What is Yoga – The Key to Living a Wild and Precious Life
It opens with a powerful piano accompaniment and then the voice comes in and sings the opening lines
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien
No, no regrets
No, we will have no regrets
As you leave, I can say
Love was King
but only for a day
Edith Piaf, Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien
This is a song (hear it here by clicking the graphic) »»»»
that when I hear it sends shivers down my spine. It is, of course, the song made famous by Edith Piaf – the little sparrow. The only other time I ever had the experience of feeling that spine tingling experience was one sunny afternoon in London.
I was walking through Covent Garden market close to the Royal Opera House. The music from the opera was being piped into the square through a bank of speakers. I was stopped in my tracks by the song being sung. I don’t know what the name of the song was but the singer was Pavarotti. He was singing what seemed to me to be a song that said Love was King.
On each of these occasions I felt the wonder of what it is to be a human being. I felt the wonder of listening to the longings of the heart as it called out expressing our relation to that dynamic all hearts long to touch and to be at one with. It is our triumph but for too many it is also their tragedy. The tragedy of being the expression of Love in form without the ability to express this in creative and empowering ways.
Rick Jarrow in his Sounds True recording “The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide – The Inner Path to Finding Your Work in the World,” tells about a survey conducted among elderly Americans. These elders were asked the question, “Do you have any regrets in the life you have lived?” Overwhelmingly, the answer that was returned was that most regretted not what they had done, but what they felt they had failed to do. They regretted the opportunity to take a path that had been offered along the way.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less travelled by
And that made all the difference
Robert Frost
from “The Road Not Taken.”
Notice that when the elders were asked the question “Do you have any regrets in the life you have lived?” they focused on loss of an opportunity. As a writer and storyteller, this answer fascinates me. It reminds me of the importance of the invitation from the soul that is forever inviting us into that expansiveness that is the movement of Love in form.
The True Meaning of Yoga
The first stage on the Hero’s Journey is what is termed “The Call.” It is the refusal of the call that is central in many movies and the beginning of many more. This is where the anti-hero becomes filled with struggle and usually lives a conflicted life until there is a sense of redemption only when they take action that they are trying so hard to avoid. At the beginning of the story of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker refuses to answer the call to go to the assistance of those who call for his help. He refuses to step into his destiny signified by his name – a Walker between the world of earth and sky.
In my own life I refused the call to become a Yoga teacher because I paid attention to the view of the collective that was the dynamic at the time when I lived in Northern Ireland. This was the collective voice that said the teachings of Yoga were the teachings of the devil. This was at a time when Yoga and the philosophy and practice of Hatha Yoga was not the household word it is today. It took me more than thirty years before I would heed the call.
I am not a Yoga teacher in the normal understanding of that term. Most people understand Yoga as a series of exercises rather than a map of the journey into living the wild and precious life. I am a teacher of this kind of Yoga. I invite through my writing, storytelling and singing an experience called union. This is the experience of a state of being where you recognise your oneness with creation. This is the experience of union. This is the true meaning and purpose of yoga. Yoga means “to yoke.” It means to join that which appears separate to that which is non-separate. This is a living paradox because in the most real of senses you are working to join that which has never been separate and never needs joining
Do I have any regrets about this? The answer is no. I might have had regrets had I refused the call the second time around when I made the choice to give up the work I was doing. We sold our house in Leeds in England. We gave up the business we had built up over twenty years and return to Ireland. Neither one of us had a job to go to or the prospect of getting one in the outback of rural West of Ireland.
Many of our friends thought we were crazy. To be honest, I felt scared but I knew that if I did not follow this invitation into a kind of metaphorical and physical homecoming that I would always regret it. I knew that part of who I was to become would die inside me if I did not go.
None of what Bee and I did made sense in logical terms. I could have stayed on doing what I was trained to do. I had started a new business promoting computer and accounting software. The opportunities where widening for me. Then my sister Mary died at the age of fifty- four years. I was fifty years old at the time. Her dying at such an early age made me ask the question the opened me up to questing and answering the call I had refused to answer when at seventeen my mother handed me a book. She was an avid reader. She had never suggested that I read any book before. She gave me a book on Yoga. I read it and knew that a door had opened in me that invited a crossing of a threshold into what my heart loved but was too afraid to follow.
