This past week I was in Chicago. Late night flights, Ubers, taxis, time changes, and more.
On my flight back home, I couldn't help but notice how quickly the landscape around me whizzed by. We cruised over Lake Michigan in a few short minutes; a Great Lake crossed in minutes! I later got home and googled the width of Lake Michigan: 118 miles. And we bolted across it like it was a small pond.
After this "lake flash" moment, I experienced the worst turbulence in my life--scary-as-hell-I-might-die turbulence. It eventually cleared up after about 20 minutes, and I made it home to New Jersey alive. Talk about movement.
I began to think: What is this whole "aviation" thing? Is it natural? Is it normal? What was I doing miles and miles up in the sky? What's going on here?
There is a premise among us, especially in the fitness community, to move back to a Paleolithic stage (of life and diet); back to a purer, simpler era. I personally don't want to move back, I want to move forward. Life moves.
Flying around at 575 miles per hour is normal. It's the world. It's humanity's way of moving with the movement of life. Airplanes are designed to be sleek, aerodynamic, and efficient--to move well within the big, wild, blue orb of planet Earth.
The Shakti concept depicts the world as one of simply power, and how this power shifts like a pendulum one way or the other and back again. This shifting creates the potential for both order and chaos, pattern, error and mutation. It's the very movement of life.
Life moves and we have the opportunity to move with it. So if life moves, how you will move with it? This is what we ask in yoga.
Up, down, left, right and back again. The poses are the world and your body is both the aircraft and captain. As the world moves you, you move the world right back. You have the ability to leverage yourself efficiently and well in all the movements of life. Through clear skies and hurricane alike, we will fly into the variation of being alive and move within the movement.
May the shapes you make and affirm your ability to be a part of the electric world, and make meaning in its incessant oscillation.