The World's Most Amazing Homes!

 

 

I have been watching “The World’s Most Amazing Houses” on Netflix.  In each episode two British hosts guide a fifty-minute visit to four architecturally remarkable and very expensive homes.  Those in cities like Mumbai and Madrid offer a monastery like repose and inner beauty amidst the noise and the crowds.  Those in nature (New Zealand, Switzerland, Nova Scotia, Arizona) offer remarkable privacy and stunning views of mountains, forests, oceans or deserts. Most of the houses also are huge, as large as half of a small hotel.  While the living spaces are other worldly, they can seem obscene in their excess. In one monstrosity in Switzerland, a museum like cavern houses the owner’s collection of vintage and modern Porsches.  “It is the first time they have felt at home,” the man said as if they were his children.  At another massive concrete structure on Miami beach the owner claimed, “I feel so much joy everyday waking up in this house.”

 

Despite the excess, I have enjoyed learning about architecture and how supports boring down into the earth can bear the weight of the glass bottom pool, the tensile strength of cantilevered roofs, the way to cut windows so that natural light and air filters across the space. These principles in architecture remind of the principles in asana we use to create the same kind of effects of light, space, and fluidity.  In the architecture of asana, we plumb the depths of the heel bone into the floor to open up space in the chest and bring lightness to the brain.  Just as the architecture of amazing homes conjures an atmosphere of openness, freshness, and calm, the architecture of each asana conjures this same kind of weather pattern inside the body.

 

While “the world’s most amazing house” can bring surprise, joy, and excitement this contentment does not last.  After only a few years, one owner of an “amazing house” was ready to build his next one. In contrast, deep embodiment cultivated through asana offers an infinite and sustaining source joy and contentment.  This is the real “amazing house”, our own embodiment.  Without yoga, we remain only on the surface of our bodies.  It is like watching the “World’s Most Amazing House” TV show and lusting after all that beauty and not realizing that you have one of your own right inside.