I’m Yogaing In The Rain

I like the gist of this chapter, which I believe is something along the lines of ‘experience trumps knowledge.’ In this case, matter is Brahmin; one that simply learns about Brahmin cannot have as complete an understanding as one who has experienced Brahmin firsthand

I like how this teaching is applicable to everyday life, too. For instance, I enjoy baking simple things. I make bread and pizza. I started with a few simple recipes and refined them; at first, the loaves of bread just turn out quite right, but with a little tweaking of the ingredient proportions, the bread consistently turns out well. The same goes for the pizza dough, except I use two different recipes depending on how I want the crust to turn out. I have experience with preparing the dough; my girlfriend does not. Over the weekend, she made one type of pizza dough – which needs to be cooked at a lower temperature than the other for a different amount of time – and didn’t have experience with that type of pizza dough. Once it was in the 500^O oven for a few minutes, I realized that something was wrong. The pizza had burned to a crisp and the pan was nearly ruined. This could have been avoided with experience; but when one just has knowledge – in this case, a recipe – one makes mistakes that a person with knowledge and experience would not make.

During the torrential downpour that we received this weekend, I had very little free time. My house is very old and much less waterproof than I thought. The basement flooded and our driveway eroded away, trapping all of our vehicles behind the house and unable to access the road. When it became clear that there was nothing we could do until Monday, we were all frustrated. However, I did use the opportunity to go to the upstairs balcony and do some yoga in the rain. I can’t say it was much different than normal yoga, other than that I occasionally got wet from the rain when the wind changed directions. If anything, I was more distracted than usual because of the water/wind and lightning. It was a neat experience, but I will probably refrain from balcony yoga when it is raining from now on.