I came to the end of a book I had started reading on the retreat in Cyprus this week.

It’s a novel by a Korean writer set just before and during World War II in Malaysia (then Malaya). The British occupied, fled in the face of Japanese invasion and returned to defeat the Japanese.

The author writes at one point of a British love of acronyms. This was a new notion to me. Do we have a particular love of acronyms, I wondered? And some of my favourite acronyms rose from the depths of my memory.

One such acronym I learned from my mother as a teenager, long before I came to the inner search. My mother was at that point on her own spiritual quest.

“Do you know what life is about?” she asked me “L I F E – look inward for enlightenment” she went on, Ha – brilliant right? I have never forgotten it and maybe that moment had more of an impact that I am usually aware of.

Because this is an acronym that sits so well with the essence of yoga, isn’t it? All that we practice in class, may build strength and suppleness in the outer body, may enhance the functioning of our innner body, may calm our mind and dissolve our stresses, but more essentially they bring us back to our centre. The fragmenting waves of disturbance that move through the body and mind, pulliing us out of that centre are stilled and we find ourselves back there. There in our centre, much is revealed: wholeness, completeness, peace, expansiveness and the bliss of simply being…in the moment, one with and a part of all that is for some precious moments.

The experience is fleeting for most of us, yet once glimps, on taste and we know that we are more than the chaos that might make up much of our every day existence.

In fact I was listening to something to this effect just a few days ago. The teacher spoke to the fact that we are born with a centre and that all our conditioning and programming pulls us out of that centre to varying degrees.

To the same degree that we have lost our centre, we feel all at sea within ourselves and in life. We feel like we just don’t belong in this world, that we can’t find our place, our home.

Return to our centre through the practices, and we feel that sense of homecoming, we discover a place where we can be completely at rest and at one within ourselves and with life at large. I think we have all experienced this at the end of a good Yoga class, yes? I often like to point to the truth in class, that the mark of a successful Yoga practice is not really what you could or couldn’t do during the physical postures, how long you could or couldn’t retain your breath in pranayama. There are positives within Yoga posture and breath practices to be acknowledged, of course. Yet, the true mark of a successful practice is coming to rest in that absolute stillness, filled with presence, empty of mind and so at home for even a moment, in our own centre.

Yoga therefore gives us a pathway back to this centre, to a belonging.

Posture, breath, dietary guidelines, enquiry, listening to the inspirational texts, singing and reciting transforming verses and mantras – all these support restoration of our inner equilibrium and in that restoration and equilibrium, we find ourselves in that centre that has always been there – from the first breath we took – but which by and by we have left behind.

Let’s endeavour to remember this…. It’s hard to acknowledge sometimes and it can hurt the ego to do so – to admit that we our to great degrees the cause of our own discomfort and displacement in life. Let’s remember that our centre and thereby our belonging never leave us. This is why the a good Yoga class can bring us back there – our centre is always there. Rather, we leave our centre. We abandon our own essence and truth.

When suffering increases in my own life, I try to remember to look and acknowledge that I have moved away from that essential centre – through conscious and unconscious choices – and suffering is the consequence. It is not so much the events, as our capacity to respond or react that brings suffering.

Life to a great degree is suffering. Suffering is tied up in the nature of life: it is changeful, there are forms and experiences that have a beginning and end, that hurt, that strip away from us that which we hold dear. And on top of this we can….”suffer over our suffering”.

Tough things happen in life, right? The rug gets pulled from under our feet again and again. And we have the saying n these times that we have been “knocked off centre”, yes?

As Yoga practitioners, thankfully, we know – if we have experienced that state of Yoga I have referred to above, that completeness, that full presence, home-coming – a that we have the tools to restore equilibrium and bring us home to our centre, to our true home!

The thing with Yoga is it has the capacity to be medicine for our whole being, yes? Body, mind and soul. Yet it is not a pill we can pop. it’s a case of self application, isn’t it? And at those times when the suffering is high, the last thing we might feel like doing is moving and feeling all those tensions, breathing into the body and meeting all those feelings, sitting still with our turbulent minds, lying back and experiencing the pain in our heart surge and overwhelm us. Grief, loss, separation, rejection: through all these painful moments in life, the layers of being we need to travel through to come back to our centre can simply be so overwhelming that we do not pass through them but rather feel we are drowning in them.

