All learning is remembering.
PLATO
I’m at the Baptiste Power Yoga Institute in Boston, lying on my back in Savasana. I’ve just completed an amazing power vinyasa yoga practice and I’m drenched in sweat; it’s pouring off my body and into my eyes. My heart is pounding in my chest. I’m flush with a mix of exhilaration, release, and gratitude.
I’m grateful to have just experienced a rigorous and inspiring yoga practice led by a certified Baptiste Yoga teacher named Gregor Singleton. Gregor has been a part of my teaching team for many years, so I already knew he was a strong teacher whose classes deliver a potent experience, but in this moment, I was overtaken with a sense of profound appreciation. I was deeply moved to have a practice that I’ve sourced and developed over many years be reflected back to me so powerfully by another human being. I’d always dreamed of being a leader who develops other leaders so they can make a contribution to humanity and community, one pose at a time. Here I was today, lying in Savasana, literally experiencing my dream come true.
As I lay there, I reflected back to what the practice has given me from my early days when I was newer to the practice all the way up until this moment. In my youth, I would often surf underneath the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Sometimes the fog would move in and completely obscure the bridge, making it appear as if the bridge did not exist at all. Then the wind would pick up and blow the fog away, and suddenly the enormous beautiful Golden Gate Bridge would re-appear.
That’s exactly how the practice of yoga has worked for me. Whenever I get lost in a personal fog and have the experience of losing myself and my inner true north, the practice has been like a cleansing windstorm that would dissipate the fog and reveal the inner knowing that’s inherently there within me, re-grounding me in what’s true. I like to call this experience trueing up.
You already know what you need in order to live an extraordinary life that you love. That knowledge is within you. Perhaps obscured, but it is still there. Many a time on my mat, or in meditation, I’ve been hit with a recurring revelation that seemed to whisper into my ear, “Baron, allow yourself to know that you already know what you need to know.” Whenever I would take my confidence from that inner knowing and revelation, the entire quality of my life would inevitably be enhanced.
In many ways, yoga is a practice not of building, but of uncovering. It is the ultimate excavation tool for the soul.
At a certain point in the early days of my practice, I realized that I lived my life in a box. As someone who was committed to success and growth, I would persistently explore the opportunities and various pathways to better myself and my life, but only within the limits of that box. I would even explore the different outer edges and the corners of the box, but still I was limited to what’s available inside the one box I called my life as I know it.
What the practice gave me is the ability to create new alternative boxes for my life rather than being limited to just doing more of the same things inside the limits of the same box, or doing the same things better or differently—which is really just improving things inside the same box. I realized that yoga practice is about creating new boxes for yourself that contain as-yet-unseen possibilities for elevating the quality of your life.
Outside our usual box of “life as we know it,” we see and hear differently. One of the most powerful skills I began to develop when I stepped outside the box of my own created reality (i.e., “my life as I know it”) was the ability to listen and truly notice the details of the world around me. I began to observe people close to me and the people I worked with through new eyes and ears, as if I were watching a film. I began to observe their bodies and movements and the ways they engage in conversations, cook, work, walk, sit. I started to really see how they moved on their mat through poses.
And I also began to observe myself. I saw that typically people bring themselves to yoga to get fixed . . . to get rid of their problems . . . to get happy. And I saw that I was one of those people, too.
Back then, I had an almost superstitious belief that yoga was the ultimate fixer. By all appearances, my life and asana practice looked pretty good, but way down deep I had a fundamental belief that I wasn’t okay. I felt there was something wrong with me, and this disempowering belief was the lens through which I viewed all of life. Skillful at wearing masks, I hid this deep, dark, dirty truth about myself from everyone.
Being a “seeker of growth” seemed like a positive characteristic to have, so I threw myself into my yoga practice and studies. I now know that traveling my spiritual path was a sophisticated way to cover up the feeling that I was broken. I kept seeking, believing if I found the right guru and the right yoga teachings, all would get fixed within me and all my problems would disappear.
After several thousands of hours on the mat, and years of daily meditation, I reached a surprising and important personal revelation: no one needs yoga. Including me.
The only things you and I need to physically survive as human beings are air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, and shelter from the elements. To function emotionally, we need someone to love and someone to love us. Spiritually, we need to feel some sense of self-respect and the admiration of others. When these basic human needs aren’t filled, we don’t do well. Any human being can meet these needs without ever doing a yoga pose.
This insight was huge for me, and it started an inquiry of “Why do yoga?” Really, I wanted to know: What was available from this ancient practice beyond the obvious physical benefits?
I realized that the deeper aim of the practice is not to solve problems and that there is, in fact, nothing to fix. Although many of us have had the experience of having some of our issues dissolve in the heat and flow of moving through poses, the point of the practice is not so yogis can work on or get rid of their problems.
When I went beyond the physical emphasis of the practice, it became about those exceptional and rare times in life when I had the experience of being absolutely whole, complete, and at perfect peace with myself and my surroundings. I don’t mean the kind of gratification we experience when accomplishing a goal or attaining something we desire. I am speaking to the experience of being absolutely aligned in oneself, with nothing being “wrong” about what is exactly as it is, and nothing lacking. This is true north alignment.
Each of us has experienced moments of true north alignment in our lives: those moments when we are fully alive in body and being, connected to all of life. In such true north moments you experience that the pose, and all of life, is perfect exactly as it is. In such moments we have no urge for the pose to be different, or better. There is no lack. There is no sense of disappointment or comparison to what should or should not be, no sense that the pose is not what we worked for. In these moments we feel open, undefended with no need to protect. There is no urge to hold on, consume, or collect. We are aligned with and flowing from our greater purpose. Such moments are perfect as they are, for however long they may last.
As I stayed in the inquiry of “Why do yoga?,” I saw that people function successfully in life without such moments, too. Like the practice of yoga, such moments are not necessities. They aren’t something we “should” have or do, and they aren’t necessarily even “good for us,” like taking vitamins or exercising. They do not make us any better or smarter or sexier or more successful than anyone else. These true north moments—these experiences of being perfectly whole—are sufficient unto themselves.
Beyond the physical benefits, and even beyond the true north alignment moments, one finds something else in yoga: the opportunity to discover that space within yourself where such moments originate—actually where you and life originate. You shift from being a character in the story of life to being the playwright authoring the story creatively, consciously, freely, and totally. In an even broader sense, you become the space in which the whole story of your life occurs.