Prayer in the Parking Lot

In today’s reading from "Mediations from the Mat", they talk about Abhyasa, or practice, and how it "is really about making something a priority".

I haven’t been able to focus on my yoga practice as much as I would like to recently. The 3 weeks leading up to my trip in Nigeria were busy and I rarely found the time, or made the time, to get on my mat and practice, not even to just sit and meditate for 5 minutes.

Yesterday on my drive back to the hotel from the office I quietly observed the city. Huge, modern buildings spread out with large highways cutting through. Abuja- plenty of wide open space, relatively clean, but feeling very much like a dust covered illusion. Like someone pulled a screen down over Africa and painted a picture of an attempted replication of an American city in the desert.

Driving by Millenium park, I noticed that in the large, mostly empty, awkward looking parking lot, a man had taken out his prayer mat and was bowed down towards Mecca. I guess it made sense to pull over there, but I can’t begin to explain how unique and uncharacteristic of the environment it seemed.

Dedication.

Whatever the circumstance, no matter how out of place or how surrounded by illusions, I hope that I will someday be able to prioritize Abhyasa like that. The dedication that I saw in that man is something I have found to be quite common during my past 5 years of traveling in Africa. I remember looking out at the shore as I rode down the Nile in Egypt and watching as people stopped what they were doing to pray.

It's simple, beautiful and a profound statement of faith. I think it stands out so dramatically to me here because I do not see it very often back at home.

It's a pretty drastic thing to say, but I think that our culture in America has instilled some kind of fear in outwardly prioritizing and demonstrating faith. It is obvious that faith has been taken to negative extremes in today's world, but perhaps hiding faith and the inhibition of Abhyasa has also been taken to the extreme...

It doesn’t matter the place, time, or God…we should all be able to take out our mat and remember what it is all really about. I have a lot to learn from that man in the parking lot.