In these moments it’s of course time to be gentle on ourselves, to do less, to nurture and show self-compassion. I remember reading that Judith Hanson Lasseter, a seasoned Yoga practitioner at the time, did only restorative yoga for a year after her mother passed away. I know, likewise, that after my father passed away, it took a long time before I could return to the type of practice I had done before. Our bodies and minds hold too much in these moments and need time from us, to adapt and recalibrate.

At other times, with other kinds of suffering, more practice can be 100% appropriate and even necessary to bring the relief and transcendence we are looking for, can’t it? I mean there are other times when that which we would run from because it hurts or because it challenges our self-image – the emptiness, the loneliness, the fragmentation within – can in fact be the gateway to that which we are longing for – that homecoming, wholeness and belonging.

You’ve doubtless experienced it in class? You arrive in some state of stress and tension. And it’s really uncomfortable to lie down and be with tihs at the start of class isn’t it? Your mind will go everywhere but into this moment, and our body feels agitated and uneasy too. And then you follow the pointers to move and breathe and feel, to open to and let go into, yes? Your mind is brought into the moment through this bringing it into this focus on body, on breath. And then you find that in that moving and breathing and consequent feeling all that you have been efforting to push away and diminish is suddently and effortlessly dissolved. By the the end of the class, all is transformed and you are greatly relieved and tell the teacher – “That was a great class”. You are so thankful for this positively changed state of being. This is the alchemy of practice. .

It takes our discernment, on the one hand, and our skill (or the skill of an experienced teacher) to know when and what practices are going to work best for us in any point in time – but we know that they can work to bring us back home to ourselves, yes? And to that sense of belonging to ourself and to life that for so much of life eludes us.

If L,.I.F.E is about looking inward for enlightenment, it is about just this – a 180 degree turn from grasping and clutching at fixes external to us, to moving through the layers of fragmentation and dischord back to our centre where everything is ever whole, and at home, and healed. Yoga shows us the way. And shows us the way in so many ways – in ways which suit each circumstance and each personality type. Not only are there different approaches to Hatha Yoga for different types of folks and different points in life. There are different paths of Yoga. There is Bhakti Yoga, the Yoga of devotion which can soothe and nurture the heart, and those who tend to live from the heart. Raja Yoga, for those who have a natural inclination towards the meditation as a means to inner transformation and homecoming. Jnana Yoga, the path of self-enquiry. And Karma Yoga, the path of selfless service.

Ayurveda also gives us wonderful tools to enable this return to our Self – Self with a capital “S” because it is the enduring Self at the heart of our being.

Ayurveda works not only to restore wellbeing to the body, but also what we call in Sanskrit “Sattva” to the mind. Sattva is equilibrium, purity, clarity, peaceful balance and the practices that Ayurveda points us to can help us to reclaim all of this in body and mind.

Ayurveda practices that help bring us back to our centre include lifestyle, diet, herbs, breath, sound, body treatments, mantra, meditation. And Ayurveda teaches us how to adapt all of these according to our Ayurveda constitutional type, the season and our age or stage of life. Through these means, Ayurveda enables us not only to build health and longevity in the body, but also balance and contentment within our psyche. This happens through an alignment of all our daily choices with our own innate metabolic nature and with nature at large.

Ayurveda teaches us to live in harmony with the flow of life within and around us. And in so doing, Ayurveda awakens us to sattvic being (pure, balanced, content, clear). The waves of disturbance in the body mind are pacified and we are able once more to rest and move in the world from that place within where we feel whole, complete, healed (in its deeper meaning) and at home with who we are and at peace with Life itself.

In fact, the Sanskrit word Ayurveda can be broken down into two words Ayur – life and Veda – knowledge or understanding. And so, Ayurveda gives us an understanding of how life works, not only our individual life but also the broader Life of which we are all a part.

In giving us the understanding of our own nature and the rhythms and ways of Mother Nature, Ayurveda empowers us to come to a blessed body-mind-spirit balance and wellbeing. We now how to sustain calm within, that calm which allows us to settle into our own centredness – clear, calm and happy.

