Practicing Yoga Every Moment

My Friend,

Welcome to a new nugget!

It is possible that you are a consistent practitioner of YOGA. Perhaps an hour everyday where breath & body become the subject of playful acrobatics. However, while that 1-hour may feel like a good fueling exercise each day, the daily stresses cause the fuel to run out quickly. This is, however, at complete odds with what the 'ancient founding fathers of Yoga' envisaged. Yoga practices were never meant to be temporarily rejuvenating but rather were steeping stones to lead to permanent transformation.

So How Can Yoga Bring About Permanent Transformation in You? Let's explore this in today's nugget. But for that we need to first understand:

What is The Transformation That Yoga Practices Were Created to Bring in The First Place? Contrary to what it may seem, Yoga at its conception had little to do with helping one maintain their physical health. In fact one of the most primitive texts on Yoga, "Patanjali Yoga Sutras" ,has only 1 out of 196 verses mentioning physical postures (asanas). Yoga practices, at its roots, were meant for you to slowly reach the pinnacle of peace (even when you stopped indulging in the breath and body practices). The acid test to knowing if Yoga is being practiced correctly is that incremental growth in inner peace is felt each passing hour (as opposed to a relapse back into stress by the end of the day).

The Breath and The Body Postures Are Just The Beginning Let's do a simple 10-second experiment. Bring a frown or a sad gesture on your face. Now, without losing that expression, try to think of something pleasant. Soon enough, you'll realize, that inviting a pleasant thought requires you to alter the facial gestures. For a simple reason - the mind and body are connected. For much the same reason, Yoga targets the breath and the body. Since if you can manipulate the body in the right way, you can release muscle tensions that become a barrier to mental peace. In fact a popular form of Yoga called 'Hatha Yoga' carried the word 'Hatha' which means to do something forcibly. That is, if we force the body to flex in certain postures and breath to be breathed in a certain rhythm, the mind-body connection brings forth the experience of peace.

The Insufficiency of 1-Hour Given that the mind and body are connected, working on the body can only help release pent up physical strains and in turn, cause 'peace recovery'. The real source of the strain, however, is the mind. Any time during the day that you experience heightened emotions, your muscles tighten up. And if such moments keep flowing in, muscles accumulate those strains. Which is why by the end of the day any "de-stressing" that may have happened during your morning routine feels back to square-one. This is the reason why unless the physical rejuvenating practices aren't accompanied by mental practices, sustainable peace is unachievable.

The Real Practice of Yoga If you've been to any Yoga class, you might have heard the instructor mention things like, "Bring your attention towards your breathing" or "Become attentive to the body sensations". While he/she/they may not have done so consciously, these instructions hint at what Yoga really entails. Yoga, at its core, is about reclaiming control over what we are attentive too. If you try to stay attentive to your breath even for a minute you'll realize how easily you lose control over your attention and wander off. Peace is lost only because whenever we are involved in any work, our mind automatically jumps to thinking about a stress, worry, inadequacy, expectation etc. If you remember a time when you were completely immersed in some work, you'll recognize that the circumstances and worries of life simply dissolved in those moments. For with complete control over attention comes control over peace. How Then To 'Really" Practice Yoga While the 1-hour of morning practice is important, what's more important is to practice control over attention. A natural way to do this is to dedicate your complete and uninterrupted attention to whatever you're doing. And whenever your attention starts to drift away into thoughts away from the work at hand (or the purpose you've defined), ask yourself "Is there any utility of the thought in the context of what I'm doing?". And if the answer is no, no matter how tempting the thought may be, come back to what you were doing. If you can practice building this control over your attention each moment you live, you'll realize that slowly thoughts that used to become a barrier to your peace have started to lose their strength. Slowly, you would've started to achieve the intended purpose of Yoga practices. As we end this nugget I hope Yoga practices becomes an integral part of your life as you realize the deepest truth about Yoga practice which is that it is not a practice restricted to 1 hour each day but a practice of each moment. For Yoga is as much about staying true to the breath and the physical postures while doing the morning routine as it is about pulling your attention back to reading a newsletter every time your mind wanders into a stray thought.

Shishir Arya