Yogic Impressions by Jim Tarran art work Oli Smyth
It all started when…
After our focaccia, lemon and ginger tea and obligatory cakes, my dear friend Will effervesced. He had had a flash of inspiration!
Sometimes clarity strikes, in the moments between doing one thing and another, when the mind is unusually spacious and available. I knew he had seen the project sized space, with that occasional, inarguable clarity that sometimes arises out of the depths of the mind - because as he told me - I had the same clarity too.
Sometimes there's a space in the Universe, that's just the size and shape of something you are supposed to do (for whatever reason). It's possible that even before you have come across it yourself, someone might drift into 'your' field for a moment, and see it. After all if the Universe is truly interdependent and selfless, as some yoga texts tell us, then there's no reason why 'someone' else might not wander into 'your' zone, or you into theirs, and see the lay of the land.
Will's idea didn't have much flesh on the bones, and in a way that was just the point. The idea was loose but clear - to make a book of broad brush-strokes. Create a yoga book that paints in evocative verbal cues. Make a book, that gives people a direct experience of the 'feeling tone of yoga'.
In my first book 'Ripples of Yoga', my aim was to do this in the simplest way possible, with super-short one or two sentence aphorisms, like a succession of 'zip-files'.
Yogic Impressions, unpacks those zip-files a little more. In addition this book adds more pointers, that give the reader even more of the feel, or 'impression' of yoga. Just as an impressionist painter evokes a bridge, lake or sunset - their work is not photographic, and yet it is somehow closer to the experience of a bridge, lake or sunset than a straightforward photograph could be.
If you recognise the 'energetic signature’ of yoga, you will be able to find it, in whatever guise it appears. You will be able to practice any posture (āsana), chant any mantra, engage with any yogic breathing technique (prāṇāyāma) or sit on any chair or cushion and ‘disappear' into the Infinite (samādhi).