Our ability to notice ‘on the mat’ fine tunes our ability to notice ‘off the mat.’
In yoga, we are asked to practice gently guiding our awareness back onto our inner landscape whenever it drifts away, knowing that by showing up more fully for ourselves, we can in turn show up more fully for others, as well as the duties of each day.
If our practice stays limited to the confines of our yoga mat, then it is not really yoga. As our practice reminds us, we can learn so much when we give ourselves permission to get quiet and to notice... So why wouldn't we want to apply this to the external world??
I guess what I'm trying to say is that the simple act of noticing immediately grounds us in the present moment - both in our yoga practice on the mat and our experience of life off of the mat.
I’ve recently revisited the book Mindfulness and Surfing: Reflections for Saltwater Souls by Sam Bleakley, a book I first read a few years prior, and I find it so interesting how, although the words on the pages don’t change, their meaning can transform over the years of gained wisdom and experience. The following passages I find very relatable to the ideas above, as well as our current state:
“For over two thousand years the Western world has developed techniques of focus on the self and the inward life. The invention of autobiography as a literary genre in the eighteenth century and its perfection in personal-confessional styles across all media - such as kiss-and-tell journalism, selfies or YouTube videos - has, arguably, dried up our receptivity to the outer world as we become acutely sensitive to the inner life. As a result, we have an ecological surplus and an ecological crisis. We need to recover sensitivity towards the world around us - its cries and pleasures, its sufferings and beauties…
The psychologist James Gibson (1904-79) revolutionized the way we think about perception in his model of ‘ecological perception.’ In Gibson’s view, the world is not passively received by the senses and then processed cognitively via the brain and central nervous system - this is an inside-out perspective. Rather, the world actively educates our attention to its shapes, patterns, motions, colours, smells, tastes, vibrations, rhythms, oscillations and (dis)appearances. The world captures our attention, shaping and dictating what and how we sense. Further, the senses do not act independently but in concert as a sensorium or total system, again shaped by environmental ‘affordances,’ as Gibson described them - patterns of attraction that draw us to them and make us notice.”
What kind of world can we discover, what new perspectives can we gain when we give ourselves permission to slow down, to get quiet, and to simply observe??