What it takes to stretch

Sailen Routray

 Sapta Chakra, from a Yoga manuscript in Braj Bhasa with 118 pages. 1899

                                                    Photo Credit: commons.wikimedia.org

Those of us who come to some form of spiritual practice and stick to it, often do so because we want to escape the madness and contradictions of the world, and have the need for certainties and clarity. However, anyone who has been following an adhyatmic tradition with some amount of seriousness for a while, soon comes to realize the hopelessness of this process.

Let me explain by taking the example of hatha yoga. Asanas are supposed to be about mastering movement. However, to be able to move the required parts of the body in a coordinated and effective way (which constitute asanas), you must be able to keep the ones not involved in the posture absolutely still. 

Hence, to perform the asana, you must keep some relevant body parts completely motionless. Say, you produce the necessary stillness of the relevant body parts. Then you start noticing the movement of the muscles, etc. in the form of a vibrating tautness. Some persistence and mindfulness of the practice will reveal it to you that this vibrating movement is a part of the maintenance of stillness. 

Therefore, movement and stillness are not opposites of each other. You can never completely resolve the supposed contradictions between the two in practice. Rather, they constitute a totality, which is made possible by an awareness of the process of letting this totality emerge by paying attention.

Some traditions make the claim that you need this attention itself to be total as well. However, therein lies another contradiction. This perhaps needs a separate post.