Future-Saints: Luke Simon

Walking down the street I sometimes think of all the things I am passing by without seeing.
It’s funny to bomb through New York like legs were just made for walking. My eyes crave to see, but it’s stressful to try to do both at once: keep them softly open and not trip or get hit by a car. Maybe it’s worth the risk to stay in our own inner planet, receiving the offerings of every day. Or maybe I’m delusional and just fantasizing that this constant conversation with the seen is serenity. But there’s a way to use your eyes wisely.

One of my boyfriend’s used to get lost in his own neighborhood. He would just loop around the East Village, or Queens, all the places he had lived his whole life, but he would still wander around them directionless sometimes, showing up late. He said he was thinking the whole time when he’d get lost, but I wonder what images were coming in to a brain untethered from local familiarity.

How do you use your eyes?
How do we open our eyes?
Two eyes & the Third Eye, too.
Seeing the truth– reality, our own reality, and is it sending us messages?
Are we receiving the world, or ignoring it?
Are we hiding from it, denying it?
Are we playing with it, aligning with it?
Is the world alive? Are our senses just nature or tools?
Tools for peace or tools for divisions?
Can we see the future?
Can we see the present?
Can we see the past?
(No, Yes, No)
All we can see is right now.
We can imagine and reshape, but we only see in the moment.
For that reason I hypothesize that the immediacy of the body and senses is a way in to one pointed awareness of now. In the austerity of immediacy is a whole field to roam in. Instead of trying to expand our vision broad and cover a lot of territory, there is a broadening upwards, like a shard of light that magnifies what is here now, and makes it fuller and richer.

When we’re walking and just looking on our way somewhere it’s not a sin to miss things. Whatever, ebb and flow. You can’t always feel like you are sizzling with super mario rainbows. But I wonder what it’s like for others to see. I think it’s totally unique for each person. I think we are foreign and exotic to each other, though I’m interested in seeing first hand that we are all One, and how you even get that vision.

Yoga has been in the news a lot lately, from William J. Broad’s sensational articles in the New York Times and now with New York State beginning to tax and regulate studios. These events have been catalysts for the yoga community to re-examine what exactly Yoga is in New York in 2012.

In the Businessweek article “Yoga Gets Off the Mat to Fight New York’s Tax Man” a spokesman for the state explained that yoga, “is included in a business model that falls under ‘weight control salon’ and ‘health salon’ categories”. Yoga is so much simpler than that. It’s basically breathing. It seems that way to me, but there is a huge range of different yoga practices being offered. Businessweek reports there is $5.7 billion a year spent on yoga. The state wants a cut of the yoga money and now we teachers and practitioners have to ask– what the heck is Yoga, anyway? Can we argue that it’s not a weight control center nor a health salon? When we’re clear, they can get clear.

We need a new category, but yoga is such a generic term, it can be used for any type of physical, mental or spiritual discipline. There are so many yogas: old and new, they are recipes and combinations of practices to bring about certain effects. Jazzercise, is, for example, a yoga for feeling jazzy and doing some cardio movement– though I would file it under the weight control category.

My yoga practice is a space in my day where I sit and breath and let my mind arrive in the moment and then I do movements that feel really good on my body, maybe listening to some music that makes my heart feel lighter. And then I sit a little more in silence to connect to a peace that is always within me. So it is about health, feeling strong and relaxed in my body, but a good practice opens me to the Spirit, and that is priceless.

My Dad in New Mexico read about how well Lululemon stock is doing and called to suggest I get a job with them. My imagination flashed to the twine and seashell emblazoned yoga mermaid bodices I would design, but then I quickly reigned myself back to the more important issue: the benefits of actually doing yoga! I explained to him that I prefer being on the teaching and practicing end. And that if I were to get into fashion, it would be just for the sake of fashion, not to infuse my yoga practice with more style. I do yoga to release the pulls of the outside world. I do yoga to experience wholeness and peace wherever I am, whatever I’m wearing or not wearing.

Yoga is growing in consumer demand because people realize the state of yoga is so enjoyable. You can feel so good, and fulfilled just by doing a good combination of breathing, moving and sitting. If Tax Men understood this they’d make yoga illegal! But probably we won’t all elope to the mountains to meditate forever. Yoga practice has something to offer to anyone and everyone. But we have to question what yoga is, now, in 2012. What are you practicing for? The outer form may shift, it may take on local flavor, but the core remains the same.

The problem with the yoga marketplace is that it fuses the aim of yoga– to re-connect to wholeness– with the consumer pattern of needing something to feel whole. I’m happy for yoga businesses for building a bridge for people to enter the practice who wouldn’t have been interested before it was a really delicious thing to buy. But it’s getting out of control–we have to keep our eye on the prize: freedom. Yoga isn’t about getting what you’ve never had before, it’s about coming back to the beauty we always are. Knowing the frailties of the situation we’re all in searching for wholeness, let’s be wise as a community and develop yoga as a way to nourish us with what we need, not more of what we want.