First There is a Mountain

Classically, yoga is a collection of philosophies sprung from the two thousand-year-old Indian holy texts called the Vedas that espoused a quest for liberation from the bonds of the material world through a life of ritual, discipline, and devotion to God.

She’d felt betrayed when she understood that her guru was not infallible, not immune from cultural chauvinisms, not a role model or stand-in for father or family—and in this way she was like me, too.

it occurred to me that if I could learn this many things, have this many breakthroughs every day of my life, I could live forever like a child. I could discover my body anew every day, and through it discover the world around me. I could start again, remake my universe.

I had been a part of something greater than I was, and that whatever it was, it felt like bliss.

And the pulsing of each of the cells of my body, in concert, got loud again too, and then the world outside began to reverberate with the same sound, a single thrum that was kites and plates and wind.

Iyengar’s supposition is correct, that the “fluctuations of consciousness” really do reside in the flesh, and when each and every cell quits its constant irritating quivering and joins in with a pulsing inside your body, your consciousness stops quivering too.

This is how you learn to feel more, to resist less, to cultivate your senses so you detect so much, smell it and see it and hear it, so much so the world itself starts to ring, and you realize that as much as you feel every cell in your throbbing hamstring, your senses have become tuned to experience the world in the finest detail, and that world is luminous and alive.

The pain said, This is the reason to work on advanced poses, to stretch strings of flesh you never felt before.

How I missed the quiet of that practice I used to do at home, under no one’s stern judgment, with nothing to observe but the way my breath slowed, my muscles loosened, my flesh became sensitive in places I hadn’t yet known were there.

Hindu and Hebrew were traditions equally arcane, equally arbitrary, as rich with history as that of the Parsis.