How Many Are We?

One of my most regular (and wonderful) students comes in every Tuesday morning, and after greeting me, asks "how many are we?" 

The question always makes me smile.
Sometimes we are 5. sometimes we are 16.
And, dare I say it, always, we are one.
 
No matter how many we are, we always fit into the space, or stretch to fill the space.
For 75 minutes on Tuesday mornings, our group is a community. We don't really know that much about each other save what we glean from chatting before or after class, but our collective experience is one of the compelling reasons to come to a yoga class. We sense each other, our joy, our forbearance, our irritation, our fatique, our shared moments of unintentional humor. We feel connected as we work, stretch, sit, breathe and rest.

The word yoga comes from the root Sanskrit word "yuj", which means to yoke or join together. This is generally understood as "yoking" the individual layers of Self, what is known as the koshas, from the most physical and external layer of the physical body to the most interior and esoteric "body of divine bliss", fathoms deep in the structure of Self. But the deeper you dive into the very nature of connectedness, the less separate all those threads actually seem. Not just the threads that are woven together to make us us, but the threads that connect us as living beings with all other living beings. With life itself.

If you're a meditator, you might have profound and fleeting flashes of this interconnectedness. In my experience, if you try to hold onto it, it slips away and is gone. But for a flash of an instant, you feel what it is to be part of a whole.

Do we reach enlightenment on a Tuesday morning in yoga class in downtown White River Junction? Jury's still out on that one, but there are these ineffably sweet moments when we experience our connection with one another, and sometimes that is the best yoga of all.