Full Speed Retreat!

David Rush

2018-09-26

Hello again. At the very end of the last newsletter, I mentioned that I would be writing again soon about the urban retreat I will be hosting at Yoga Next Door during the October bank holiday. Many of you have been asking about if (or when) I was going to do any workshops - well, this is it! This is a project that is very near to my heart because it is the first time I will be doing more than exploring the physical body in a workshop setting. In fact, this workshop is intended to explore how yoga is about something more than what we do on the mat.

I came to yoga relatively late in life. But I have always been an explorer of the phenomenology of human experience. Yeah, I know that’s a mouthful. One of my academic friends gave it to me. It means that I’ve sought and found some of the weird and wonderful things that don’t quite fit into an easy materialistic view of life. I’ve read a lot of “scriptures” trying to understand them. Somewhere around 2006 I became convinced that I needed to connect it all back to the simple experience of the physical body, so I figured I’d give yoga a try. And it was obviously exactly what I needed, right from the very first minute.

So when I first read The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali I was genuinely surprised. It was not like any religious or “spiritual” text I had ever read; in fact, it read more like a how-to book for producing experiences that I thought “just happened” and couldn’t be reliably reproduced. The long-suffering engineer in my soul was delighted.

The fact that it is really short was also pleasant. Traditionally the Yoga Sutras are broken into four “legs” (the sanskrit word is “pada”), where each leg maps out a particular part of the process. For the most part, I find those divisions helpful, and we will be following its structure, more or less, through the four sessions of the weekend.

  1. Samadhi Pada — “bringing together”
  2. Sadhana Pada — “practice” or “discipline”
  3. Vibhuti Pada — “method of manifestation”
  4. Kaivalya Pada – “freedom” or “liberty”

In spite of the brief text, it’s a lot to bite off for a single workshop - especially if you want to include practical work to go along with Patanjali’s how-to. Since the practical work is essential for understanding, we wil be doing some. And after looking at the Hot Yoga Dublin/Yoga Next Door calendar, we thought the bank holiday weekend would provide a great opportunity for you to take a deep dive into the material, yet still have time for everything else (e.g. kids, dogs, chickens...) in life.

You can also explore just one day’s worth of material, if that is a better fit for your circumstances. Obviously, I’m excited about the whole thing, but the second day will have more “take-home” practice content (read that as “fun stuff”). I’d highly recommend it if you find the whole weekend too difficult to attend.

As usual, I’ve gone on for a bit longer than I meant, so I will close here. There’s a lot going on with my teaching practice just now, so it’s likely that I will write again soon. But then again, you never know how the future will turn out. In any case, let it bring you into something more in your own practice of Yoga.

Shanti OM


This document was translated from LATEX by HEVEA.