The gate is narrow. The path is mine alone.

Your intuition knows what to write. So get out of the way. Ray Bradbury.

Yoga has a plethora of definitions, from intimacy to discipline, and it incorporates a dizzying array of practices, from the all-too recognisable pretzel (padmasana) to the esoteric half smile of enlightenment, but in some sense it certainly centres on uniting physical and spiritual experience. Or perhaps it simply raises the question, though the practice of introspection in action, of whether those were ever separate in the first place. Certainly the notion that we are physically embodied automatically assumes there is an ‘I’ that is separate or separable from the body, and that allows us to bring to light (pradipika, in yoga) the key question which at least some yoga has at its heart: ‘who am I’?

Education is traditionally defined as leading us out of the dark, but in a sense, as the question above illustrates, yoga is patience with the dark, waiting for the moment to arise, waiting for the surface to settle so the dark can be observed, so what is beneath the obvious can show its face. In that vein, let me tell you a story.

While I was writing my PhD I came across an intractable problem that I simply did not know how to solve (my PhD focused on Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, and the problem was to do with consciousness and awareness). I was a long-distance student, writing in a hut at the end of the garden, with two teens, and very little money. The pressure was intense. I immediately wrote to my supervisor and asked, ‘what are your thoughts about this issue? I’m stuck’. His response: silence. I had a hollow feeling in my stomach as I continued to grapple with the problem, unable to find a way to resolve the tension that had developed in the chapter I needed to finish, fast (between cooking, picking up and dropping off, work, and struggling to pay bills). I waited a polite week, and wrote again. This time I was more insistent: ‘Dear Graham, I’m really stuck with this problem. What do you suggest I do’? Again, nothing. The deadline for submission was a bare week away and I had 10,000 words that failed to conclude on a key question for the thesis. I called the department in Cork, at the other end of the country. ‘I’m afraid Graham’s away for a few days’, was the reply. ‘He’ll be back in time for your presentation, which is due a week after your submission’, said the secretary.

I gritted my teeth, walked the dog, vacuumed the house, and took a sack to put all the clothes my children had failed to pick up off the floor. I left the sack with a note that said: ‘Reclaim these if you want them. If they’re still here this time tomorrow, I’m taking them to the charity shop’.

‘What’s got into you?’, muttered my daughter as she rooted through the sack for her favourite T shirt.

Shivering, at midnight, in the hut at the end of the garden, I meditated. And then I wrote. Nothing groundbreaking, just some tentative concluding thoughts and further questions. Could a kind of panpsychism explain awareness? I submitted, with an air of resignation, and dove into the dirty kitchen.

‘You see’, said Graham, smiling, at the presentation, ‘the answer is not necessarily clear, but there is a way forward’. It dawned on me: I had done it myself, as the Taoists say.

A more holistic understanding of what we are is vital in the ecological emergency. We would do well to teach students that our flesh is plant grown, that we are meat to other creatures (Val Plumwood’s brilliant essay on being caught in the jaws of a crocodile could be mandatory reading in this regard). In teaching a class of students how to manage stress and anxiety, palpable in this age of extinctions and fragmentations, there are multiple opportunities to illustrate the interconnections between breath and air, water, river, space, mountain ice. For those who are prepared to encounter the realities of our current predicament, we might go further and explore the exhalations of factories, the attitudes of greed and exploitation, and their impact on the vulnerable and marginalised of our own species, and the uncountable lives of plants, animals, microbes and ecosystems, maimed or destroyed under the juggernaut of profitability.

Moving ourselves as part of our studies leads us out of the numbing illusory virtual worlds where other lives are bigger, better, more dramatic, back to the felt sense of being where we are. This feeling can become so sensitive that it lets us note the space between the pulse, the shape of remembrances of times past, the smells and colours and sounds that let us imagine, create art, or music, value intuition, and learn the intricate patterns of compassion.

The movement of shadows, the gaseous mixture of stars, this leads us beyond thought, educates us as to the non dual nature of our being, which is both matter and energy, but also a dance of systems in interaction, and also the open eye of awareness at the heart of being. Education has no end, but like yoga, it is a light shone into the dark of who we are. More reflection on this question of the kinds of creatures we are can elicit a return to critical thinking: what are the stories, the histories, we have been told to take as true? Education can bridge the gap between solid knowledge and the airy question of where we begin and end, what responsibilities we have, what lore, and laws, require our attention.

Yoga, like education, is a kind of discipline, but it is discipline, as Alan Watts so memorably reminds us, in the sense of grace, as skill, as getting better at being where and what we are. So, from poetry to philosophy, from history to analytics, from scientific theory to physical education, breathwork to meditation, yoga is an embodiment of the skill of looking inward. While deepening our understanding of our interconnected nature, we could transform education in the classroom for teacher and pupil, and could transform education itself to a lifelong practice which changes how we see ourselves, and how we live.