Headless Yoga

Headless Yoga: 

what I most love about sarvangasana, shoulder stand, is the perspective it gives me, how my view is immediately altered by feet reaching through the air and shoulders firmly planted on the ground. It's headless yoga really, an instant recognition of myself as spaciousness, an aware capacity that intimately knows itself as being seamless with the world. 

sarvangasana is known as the queen of asanas, offering near endless benefits from its practice. It's long been a favorite of mine, perhaps because of the ease of my first attempt, naturally arriving to its completion with little effort needed. There are posture that still defy comfort and lack a fine degree of grace even after decades of practice. Yet the shoulder stand seemed to welcome me from the very beginning of my yoga journey, as if gravity would loosen its grip for just the moment of this pose and allow me to gain access to the spaciousness of this view. 

headless yoga indeed. 

right from the start. 

of course I didn't have the words to describe this, only after my encounter with Douglas Harding and the Headless Way did my perspective have a sense of intellectual understanding. But the wonderful thing was that it never needed any explanation, I was seeing, without need or use of words. It was the simplicity of everything being exactly as it is - open, spacious, and aware. 

headless.

sarvangasana is always near the beginning of my practice, and it's a posture that's held for the greatest length of time. I love to flow easily into this pose, as if slipping seamlessly into my natural view, returning to my original sense of the world. It's like coming home. And this often stays for the duration of my practice, a shift of perspective that gives a clear view of reality and every asana after is just a continuum of an infinite practice, causeless, ongoing since the dawn of time. 

headless yoga. 

~

Peace, Eric