Yoga is the art of absorption. In each practice aim to be like a sponge, soaking through your skin, muscle and nerves, all the way to the pithy core of your bones. These days, the feeling of absorption is getting lost (or dried out) as classes go lickety-split down the mat. When we barrel forward in haste and rush, very little sinks in. We must slow down and move at the pace of the breath. Via rocking, pumping and wringing movements, practice until your tissues are soaked. In a time-honored process, stay in the pose until you reach the saturation point.
The word in yoga for mind-body saturation is samadhi. It is said in the Dattatreya-yogashastra that Siva taught 80 million techniques to realize samadhi. “One should fill the whole body from the soles of the feet to the crown of the head with divine fluid,” says the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. Like baptism, this interior drenching bathes every cell and every fiber. Not only does this involve physiological soaking— of the cells, glands, nerves and gut— but also a kind of psychic soaking. Like a sponge in the ocean, the mind is saturated in awareness. When mind and body become soaked all the way through, in what the poet Philip Larkin called “a furious devout drench,” we absorb into that which has no boundaries or limits.
All too often, people go about their day absorbing very little. When we are preoccupied, caught up in “busy brain,” very little sinks in. In time, people become hollow and heartless. In meditation, ultimate absorption involves steeping of the delicate fibers of the heart. The heart absorbs the most subtle of vibrations and in rapture, a wellspring of kindness, care and compassion rises up. Soaked in the tidal fluids of the heart, relinquish your grasp on “me, my and mine” and dissolve into a sea of grace.
So make your tissues receptive and permeable. Saturate some each day. Learn to trust the process of dissolution until, like Jonah inside the mighty fish, you are swallowed whole into the body of the one great god.
