Be A Witness
“Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go; they merely determine where you start.”
I was lucky enough to spend some number of months on an ashram in 2011 right here in the United States. There were a lot of awesome teachers there, some of them swamis, some certified teachers, and others just dear friends that were at my side in a program that guided us through some intensive yoga practices. One of the teachers was known for his refrain, “Be that witness!” We would be lying in savasana at the end of a yoga class and he would say in a hushed tone, “Be that witness….witness….WITNESS!”
Some of us thought it was funny and it kinda was. If you don’t know the context of why he was so focused on the idea of being a witness, it might seem a little strange. What does he mean, and what does it have to do with yoga?
Everything! It is the core practice of yoga that is within all the other practices. Feeling tired and frustrated? Zoom out and scan your body, mind, and breath. Listen for the messages there. Zoom out further and think about what happened before yoga, what’s happening right now on your mat, and what you expect to happen after. That’s witness consciousness; just noticing, BUT ALSO, not getting emotionally entangled in the story behind it all.
You might take a survey of what’s going on within you and label it as good or bad, and that’s okay. We all have ups and downs, and a successful yoga practice doesn’t mean feeling more ups than downs, even though I love the ups. It’s more about always remembering that things change constantly and while you won’t be always up or always down, you can remember that you are that Witness, watching the ups and downs. Otherwise, it’s so easy to feel that you’ll always be down while you’re hitting a low.
I’ve been tired these past couple weeks. A couple of weeks ago I spread myself too thin and I ended up skipping my weekly post; same thing happened the following week and now I’m in New York on my family vacation. My first thought was, “Oh no! I failed and now I have to catch up. I’ve got to deliver what I said I would.”
Funny that I had planned to talk about focus during the month of May, because I have actually been feeling very scattered. As a mom, it’s almost expected that I would feel pulled in different directions, but these past few weeks was more about trying to do too much. I was trying to reach the moon when what I needed was to feel my feet on the ground.
I needed to practice focus by doing less, prioritizing, and committing to what is most important to me. I needed to remember to incorporate that practice of being a witness of the present moment, as the teacher at Yogaville had gently urged us to do during every class. Over time I realized that in his class he was not just for teaching students how well to do yoga postures on the mat, but how well to embody the simple awareness that brings yoga postures alive. It’s something that can be felt but not necessarily seen by an outsider. It was sort of a rehearsal for everyday living.
But really, the saying that there is no dress rehearsal for life is true. Yoga is not a thing to be done; you practice it. It’s practice for a performance that will never be perfected for the future. It is practice for a show that only ever springs up spontaneously in the present moment and it’s not a show we put on, but a show we watch all around and within us. As T.S. Eliot said, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where started and know the place for the first time.”
P.S. the photo above is my daughter and I admiring some hanging sculptures at Hudson Yards shopping mall in Manhattan.