Your Yoga Practice: Beyond the Game of Life

By Kino MacGregor • November 25th, 2010 • 4065 Views

Kino brings wonderful insight to the concept of complete yoga practice and complete yoga lifestyle. When we begin practicing yoga the deepest part of our consciousness asks for clarity, awakening and truth. What is sometimes the first step in taking positive steps towards the peace that we all yearn for is a recognition of exactly how deeply we are entrenched within our harmful patterns of the past. Yoga can sometimes be riddled with fierce competition in an effort to help practitioners confront their competitive nature. You might find yourself competing with a new yoga practitioner in your daily class who is naturally very flexible. Or you might find yourself competing with yourself and comparing your body in a negative light with the way it was last year, last week or yesterday. Yet still you might be competing with your friends and peers. All of this is totally normal because it is totally and completely part of being human. The yoga process is not a denial of humanity, but instead presents you with a clear mirror through which to view your character. And in the safe space of yoga get the chance to move through the competition of the ego into the open, non-judgmental realm of peace.

Physical hatha yoga even sometimes creates a fertile ground for the competitor's mind because the postures are taught sequentially based on proficiency. It is even tempting to judge a person's spiritual development by the amount of postures they are doing. Yet the real yoga happens within and is a process where dedicated practitioners heal the body and train the mind. It really does not matter how good your lotus position is, how many handstands you can do or how deep your backbends are if you are unconscious about the way you treat other people, beings and yourself. Similarly it is often the insurmountable challenge of the most demanding postures that teaches the fiercest competitive practitioners a very deep and hard lesson-humility. There will always be someone stronger, more flexible, younger and more knowledgeable than you. There will always be someone doing more yoga postures than you. You will never get it done and you will never be the best forever if at all.

And that...

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Location:  Miami, US

Kino MacGregor is one of only 14 people in the United States to receive Certification to teach Ashtanga Yoga from its founder, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois in Mysore, India. The youngest woman to hold this title,...