The Seat of Awareness.

In modern yoga culture, asana often becomes associated with poses, flexibility, movement, and achievement. We learn to do yoga. To stretch further, balance longer, and master increasingly complex shapes.

But originally, asana simply meant steady seat — the seat of awareness.

Not performance. Not perfection. Just held stillness - Presence.

Practicing yoga this way, fateful to its real meaning and intention, in all its forms changes everything.

Every posture becomes less about what it looks like and more about where it invites us to arrive. The question shifts from Am I doing this correctly? to Who is experiencing this? We move from trying to control the body/mind to listening to it. From effort to relationship. From outer form to inner experience.

This shift sits at the centre of how I teach yoga and meditation through beanddo.

For over three decades I’ve been interested in something that extends beyond technique or physical practice. I’ve been interested in how yoga can become a way of inhabiting life itself. Not something confined to a studio or mat, but something that can travel with us into meetings, conversations, creativity, parenting, relationships, and the ordinary moments that shape our days.

My teaching approach is simple: one posture, one sequence, one practice, one insight at a time. Rather than accumulating more and more techniques, we slow things down enough to discover what is already happening within and around us.

Something interesting begins to occur when attention changes and perception opens. You start noticing tension and resistance releasing not through force, but through awareness.

You discover more space between event and response. Habits break as you lean into a more conscious world. Steadiness and ease begin to arise naturally and follow you off the mat and into daily life. You become aware of what the body/mind truly needs rather than what habit automatically reaches for.

Yoga then stops being something you practice and starts becoming something you inhabit.

Meditation and asana are no longer separate activities. They become partners. Each posture becomes a living inquiry. Each breath becomes a conversation. Moment by moment, awareness itself becomes the teacher.

I often tell students that the most important movement in yoga is not what happens in the body. It’s what happens to our own reality as perception moves from unconsciousness to consciousness. From reaction to response. Where doing merges with  being to become pure and flowing creative action.

This is where transformation begins. Not through adding more, but through seeing more clearly. Because yoga practice in the end gives you nothing. Instead it takes away illusion, negativity and fear. 

Because perhaps the real practice has never been about reaching the pose.

Perhaps it has always been about finding the seat, the position, the place from which you meet your life fully.

My next set of community yoga classes start this week. Read more here.

Read more about my unique and life long investigation and teaching of Modern Meditation here. 

Try out some simple Modern Meditation for free here