Live Your Life on the Tightrope

If you haven't already, watch the movie Man on Wire.  As a yoga practitioner, I felt inspired by watching someone follow a force he could not resist onto the tightrope.  There, concentration, passion, and awareness make simple motions meaningful again.  Philippe Petit kneels, lays down, salutes, simply lifts a foot, and we are breathless watching.  

The movie offered an answer to a question I sometimes ask myself about yoga- WHY?  Why obsess over these strange positions that have questionable practical function in everyday life?  All you have to do is sit there and you can become enlightened.  Or if you're in it to get in shape, why don't you just go for a hike or hit the treadmill?

But I realized watching this movie that yoga is about learning to live on the tightrope.  The phrase yoga teachers so often repeat, "find your edge," sort of means step out on the tightrope! Follow the pull of that force telling you to shift your weight from the edge of the World Trade Center's roof to the rope (resistance is futile...haha sorry).  Find the place in you where you feel alive and let that rule you and nothing else.  Maybe you're just sitting there in zazen, maybe you're in urdhva dhanurasana, but Why has nothing to do with it; you do it just Because.