Crossing Borders 
The question I asked myself was this. “Tony, if you had only four more years to live would you be doing what you are doing now?” It took no time to answer “No.” So I and my beloved Bee, one cat goddess and an angel of a dog made the decision that we would, in the words of Joseph Campbell “follow our bliss.” I’m not sure that the cat was initially keen on the move. But she was a star on Moving Day ,delighting everyone she met when travelling the long journey from Leeds in England, through Scotland, across the water to Belfast harbour and on to Dowra on the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
Now I have a favourite saying that I use when we sit together looking out over the beauty of the landscape we are graced to live in. I turn to Bee and I say, “Another fine mess you have got us into.” This is a line frequently used by the comedians Laurel and Hardy. It really is a wild and precious kind of mess that we live in since we took the road less travelled.
The central theme of the song sung by Edith Piaf is the theme of Love. For me it is intimately connected to the theme of forgiveness. We all have regrets. The greatest regret for many will be living with the knowledge that you refused to live the life you where called to live. You will regret not singing the song that only you are here to sing. This needn’t be a song – an action that will change the world but let me say this. Your heart knows what it longs to give to the world because it is from this centre that the meaning of your being here is found and it is found in the movement of energy from this heart centre that naturally gives from its direct know of Love.
When the poet Mary Oliver, who wrote the line that inspires the work I am graced to do was asked by Maria Shriver Schwartzneger “What have you done with your one wild and precious life,” she replied that she had learned to love and be loved – but that it had not been easy. This is as succinct an answer to the meaning of existence as one is ever likely to hear.
I am blessed that I have only one regret and I do not dwell on it. A long time ago and over a long period of time I told someone that I loved them. I didn’t really know what love was. I lived a fairly loveless life. It is why I so identify with the lines from the Hafiz poem,
Everyone you meet you say to them
“Love me!”
Of course, you do no say this out loud
otherwise someone might call the cops.
I spent most of my twenties saying to everyone I met, “Love me!” I didn’t say it out loud but I was radiating it into the atmosphere. I felt loveless and unloved and there were many times I almost threw my life away in behaviours that where a result of a sense of desperation. I don’t regret that time but I can honestly say I would not want to live in that kind of state again.
5th Chakra Practice
Let there be no regrets because it blocks the energy of the new which is the energy of Love moving into higher form. If you do have regrets then make amends in the best way that you can. if you have regrets they are a form of attachment to an idea of what you should be. However, you are the living process of Loves forever becoming. While you might have regrets Love that is the cosmic energy that creates you in each and every moment does not ever experience regret.
Practice forgiveness and give up feeling guilty. When the energy of any thought of regret arises do not give it your emotional attachment. Practice the art of silent witnessing and release such regret, which is a form of non-forgiving, into the ether (5th chakra) with the request that it be given back to you to be used for the highest good of all. Do this as often as you need and pay attention to how the Universe replies. Be open to any possibility.
You are here to live a wild and precious life. You do not earn that right by anything you do or do not do. It is already a given. It is your birthright. It is what I refer to as your true name – the name that Love agave to you before you were born – to speak into this world of form. Your only true regret will be if you do not do this. This is the call of the soul and in the words of the master soul friend (anamcara),
What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul.
The means that you gain nothing if you lose your knowing connection to the infinite creative expression within you that is your source of joy, purpose and passion for life. This is the direct knowing that you are a unique sound of Love in form. Knowing this (which is not simply intellectual knowledge) you have no time for regret because your core being knows that it partakes in the timelessness of Love moving into form through you.
This knowing and the forgiveness that arises from such knowing is a major key to living a life without regret.
OTHER GREAT CONTENT
Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.
life transformation
FREE Healing Meditations, Affirmations, Inspirational Broadcasts and Downloads
SPIRAL DYNAMICS – Another map of personal and spiritual development for your consideration
THE HERO’S JOURNEY – Video that outlines the personal and spiritual development called the Hero’s Journey
