May 25 2024 23 mins
Yoga practice is EVERY DAY
As Rabindranath Tagore, translated by William Radice said it:
Every day, the dawn
Brings a blessing
To whatever is still growing
Towards the Sun
Rabindranath Tagore - Sparks/ Sphuliṅga, 31
Yoga practice is an every day affair.
An all day, every day endeavour.
A day and night, summer and winter ever new commitment.
As Tagore’s words remind us, ‘every day, the dawn brings a blessing to whatever is still growing towards the sun.’
I first encountered this verse in a collection of Rabindranath Tagores Brief Poems titled The Jewel That Is Best.
It contains many sparks and gems, but this is the one that most arrested me when I first picked up the book at an airport bookshop in Mumbai in 2010.
Yoga practice invites us into a remembering of who we really are. And one of the ways this is facilitated is by the embodied prayer of celebration, gratitude, reverence and devotion that is sūrya namaskāra, or saluting the Sun, symbol of the light of consciouness without which we would not be having any experience at all.
When we actively, steadily cultivate gratitude and presence, we can harness yoga principles to realise more fully our human potential, work skilfully with the blessings of this day and keep growing towards the Sun of integrated, unified, whole consciousness.