JANUARY 29, 2025
My response is generally the same: what would happen if we didn’t hold for time?
Cheeky though the retort may be, the counter-question gets quickly to the point: nothing happens without time.
To state that time is equivalent to change may not sound mind-blowing to you. But have you ever wondered why we experience time in such a relative way?
I’m sure you’ve observed that when you want something to change — such as the challenging sensations in a Yin pose, maybe your career, or the angst of a separation — time has a weird way of slowing down and feeling like it will never pass, yet when you want something to last, like a double-scoop ice cream cone, time melts by precariously fast.
My sense is that sequestered inside our relative relationship with time is the more profound, perhaps subconscious, knowing that change takes longer than we like, and in time, everything, even what we like most, is bound to change.
In Samkhya Yoga philosophy, this bendy, curve-like nature of time is expressed through two interrelated concepts called krama and karma. Most folks have heard of the latter, so I’ll start with the former.
The Sanskrit word krama connotes an order or series of progressive steps. When related to time, krama is somewhat analogous to Western philosophy’s notion of chronological time: the linear or sequential progression of time through past, present and future.
Chronological time, say, a day divided into hours, minutes and seconds, is an effective tool for organizing modern society, ensuring buses and trains leave and arrive on schedule and people show up for yoga on time (make sure you read up on Santosha’s latest etiquette reminders ;). In short, chronological time gives control; it is predictable. It lets us say, “X thing will happen at X time.”
The problem is that we know when it comes to the things of real substance, you know, the body, family, relationships, life, death, that kind of super fun stuff — chronological time rarely cooperates with us. Enter karma.
The word karma translates to action. But it’s more than that. It’s the notion that everything, every action, is connected through time. Huh? Bear with me a second here. If there’s a plant or tree in sight, peek at it for a second. That tree or plant came from a seed that came from a seed before it; it also contains seeds that will become trees or plants that will become more trees or plants. What you’re actually looking at is the past, present and future — all at once. It’s quite remarkable, really.
In some manner of speaking, then, yoga philosophers posited that time drives evolution and change by simultaneously progressing and repeating itself, something like how a line and a circle might combine to give us a spiral. Consider that Earth never orbits the exact same path around the sun, though round and round it goes. Thankfully!
So what does all this have to do with Yin Yoga?
As a companion to chronological time, the ancient Greeks emphasized the concept of kairos: the opportune time, the time to plant crops, the time for harvest, a significant and ideal moment for change when time has circled both back to where it came and yet also toward somewhere new.
Vanda Scarvelli wrote that when we practice yoga, “like Gods, we must have time, infinite time…because to have time implies a quality of elegance and ease which gives poise to our movements and wisdom to our action.”
What I believe she’s hinting at here is that time isn’t just a progressive sequence of events or an opportune moment; it’s also a way of being in the world. In other words, our relationship to time dictates not only how we do things, like a yoga pose, but also the way we live.
Inevitably, poses are hard; relationships end, things change, and life decays. But when is the moment ripe, ideal or opportune to feel pain, to be wrong about something we may strongly about, to let relationships ebb, to be humbled, to endure heartbreak or loss? Perhaps there’s no taller task than to give an infinite, unhurried sense of time to the very forces which seem to take time from us. But if we can’t acknowledge their due place in the order of things by giving them this, how will we begin to know?
It may contradict much of what you’ve heard or thought about yoga, so take it with a grain of salt, but one soft truth I’ve gleaned from 20 years of Yoga practice is that Yoga isn’t actually about removing pain or grief from my life, abandoning my fear or guilt, or even escaping my past, because, in the most fundamental sense, these can and do belong here, in time.
However hard it may be to bear, I find it comforting to know the moments we spend in practice and poses may teach us to give grief and sorrow the same kind of quality time we might more willfully give to love and wonder so that if we’re lucky, we can do them — because we must do them— with, as Vanda Scarvelli might have said, a touch of elegance and wisdom.
It’s true that yoga can change your life, maybe even a few times over.
The catch is that it doesn’t get to happen on your terms — otherwise, it’s not worth its weight in poses. Like life, yoga needs time, especially and probably most importantly, when it feels like time isn’t on your side.