yoga – the muse of being

shape of the moment

reality is a self-knowing presence,
it is the One Beingness
composing and decomposing
the various dimensions of life.

don’t discard what you have seen or understood,
in the hopes of finding something better-than-this-moment;

the quest to end that sense of lack
does not end in the acquisition of a ‘thing’

it comes to its resolution in the other direction…

when we finally, finally begin to accept that
what we deeply want is closer to home than any thing.

there can be a type of discomfort that arises when Being what you are –
like residual habits of mind and feeling that come knocking for attention…

stay.

it requires courage and sometimes a bit of inner fortitude.

gumption, maybe.

just notice the wavering for now.

everything is consciousness.
there is only consciousness.

stay home.

the resistances of the mind can feel torrential;
but remain in your heart,
in the Silence of Awareness,
expressing itself as

this sensation
this breath
this moment

stay here.

there’s nowhere else You can be.
but let’s not pretend anymore,
to be anything other,
than the shape of this moment,

and what lies beyond it.

Love’s Wonder

there is only this pure consciousness
to know and be known at all times
there is nothing to do or become
since you already are what you have sought;

the answer to all the existential questions we have
lies simply in the heart of our Being.

and yet…

though there is nothing to do or achieve in life,
that knowledge is simply the backdrop of spiritual understanding:
the joy, the juice, lives in the expression of self as ‘foreground’ –

and you are equally that expression as the perceiver of it.

there can be a joyful alignment of
fruitful effort towards the ends of celebrating this,
your moment-to-moment creation as Consciousness.

this is the Yoga of Being.

what that might look like will always differ between unique expressions.

but perhaps it is bound to be a type of surrender or offering to the altar of what we experience.

Consciousness;

I surrender what I believe to be,
I surrender what I feel to be,
I surrender what I perceive,
to the space wherein you hold your Being.

Consciousness;

I offer my thoughts,
I offer my sensations,
I offer my breath,
to the Heart of the Witness:

That Which is Perceiving, Knowing, and Being
all aspects of my experience, at all times.

Yoga is a co-operation with the movement of life.
Yoga is to offer this moment as an expression, to the source.

To breathe, to feel, to perceive;

To come into ever-greater touch with the intimacy of our lives,

This orientation reveals ever-wider ever-subtler expanses of Love’s wonder.

the infinite that perceives experience in this moment is pure consciousness;
it is absolutely free from motion, development, change, or form,
the changeless, peaceful, imperturbable background of reality.

that which is perceived, the elements of experience themselves, is consciousness’ dream:
this experience moves, changes, flows, develops, and is finally resorbed as pure perception into silence;
it is the dynamic motion of all that is created.

…background/foreground…

they are not separate;
we could say that there is only consciousness,
its dream made of it own very self.

nothing exists but the True You.

spiritual awakening is simply to experientially recognize the infinity of the self at all times; spiritual yoga is then to express and live that causeless understanding here, in the realm of space/time.

backdrop and foreground

consciousness is both the backdrop and the foreground player upon the stage of life…

however, experience can be subdivided into the phenomenal and the noumenal.

the phenomenal is that which dances, acts, plays, and moves,
that which is witnessed, that which is perceived as objective existence,
that which lives and is born and will die,
it is consciousness-in-motion.

ruled by the metres of time and space, the phenomenal is the realm of the body/mind.

the noumenal is that which perceives, the ultimate reality,
that which never comes and never goes,
that which is limitless, boundless, eternal and free,
the true, imperturbable self,
empty of concept, percept, or object;
it is the absolute, it is unshakability itself,
it is that which truly is and which will never cease to be,
it is consciousness-at-rest.

unruled by any limit or form, the noumenal is the realm of consciousness, Brahman.

yoga means to yoke, to tie together, to bind.

these two realms – objective phenomena and non-objective infinity, are yoked in our sadhana through the exercise of conscious yoga: the permeation of the non-dual understanding through the body…and into all other realms…

it is the body that is the bridge from the limitless into the time-bound.

so the true non-dual yoga (as I see it) is first to understand, and then to feel.

understand your reality as infinite Consciousness,
and feel the present sensation as the doorway into the unknowable.

…without agenda, give yourself to the felt-sense of Now…

in other words…

know yourself as infinity;
feel yourself as the expanse of this moment…

the rest lies in the hands of the unseen.

sensation and consciousness

the reality of the body is consciousness.

whether we think of the body as the current, present-moment sensation,
or as the physical, biological body we have inherited as our vehicle through this realm of form, its reality is always consciousness – for consciousness is the one reality of all appearances, regardless of whatever ways we consider or subdivide the relative.

reclaiming the body as an expression of universal consciousness involves merging the two seemingly disparate realms of sensation and consciousness.

consciousness is the presence that perceives experience,
always unaffected by the appearances it displays within itself,
and is not a sensation nor is it limited by any sensation.

sensation is just the body-of-the-moment stripped of any psychological storyline,
it’s an ever-changing, raw, evolving expression of the mysterious intelligence of form.

the bridge between these two worlds (sensation and consciousness) is ultimately poetic and free from logic, but we could say this merging involves both:
knowing ourselves as the infinite presence and
unknowing our preconceptions about our expressive limits.

it is an offering of sensation to the altar of experience,
with the grace that allows and unfolds sensation moment-to-moment as the guide.

as the body becomes more integrated into the experience,
the sensory body becomes more and more consciousness-like.

it feels spacious, transparent, luminous, and free;
and in its natural expanse it is felt as undifferentiated from the consciousness that perceives it.

in the experience of the limitless sensory body,
yoga turns back into meditation,
and the body no longer obstructs or distracts from the experience of pure consciousness.
non-duality is known in both immanence and transcendence.

it’s not that sensation stops;
it continues to express deeper layers – and that journey never has to end.

if there is interest, the accent can always be placed on the body-sensation, the yoga of the moment. you can live through this yoga, and it remains an expression of non-duality, having understood the infinite reality of consciousness.