I bought a watermelon at Costco last week. It was one of those all-too-frequent moments when any preference I might have for buying local, in-season produce was utterly crushed by my preference to avoid fighting with the four-year old sitting in the shopping cart.
I don’t actually know where said watermelon was grown, but upon cutting it open, I was pleased to discover that it actually looked and tasted pretty good. That however did not change the fact that I was faced with the imposing task of trying to cut the whole thing up, and given that it’s winter in Chicagoland, I couldn’t simply chop it into wedges, put them into my children’s paws, and open the back door.
So I sliced away–surely mumbling to myself about all the other things I had yet to do–until suddenly I realized I was cutting the melon so close to the rind that half of the chunks would taste nasty and probably result in my kids passing over this unlikely winter gourd in favor of ransacking the pantry to pilfer its processed delights.
Ludicrous! Here I had this huge watermelon, which contained more watermelon than our family could possibly eat, yet I was so determined to extract every bit of fruit that I was including the unsavory bits.
Ludicrous maybe, but herein I recognized a pattern. Was this not yet another example of an often unconscious drive to extract as much out of every experience as possible, even to the detriment of my original intention?
Maybe this isn’t you, but I don’t think it’s just me. In fact, I want to argue that this is a hallmark of our culture. We’re encouraged to think of any failure to maximize our take of anything as a missed opportunity. If two is great, then three is surely better, and four would be better still. So it goes as we gobble up everything around us like Pac-Man, fleeing the ghosts of scarcity while trying claim every damn dot on the board for ourselves. Mine.
But we are not Pac-Man. There is a point at which having more of anything, except perhaps love and consciousness, starts to offer diminishing and then inverse returns. Unfortunately, we are often too busy trying to extract all the goodness and make sure we don’t miss out that we fail to recognize when we have enough of a good thing.
So, too, with yoga practice. For even experienced practitioners, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of chasing particular sensations, experiences, or poses because we’ve become overly committed to fulfilling an ideal in our minds of what practice should look like or how it should feel.
This is not to say we shouldn’t have goals, rely on trusted techniques, or seek to alter the contents of consciousness in ways that benefit our lives, but when we become too determined to make a given practice become the perfect, Platonic, end-all-be-all practice, we lose the ability to relate to it moment by moment as it unfolds, which keeps us trapped in our mental models and makes us unable to access what is actually happening NOW. This is ironic because the distance between our mind’s abstractions and the actual present is exactly the distance yoga is designed to collapse.
Moreover, if we continue to practice in this acquisitional way, the practice itself can become a type of drudgery, an impossible attempt to satisfy the cruel master of our minds. When this happens, we not only end up missing out of on the real rasa, or nectar, that lies at the core of our own experience, we risk turning our practice into so much bitter fruit. 🍉 🤢
Thanks for stopping by. So you know, my Friday, 10 am central class through Ahimsa Yoga Studio is changing format to Strength and Mobility Vinyasa (virtual only). You can sign up here. If you’re looking for a complete list of my live classes (both in-person and virtual), check out the Classes page.
I also have a growing number of recorded classes available at a zero-dollar cost on my Youtube channel, and if you want to get these blog posts by email, enter your address below and click the blue button.
🙏 🕉 😊
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