Already a dedicated practitioner, Esther Myers wondered what would happen if she devoted even more time to her personal yoga. Vanda Scaravelli suggested we practise as though there was ‘infinite time and no ambition’. When asked how strong the gravitational force and how deep it’s possible to release in a downward direction, Vanda
replied, ‘To the centre of the earth. Is that far enough?’ There are seas on this planet of unknown depths – will they ever be plumbed? Tibetan meditation encourages us to develop a Big Sky Mind and gaze up at the limitlessness, without end and without an end, without urgency, a goal or destination.
Have you ever felt the outbreath so full of ease it could last forever? The inbreath so pleasurable that time, mind and body drop
away? Every once in a while there’s an openness, a gauzy moment like a swoon, a suspension, a delicious pause when nothing happens – no sound, thought, or judgement. The experience is beyond description – it’s expansiveness itself.
Oceans
I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
And nothing
happens! Nothing…silence…waves…
Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?
– Juan Ramón Jiménez (trans. Robert Bly)
Yoga practice depends upon structuring time by-the-clock and using or creating a physical environment. Once we have those, plus the opportunity, we’re free to explore the material world of the body on the ground and the impossibly swift and figurative inner landscape of the mind without borders, boundaries, or restrictions.
Irving Berlin wrote beautifully, in a love song dedicated to time, space, wonderment and contemplation, ‘How far is the journey from here to a star? How deep is the ocean, how high is the sky?’
