#ChooseToChallenge
Happy International Women’s Day! The theme of this year’s celebration is #ChooseToChallenge, shared on the IWD website alongside this statement:
A challenged world is an alert world and from challenge comes change.
So let's all choose to challenge.
How will you help forge a gender equal world?
Celebrate women's achievement. Raise awareness against bias. Take action for equality.
The relationships between choice, challenge, awareness and change are familiar to those of us who practise yoga as a physical activity. We choose to interpret poses in ways that support and/or challenge our bodies, which in turn gives us greater awareness of our bodies and prompts more choice. But the IWD statement has got me thinking about yoga and challenge, and about yoga as challenge, in a more holistic sense.
Firstly, let’s remember that yoga is much more than physical practice, known as asana. Asana is only one of yoga’s eight limbs. If you want a starting point for learning about the eight limbs, I’ve added a link below. The purpose of asana (limb no. 3) is to prepare the body to better support the mind. For example, asana practice is often seen as preparation for meditation (limb no. 7). By moving the body, we quieten the mind and feel prepared for meditation. Practising yoga every day may not mean practising asana every day. It might involve a limb such as the yamas (no. 1, often classified as standards of morality, self-restraint, or interaction with others ), the niyamas (no. 2, which focuses on personal habits and observances), or dharna (no. 6, total concentration). The more you learn about the eight limbs, the more you realize that they can be found in so many parts of our lives before and beyond the yoga mat. It’s daunting though! There’s a reason that the term ‘yogi’ was traditionally bestowed upon very few people, those who dedicate their entire being to the eight limbs. I’ve added a link below to a great article about the true meaning of the term by Arundhati Baitmangalkar, and really recommend that other yoga teacher’s listen to her podcast, ‘Let’s Talk Yoga’, where she frequently tackles difficult issues about yoga’s presentation in the West.
I am not expecting you to become a yogi. I don’t want to become a yogi myself. But here’s my suggestion to you, based on the IWD of choosing to challenge. Spend a bit of time reflecting on the physical skills you have learnt through asana practice. Maybe parts of your body have become stronger or more flexible. Maybe you can find yoga poses on different planes for a different experience (for example, how do you feel in Eagle pose compared to Shoelace?). Maybe you have got better at being upside down, or standing taller, or balancing on one leg. Hardest of all, for some of us, maybe you’ve given yourself permission to rest during a yoga class.
Once you’ve thought about the physical benefits of your practice, here’s the really challenging bit. Start to notice how you also apply the same skills and processes to your life beyond the yoga mat. Skills such as strength, flexibility, concentration, perspective, balance and compassion. You have these attributes. You demonstrate them every time you take a yoga class. The real challenge is to take them into our interactions with others, our intellectual and physical work, our care for our own physical, mental and emotional health. When you start to name it, and to see that the ability to breathe through The World’s Longest Pigeon Pose will also help you when you’re on hold to the gas company, that is when the asana work really becomes worthwhile. You challenge yourself on the mat, so that you become more aware off the mat. And it is this awareness which brings change.