Yoga Tales from Rural Maine: The art of being alone

I was in love once, long ago, with a man who had mastered the art of being alone in a crowd. He was a drummer and his band was touring almost 200 dates a year. This meant that he was almost never alone. He was always on stage, in a bar, in a restaurant, in a van, sharing a hotel room...I asked him about it once. How could he stand it, never being alone? He said it was okay, because he had mastered the art of being alone in a crowd.

Yoga is like this. Yoga gives us a chance to practice radical aloneness. We become aware of our separateness; we notice our own bodies; our own breath; our own thoughts. We put our own two feet on our own yoga mats. We close our eyes and in the darkness, we have only our Selves.

But it is through this radical aloneness that we can access the most radical form of togetherness. In the same way that my drummer could be by himself in a crowded room, so too can the yogi. We can be alone any time, any where, under any circumstances. And at the same time, even as we turn our focus inward, we are aware of our indivisibility. We are only ever us; we are never only us. Both things are true at once. We can turn to whichever one we need, in the same way we might turn over our pillow to find the cool side.

Each breath is our own beautiful breath. At the same time, each breath is the breath of Everything and Everybody--the breath of the trees, of the ocean, of our friend and of our enemy; the breath of our teacher and of our teacher's teacher; the breath of the very Earth itself.

"Yoga" is the union of body, mind, and spirit. Every time we step onto a yoga mat, we are a drummer in the great band of life, stepping into a sea of humans, and turning our focus inward. We master the art of being alone, so that we might know that we never truly are.

Alone. Together. In an L.A. hotel room.