Krishnamacharya practicing Pranayama in the Lotus Pose
Someone asked me in Quora this morning right after savasana and before pranayama: What are some mind-blowing facts about yoga? What a great question!
It blows my mind when I glimpse at yoga’s underlying intelligence which enriches my own life and makes me useful, as well as how it brings me happiness and peace. But that is not enough, I wanted mind-blowing!
Yes, yoga is not just about the poses and blah blah blah, that is not mind-blowing any longer, we all already knew that. So let’s dig a little bit deeper.
Here are 9 things that blew my mind about yoga “lately”. What blew your mind? Tell me in the comments or in Twitter.
1- Flexibility is of the mind not the body. The first time I heard Pattabhi Jois say those words I was stunned, especially because he said it with no extra words, in a very simple way: “Body is not stiff, mind is”. It blew my mind because, like every person I encounter nowadays who tells me that they cannot touch their feet and therefore will not do yoga, I had never looked at it that way.
It shifted the way I related to yoga poses, I had not realized that even though we have a body with limitations, proper breathing, alignment, and patience can work miracles in any-body and yes, even those who think they will never be able to touch their feet in a forward bend, will, eventually.
2- Measuring Life-Span in Breaths. Not Years. Once we break away from the conventional tacit agreement we all follow, by which our life-span is measured in years, and change it to how many breaths we have left instead, then every one of them becomes important, critical, and something that we used to take for granted becomes now the center of attention.
Yogis are connoisseurs of the breath, they treat it like the fine and rear treasure it is, they study it and aim at making it smooth, long, and peaceful. Yoga is a breathing practice.
3- Guess What Is The Most Important Vital Organ? Did you say the heart? Not for yogis.
The main organ in the body from the yogic perspective is actually two of them: the lungs. And when you come to think about it:
a) if breathing is the most important function then this makes sense,
b) if both the heart and the lungs are either there, or you die, then why not chose lungs? After all, they are AS important as the heart.
Finally c) the workings of the heart are pretty much beyond our control (unless we are very advanced at yoga) but the workings of our lungs (expand capacity, fill them up with oxygen) can be somewhat worked by our will through the breath.
Krishnamacharya (the father of yoga and master teacher of last century) is the one that opened my eyes to this point which you can find if you read the Yoga Makaranda.
It is congruent with the focus on the breath and makes you see life a bit different. By the wonders of our times you can read the Yoga Makaranda for free here.
4.- It’s 24/7 Practice: Might not sound too mind-blowing but it turns to be so when you realize that no matter where you are or what you are doing, you are practicing.
There is a practice for each moment of the day as the guidelines are designed to deal with the issues of the real world, for example, by eliminating the crappy people out of your life so your mental energy is not totally consumed by hating or judging, and rather it can be directed to more beautiful and useful things, like becoming the radiant person we already are.
These suggestions for daily life are all included in what some consider the “bible” of yoga, a compilation written 2500 years ago -give or take- called the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. The specific line about dealing with crappy people does not say much, it just says “ignore”.
If there is ONE measurement by which you could see if a person is practicing yoga is that they will be kind. They will not make you feel inferior or treat you with disrespect, they will not be mean to you not face-to-face and not through the Internet or through any medium. This is mind-blowing to me.
5.- The Path Ends Here, And It Actually Never Began. This is how the path of yoga goes for those who take it seriously (i.e.: practice every day and focus on it, want to learn about it):
We start with one of those classes that are everywhere and with the body. We start with it because the body is the most visible thing we “think” we have.
Then the body with its magnificent intelligence begins to inform us of things we need to consume less of (food and otherwise, like: news, affairs) so we can enter certain poses in the next practice. Suddenly we start to eat more nutritious things and on that note we also begin to eliminate better (as in going to the bathroom more often).
We let go of the things we do not need and start to have only things we really need. this also extends to people (there are people in our lives we can do best without). Suddenly our whole life becomes cleaner and we need less things.
