from the book Self-Awakening Yoga
by Don Stapleton, Ph.D.
SELF-AWAKENING YOGA IS BASED ON THE FUNDAMENTAL INQUIRY "Who am I?" The insights that unfold as a result of this inquiry into your inner experience are gifts from your teacher within.
In the inquiries of Self-Awakening Yoga, you are invited to witness the actual experiences that arise when you let go of attempting to control your experience. From many interesting perspectives of sell each of the inquiries presents an opportunity for cultivating your receptivity to the mystery of the unknown. In this way, Self-Awakening Yoga can be a perpetual source of inspiration for evolving into ways of being that are not the results of your past. You are the being endowed with infinite capacity to birth yourself into new forms in response to a continuously unfolding universe.
The structural details of any yoga practice or spiritual system can be alluring; it’s easy to mistake external 'techniques for consciousness. But a practice comes alive with creativity when you commune with your body~ sensations, as you live in the question of what is unfolding from the inside of your physical world. The principles of Self-Awakening Yoga can help you learn how to use your yoga practice--regardless of its form--for inventing explorations that provide personal access codes to the wisdom being of your body.
Being true to the intelligence of the body requires leaving the known as a jumping-off point and venturing into unknown territory to allow prana to truly guide you. Taking your yoga learning to this level of personal ownership frees you from the illu-
sion that "truth" exists outside of you--in techniques, in the authority of an expert or teacher, or even in achieving your future ideals. Open-ended movement inquiries give us access to our evolutionary potential and open possibilities for progressing to a level of integration that goes beyond any previously experienced. The doorway to this alignment of self is located in the here and now, with observing and interacting with what is present in our bodies and communicating at the level of sensation.
The energy that animates the body is prana. According to yogic philosophy, this creative energy that flows through you is the same intelligent life force that animates the entire universe; the individual self, then, is seen as a multilayered field of condensed energy within this larger field of prana. By attuning your mental awareness to the workings of prana in your body, you access your ability to interact with the quality, purpose, and direction of your life, and thereby affect the world in which you live. From the early yoga shamans to innovators in modern times, yogis have left a trail of diverse methods for gaining access to this mysterious force--what has come to be understood as a primary goal of yoga.
The great sage Yogi Patanjali begins his famous discourse on yoga with the word now:
Atha-yoganusasanam: "Now the discipline of yoga."
With this one word Yogi Patanjali introduces the purpose, the practice, and the results of yoga. The barrage of forces that compete for attention in our lives make it difficult to enter the present moment--gathering body, mind, and spirit into the same "field" runs counter to the ongoing action demanded by the many projects that consume our focus on any given day "Being" can seem luxurious, at best; many of us struggle with the thought that stepping into now, this one moment, with all parts of our being means leaving more "important" work behind. Even when we take time to practice yoga we can succumb to the effects of bilocation--the body can be on the yoga mat while the mind is at the office, picking up the kids, or rehearsing a conversation we're avoiding. The practice of attuning to sensation provides us with speed bumps for noticing when we have zoomed out of the present moment into the past or future and teaches us how to build pathways into the pranic field of creative energy available to us in each and every moment.
