The A to Z of Yoga: C is for Connection

This is a straight from the hips offering for those who love yoga, who want to know more, and who sense that it is a path of endless discovery. Because it is.

This A to Z of Yoga is hardly definitive. It is an invitation. I hope you will be delighted and inspired to dive deeper into your own journey of yoga as a fearless adventurer, a pioneer into the frontier of the incredibly unique and unfolding experience that is you.

C is for Connection

Step onto the mat, into your breath, and into your body, and by the time you’re finished with the practice, there’s a sense of feeling home again, of feeling whole, of feeling reconnected.

This is the power of yoga, of uniting mind, body and breath, and expanding our awareness and states of consciousness through the practice.

From the Sanskrit root yuj – to unite, to join, to yoke – yoga is about connection. It is the connection of self to Self, of self to other, and to all of life. For ultimately, life is about relationship and our experience of self, which we come to know through the ways in which we relate to everything around and within us. As so many spiritual traditions teach us, all of life is interconnected. Through fields such as ecology and quantum physics, science has been slowly ‘proving’ what the ancient seers have revealed over thousands of years ago. In Tantra, this is known as Shiva: absolute conscious, the unified field, the underlying awareness-presence of life.

The beauty of practices such as yoga, is that they enable us to have a direct experience of this fundamental interconnectedness. And this experience of interconnectedness starts to alter the ways in which we relate to ourselves and to others, from the profound understanding that we are neither different from each other, nor inherently separate. With this understanding, we naturally begin to generate the qualities of compassion, peace, and love, and the fundamental feelings of belonging and wholeness that we all long for, as we take that essential journey from self back to Self – to arrive right where we started, perfect and complete.

And all we require is our very own body-mind, a curiosity and longing, and the heartfelt cultivation of awareness.

Hungry for more?

Here are a few more C-words to add to your yoga lexicon. Let these words take you down the rabbit hole of your own research, exploration, and contemplation.

C is for: Chakra, Chit, Consciousness, Craving, Chandra