My urgent need for immediacy

Photo via Unsplash by @aaina.

When I was little, my mother often took me and my brother to art galleries on the weekend. We never stayed for long: we were too young to have the patience for that, and most museums hadn’t yet developed the children’s areas they have now. The amount of time we spent wasn’t what was important. It was just being there, seeing whatever we saw, taking from it whatever we took away.

The lesson my mother passed on to us through this casual approach was that art is about reaction. Your own reaction. Whatever comes up for you when you experience it, not what you are “supposed” to see or feel. Or put slightly differently, art is about immediacy in the true sense of that word. Reaction without mediation. What is right now.

This is still how I think about art.

It is also how I think about yoga: practicing is about immediacy not studied appreciation.

Of course, in the everyday use of the word “immediacy” there is a sense of urgency, something that needs to be done now. And sure, there are days in which I can’t wait for my practice, where getting into the flow feels like something that has to be done right now.

But the actual impetus in my yoga practice is for a connection to my body and full self that isn’t mediated by “should”s and “used-to-be-able-to”s. A space filled with curiosity and acceptance, a space of my own creation, a space I know I have access to all the time, if I just let myself.

To me, this concern to be truly myself, in my body, as I am, without mediation, may be self-absorbed but it is not selfish. Many of us spend the majority of our time fighting our bodies: getting up before we are ready, rushing through work before we fully understand its consequences, paying only perfunctory attention to each other.

Of course, work is neither art nor yoga. But the way we do it, it is also not human. Our bodies are meant to feel, our minds are meant to process, our souls are meant to witness and know. And only when we give ourselves the time to do all that, directly, without filters, can we be ourselves, together, and at peace.