Though I haven't unrolled my yoga mat in years I still DO yoga quite frequently. Of course, if you've ever done yoga in any meaningful way (read: more than just for the purposes of sweating and stretching) then you understand that we don't truly do yoga so much as we live yoga. Yoga is breath, yoga is mindful presence, yoga is centered-ness; quite simply, yoga just IS.... Certainly, we each take from our individual yoga practices only those "results" aligned with the degree and quality of investment that we bring to our practices; input and output in equal measure (you shouldn't expect bliss to emerge out of skepticism and laziness... though you might be surprised to learn that these attitudes represent a huge number of beginners who gradually venture on to great mastery of the yogic disciplines).

In actuality, what most of us probably hope to accomplish in living our yogic values each day is a gradual refinement of those qualities that we invest in our practice. Rather than longing for any spiritual mastery or any awakening to the greater mysteries of consciousness, we just want to bring stress or nervous energy to the mat in the hope that we might relax enough to re-purpose those energies into a passable contentment or that we achieve a degree of self-awareness about our conditions in the process. The list of intentions for practice is endless, as are the initial motivations for practicing and the long-term results attained.

What I have discovered during my absence from the mat is that many of the big results that I reaped when I was a regular at my favorite yoga studio haven't lost any of their impact or importance in my life now that I have wandered down a different path and engage in other practices. Sure, I no longer get to bask in the after-practice glow, my joints creak more than they used to, and I have lost the calm I once had when I was forced to endure gridlock traffic. But the lessons learned on the mat - the truly life-altering lessons - have shown considerable resiliency. Yoga never stops teaching us how to embrace the present once we've experienced what that truly means. Of course, that doesn't mean we can't and don't revert to fretting about tomorrow and get pissy standing in long lines at the grocery store; we have to work harder to recall a state of mindful presence when we aren't in control of our surroundings. But are we ever really in control to begin with? Perhaps yoga's greatest lesson is that it teaches us nothing about the world beyond the boundary of our own skin.

We cannot effect the world in any lasting way except through how we relate to it. Yoga is about that relationship between the internal and the external on the meeting ground of our senses. On the mat - and after it - we seek a way of action in the world where meaning is discovered through self-awareness, where freedom is encountered when we surrender to the forces in our lives that ceaselessly entangle us.