Rediscovering yoga’s sparkling truth

On the life journey, it’s certain that we’ll endure failures and make mistakes. A friend of mine, an inventor with eight devices in use and registered by the Office of U.S. Patents, is a good example of reinventing after mistakes or failures. Before any success he experienced numerous failures. It’s as if he, along with all the other creatives of dogged determination, have memorised - and then forgotten - Samuel Beckett’s oft-quoted statement on success:

We were college roommates, and though I’ve not kept up with him, I cherish the memories and recall his dormitory room experiments even in his 20’s. After college, our lives sent us scurrying toward a lot of things that ended up secondary; but like many of our peers, we were not fully prepared when thrust into adulthood’s responsibilities. Our vocations were the focus, and that meant working through the stages of life centred on careers and fatherhood. In the world of work, we laboured under authorities that were not always kind or fair, and our jobs kept us bound to responsibilities.  The process of inventing and registering for patents is unclear to me, but I think registering new inventions confirms that the stumbles leading up to it were ultimately productive and each failure produced a better failure leading to a patent-worthy
invention.  An inventor’s name is frequently connected to their product and the impact it makes. It’s hard to think of the atom bomb without invoking the name Robert Oppenheimer, and his reported musing at the bomb’s detonation, quoting Vishnu speaking from the Bhagavad Gita. “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I’ve registered some things too: vehicles, my writing, my fingerprints, credit cards, post office boxes, drivers’ licenses’, telephone numbers, passports, addresses, and more.
And while some registrations are a simple formality, others are more complicated.  Together they mark the official unfolding of my life housed all over the world in bits and
documents.  Yoga brings each of us to private changes that have no official registration. When practiced with others, yoga can still be a personal experiment leading to individual reinvention. And now, due to the worldwide pandemic, most of us are more familiar with private yoga than we were before.
Many of us have greater clarity and know that our experiments and private failures can discourage us, or provide us with a springboard to reinvention.  Before the pandemic, I’d go to class and walk away after handling the small detail of writing my name down on a sign-up sheet when I entered the studio – or signing in on a computer screen. Sometimes, I’d fill out other forms too. My registration was official and public but also my inner experience of yoga was unofficial and private.
All of us register for moments in yoga but more importantly, yoga registers on us.  It blooms inside – accruing over time – to the construction of what I would call, a re-invented person. Through reinvention and imagination, I’m not just a lion exhaling with force, I’m an avatar for Simasana.  I’m not a lion, but my body doesn’t know that; and Simasana’s lionhearted, barbaric yawp, registered deep in my body speaks to something “far more deeply interfused,” in Wordsworth’s words.