It has been my experience as a student and teacher of yoga that, what we do on the yoga mat, we also tend to do off the mat in our daily lives.
For example, if we move through yoga poses too quickly, we probably rush through our daily life as well. This can leave us feeling tired, strained, and stressed, and even a little empty.
If we want to move through our asanas (or our life) with more steadiness (sthira) and ease (sukha), we need to learn how to let go of the things that are weighing us down and preventing profound change. This process of change starts more often in the mind than in the body. I call this ‘exercising the mental muscle’. It’s a ‘muscle’ that we must learn to use as much as any physical muscle group in our bodies whilst practicing asana.
Training Your ‘Mental Muscle’
Experiment with the following quick mental exercise when you move through your yoga postures but find yourself unable to keep your breath steady and even. Perhaps your thoughts start to drift and take you on a wild ride whilst practising? Perhaps your thoughts hold judgement or negativity about your own practice or about others?
If you find yourself unable to concentrate on what you are doing and too many thoughts are interfering, your breath will be uneven. Before you know it, your alignment also goes out of the window.
To get back on track consider this:
Thoughts originate in the mind. They exist in the mind. They dissolve in the mind.
The thought that you know something (or that someone else knows something that they share with you) doesn’t mean that this is true (individual or collective) knowledge or that this is all the knowledge there is.
Everything that is known or will be known to mind originated, originates or will originate in a thought (anyone’s thought). It is for this reason that the knowledge we have today was and is only ever that: a thought.
Likewise, the thought that you are a limited human being with limited knowledge (based on your thoughts) doesn’t necessarily mean that this being is all there IS – a being with a beginning and an end, with a birth and a death. On the contrary, what this means is that you can never know that you are limited. After all, everything you know or will know always appears to you as a thought in mind. And so, the belief that you are a limited human being with a limited mind or a limited consciousness is without a solid foundation. It’s a thought. An illusion, or maya in Sanskrit.
How does all this relate to finding more ease and joy in your yoga practice and in your daily life?
Finding Stillness in Not-Knowing
Not-knowing opens the door to knowing. In other words, knowing that you do not know satisfies the part of your mind that wants to know. Yoga is a path that challenges you to be ever mindful of this core simplicity. For if you are mindful of it, you would realize that true knowledge can only be found in not-knowing. It cannot be found anywhere else.
Removing and transcending all your false identities and obstacles (which means to surrender everything you think you know) and to reside happily in not-knowing will clarify this confusion. The key is to learn to let go. To surrender to the certainty that mind can and will never know.
When you stop hiding from not-knowing, it is much easier to steadily progress on the path of yoga. Patanjali’s first four yoga sutras make that clear. If you understand them, you understand everything, in principle…
atha yoga anushasanam
yogash chitta vritti nirodhah
tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam
vritti sarupyam itaratra
now begins the study and practice of yoga
yoga is to surrender the projections of the mind
then the true nature of the self manifests
otherwise there is identification with mental projections
Food for thought: The above conclusion (=> knowledge) is of course only just that: a thought. ♡