"I never watch the stars, there's so much down here."
-Lorde
I love this lyric. Maybe Lorde is a yoga teacher!
In the Vedic tradition, when the gods need to make sense of the world, when it is required that they feel, intuit and experience life, they must descend from the heavens and assume a mortal form. You see, humans have muscles, bones, nervous systems and organs of perception--tools of action and sensation. In their divinity, the journey of the gods is somewhat flat and dim. But in human form, this journey becomes much more interesting, varied, and open-ended.
We are blessed with the ability to create and sense. We can bind ourselves to any course of action, and feel its weight, value, and emotion with deep ferocity. And then, it ends! Each moment of our lives is utterly mortal, just as we are. It lives and eventually dies like a spectacular shooting star. Shooting stars are so cool for their surprise and momentary explosiveness. Up there in zero-gravity, they're just rocks; their beauty is in their quick, fiery descent towards Earth.
This is spanda, or pulsation. The richness of the practice of yoga, or anything you bind to, is its fleeting resonance. It is and then it isn't. Whatever it is is whatever it needs to be for that frozen moment. Then the pose ends; the cycle ends.
Like a celestial being fallen from the sky, before you lies the ability to create a linking of little moments. Your commitment to practice creates something. Temporary lines of action or intent. Flashes of purpose or experience. And these too will end.
If mortality provides the vast forum for anything to happen, and the tools for you to appreciate the fruits of your labor, let's see what happens. The interest and value in each snapshot is in how they are woven together in time.
No yoga pose lasts forever. It will be and then pass. No situation, neither heavenly nor horrible, will last forever. May the shapes you make and affirm your ability to be a part of the fleeting, mortal world, and make meaning in its beautiful brevity.