The Weave of the Big Picture

A guest post today from Jonah Halfpenny:

I was in a yoga session this morning—this is something my sister and I have been doing since we started training with Amos. He is a master of many martial arts, but before he will train us in any of those, he says we must learn to center ourselves though meditation, and that yoga is a form of active meditation. We had done poses for nearly an hour, and my body was exhausted.

photo courtesy of openskyyoga.com

When we relaxed into our resting pose, lying silently on our backs, something he said weeks before came back to me. That our bodies are limited, but the soul is limitless. The soul contains the entire world. We are expansive. We are everyone and everything. When he said it the first time, it reminded me of Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself”—my sister is a book fanatic and had given me his book Leaves of Grass to read. It was one of the few belongings I brought with me when we moved across the continent to live with our great aunt. So the idea of being expansive made sense; I liked the notion when I read Whitman, and liked hearing it echoed by my teacher. But today I actually felt it for the first time.

Lying there, motionless and exhausted, with my eyes closed, I actually felt something inside me expand, felt as though the whole world really did dwell inside me, and what amazed me was that it felt so peaceful. I thought it was so strange, that a world so full of turmoil, war and violence, greed and suffering, could feel so whole and right inside one little person.

I’m not sure what to make of it yet. But it’s worth exploring. Maybe it’s the difference between seeing news reports of rebels with machine guns and seeing an astronaut’s picture of earth from above—when you take something as a whole, the details fade into the weave of the big picture. I hope this is just the beginning. I’ll report back if I ever figure it out.