(First published  23/11/09)

There are numerous reasons why we start yoga, and for many of us as we travel down our own individual yogic journey, we discover that there are unexpected benefits and lessons from yoga. By nature, yoga is a holistic practice – tailored to fit every individual and also something that reaches the parts other practices might not reach; or another way of putting this: yoga is very good at crossing the “t”s and dotting the “i”s.

So as we strive to understand yoga, to see both the wood and the trees – we look for ways of simplifying the overall practice. One such way, is to have pithy one liners that stimulate reflection and understanding of why and what we do in yoga. The traditional means of teaching were aphorisms as seen in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, which traditionally were then expanded upon and explained by a teacher for the benefit of the student. Now in our modern culture, we look for something more streamlined, the “sound bite”. So with this in mind, I found myself recently describing the goal in yoga as being, in short: 3 Cs.

In other words, we seek in yoga: Calmness, Clarity and Contentment.

Easy to remember and focus upon. But how do we achieve these goals?

Calmness

The opposite of calmness is a state of mind we are all familiar with – stress, anxiety, worry, agitation, anger, and so forth. And these human concerns have been around our lives for a very long time. In fact, experts recently revealed that Stone Age humans suffered from stress – they found traces of stressthrough tests on human remains from that period.

We spend a lot of our lives in these negative states: it’s as if we do not want to leave them. We can identify with them, and get caught up in their stories. “I am an angry person”, “I am an anxious person”, or “I am a stressed person” are sentences we have perhaps all uttered at some point. Yet, when we are caught up in these emotions we do not realise that this is not who we are.

By simply changing the syntax and our perspective, these descriptions can be rewritten as: We can be angry at times, we can feel anxiety at other times, and we can feel stress – perhaps for longer and more often than we would like. But this is not who we are.

Yoga’s selection of methods – asanas, pranayama, meditation, philosophy and the rest – teach us how to disarm and remove these negative states. They might feel stuck and fixed at times, but essentially, everything is impermanent. All things change.

And as many of us have noticed, after practising yoga there is a sense of calmness within us. How long it lasts is another matter, but yoga does have the tools to bring us to a place of calmness. Sustained and regular practice helps to maintain the calmness for longer periods.

Clarity

When things are tough and difficult, when everything feels in a mess, or we simply feel rushed off our feet, clarity is also swept away. This is when we feel muddled, confused, and unable to concentrate. It is not separate from calmness – they are interdependent – and this is again where yoga helps.

There are times when we feel as if we are lost in the fog, trying to find our way, stumbling around and failing to reach our destination. In numerous texts it is put another way, that we have veils over us that obscure clarity and by removing them we will achieve clarity. It is put this way, because it is said that our inherent state is that of clarity – it lies within us and is temporarily hidden or covered. This also is true of calmness – our natural state of being without external influences is calmness.

Again, this is where regular yoga practice – especially a meditational approach – helps to bring us clarity.

Contentment

We all want to be happy – even those who deny this, deep down would like to be happy. But we swing like a pendulum, from happy feelings to bad feelings. In philosophical terms this is our dualistic nature. By achieving a non-dualistic state, we are able to stop the swing of the pendulum.

For example, there are two basic human emotions: aversion and desire; and we go from one to the other very easily and often without awareness that this is occurring. Food is a good example: we crave some food, hungry for it, so our desire rises; and then we start eating and eating, and if we are not being aware (lacking clarity) we soon find ourselves feeling sick – aversion has stepped in. This can be subtle or extreme.

This can be applied to most areas of life. Our work – desiring a certain job and then after a while, we do not like it or even hate it – aversion is back. The nature of the job might not have changed, but we have and our mood has. Now, they say change is good, perhaps we really must make a change in our job, but we need to act with clarity and awareness, to avoid the swing of the pendulum throwing us in the wrong direction. But this is why some of us keep changing work, we are never satisfied, and always blaming work instead of looking within for the answers. Yoga helps us to see this as it is, and to understand – it’s like wearing the right glasses so you can see things as they are – or see yourself as you are.

The point is this, perhaps we need to stop eating or change our job, but this needs to be addressed with calmness, clarity and an understanding of what contentment is.

In yoga contentment is one of the niyamas, called santosa, which is one of the qualities that we aspire to have. As BKS Iyengar puts it “a mind that is not content cannot concentrate. The yogi feels the lack of nothing and so he is naturally content.” TKV Desikachar elaborates when describing santosa as “being content with what we have” by adding that the real meaning of santosa is “to accept what happens”, and learn from this (note, that this is not passive, we might take action, but from the right frame of mind).

It is also learning to be able to be content in an unconditional way; to realise that our contentment is not dependent on external actions or things around us. We still learn to find the best job for us, we enjoy our food and so forth, but we learn to operate in a way that means we see the big picture.

When we practice, we often find ourselves feeling lighter, more at ease – and this is when our troubles fall away and what is left is a sense of calmness, clarity and contentment.

We might, one day, master these three principles, but in the meantime this is where yoga as a practice is so effective. By returning to our practice, especially when things are tough we can return to these principles or calmness, clarity and contentment – for a short while.
Things will change and more hurdles will be in front of us, but that is why we keep returning to yoga; to put us back on track.