The word purnam refers to wholeness, encompassing everything, the range from light to dark, hot to cold, feminine to masculine, so on and so forth. Embracing wholeness means that we are receptive to this whole range.
And while it’s easy to have an intellectual understanding of it, it is a lot more challenging to truly embrace it, and feel it, and believe it, and act like it. Let’s face it. There’s a twisted narrative of “wholeness” which is based on the exact opposite— impoverishment. We are told that we are not whole, and to be more “whole” we have to seek the “next thing”, and so we have to have the latest iPhone, a bigger house, the most expensive car we can afford. Instead of seeing this life as something to be lived, we treat this life as an endless pursuit of entertainment and pleasure. Our wholeness has been defined by pleasure, and not by wholeness itself! Do we know how to be bored, to sit through discomfort, to not always win, to sometimes experience failure? Those are all parts of wholeness. What about our yoga practice? Has it become a source of entertainment as well? Are we applying the same twisted notions of impoverishment, that we have to achieve a certain pose, that we skip the poses we don’t like, that pick and choose elements of it, give me asana but I refuse the yamas, let me learn how to do a headstand but I’m unwilling to know about veganism. Have we lost ourselves in the labyrinth of seeking pleasure that we have forgotten our completeness? Have we become attached to performance and forgotten intention? Do we exercise our physical bodies but neglect our spirits? Whatever the answer is, in the practice of remembering our wholeness, we can always start again. And so today, we start again.
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