Of course, I should do it all, but let's be honest: I don't do much.
Well that is, I don't do much of what people think of as yoga.
I'm 45, fat, and am becoming seriously inflexible in body. I never, ok, rarely, practice asana or pranayama.
But I consider myself a practicing yogi. I have, after all, been blessed with Karma Sannyasa Diksha by my Beloved Guru.
So what do I do?
Well, every day - every day - I think about my Guru. Every day he is on my mind. Every day I remember touching his feet, and every day I thank him from the bottom of my heart for accepting me as his worst disciple.
I have a piece of paper blue-tacked to my computer monitor at work. It has written on it the Yamas and the Niyamas. I look at it many times every day. It helps me to bring what I consider to be the real spirit of yoga into my working day. I try hard to deal with every person and every situation in light of those ten simple principles.
I approach my daily work as service. When someone at work asks me to help them, or to do something, it is my Beloved Guru who is asking through them. It doesn't matter that they are asking me to provide evidence for internal audit, or to find the root cause of a bug in the program code. What I am being asked to do is irrelevant. The fact is, I am where I am, and this is what I am to do. I could not be where I am if my Beloved Guru did not put me here. So, I do as He asks, and I do it for Him.
I try to take 20 minutes each mid-day to chant some malas of the mantra my Beloved Guru gave to me. My Beloved Guru has provided a multi-faith room at work so I can do this. Sometimes I am too busy, but that's ok, because if I am busy, then I am busy with my Beloved Guru's work.
So I would love to be thin and bendy, and to be able again to practice ustrasana and siddhasana, matsyasana and my other old favourites. But that won't happen. It's not my path, and I'm not yet ready to step up to the third rung of the eight-step ladder. The first two rungs are enough, and are more than I believe I will achieve in this incarnation. If I try, and if I persist in my trying, then perhaps I can achieve enough that in my next incarnation, I am ready to take another step.
I hope and pray that in my next incarnation, I am able to be born on the same landmass, or even the same country, as my Beloved Guru. If my Yoga practice can achieve so much, the reward will have far outreached the effort.
