Yoga is the practice

This is the threshold. To plow through life, seeking pleasures, avoiding pain, rejecting dissonance, reveling in success, and cursing the vicissitudes of fortune. Or to pursue a life of inquiry, simultaneously nonattached and deeply immersed. To experience all of yourself as both the center of the universe and a dust mote on the filament of history. To choose to have a practice - a daily discipline of yoking your heart to your mind, your mind to your breath, your breath to your body, your body to the earth and the rest of humanity - is to pass this threshold into the examined, mindful life.

The exact way in which you engage in that yoking (in Sanskrit, the yoga) will change. Should change. The course of your relationships, your career, and your health will inevitably shift; the only constant is change. Likewise your asana practice and other m ind/body pursuits will, should shape-shift over a lifetime.

Passion, depression, contentment, inquiry, exaltation, loss. Will you engage or will you deflect? Will you be immersed or consumed? Like anything substantial, to live a mindful life isn’t easy. It takes attention and skill. It takes beginning where you are, as you are now, yoking this larger intention to the present moment. It takes practice.