Doing yoga asana practice is inherently ridiculous.
Why would you want to stretch your body into somewhat painful positions, anyway, when you don’t really have to? Surely, the health benefits that accrue from the practice could be achieved by some other means.
And even if posture practice is a superior means of health care, it’s far from obvious that doing as much as the Ashtanga model calls for is optimally salubrious. Presumably, you could derive just as much with far less effort and save yourself lots of time in the process, as well.
Some days this is more salient than others and it seems particularly strange to engage in the practice. Your alarm goes off before six AM on a summer day that doesn’t require you to get up before noon, if at all. Nevertheless, you rise and ride uphill to a cavernous dance studio where you unroll a plastic mat and spend the next ninety minutes getting all sweaty and sore when you could have far more easily remained dozing beneath the covers.
The nonsensical nature of the activity is made more apparent by the presence of a dozen or so other human beings doing essentially the same thing; you can’t help noticing how weird it seems for others to be spending their mornings in this way, too.
Maybe we actually are all stilling the fluctuations of the mind so as to be able to perceive that which we really are—our true nature as the indivisible Oneness of All. If so, great, but couldn’t this be achieved without having the opportunity for forty more winks?
I often observe, on my ride home from the studio after practice, someone standing in the morning sunshine, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette; I wonder what my days would me like if they started that way.
Perhaps I wouldn’t feel as good about myself afterwards, but is there any reason to believe it would be a more absurd existence?
Why would you want to stretch your body into somewhat painful positions, anyway, when you don’t really have to? Surely, the health benefits that accrue from the practice could be achieved by some other means.
And even if posture practice is a superior means of health care, it’s far from obvious that doing as much as the Ashtanga model calls for is optimally salubrious. Presumably, you could derive just as much with far less effort and save yourself lots of time in the process, as well.
Some days this is more salient than others and it seems particularly strange to engage in the practice. Your alarm goes off before six AM on a summer day that doesn’t require you to get up before noon, if at all. Nevertheless, you rise and ride uphill to a cavernous dance studio where you unroll a plastic mat and spend the next ninety minutes getting all sweaty and sore when you could have far more easily remained dozing beneath the covers.
The nonsensical nature of the activity is made more apparent by the presence of a dozen or so other human beings doing essentially the same thing; you can’t help noticing how weird it seems for others to be spending their mornings in this way, too.
Maybe we actually are all stilling the fluctuations of the mind so as to be able to perceive that which we really are—our true nature as the indivisible Oneness of All. If so, great, but couldn’t this be achieved without having the opportunity for forty more winks?
I often observe, on my ride home from the studio after practice, someone standing in the morning sunshine, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette; I wonder what my days would me like if they started that way.
Perhaps I wouldn’t feel as good about myself afterwards, but is there any reason to believe it would be a more absurd existence?
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