Inside Yoga 64 (26/11/12)
Last week I was reading a Sunday newspaper magazine article about amazing humans (“Meet the Superhumans”, Observer magazine 18/11/12) and I was fascinated by the story of 25-year-old free diver, Tom Sietas, from Hamburg, who can hold his breath for 22 minutes and 22 seconds – he is the current world record holder.
What struck me were the similarities with yoga, because as the story pointed out – for Sietas, “thinking is the enemy”. This is what we learn in yoga. In yoga philosophy, the mind refers to our thoughts. You can see the mind as a “thought bank” where all our thoughts come from and are stored. We learn to work with the mind, and more importantly we learn to keep it quiet when we need to and to use it effectively when it is needed.
I wouldn’t describe the mind as our enemy, though it can feel like that at times. Our mind can be like children in the throes of the “terrible twos” causing havoc just because they can! Equally our mind can be our friend. It is about learning to understand our mind, and learning to control it – like the diver does. He keeps is quiet so that he can perform his incredible feat.
The free diver is holding his breath, whereas in yoga we breathe constantly (though there a few pranayama exercises that ask us to hold the breath), but his focus works the same as ours.
As the article described, thinking uses oxygen – something he simply can’t afford when he’s suspended under water for considerable lengths of time. “The more emotional your thoughts, the worse it gets,’ says Sietas. “So if you think about the last fight with your girlfriend, your heart rate goes up.”
Likewise in yoga, a busy mind will adversely affect our breathing and body, making it harder to enjoy the practice. We learn to relax the body where possible, and at the same time, flex or extend muscles where needed. It a lesson in self-awareness as sometimes we might not notice that we have tension, for example, in the neck and shoulders. Practice teaches us to become more aware of this and to take action, for example, we discover tension in the neck so we do something to relax that area – a simple roll of the shoulders can do the trick.
Holding a yoga posture in a calm and alert way is a skill we learn and this is a fine balance – that’s why we need to be alert and pay attention to our mind.
