The Goddess has taken yoga lessons for thousands and thousands of years. And with each teacher I learn something radical and wonderful.
Ned, one of my all-time favorite teachers, stresses one theme again and again: Yoga is not work. It is not “exercise.” It is not about no-pain-no-gain, feel-the-burn working out; on the contrary, it’s about pleasure. “If it’s not pleasure,” Ned says, clearly referring to other things as well as to yoga, “don’t bother with it.” Ned teaches this pleasure principle not only because he hates exercise but because, after fifty years of doing yoga, he hates the idea that we might hurt ourselves and then say, “Yoga hurt me.” Yoga never hurts you, he says; you hurt yourself by pushing too hard. You push too hard because you feel defective, flawed, fat, unfit, whatever, and so you think, “I’ve gotta work out like crazy today to be BETTER.”
Ned believes we’re already perfect, and that Yoga offers us the opportunity to experience our perfection. Not in a goofy, blissed out way (although sometimes that, too). The poses, thanks to the ancient wisdom that created them, allow us to feel the energy, the antidepressant energy, we already have in our bodies, but that sometimes just needs to be freed. Not by killing ourselves. Just by noticing it. Helping it course through us… but gently.
And breathing with it. The word “conspire” means “To breathe with.” Isn’t this the best possible lesson about love? That all you have to do is breathe with it? To conspire with your lover to have fun together? To be conspirators in the art of pleasure?
To paraphrase Ned, love doesn’t hurt us. We hurt ourselves when we do the feel-the-burn exercise of knocking ourselves out to prove to ourselves we’re worth being loved, or to prove ourselves to our lovers. Nothing needs to be proven—it’s already good enough (notice I didn’t say perfect); and if we can go with that, a whole lot of unpleasurable things vanish.
This Valentine’s Day, as everyone makes a run for the stores, please remember that you don’t have to prove anything. You don’t have to be pleasing. And once you feel this freedom, you won’t require your lover to prove anything or be pleasing, either.
Just be together, if you can. Breathe with each other. Conspire to do whatever feels good together, even if it’s nothing at all, and just feel the pleasure of it.
