Never give up | Always let go

Most days when I drive to the shala, I turn right onto Renwick street with the river to my back. Out the right corner of my windshield as I search for parking I see a large mural painted on the brick wall of our neighboring crossfit gym: the words “NEVER GIVE UP” are stenciled across the front of a massive black heart. 

It struck me how fitting a mantra “never give up” was for January’s theme at the shala, effort. Efforting at first seemed to contrast sharply with one of my favorite yoga principles, aparigraha, understood to mean non-grasping, or non-attachment. 

But gazing at the heart around the words, a memory of a teacher of mine flashed through my mind: “Never give up!” she said, then, sounding like the baseball great Yogi Berra, immediately followed with the words, “Always let go!” 

And that’s how these phrases forever live in my mind now, as in-breath and out-breath: Never give up / Always let go.

We’ve all heard that one translation of yoga is “to yoke.” It is union, the union of opposites. To do yoga is to intentionally, simultaneously attend to (seemingly) contradictory polarities, in this way making manifest the paradoxes inherent to all life. So your teacher might cue at the same time:

effort with ease,

strength with stability,

contraction with release,

resilience with surrender,

…and so on. We practice asanas this way because consciously embodying paradox increases our awareness of and tolerance for the complexity that is reality. The effort is to stay committed to practicing. Practicing in this way gently begins to free us from the survival impulse to reject the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, or strange. It also frees us from the expectation that rigidity, clinging, or domination will lead to success. Practice allows us to gently begin to heal wounds of severance and to remember our true nature, which is interdependent. The realization of this interdependence is what generates ahimsa, non-harming, another yogic value.

For the yogi, to “never give up” the path of yoga indeed means to always be in the process of letting go; of grasping less. When we release grasping on life we are freed to perceive deeper and deeper realities, coming home to ourselves and to one another. So here’s a mantra for your mat this month: Never give up! Always let go!

A blog post by Amanda Munroe. You can find her on Tuesday at 5:15pm at Newburgh Yoga Shala