by Katharine Bierce and Jacquie Bullard
Although Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras have long been known to include eight components of Yoga practice, the Integral Yoga Institute has recently discovered the ninth limb of yoga. Unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls, this one was found in the bathtub. The title is Laughter Yoga: The Best Medicine.
To study this topic in detail, consider taking a class with goats or kids.
Anyone who practices yoga for a long time knows animals have so much to teach us — that’s why so many poses are named after animals. Too bad there isn’t a bear pose, because bears love yoga class since it’s a good chance to paws and reflect. We’ve all seen dogs do yoga. That’s where we got the name for the pose downward dog. But did you know that in a yoga class for dogs, they tend to refer to it as downward human?
There’s nothing like yoga to remind us of our kinship with all of creation! Kids inherently know that we are all one. One IYISF teacher shared a joke from her 3 year old granddaughter: What is the difference between a yogi and a duck? Nothing!!!
Swami Ramananda once shared this one: “What is the difference between a Yogi and a non Yogi?…..A non Yogi thinks there’s a difference.” (The original source is unknown…but this joke surely points to THE source!)
Speaking of a unifying force, there’s nothing that brings us together like food. Like people, bagels struggle in yoga class to find their center. But once a bagel has mastered yoga, it actually becomes a pretzel.
Pizza, commonly thought of as junk food, can also be part of a yogic diet. Ask any yogi who orders pizza. The most common request? “Make me one with everything.” But at the end of the day, apples are the most yogic food of all, because they’ve got such great core. Food is not just the source of life, it also provides great yogic inspiration.
Yoga practice doesn’t just put us in touch with the source of life; we can carry it into the afterlife. For instance, what kind of yoga do you do in a casket? De-compose. But before that pose, some yogis are known to cry out Ohmmmmmmm! right before they die from trying to install the latest Microsoft updates with a hair dryer.
I have to say, I didn’t used to like people who practiced yoga. If you ask me, they seemed like a bunch of posers. And I didn’t believe yoga would fix my posture…but I stand corrected.
By now, I’ve been practicing yoga for decades. It’s been a long stretch. Sadly, despite years of teaching and practicing yoga, I had to quit. My doctor advised me to stop because she thought that I was self-meditating.
Even so, I’ll probably start practicing again before you know it. After all, I’ve been working on my squirrel pose. I’m sorta nuts without yoga.
Happy April Fools, yogis!