the underground, london: a starry self-remembrance

The scent of woodsmoke and pine wafted lazily, heavily, through the summer breeze, just starting to chill. The air tasted of it, too, but also of sage and sand and adventure. My tent is all pitched and my favorite flannel is on and my dearest friends are around me and I just feel so, so full. You know that feeling? The one that feels especially tangible after a long time spent outside, the sort where dirt is caked under your fingernails and you can taste sun-kissed rays lingering on your skin. Traces of a day well-spent are scattered around us – a deck of tarot, friendship beads and charms, bags of half-drunk bevvies and almost-gone popcorn. Whispering aspen trees to my back, an open field of rustling bluegrass up ahead, a meadow wide enough to break up the trees’ overhead tangled branches; a patch in the heavens just for us to see the stars start to emerge across the twilight dim. The first, the biggest, the brightest. The ones you make wishes on.

Cassiopeia. I can always find her. The Big Dipper, too.

It was a New Moon in Gemini, so eventually the darkness becomes practically pitch if it weren’t for the soft glow of dying embers to our side, and the starry, starry sky. Brilliant, expansive, eternal. Soupy, mercurial, cosmic depths, streams of stars I feel I could dive into, if only I could get the angle just right. Floating across the cosmos in a state of savasana.

Because, believe it or not, this is a yoga practice.
More specifically, this is samadhi – the eighth and final limb of yoga, often described as a state of ecstasy or awe.

As I have been working through my The Yoga Underground Yoga Teacher Training booklet, I have been trying to intensely learn / study / memorise / apply The Eight Limbs. As yoga practitioners, we are likely to really only put our focus on asanas – aka the physical postures, what we actually do and how we actually move when we show up to a yoga session. But there are seven more things!! Things like dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), and pranayama (breathing exercises). And, of course, samadhi. How so incredibly cool (I wish I had a better word, but really, cool!!) it is that this sense of awe, this wonder, this alive-ness, is yoga!

The TYU YTT manual says: “Here, you transcend the Self altogether, feeling a profound connection to the divine as well as an interconnectedness to all living things. This is the experience of ultimate peace and is not something you arrive at and then never have to think about again. The idea is to get glimpses more and more as you practice mindfulness, being present, and living with love on every level. And then, slowly, those glimpses begin to grow in depth and length, connecting you to your higher Self and the Universe.”

That feeling when you’re staring at the cosmos, the Milky Way and all the galaxies beyond, and you just feel so small in comparison, just a blink of time in all of the lifetimes and universes? It’s a yoga practice! It’s a transformative, transcendent element of yoga. This feeling doesn’t only come through stargazing – you might feel it too standing at the mouth of a canyon, witnessing a true lightning storm, watching something incomprehensible and foreign like a flock of manta rays swimming or mass butterfly migration. Maybe at a really amazing concert or at a really important protest or travelling somewhere new and meeting someone really kind. It’s everywhere, this aliveness! This communal awareness! This energy and power all around us, inside us!

I love that feeling because that sense of smallness isn’t a pathetic or demoralising one. It’s powerful. It fills me to the brim with wonder. It’s so, so awesome – in the literal, original sense of the word – to really feel and see and understand how small we are, how we are just the littlest blip in all that has happened and all that will, how things really matter less than we think in the grand scheme of things, and how, because of all of that, at the exact same time, everything matters so deeply! We matter! We’re here and alive and feeling and breathing and we soooo statistically should not be. It is so deeply bizarre and wonderful that we are here and alive and feeling and breathing – that we are anything at all. As individuals, and as a worldwide community. And we’re all interconnected, all of us. People, plant, animal. And part of yoga is really feeling, believing, living with that interconnectedness in mind. We have the same veins that flow through trees, the same cracks in our skin as the earth, the same connection to family and kin as elephants or dolphins or wolves. The same blood and brains and hearts as everyone else here on earth. We have so much more in common than we ever have had differences. And maybe the most amazing thing of all that connects us is the stars! We are connected through a divine, cosmic, incomprehensible origin story. We are all literally made of stardust.

Let me say it again, because it is just so unbelievable.

We’re made !! of stardust!! We’re of !! the stars !!!

Do you ever just think about how incredible that is? How insane and awe-inspiring that is? How absolutely, unequivocally important everyone is? Your barista, your ex, your neighbor you have never said hi to, your weird uncle, your teacher that gave you a bad mark, the teenager who cut you off in traffic, the person in your immediate vicinity or across the world that has a different (skin color, gender identity, religion, sexual orientation, ad infinitum), your self – is an epic, legendary cosmic ruler of incomprehensible kind and degree. We’re stars, baby!

I was reading a book the other day and this is what it said –
“Within your body, the elements that make up your physical being – carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, more! – are the same elements that were forged in the cores of ancient stars. You are stardust. Quite literally. Every atom in your body can trace its lineage to the birth and death of stars in the cosmos. You are a universe in a body; you are a repository of cosmic history and an embodiment of the universe’s grand narrative. Your existence is the result of eons of cosmic and biological evolution. You are the universe experiencing itself, contemplating its own existence, marvelling at its own complexity…
Appreciate the universe that lives in you. Like a universe of suns and moons and civilizations swirling in orbit within an ancient solar system, all of this is inside your own body. Whoever you are, you’re a marvel. A kind of god.” (Brittney Hartley, No-Nonsense Spirituality, emphasis my own.)

Stars and moons and suns and planets and civilisations inside us all.
What could inspire more awe, more wonder, more samadhi than that?

–

I am a deeply feeling person. An empath, some might say. I have moments where I feel an overwhelming sense of awe and aliveness to the point where I’m moved to tears, regularly: Every protest I’ve ever been to, to see that amount of goodness in people mobilising for collective change and betterment in our society. I feel it looking out of a plane or bus window, noise-cancelling headphones on, my newest favorite album blasting in my ears as I look at the world below me, all around me. I feel it on the back of a stranger’s motorbike in Jaipur, or the kindness in every shared cup of tea in Jerusalem, or a Bedouin woman poking my space buns curiously, or in sharing cassava on the side of a road with a mother and her baby in Lugazi. I feel it while being mesmerised by jellyfish, in the rustling music of aspen leaves, in the daffodils that are the first signs of spring, in standing at the banks of roaring rivers or on the cliffs of turquoise, tremendous oceans. In street art, in the first tree that turns autumn in a sea of otherwise green, in the pepper-pink dusky clouds, in weeds growing out of concrete, in finally hearing my favorite song live, in a local cafe I used to frequent remembering my order, on canyon drives with the windows down and my curls billowing around my face. When I read a passage that feels like it was written just for me. When the sun dances in colors behind my closed eyelids. When I get to be barefoot for a while. When my cat nuzzles up against me and I just know, in that moment, I am his whole world. I feel it when I laugh so hard with my friends we have to lean on each other and when my sisters know just when to call me. I feel it when I’ve done something particularly brave, or hard, or kind.

And always always always, samadhi with the stars.