The Art of Vinyasa: Awakening Body and Mind through the Practice of Ashtanga Yoga

By cultivating open-minded states of inquisitiveness and acceptance in the controlled structure of a practice, encountering paradoxes and the unknown begins to feel safe, interesting, and exciting rather than tedious or frightening.

Half the world is given to us, but the other half is created by how we frame it.

The “work” we must do is to practice with dedication, consistency, and an open mind.

a paradoxical comprehension is imperative: we must see the ego’s construction of our self-image as an amazing organization of the mind so it can make sense of things and work efficiently, but we must constantly be alert, eager, and ready to dissolve and update the images and stories the ego spins out.

Compassion leads us to see clearly that since we are not separate from the fabric of the world, we are not truly liberated and happy until all beings are free.

Due to the overlaying of Prāṇa and mind, the subtle body is not a matter of pure abstraction and data processing but a virtual storehouse of deeply rooted clumps and knots of unconscious emotions, internal sensations, concepts, memories, tendencies, and stories.

the necessity, when searching for truth, not only of seeing God in all beings, situations, and manifestations, but of seeing all beings in God. The example demands we see through concepts of mind, not making one thing more “holy” than another (our concept of God, for example) or making something of lesser value (the excrement). This is the same as

Svādhyāya can seem brutal—having to admit (to ourselves, no less) our shortcomings and mistakes and to stop covering up our imperfections. However, once we watch closely, looking past our presumptions, judgments, actions, and feelings, it is not harsh at all. A deeply satisfying feeling of living in alignment with ourselves, as if we’ve come home

Vinyāsa, then, means the focused, intentional sequence of form, thought movement, and breath that frees the mind by recontextualizing the body, sensations, form, and all objects of attention. It can be a specific form of yoga practice, but in a broader sense, vinyāsa is the mindful process that naturally occurs when we arrange any circumstances cor