The quality and discovery of spaciousness is an important one to me, and is a word I hear myself use a lot when I teach. In a society that loves categories and ways to pin and identify, the idea of expansion feels at times like rebellion—in my opinion, one with great potential for beauty as we unfold, disentangle, and blossom.
I was listening to an On Being podcast this past week called "The World is Our Field of Practice." Zen priest angel Kyodo williams had this beautiful quote that I have been mulling over for the past few days. She said, “The way that I think of love most often, these days, is that love is space. It is developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves to allow others to be as they are—that is love. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have hopes or wishes that things are changed or shifted, but that to come from a place of love is to be in acceptance of what is, even in the face of moving it towards something that is more whole, more just, more spacious for all of us. It’s bigness. It’s allowance. It’s flexibility.”
This quote to me is our very practice of yoga, on and off the mat. And the beautiful space of BYS, physical and otherwise, is a treasured arena to explore that expanse.
Photo by Shannon DeFerrari
