Finding The Sacred Matrix: Why I Keep Practicing Asana, Again and Again…

by: Erika Smith Iluszko

My time away from teaching has shown me, again and again, how deeply I love being both a teacher and an eternal student of yoga. But more than that, it’s revealed something profound about why I step onto my mat each day—not just to stretch my hamstrings or calm my mind, but to enter what the ancient texts call the “yoga matrix,” that sacred web of interconnection that holds and sustains all life.

The Body as Sacred Ground

When I roll out my mat and begin to move, I’m not just working with “a bag of skin filled with bones and blood.” I’m entering a living laboratory for understanding the deepest mysteries of existence. The human body—my body—becomes the ideal ground for experiencing what the texts call the “meta-pattern that envelopes and penetrates all that we perceive.”

In our everyday lives, our attention projects outward, helping us navigate the world efficiently. We see our bodies through familiar filters: the belly that never feels quite right, the shoulders that carry our stress, the face we scrutinize in mirrors. But when I practice asana with meditative awareness, something profound shifts. These limited perspectives about what the body “is” begin to arise as objects for observation rather than absolute truths.

Through consistent practice, I’ve learned to dig my well deeper and deeper, seeing through the cultural constructs we’ve agreed upon to describe the human form. What I discover beneath is both startling and liberating: the body is not a fixed object but “an open matrix of awareness through which theories, thoughts, and sensations come and go.”

The Alchemy of Asana

This is why I practice the way I do—not to achieve perfect poses or Instagram-worthy flexibility, but to participate in an ancient alchemy. In hatha yoga, we “work the body like we knead dough when making bread,” transforming what feels like unconscious flesh into something vital and alive. Each asana becomes an opportunity to extract, as the texts say, “all the juice of insight and consciousness that lies within.”

When I move into a forward fold, I’m not just stretching my hamstrings—I’m exploring how resistance and surrender dance together in my nervous system. In backbends, I’m investigating the relationship between fear and opening, between protection and trust. Each twist reveals how holding patterns in my body mirror holding patterns in my mind.

The practice becomes a way of “slowing everything down,” as if saying to life itself: “Wait a minute, we are going to look with fresh eyes and listen with open ears at this mystery that is presenting itself through, within, and as the body.”

Beyond Liberation: The Jeweled Net of Practice

Different bodies require different keys to freedom. Some of us carry emotional shackles—shame that manifests as rounded backs, anger held in clenched jaws, grief stored in tight shoulders. Others navigate physical limitations, chronic pain, or bodies that move differently than the cultural “ideal.” Many bear the weight of systemic oppression or generational trauma encoded in our very nervous systems.

This is precisely why yoga was traditionally student-centered, taught individually with practices tailored to each person’s unique “vehicle.” My practice looks different from yours because our shackles are different, our paths to liberation necessarily distinct.

Yet here’s what moves me most: beneath this beautiful diversity of approaches—whether I’m drawn to the physical intensity of hatha yoga, the intellectual rigor of jnana yoga, the heart-opening of bhakti practice, the sacred activism of karma yoga, or the integration of tantra—there exists an underlying web of interconnection. Like Indra’s mythical net, with its jeweled intersections reflecting all other jewels, each authentic practice contains within it the essence of all others.

The Matrix as Mother

The word “matrix” comes from “mother”—it implies a womb that interconnects and sustains everything. When I practice asana with this understanding, my mat becomes sacred ground where I can experience viscerally how “whatever your practice is, no matter what you think or experience, all of this is cradled within the matrix called yoga.”

This matrix has no agenda, no preference for advanced poses over simple ones. Like an unconditional mother, it allows everything to grow, flourish, and flower—and it also allows everything to die or disappear. My tight hamstrings are as sacred as my moment of ease in a pose. My frustration with a challenging sequence is as welcome as my joy in fluid movement.

From whatever point I begin my practice—and I must always begin from where I actually am—this matrix starts to open, revealing deeper and deeper layers of immediate experience. I discover that my physical practice is not separate from my emotional life, my relationships, my engagement with the world. Everything is nested within this more complex, interwoven pattern.

The Forest and the Trees

Sometimes in practice, I become absorbed in the details—perfecting the alignment of a pose, working with a particular pattern of tension, exploring a subtle shift in breath. Other times, awareness expands to include the whole room, the sounds beyond the windows, the sense of being part of something vast and interconnected.

Both perspectives are necessary. Like standing within a forest, my specific viewpoint gives me a rich, vivid taste of the whole that’s far more real than seeing the entire landscape from above. Yet knowing the forest extends beyond my immediate vision adds a sense of safety and belonging.

This is the gift of consistent asana practice—learning to move fluidly between the specific and universal perspectives of experience. In a simple forward fold, I can simultaneously feel the particular sensation in my lower back and sense my place in the ancient lineage of practitioners who have explored this same territory for thousands of years.

The Sacred Ordinary

What continues to astonish me is how the practice transforms the ordinary into sacred. The most basic yoga movements—lifting my arms overhead, folding forward, turning my head—become gateways into unlimited depth when approached with meditative awareness.

I’m no longer trying to escape my particular viewpoint within the net of experience. Instead, I’m learning to see through my own perceptions, to recognize that the appearance of separation is itself the illusion. Each moment of practice—whether struggling with a challenging pose or flowing with ease—contains within it the entire pattern of the yoga matrix.

Why I Return to the Mat

This is why I practice asana, why I return to my mat again and again: not to achieve some perfect future state, but to participate fully in the mystery that’s already here. Through the honest exploration of what arises in my body, through the humility of working with limitations, through the awe of discovering new subtleties in familiar poses, I find myself “engulfed in a rare form of freedom.”

The practice reveals itself when I allow my senses, intelligence, and body to unfold “free of a self-image or any sort of goal or motivation.” In these moments, I experience what the texts describe as “the luminosity of each jewel of awareness” increasing as it reflects upon every other gem within the net of consciousness.

My time away from teaching has deepened this understanding: that asana practice is ultimately an act of honesty, humility, and genuine appreciation for the life process as it is. It’s not about transcending the body but recognizing the body as the sacred ground through which the infinite expresses itself.

When I lie in final savasana, I’m not just resting—I’m allowing myself to be held by what the texts call “an incredibly ancient, self-renewing latticework of tradition.” I can relax into this hammock of the yoga matrix, trusting that reality will unfold “free and unobstructed” when I stop overlaying it with my preconceptions and desires.

This is the heart of why I practice, why I teach, why I remain forever a student: because every time I step onto my mat, I enter this sacred laboratory where the mystery of interconnection reveals itself through the simple, profound act of moving with awareness. In a world that often feels fragmented and disconnected, the practice reminds me that we are all jewels in the same vast net, each reflection containing the brilliance of the whole.