Straining on a Gnat

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cumin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.”

Matthew 23:23-24

In these verses, Jesus rails at the teachers of the law and the Pharisees, decrying their over-emphasis on minor details while they ignore the more important. Ultimately, Jesus is asking them to attend to all aspects of the law, putting into practice both the small and the great commandments. A lesson from yoga may give us some insight into why this balancing of attention is important and how to accomplish it. B.K.S. Iyengar teaches the following about how to apply our efforts evenly:

When you are over stretching somewhere to get an optimum movement, have you ever noticed that you are also giving too little attention to other parts of the body?…Suppose you are doing a head-balance. What happens if you stretch your legs in order to get a good pose and let your neck muscles become loose, or if your elbows do not grip the floor, so that the fear comes that you are falling or swaying from side to side? Because the strong muscles try to control the pose, the weak muscles give way. When doing the pose, therefore, you have to maintain a single stretch from the floor to the top without letting any part drop. When you are stretching the legs, you have to send an alarm signal to your arms: “I am stretching a leg, so don’t lose your attention!” That is awareness. Because we lose our awareness and our attention is partial, we don’t know whether we are holding the grip or not.

You can lose the benefits of what you are doing because of focusing too much partial attention on trying to perfect the pose. What are you focusing on? You are trying to perfect the pose, but from where to where? That is where things become difficult. Focusing on one point is concentration. Focusing on all points at the same time is meditation. Meditation is centrifugal as well as centripetal. In concentration, you want to focus on one point, and the other points lose their potential. But if you spread the concentration from the extended part to all the other parts of the body, without losing the concentration on the extended part, then you will not lose the inner action of the outer expression of the pose and that teaches you what meditation is. Concentration has a point of focus, meditation has no points. That is the secret. ~ The Tree of Yoga

The outer work of posture is to shift our inner workings, helping us to discover a new way of being. The law that God gave to the Israelites was not to be merely an outer work - a list of requirements that could be accomplished with an everyday consciousness. Instead, the outward work with its many points of alignment, to borrow a concept from yoga, was to change these practitioners inwardly. I hear in Jesus’ words a frustration that the teachers and leaders have not acquired this shift in consciousness and will pass along this wrong conception of the law to those who look up to them. Then with the approval of those who by their place seem to be the authority, the people will unknowingly perpetuate practices that will thwart God’s original intent - the transformation of His people.

How does this resonate in my own life? What might I be over-emphasizing, causing my grip to loosen in another area? Am I being transformed by my spiritual practice, becoming what God intended? Holy Spirit, please teach us how to practice, in Jesus’ Name, for God’s glory. Amen.

#spiritualpractice #Christianyoga #transformation