Awareness isn't in me. I am in Awareness.
In a recent yoga class, we explored the expression “doing my yoga”. It's such a familiar habit to talk about my yoga or my yoga practice. But perhaps there's another way of seeing it. In reality, you're not simply doing yoga; you're in yoga.
This subtle shift in perception takes us back to the very definition of yoga: union. A coming together of the different aspects of our life and experience into a unified whole. A sense of oneness.
Shifting how we see our yoga practice towards what is often described as a non-dual understanding can bring about a profound recognition.
Increasingly, in our yoga classes, we're exploring and working directly with this possibility. The key is Awareness. Or, perhaps more accurately, Conscious Awareness — although this is a slightly tricky expression, because awareness and consciousness are, in essence, one and the same.
Most of us, particularly in the West, have been conditioned to think of ourselves as a material body and mind, with consciousness somehow produced by, and contained within, that form. We tend to assume that each of us possesses a separate awareness, belonging to our own individual body.
But when we encounter yoga as an authentic non-dual teaching, something quite wonderful can happen. There can be an aha! moment of recognition:
Oh! Rather than Awareness being inside me, perhaps this mind and body arise within Awareness.
One way of opening ourselves to this different way of experiencing yoga in class is to gently question the idea that I am doing the posture.
Instead, what if there is simply the posture? No separate 'me' — no individual mind and body standing apart from the experience and carrying out an action. Just the posture, unfolding within Awareness.
This is a significant shift.
The body, with its apparent boundaries, no longer defines the boundaries of Awareness. We begin to recognise the openness within which the experience of being a person arises.
And this is what the postures can help us discover. They provide a framework of experience within which we become aware of the nature of Awareness itself.
So the inquiry becomes subtler...
We begin to notice that everything we experience — everything around us, every thought, action and feeling — arises within this field of Awareness.
The next question naturally follows: Who is having or seeing this experience?
What is this 'me' that appears within Awareness? And can it really exist independently, somewhere outside of Awareness?
Given time and space to explore, something begins to unlock.
The self-created distinction between Awareness and everything that appears within it begins to dissolve. Gradually, even the sense that I am Aware — the 'I' who is supposedly doing my yoga — gives way to a deeper recognition.
There is only Awareness.
Perhaps this is the invitation of yoga: not to become better at doing something, but to recognise what is already here.
Being in yoga is the key.