finds itself confined almost obsessively by the talk of physicality and alignment; the body and its possibilities -- it is the access I have to words that inspires me the most.
And there are a lot of words tossed around the yoga room. Elusive, ethereal words that float across the air and hang almost oppressively out there like someone's stagnant shallow breath. You know, "those" words. There's the word but not the meaning. There's the word but not the story. There's the word but not the content or the connotation or even the subtext. Words loiter around like movie extras, some more jaded than others but still they wait like undiscovered talent costumed with images waiting for that big break, the right delivery, recognition, to land somewhere. These words have potential and talent and possibility to reach us deeply, touch us in places where contact is so surprising that our body literally softens. "Ahhh." Yet, we as teachers so often and so impulsively and even somewhat promiscuously toss them into a verbal nonsensical salad of pseudo spiritual wisdom and maybe a little grasping humor.

Breathe.
Consciously.
Breathe.
Consciously.

We remind ourselves often of the most obvious things on our yoga mats: To breathe more fully, to think more expansively, to feel more possibility. To affirm and re-affirm the most fundamental parts of our daily human lives. Do we forget? Do we get confused? Do we get so bogged down by the spell (of our own casting)? The curse of our unreasonable expectations, the grip of our overreactions, the emptiness of unresolved, stubborn behavior that sits perched in our lower backs or our hips; Like Hanuman's shadow, pulling us back by the ankles from our inherent desire to plunge forward into the gutsy dance of life and union and party and community? We get fixed in place like an old armoir that sits in the same corner of your bedroom leaving a permanent impression in the plush carpet. We get immovable and weighty. Weighty with our own thoughts, our own sensitivities, our own diets, our own choices, our children, our own daily dailiness.
In yoga, the word "guru" and weighty mean the same thing. It is the guru who is heavy with knowing, literally one who is weighted down with possibility, with recognition, with the knowing and seeing of a moment. The "guru" possesses such fluency of life that life's gifts are never dulled, or absent or denied. The guru is weighty with value, so much so that choosing the right word, the right career, the right fit, is no longer elusive or a challenge. Choices are clear and doubt becomes only a momentary border to consider and then release. Just the idea of being that grounded. Heavy. Earthly. Guru.
Yoga is beloved by so many because I think it is the great reminder. The space where we begin a relationship with space. A space to release ourselves not to become more absorbed with ourselves, a place to remember our gifts and cultivate them, not toss them aside like an outdated magazine at a medical office. A space to see our gifts with tender eyes and tolerance. With patience, with belief, with wonder. Where do these opportunities go during the cycle of a day when we leave our mat and tread out into the world? Where does the opportunity go when we seal ourselves in our cars and drive our children around town, where the stamina becomes not at all about holding the weight of our own bodies in downward dog but becomes about the ability for us to hold on long enough to the knowing and feeling and believing in our own miraculous gifts. Where does the extraordinary go?