Many of us are celebrating Easter and Passover this week. Passover celebrates liberation from slavery, and Easter celebrates Jesus’ ressurection, both ideas that tie in beautifully with the practice of yoga. Yoga is, after all, the process of liberation from suffering, a process by which we are born anew in each moment.

The first three yoga sutras teach us that the practice of yoga begins now, in this moment; that suffering is caused by the turnings and chatter of the mind; that bliss is achieved when we are liberated from the turnings and chatter of the mind. On the mat, we learn to notice our thought patterns. We learn where the mind goes when a posture is uncomfortable, when we don’t do the posture the way we would like, when we are in a posture we love, and so on.

Every situation our mind could encounter, we encounter on the mat. Which thoughts enslave us? In the story of Passover we learn not only of the Israelites enslavement, but we learn that the Pharaoh, too, is enslaved by his desire to control others. When he decides to release others, he is freed from plagues, but as he wavers on his decision, each time he decides that the Israelites should be enslaved, he is once again plagued.

When we free ourselves from the thoughts that enslave us -and our desire to control that which can not be controlled- we are reborn in each moment. Liberated from our ideas about success or failure and how things should be, we are free to act in union with our source of higher wisdom, whether that is God, Jesus, the universe, or simply our own wisest self.