The thing I love the most about home makeover shows is where they find something really valuable and unexpected under some badly designed wall or worn out carpet or boarded up fireplace. That stuff that’s over the top of the hidden treasure, like that old ugly carpet, is just like the yogic concept of prakriti.
Prakriti is the stuff of the material world. You can think about it as layers of forces or energy. The Sanskrit word for these forces/energies is guna. The word guna literally means strand or string or thread. So you can think about the gunas as the threads that make up a cloth. That cloth is prakriti.
In The Bhagavad Gita, the gunas are described as the threads of the cloth that make a mask or a veil. And that veil, like the bad 70’s shag carpet in the Fixer Upper house, is disguising something amazing.
One way to apply this in a more practical way is to start to consider what is underneath, out of sight for you. What is behind your desire to practice yoga? What is happening in your yoga poses that is more than just the outward appearance of the shape of the pose? What motivates you on (and off!) your mat? What is the intention that informs and underpins your yoga practice?
The fall is the perfect time to start to ask these questions and settle into the ways that yoga practice can serve you best through the colder and darker months ahead.