If you’ve been coming to my classes this Spring you’ve undoubtedly heard these words: Sthira, Sukham, Asanam. They come from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, book II, verse 46 and he translates them as “Asana is a steady, comfortable posture.” Sthira means steady or stable, Sukham means ease or comfortable and Asanam is posture.
 
I’ve been rolling these three words around in my brain all Spring contemplating how they relate to life off the mat in our busy, urban chaos. I have many questions, some include: How do we maintain our stability in the midst of chaotic urban lives with cell phones going off, computers on the blink, drivers weaving in and out, horns honking, people at the Berkeley Bowl riding their carts up on your heels to get their juicy tomatoes?  
 
How do we maintain a sense of comfort with the economic downturn, the random violence in our cities, foreclosed homes, kids who are obsessed with their techie toys?
 
How do we maintain any comfort with the fast pace of life that we’ve developed in which the piles of paper never seem to diminish, the email inbox is always full, there are 10 calls to return at anytime and that doesn’t account for feeding ourselves and our families, tending to our physical and spiritual health and seeing our family and friends.
 
One of the answers for me is to continue to turn inwards. To continue to deepen my practice in which all of those things can be happening and I am just sitting. Just sitting. Breathing. Being. I temporarily unplug from the grid to be in my practice time so that the quality of presence I gain from practicing can spill into daily life and I have space inside of myself to breath in the chaos and breath out ease. I see how the only place I have ANY control is inside.
 
Yoga gives us two great tools to help us maintain balance. They are the first of the two yamas. Ahimsa, a practice of non-harming thoughts, words and actions, and Satya, the practice of committing to our truth. Together Ahimsa and Satya offer us the path to live in the world in a balanced and easeful way. For if we were to listen deeply inside to what our truth is in any given moment, we would stay true to ourselves and we would then speak our truth to others with a foundation of ahimsa, so the truth would be told with compassion.
 
These are two simple, but profound practices. We could all spend our lifetime honing these skills. What I notice in practicing ahimsa with myself is that I widen my capacity to be kind and compassionate with myself. I give myself a wider birth for being human and recognize I will make mistakes and to then not beat myself up about that. Speaking my truth liberates me. I notice I feel calmer, more relaxed, more stable when I speak my truth kindly.
 
Through practice I continue to develop the skill to let go and surrender to each moment. Just the other day I was riding my bike down Telegraph Avenue to teach a yoga class, my yoga mat slung over my back and as I pedaled along a car honked loudly at me and then screamed out of the car window “move over.” I felt my heart tighten and the immediate desire to want to yell something back, but because I’ve been practicing metta all Spring (the practice of loving kindness sent to oneself and to others) I found myself pulling my energy back in and recognizing that this person had to be in pain to be yelling at me when I’d done nothing. So I opened my heart to him and sent him some metta.
 
It was a liberating and pivotal moment. What I realized in that moment was that I HAD a choice in how I was going to react. I could choose the reflexive thing which would have been to yell back something nasty, which would only tighten my own heart and make ME feel bad. Or I could recognize that his yelling had NOTHING to do with me and he was in pain. When I recognized that in the moment my heart immediately softened and I sent love to this stranger. I felt better.  In fact I accessed the sense of love that then flooded my system.
 
I arrived at my class happy and open with a full heart. I hadn’t let this encounter throw me off balance, losing my stability, and I maintained a sense of ease.