Transitions
It’s all about the “in-between” moments
While practicing yoga, the poses themselves are so often the focus of the practice and the target of perfection.
But, really, isn’t it the transitions between āsanas or between moments in life that matter more?
The second that we arrive in what we have idealized in our minds as “the pose” is just a “freeze-frame,” a snapshot of what we perceive as the expression of the āsana we were working towards.
One of yoga’s greatest gifts, it seems to me, is to teach us that, just as in life, the moments of passage between poses is just as important, and maybe more so, than the moments we freeze in photos. For life is not just a series of still frames, but, rather, is composed of moving parts.
And how we dance from one āsana to the next might mirror how we do this off of the mat and into the rest of our lives. Do we stop, flustered, tired, sure that we can’t move gracefully into that next part of the practice?
Or can we breathe and bend and flow without being too attached to the outcome, or to why we are even where we are at this moment?
Although I haven’t attempted the pose in the above photo in many years now, I vividly remember the steps involved in arriving at the expression you see captured here. The artist…