Then we realize at some point -if we did not already- that the whole practice is about breathing and how we breathe because it is the breath that is ultimately related to the mind activity Agitated breath equals an agitated mind. We begin to practice breath extension and retention which in turn leads us to better and more alert states of concentration.
Suddenly our mind is “arrested” and we are …. HERE!
What I mean by here is that suddenly you stop elaborating thoughts, like for example, thinking ” “who is this woman writing this? What does she know? “, or “What will I have for breakfast?” or “Wonder Where is this in the yoga scriptures”? and rather the mind is silent.
We can still check our sources of course, we don’t become stupid, what we become is more “efficient”. I.e.: we still question if we have to but the “cheap drama” around it is gone, we are present without the constant commentary/judgement of the mind and therefore here.
We sense with the body and we embody “being-ness” rather than give in to our tendency to slice and dice with the sharp and never happy mind, or to “do”.
There is no longer a need to try to control or convince anyone of anything. We know. In other words, we arrived, but we never left in the first place. We were always home, we are here right now.
6.- Turning Dust Into Gold. If you notice, all of the points above have one thing in common, they all contain the miracle of changing ourselves in a gradual and positive way.
Don’t know about you but I know how hard it is for me to change, although since yoga I have become more flexible and not just in body.
The real miracle happens when we are able to shift our perception, that is what is meant in alchemy when the shaman or the magician or whatever the character is that turns dust into gold does so. There was never dust and there was never gold, the alchemy is just in the perception of the observer.
There are four poses mentioned in pretty much all scriptures that are labeled as “most important” two of them are the lotus and the set of inversions. There are also lots of mind-blowing facts about the breath, but here are three coming from both areas, to offer a taste:
7.- Inversions As Anti-Aging Agents: If you look at yourself in the mirror and then look at a photo of you from 20 years ago you will see that some things have changed. It would be silly to pretend that the sagging of the skin reflected on the mirror is not also happening inside, to our internal organs. It is.
Inversions, especially when done well (best to learn with a teacher) with smooth and long breathing help all internal organs return to their original place and from which they have been moving by the effects of gravity. Blew my mind when I heard Ramaswami tell this story at one of his workshops.
8.- Lotus Pose As Enlightenment Ship. The fascinating thing about the lotus pose is that, sage yogis tell us, it provides the best balancing foundation for meditation. Not just in the sense that the body is best supported and that the pose favors the right alignment of the spine, but also in the sense that the part that is slightly in contact with the floor -when you perform the pose well- is the area between the perineum and the anus, a sacred area from the yogi perspective because it is the root chakra, the base where energy sprouts form.
The lotus puts all the odds in your favor that if you do it following proper technique (clear mind, after asana, and on and on, way beyond the scope of this piece of writing), then you can be rooted in the earth, just like a lotus flower is rooted on the mud, but through the spine soar into the opening of a lotus flower, above water. Or in other words, return to this moment and get out of your own way.
9.- Finally a very practical thing that blew my mind came from B.K.S. Iyengar. He says that for every 30 minutes of asana (poses) practice we must allow 5 minutes of rest (savasana or corpse pose) so that the nervous system has time to come back to normal and to center and so we are not over-excited throughout our days. How many of us knew that? But more importantly, in this rushed world, how many of us will respect it?
Credits:
This post is written by Claudia Altucher. She is a yoga teacher, published author, and an avid blogger. In the spring of 2000 she took her first yoga class at a gym. While in the corpse pose she found herself crying. She later realized that a hip release had occurred during the practice and had allowed her to let go of an old emotion. Since that moment Claudia got hitched to yoga. She has learnt yoga all over the world from many masters teaching different styles. A 2003 visit to the Ashram of Swami Sivananda Radha in British Columbia was a turning point. It was here that Claudia got a revelation that our lives can be dedicated to the Divine and everything we do is sacred. Claudia then got introduced to Ashtanga yoga in 2004 and started attending workshops conducted by Manju Jois in India. Since then she has been to Mysore multiple times. This post has been reposted with permission. You can find the original post here.
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