Asana

Asana literally means seat. Long before it described the vast catalogue of postures found in modern practice, it named a single question: can the body hold still enough, comfortably enough, for anything else to happen.

The classical instruction for asana is notably brief - a posture should be steady and comfortable, sthira and sukha, held without strain. This is easy to say and hard to arrive at, since most bodies default to either rigid effort or slack collapse rather than the steady ease the word actually asks for.

Treated this way, asana is not a warm-up for the real practice. It is the practice's foundation: the discovery that stability and ease are not opposites, and that finding both together in the body tends to locate something similar in the mind sitting inside it.

From the Editors' Desk, Shastra Digest.