Water…something most of us take either completely for granted or spend very little, if any, time thinking about. We read the health benefits of eight glasses a day, buy it in bottles and turn on the tap whenever we need it, which is often, as 60% of our body weight is water. There seems to be plenty of it. 70% of the planet is covered with water. The oceans are miles deep and vast as imagination, but water we can use…only 2% of the planet’s water is fresh, with 1.6% of that being locked away within the polar ice caps.
Why do I mention this? First let me describe an experience I had earlier this week.

Sitting in a basement classroom at a recent corporate training session, through a slight joke, an apple represented a trophy for productive contribution:  no windows, climate controlled, sterile, blasé tones–but on the plastic table with the faux wood top, that apple stood out like a flame in the darkness. Alone or in a field, among its brethren piled high at the Whole Foods down the way, it would be ordinary, run of the mill, standard, but not here. It’s vibrant red with jagged green coming from the indentation at the top, it seemed absolutely alive, organic, beautiful…something real among the unreal. I wondered at that moment how much of the apple was water, about 85% according to google’s various answers. I thought of the seed, that tiny little thing, something smaller than the nail at the end of my pinky finger, how it, like so many tiny things, if you just add water, can become something huge and beautiful, something that bears fruit and can feed hundreds.
For many people, and many many more every day, yoga is like that bit of water we put on seeds. It nourishes us, creates an environment where we grow out and up in so many different ways. Moving within our classes between poses, linking breath to movement in the finest moments we experience on the mat will seem liquid, flowing from Utthita Parsvakonasana EXTENDED SIDE ANGLE into Ardha Chandrasana HALF MOON to Virabhadrasana II WARRIOR II can be a magic, graceful poetic movement with intention. Water as metaphor can be many different things. Like the individual streams and rivers that eventually lead back to the one source, the ocean, so we, possessing individual consciousness may some day rejoin with the All–get back “Home” so to speak. It’s a pretty universal concept. Every culture has a variation of it, Heaven, Valhalla, Shangri-La, Vegas (ok not really)…or in the briefest moments within yoga that we hope to attain: Samadhi. The eighth limb of yoga, the final limb, the reason we’re on the mat.

I bring up all this talk of yoga and water for a reason, this weekend, tomorrow in fact (4/22), after the Boulder wildness of 4/20, after the semi-fizzle of Kony 2012’s Blanket the Night, CorePower Yoga is offering throughout Denver a special donation class at noon where all proceeds will be pooled together and given to Water for the People, whose mission is simple, work towards a world where all people have access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
If everyone had these two basic things, wouldn’t this planet be that much closer to the realization of one of those vaunted, otherworldly concepts spoken of earlier? Oh, and more yoga, lots more yoga.

 

****** 303 Magazine and Core Power Yoga are offering a month of free month of yoga to the person who needs it most. Tell us why you deserve, want and NEED that free month of yoga in the comments below. Also, VERY IMPORTANT, email zach@dev-303magazine.pantheonsite.io with you contact info for notification of your win. The contest will run for two more weeks and then we will announce the winner. Good luck! *******