Excerpts from Suspended-Body Yoga
From Chapter One—The Session
Introduction
The suspended-body yoga session uses an exercise regime designed for improving the strength as well as the flexibility components of physical fitness as a vehicle for a daily meditation practice. What makes an exercise regime—especially this one, which utilizes a suspension training device to animate our body as exercise prop—conducive to being a meditation practice is its similarity to ritual: both are activities that are planned, structured, repetitive, and purposive. Just as exercise is defined (in part) in contrast to occupational and household daily physical tasks, ritual is defined in contrast to our routine, sensible, responsible daily orientation to reality, carried out in obeisance to clock and calendar time and map and blueprint space.
In withdrawing from the everyday world during our suspended-body yoga session, we enter a ritualistic path that is a transition from one mode of life to another: from the profane realm, our quotidian life with its (necessary) transitory concerns, to the sacred realm, in which we contemplate transcendent realities, such as the infinite, of which we’re only an infinitesimal part.
This session is a performance of a series of ritualistic actions structured in three parts. The beginning is preparing for the exercise workout; the middle is performing the exercises with absorption, fierceness, tranquility, contemplativeness, and devotion; the ending is surrendering to relaxation.
Excerpt 1
From Chapter One—The Session
Part One—The Beginning
Setting Up
Bare feet
We take off our shoes or other footwear when practicing suspended-body yoga for practical reasons. Feet made bare become prehensile: it’s easier to maintain our balance and stability during standing exercises when our feet, the foundation of our erect body, can grip the mat. What’s more, only if our feet are bare can we shorten and elongate—strengthen and stretch—the ankle and foot muscles.
We also take off our footwear—not only that which is designed for formal and informal use in public (shoes, boots, high heels, flats, sneakers, moccasins, loafers, sandals, and the like) but also that which is usually used in private (slippers and flip-flops)—as ritual. All footwear, whether worn outside or inside the household, represents activities of the profane realm. Taking off our shoes or their footwear variants represents putting the quotidian world aside for the hour or so of our practice in order to enter the realm of the sacred.
Accordingly, sit and unhurriedly remove your footwear with your hands. Then, with attentive care, even solicitude, set it aside near a wall, away from where your mat will be placed.