Yoga for the Mind

Yoga has gone mainstream. It is in our everyday vernacular. It sells cars. And cereal.

Whether or not you've tried a class, you have an idea of what yoga is. To most people, yoga is a way of stretching and becoming more flexible. For others, it is a means toward relaxation. For others still, it is a fitness workout.

All these elements may be attributed to yoga, but yoga has a broader base and higher purpose. With origins dating back at least two thousand years, yoga is an ancient spiritual practice. Its intent is not to stretch the hamstrings, but to bring quiet or stillness to the fluctuating thought waves that disturb the mind. The word yoga means “yoke”, inferring to the union of body, mind and spirit.

The reason that asana practice is popular in the West, is that it appeals to our sense of working the body, giving us something to “do”. Besides, there are a myriad of health benefits in performing yoga poses. Depending on how they are taught, the sequence they are taught in and the skill of the teacher, asanas can bring about relief from much physical discomfort – alleviating anything from back pain to PMS. And this is a good reason to practice yoga. But it is not the only reason.

If you sit around and watch your mind for any given five minutes, you'll notice a turbidity of thought. Carol Shields called it “the longest conversation of your life”. The inner dialogue that is crammed with endless opinions, admonitions, desires, fears, justifications, observances plus an assortment of mundane and intriguing ideas.

Yoga aims at quietening this mental noise. And the brilliance of BKS Iyengar, a living yoga master, was that he perfected alignment of the body in the yoga asanas in order to penetrate the mind.

Say, when you go to a yoga class and are asked to work in triangle pose, your feet are spread wide, your arms extend from the shoulders. Then, you are asked to lengthen and bend to the side. But the pose isn't over. Many actions are required to sustain this pose: the feet must press into the floor; thigh muscles roll outward to align the knee joint; quadriceps contract to further the stability of the legs. Then the spine lengthens and the torso revolves upward. Then, of course there is the matter of the breath – you must breathe.

While you are working, the mind -- which is usually preoccupied with thoughts of dinner, or the argument you had with X, or the seeds you'll plant this summer, or the weather -- is harnessed close in to the body.

Even for one fleeting second.

After that second, you may become aware that you feel discomfort in the pose, or you want to come out, and then the instructor reminds you to contract your thigh muscles. So your awareness returns to the thighs. Then, she reminds you to breathe, so you realize you've been holding your breath and you let it go and you breathe. For a moment, your mind is freed up again.

And so it goes.

This is not to say that you'll become enlightened after one class, or even after twenty years; however, the awareness gained on the yoga mat, through the body, can be applied to daily life. You begin to recognize how the body affects the mind. For example, slouching forward closes the chest, it brings about a depressed mind. Opening the chest invites life into the body, nudges the mind into a state of well-being. When your life feels out of control, standing poses bring about stability. Forward bends, tranquillity.

The beauty with the practice of yoga is that awareness deepens over time. As you practice the asanas, the body becomes more open. But more profoundly you learn to move you past your thoughts and into the essence of your own Being.

Introductory Musings : Number 2

For over a decade now, I've been working on, refining and teaching uttitha trikonasana (triangle pose). Often, especially if I've been away from my practice for a few days, it feels like coming home. So why, when at a workshop with Maureen Carruthers did I run up against resistance in this pose? It wasn't a physical obstruction either.

Maureen asked us to enter trikonasana (triangle) in an exploratory manner. To move slowly, deepening our relationship to our centre. I found myself wanting to go into the pose the way I always did, with some awareness, sure, and with a definite swiftness. So, I had to stop and ask myself: did I need to go into this triangle the way I did yesterday's triangle? Did I think if I didn't do it the same, I'd somehow lose the pose? Maureen encouraged us to put aside our competitive nature and, as we moved into the pose, to seek joy.

Joy. Right. That's why I do this practice. For the love and joy of it. How could I forget?

All This Space

When I was pregnant with my second son, I took my first son to stargaze in our backyard. World affairs had me rattled – the US had begun their anti-terror campaign by bombing Afghanistan. I often thought of the Afghani women who were pregnant like me, having to flee their homes, or giving birth as explosions blew apart their country.

The night was clear. It was late Fall and we were returning home from a dinner out. Above us the Milky Way twisted through the sky. Recently, I'd read that the Milky Way is home to as many stars as the human body is to cells. I recounted this to my son. “Come on,” I told him. “Let's lie down and look at the sky.” He ran inside for blankets and an old yoga mat we could throw on the ground. Had he ever done this? Reclined over the earth and stared at the night sky? It had been so long since I had, I could not remember.

Lately, he'd been asking questions about space. Planet sizes fascinated him, as did the length of time to orbit the sun. What was the Milky Way anyway? And how long would it take to fly to the moon?

It was the perfect night for stargazing.

We snuggled into each other, holding ourselves against the cold. I started to point out the few constellations I could recall. Big Dipper, Orion's Belt, Three Sisters. Then I rambled on about what I thought was Andromeda and how astrological signs were somewhere up there, but I couldn't really tell him where. I told him we could check out astronomy books from the library. Then, I asked if he'd be interested in a star chart.

He gave a little grunt and I realized he hadn't been listening. He didn't care for the names of constellations, they were all there above him, nameless and magnificent. So, I stopped talking and let myself release into the cold embrace of earth. Quietly, I shut down that part of myself that needed to pin names onto each star. Miraculously, the cosmos began to open up. The sky became deeper, it breathed and pulsed like a living thing.

Beneath this immense display, the relevance of human dramas diminished. There is all this space, I thought. The universe is more vast than our minds can comprehend and we tend to close in, become tight and constricted. There is all this space and still, we war over territories.

We are like this in our minds too. Closing in on perceived problems or opinions, fixating on what we lack, what we fear, how to win -- and reacting over and over -- to these obsessions. We want our lives to be solid and predictable. We want to claim the sky for our very own.

One of the precepts of yoga is ahimsa or non-violence. Violence goes beyond blatant warfare and is understood, on subtle levels, as non-aggression. We become aggressive in countless ways: our need to win an argument, to clutch onto an opinion, to deepen a yoga stretch by shear will. We, all of us express aggression in a variety of ways. And each time we do, we contract – physically and mentally. We pull the sky down around our ears, refusing to offer space to ourselves or to others.

So we study ourselves in our asana practice, we begin to notice when we are pushing ourselves in aggressive ways. Are we trying to touch our toes at the expense of straining our backs? Are we clenching our jaws, holding our breath because we just want to do it right? Can we recognize this tendency and create space around it?

Letting go of the need to “win” the pose, we learn to work without strain. And when we learn to work with ahimsa on the mat, we learn to weave it into our daily lives.

Staring at the wide open universe, I knew that, too often, I closed of from its immensity. Wasn't this what I was searching for? This spaciousness in both my body and mind, this living connection to the universe.

I pulled my arm around my son, felt my baby kick within my body. I wanted to offer them a love, a peacefulness as wide as the sky above me.

Even wider.