November 4, 2011 Yoga and the Nature of Time

According to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, liberation or enlightenment is called kaivalya, which means ‘aloneness’.  This refers to the nature of awareness, which usually has a subject and an object.  If awareness can be experienced with no division between subject and object, there is only awareness, and that is kaivalya.  This happens, according to Patanjali, when the three gunas have fulfilled their purpose. The gunas, inertia, movement and luminosity, are characteristics of everything that can be observed in nature, and they are always in flux.  The practice of yoga fosters an experiential understanding of how his or her body is organized in progressively more subtle combinations of the gunas, as separate but interacting layers (kosas).  Each layer has its own particular natural time scale, or rhythm.  As consciousness entrains itself to a particular layer, time resolution and time continuity increase.  Time resolution is the time rate at which measurable events are perceived; time continuity is the subjective perception of the passage of time—the greater the continuity, the more time appears to stand still for us.  At the most subtle layers or kosas, events are perceivable at a level of detail that may approach the quantum, and an a-temporal realm of subjective time may be reached.   Liberation is attained when this a-temporal realm is reached, which corresponds with the stable awareness of non-duality of subject and object.  In this workshop the details of the progression from temporality to a-temporality are presented in a combination of a talk and an asana class .

December 2, 2011 Twists

January 6, 2012 Forward Bends

February 10, 2012 Backbends

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