I’ve been teaching and practicing yoga for the past 30 years. I notice, with more compassion that I had when I was young, that it’s not always easy to be alive as this human body. There are constant challenges that arise. Even the most wonderful body has weak areas, places that remain tight, contracted or shut down after years of practice. Sometimes I look at my students and see them struggling so bravely with a hip, a knee or a shoulder that just doesn’t seem to respond to their efforts and intentions.

Because this happens more as we grow older, I’ve been carried into a much broader and more expansive view of what yoga is, and what it means to live in this body. Our post-modern technological world does not encourage us to live as embodied beings! Think of the way our grandparents might have lived. I know people from that generation who walked, or rode horses every day of their lives. They grew their own food, and paid attention to what their bodies were telling them about the weather.  When I was in New Zealand, we lived for a while among the aboriginal people there-the Maoris. We were a group of white hippies, trying to learn how to live on the land. Our experiment was actually a grand failure, rich with deep learning and transformation.

Every morning, our white boys and the Maoris would get into their boats and go out to fish.  Every day, the Maoris would paddle to one place in the water, put down their anchor and start pulling in the fish. In the beginning our boys would drop anchor somewhere else. But the fish were always where the Maoris were. It was incredible to us- they really knew where those fish were! We asked them many times to tell us how they knew this-was it the weather, the wind, the sky, the water? They couldn’t tell us-we were still trying to understand with our minds. They used to laugh and tease us about it, with great kindness. One day, one of the elders finally told us, “Listen to your bodies. The body holds the secrets you are looking for.”

How difficult it is for us to listen to our bodies in this world we live in. Our cell phones, our computers, our MP3’s, our cars and our televisions pull us constantly into cyberspace, a disembodied world without any real grounding, without energy, feeling and sensation. How to spend a day at your computer and remain alive and open to the world of your body-this is a great challenge for all of us. Our body is truly the gateway to our deep inner wisdom: our instincts, our intuition and our inspiration. To learn how to live as a fully embodied being is a lifelong adventure. And that is one of the gifts that yoga can bring to us.

We can practice, not just to improve the body and remove our pain and constriction. We can practice in order to directly experience the miracle and the paradox of being a human being. We are this body, and at the same time so much more. Everyone knows this, somewhere deep inside.

I was giving a workshop a few years ago in a small logging town north of Nelson. I stayed in the home of a woman who was married to a logger. One day at lunch we found ourselves alone together. This man had never even heard of meditation or spiritual practice. He began to tell me how he had just had his 60th birthday. “How was that?” I asked him.

“I went to the mirror that morning, the day I turned 60,” he told me. “I looked at myself, and I knew, without the slightest doubt, that I am not 60! Something inside of me is just the same as when I wasa young child. What is that?”

I said to him, “It doesn’t matter what you call it. You just have to know that it’s there, always, this unchanging aspect of your own being.”

That’s the riddle of life, the question that life asks us each day: How can I live fully as this body, and know at the very same time that I am so much more?”