Emptiness

In the 17 years I’ve been teaching yoga, the most common complaint I’ve heard is that it seems impossible to develop and stick with a yoga practice. The main reason for that is that it seems people have filled their lives to capacity and perhaps a little beyond, to just shy of a breaking point – so that life is lived in a super stressed-out, high anxiety, push and shove sort of way, cramming as much as possible into every day, spreading one life very thinly over as broad an area as possible. It seems there is some kind of nobility or honor in MORE: doing more, having more, taking on more, accomplishing more, knowing more, talking more, collecting more stuff, more friends, more responsibilities, more demands, more problems, more music, more work. What most people seem to crave is more time, more peace and calm, more centering, more relaxing, more joy. But the move to fill every corner of space and time continues. Tapas (austerity, intensity) invites us to empty out. “Austerity”, in this sense, refers not to extreme austerities but of living simply. Clearing out your mind, your heart, your garage, your closets, your clutter, your calendar to make room for yoga – for a more affirming lifestyle, that is the intention behind tapas. If you’ve ever spent a day or even a few hours cleaning an over-stuffed closet or a garage full of junk, you know the wonderful feeling you get when the job is complete. All joking about the backache aside, there is normally a surge of energy that comes after emptying out a space or organizing a room or closet. Everything you have takes energy. Just sitting in a room with your stuff takes energy. You are seeing it. You have to look through it to find the stuff you are looking for. You have to clean around it. It is in your space. Start to discriminate about what you invite into your space. Just because you received it for a gift doesn’t mean you have to look at it for the next 20 years. Sometimes I use things like that (gifts) in a more seasonal way; bringing them out at certain times of the year, in memory of the giver, in celebration. That way I can rotate some of the things I have. If you want to invite yoga into your life, and you find you are struggling to keep your practice, try to clear out a place for it, and I don’t mean a small corner of a table filled with junk. I mean CLEAR OUT the riff raff. Otherwise, you are filling your life with a gesture that essentially says that what you really want to invest in is STUFF, BUSYNESS, WORLDLY PURSUITS.

You always start where you are. Look around. You can start anywhere – any little gesture of releasing, of clearing, will have its affect on you. Go ahead and try it. You will start to enjoy it so much you will want to keep going. That’s a good thing because tapas is not something you just do once and it is done. Like every aspect of yoga practice, it will become an ongoing part of your life – looking around to see what needs your attention. Shoveling STUFF out the back door as fast as you can, watching in amazement as it continues its march into your life, right through the front door! We live in the land of abundance – the land of plenty. There is no shortage of STUFF. Actually, some of the poorest people I’ve known in the USA have the largest piles of stuff. So if you want to make room for true prosperity and wealth of the most lasting kind, simplify your life. Start now and continue regularly to observe everything, including the flow of thought and feeling. What you take in, not only food and beverages, but also ideas, images, books and magazines, movies, videos, TV programs, it all becomes a part of you. And just like everything else, it can move you in the direction of peace and truth, of awareness and understanding or away from it. It can help you to understand and thrive, or it can add to the proverbial clutter of mind, emotion, and environment. Learn to discriminate. Learn to listen quietly, to watch, to see, and to say no thank you. This is not selfishness. This is managing your energy so you are not drained or distracted. It carves you out so you can be more fully alive, more fully present, much more available than ever before. It carves you out so, like a fine violin, you will resonate with beautiful vibrations.