Yoga and Quality of Mind
There are powerful links between the ancient practice of yoga, and our Quality of Mind programme.
This post explores the links, encourages you to do more yoga, and invites you to a forthcoming festival that I am attending.
So what does yoga do?
It releases stress.
It shifts your thinking.
It encourages you to be in the present moment.
It encourages you to surrender
It helps you access an altered state of being
Yoga means union. It’s about union between mind, body, soul and the divine. That might sound rather grand or esoteric for some, but it’s also pragmatic and an experience that we can all have.
So where does it fit into Quality of Mind?
The Quality of Mind programme is about learning about the mind, so that you can live and work with more peace, freedom, clarity and joy. To put our teaching into practice in your daily life, it’s useful to have practices - practices that stop you in your busy tracks and take you out of your noisy mind. Yoga is ideal for this.
Thoughts get stored in the cells of the body. The busier your life, the more noisy the mind, the more thoughts get stored in the form of stress. Any exercise is great at releasing the stress. Yoga is particularly good at it, because it combines consistent breathing with postures that open up and flex many different parts of the body where stress might be stored.
Yoga provides you a quiet space to reflect on your thinking and to shift the thinking you’ve been caught in. Again, other forms of exercise can also do this, but again there’s something special about yoga because the rational mind quietens down way more than if you’re going for a run or bike ride. I often find that from a yoga session, I go into the session with a problem, and when I’ve finished the session, my perspective and/or my feeling about the problem has changed.
Yoga also encourages you to be in the present moment. Yoga is a practice that is about letting go of the outside world of thinking, to focus fully on the instructions of the teacher and the sensations in your body. As we learn in Quality of Mind, there is only the present moment - the mind only works in the present moment. So it’s useful to have a practice to actually stop your mind from running into the future or into the past. Yoga can be a training for coming back into the present moment.
The fourth point is about surrendering. I love it when my yoga teacher says surrender to the class. What does that mean? It means the my rational mind can switch off from all that I’ve been thinking about. My rational mind also doesn’t have to ‘do’ the class. When I surrender I sink into being in flow. Somehow in flow state, my body can just do all the moves. In fact, when the rational mind is out of the way, I can do way more in the postures, and I can also do it far more easily. And let’s be clear, surrendering isn’t an apathy state. It’s relaxed and it’s also highly focused and productive. Now imagine - what would it be like if you surrendered in all areas where currently you’re struggling or striving hard?
Now the final point and the higher aim of yoga is ‘Samadhi’. In simple words, this is the state when there’s nothing that can disturb your mind. It’s a state of peace and tranquility. According to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, when you achieve the state of samadhi, your mind and body become one with themselves — their union becomes so strong that they become inseparable from each other. Just try it, it feels in some ways like sleep, but it’s not. It’s a deep rest and a deep dissolving of the ego and identity. ‘I’ disappear for a bit.
In Quality of Mind, we experiment with this state. We call it a ‘being’ state or a state of experiencing pure awareness. And the value of experiencing this state is to release from all the stories that you’ve been immersed in, and to re-connect with your ‘true self’.
If you’re a current yogi, I invite you to take the reflections above into your next class. If you don’t currently do yoga, I invite you to give it a go. But don’t do it as a bunch of exercises, do it as an exploration of your mind. And do let me know how you get on - I’d love to hear.
And if you’re interested, I’m going to the World Yoga Festival, Henley-on-Thames, UK on 3-6th August. This provides an interesting opportunity to try different types of yoga but also to learn more about the philosophy behind it. Why not come along?