The teaching of Ayurveda is that when we live in alignment with our individual metabolic nature (which Ayurveda can identify for us) and with Mother Nature, the inner turbulence is quietened. This allows us to feel whole. complete again. We find ourselves back in our centre, in touch with our essence and the truth of who we are so that centre we begin to finally embody and live according to our own natural tendencies, rather than against them.

In this way. Ayurveda as much as Yoga, can bring us to experience the treasure of our own being, that pure centre within where we are always clear, light and untainted by anything that life might throw at us, and by anything that we might acquire. We find our true wisdom in our heart and a capacity for higher seeing and perception.

Ayurveda too then ultimately will draw us into our true home, still, clear, enlivened and enabled to meet the fullest and richest purpose of our life, as we anchor ourselves in our quiet centre where we can further LOOK INWARD FOR ENLIGHTENMENT.

And so if Life is about L.I.F.E.,, let’s awaken to it and in so doing live our best, most fulfilled and complete life. Ayurveda and Yoga can take us there.

However, we do need the inclination and motivation to apply the wisdom of these two traditions in our daily life. If we do, the results will be ours. As the Yoga saying goes – “Practice, practice and all is coming.”

The Vedas teach us that there are three blessings in life:

1. To get a human birth

2. To have a longing for truth – awakening to the truth of all we really are, revealed in our centre.

3. To come across the teachings that can fulfill this longing,

If you are here, then I know you have two of these blessings: human birth and access to the teachings (Ayurveda and Yoga) that will take to that centre of wisdom and light within where you will find all the answers you will ever need.

The missing link then is 2 – our degree of longing. This longing is “mumukshutva” in Sanskrit. Great word, right? (I LOVE the Sanskrit language, don’t you?) For some of us mumukshutva is a naturally present part of our make-up. For others of us it is something we will need to cultivate and there are means to that end. The less our current ways of thinking and living serves us, the more they and our experience of the world cause us suffering, the more likely we are to develop mumukshutva – a longing for liberation from the unending cycles of suffering that make up our lives.

The moment will come when the suffering, and the efforts to keep it all together no longer work for us. We begin to long so deeply for freedom from it all. It has become intolerable to be so disconnected from our own belonging and wholeess – from our centre which is part of and one with the centre and source of all.

At this point, we hold our hands open to receive guidance, we surrender to the ways and pointings of Life, and then….relief and release – we can drop into that still centre of homecoming within.

This reminds me of a story told by Osho. It is the story of the nun Chiyono.

Chiyono was a Zen student who achieved enlightenment after years of struggle when a water pail broke. While carrying water and gazing at the moon’s reflection in the pail, she tried to save the weakening pail from breaking. However, the bottom fell out and it was in that moment that Chiyono realized that her attachments and striving had been the barrier, and her enlightenment came when she let go and emptied her mind, and in that emptying dropped into the moment – at which point she would have dropped into the eternal, unchanging centre of her being. She just had to let go of the striving once the pail broke and emptied of water, and then there was no more reflection of the moon in the water. And as the moon’s reflection disappeared, she had an awakening about which she wrote this poem:

This way and that way I tried to keep the pail together

Hoping the weak bamboo would never break

Suddenly the bottom fell out

No more water; no more moon in the water – emptiness in my hand.

Her story illustrates for us how struggling to hold on, following our own mental constructs to find solutions to our suffering and for our way forward in life, can prevent us from dropping into our true wisdom and potentiality for seeing and understanding – or some might say, into enlightenment.

Chiyono’s story shows us that enlightenment is achieved not through effort or trying to control or direct the outer circumstances of our life, but by letting go and allowing understanding to arise naturally: not by striving to change outer circumstances and to find salves in the outer, but by letting go and dropping back into our centre where we find all we have been longing for for so long – liberation from our constricted, suffering, small life and a merging into the eternal, unlimted stream of life.

I’d love you to join me for upcoming Ayurveda and Yoga events, retreats and courses so that you can find your own gentle pathways, perfect for you at this moment in your life, back to the ever present yet perhaps ever elusive centre of belonging within you.