— Opening to Broad Perspective & Healthy Detachment While Maintaining Sharp Focus & Deep Inner Connection
Close your eyes. Turn your attention inward.
Place one or both hands over your heart. Do you feel any warmth under your palm? Do you feel any movement? Perhaps the rising and falling of your chest as you inhale and exhale? Or maybe even your heartbeat? Release your hand back down to your lap, but keep your awareness on and a sense of that part of your body.
Moving outward from the center of your heart, bring your awareness to your torso — ribs, belly, and back… then to your shoulders and hips… upper arms and legs… elbows and knees… forearms and lower legs… hands and feet… fingers and toes… Bring awareness to your skin, to that part of you which meets the air — where you and not you touch.
Now can you extend that awareness to just outside of your skin and also glance back to see yourself sitting there? Expand your awareness out further, about 12 inches all around your body. What’s the view like from a foot overhead? Can you grow your awareness outward to include the whole room? How’s the view looking down from the height of the ceiling? There are probably other things and maybe even other people included in your view now.
Continue to move further outward. How about from the other side of the ceiling, above the roof — can you still see yourself? What else — buildings? trees? cars? water? Open out further to the view you would have from an airplane flying overhead. And then from just outside the Earth’s atmosphere looking down on yourself. And then even further — from the moon. And then past the moon, from outside the planets of our solar system… our galaxy… and beyond…
Can you hover in that view, replace your hand on your heart, and now also bring your attention back to the warmth under your palm? Can you feel the beating of your heart?
This is my curiosity as of late: How do we keep a pulse on that beating heart, on that internal life AND open to such an expansive perspective?
The Guyan Mudra (hand position in which the tip of the thumb and forefinger meet while the other three fingers are extended) is a favorite of mine and symbolizes the unity of the universal (thumb) and individual (forefinger) consciousness. I use it to remind myself that not only does the universal Truth support the individual truth, but rather that they are one.
So, how do you open to a broad, universal perspective and practice healthful detachment while also maintaining sharp focus and a deep inner connection? You remember that they are one and the same. You are It, and It is you. The inward excavation is a reciprocal action — the deeper you move inward, the greater you open outward (and vice versa). When we see this, when we feel this, when our awareness lies here, we are in Truth.
Place your attention on your breath. As you inhale, fill the belly and then the chest. And then as you exhale, empty the chest and then the belly.
Breath connects the vast expanse of what is out there to what is right in here, contained within our bodies. When you inhale and draw air into your body, breath feeds your cells and gives you life — it’s like freaking magic (…or maybe alchemy or science)! And then you exhale back out into the vast, infinite space which is both right in front of your face, touching your skin and also far out into the sky, out into the ever-expanding universe. It is both the close and that distant, that immediate and that far-reaching, that intimate and that universal.
I invite you to play with the concepts of contraction and expansion in your yoga asana practice. When we talk about contraction, especially in something like yoga, I feel it often has a negative connotation, inferring smallness. But I want to use the word, contraction, in reference to our point of awareness and the act of touching in on our center, on the quiet pulse within. Expansion is a little more obvious — it is a growing, opening, seeing, feeling, and sensing outward. As you practice, see if you can’t maybe warp, blur the line between, confuse, and reunite expansion and contraction.
I encourage you to keep coming back to the breath as that which brings you immediately back home to yourself, right here, right now, AND also that which inspires expansion and connects you to all living things, and the unimaginable vastness of eternity — to all which ever was and all that will be, to all who ever was and all who will be.
Finally (and perhaps most importantly), as you continue your yoga practice off of your mat, can you allow this expanded perspective to inform the way you see yourself in your life, in the communities of which you are a part, the planet on which you live, the universe, the infinity of time and space? And then come back to that beating heart. Because here you sit, and incarnation of a soul, here for some finite amount of time. How will you spend that time?
Krystal Barschig 