Inside Yoga 75 (26/4/2013)
I have been reading Coming To Our Senses by Jon Kabat-Zinn which is about “healing ourselves and the world through mindfulness”. In it he has a short chapter about yoga, an overview, which I thought encapsulates the practice of yoga so well I want to share it.
In his book, he says “yoga is one of the great gifts on the planet, and availing yourself of it and bringing mindfulness to your body and mind through the gateways of yoga asanas and the flowing sequences of various postures can be extraordinarily uplifting, rejuvenating, invigorating, transporting, and just plain relaxing. You can think of yoga as a full-bodied, 360-degree musculo-skeletal conditioning that naturally leads to greater strength, balance, and flexibility as you practice. It is a profound meditation practice, especially when practiced mindfully, and develops strength, balance, and flexibility of mind even as it is developing those same capacities at the level of the body. It is also a great doorway into stillness, into the rich complexity of the body and its potential for healing, and, as with any other meditative practice, a perfect platform for choiceless awareness.”
Later on in the chapter he adds: “Breathing is a key part of yoga practice. How we breathe while moving into and maintaining various postures, the qualities and depth of breath in different configurations of the body, and most importantly, the quality of our awareness of the breath, and what the senses and the mind are up to from moment to moment, are of central and critical importance in practising yoga mindfully.”
And importantly, he makes the point that, “in yoga, the postures themselves are of secondary importance compared to the attitude we bring to the practice in terms of both presence of mind and openness of heart.”
Kabat-Zinn, who is based in the USA, works with people suffering from chronic pain and stress. He describes how some of his patients “visualise themselves doing postures they are unable to do because of injury or chronic pain, and that too can have its effects, perhaps by priming the nervous system and musculature for future attempts to practice once the inflammation of certain regions has been reduced, as well as increasing concentration, confidence, and intentionality just by imagining yourself doing it.”
This can also help all of us, regardless of state of health, because visualising what we are doing can help us to connect with our own body, breath and mind more effectively, and thereby improve our sense of well-being regardless of whether we can physically do the actual yoga postures.
Kabat-Zinn touches upon an important element of yoga practice – the process of inhabiting our own bodies. He explains: “Through the practice of mindful yoga, we can expand and deepen our sense of what it means to inhabit the body and develop a richer and more nuanced sense of the lived body in the lived moment. In fact, the deep meaning of the word “rehabilitation” actually means to learn to live inside again (from the French habiter, which means to dwell, to inhabit).
His focus is on rehabitation due to injury and stress, but this is also relevant for all of us. For me, the yoga practice is about coming home, that by exploring moment to moment our relationship with our own body, breath and mind, we learn to be at home in our own body, mind and breath – when we are safely at home we usually feel more at peace. We make a connection that might have been missing, possibly due to a busy life that has led to a separation from our own body, breath and mind.
He concludes that: “we are talking about the rehabilitation of our whole being, and the recovery of wholeness moment by moment, step by step, and breath by breath starting, as always, from where we are now.”
