Minister on the Mat

I'm back from Kripalu, reflecting and reflecting. . . There were moments on the trails I walked around Kripalu's beautiful property when I wanted to shout, "God is good!" That's the one-sentence summary of my experience. I loved the gentle morning yoga. I loved the guided hikes and the bike ride through Stockbridge.  Much to my surprise, I loved the drum circle (more on that, later). I loved the healthy food, the silent breakfasts, and the conversations over lunch and dinner with other guests or volunteers. I will cherish all these things in my heart for some time to come.

Morning coffee was the only issue. They didn't serve any in the expansive cafeteria. All kinds of juices, teas, filtered water, locally-made apple cider could be yours--as much as you want. But no coffee. So I stood in line at the small cafe downstairs, with all the other people who weren't quite ready to give up caffeine. In the old days, which coffee-drinking Kripalu staff call "B.C."--before coffee--you couldn't even buy a cup on the premises. People would bring in instant, like contraband, and slip it into their hot water. Or sneak a bike excursion to town for a latte.

I got into yoga by way of an injury, or as I like to think of it, a humbling.  My body wouldn't do what I wanted it to do, and finally let me know: out on a run one day, my piriformis popped. The pain was breathtaking--and as I eventually learned a sign of a back condition, which along with a piriformis, I did not know I had, spondylolisthesis.

I used to run a lot, and sometimes I would feel a kind of cohesion between my body, my breath,  the natural world and God that I did not experience in other kinds of activity. When the running had to stop I was left with a longing for the same experience of cohesion. Eventually I found my way to the floor, in child's pose on a yoga mat.

Yoga, which means to unite, join, harness or yoke, was developed thousands of years ago as a way to prepare for meditation; it is a practice intended to sharpen our awareness and dispose us to receive grace. Which so many of us seem to need.

At Kripalu I met someone who got into yoga when his father died; I met someone else who was on a retreat with a group of relief workers from Haiti; I took a class from a beautiful woman who told us she'd spent six years of her life on crutches, and that the best yoga class she'd ever taken was taught by a woman who had MS. I read testimony from a firefighter who was on duty on 9/11, and came to Kripalu  several months later. Grief, trauma, injury--something humbles us, and we end up on the mat longing for stillness and, as one priest put it,  for "reestablishment of contact with the body."

Kripalu yoga is named after a beloved Indian religious leader, Swami Kripalvananda, who lived from 1913-1981, the last four of those years at the original Kripalu center in Pennsylvania. His name means"The Compassionate One," so the form of yoga named after him is rooted in compassion: compassion for the self and compassion for others. As we practice the yoga poses this way, learning to treat our bodies with compassion a little more each time, we open ourselves to the possibility of unity, at least in fleeting moments, with a God who looks on us with compassion all the time.

When I showed my eleven-year-old daughter the Kripalu Web site, she said, "That looks like a place you would like; it would drive me crazy!" Yoga is not for everyone.  But my daughter was right: I did like Kripalu. No, I loved it.