Today Yoga is reduced to a mere form of exercise – hot yoga, power yoga and what not. It’s numerous physical benefits are glorified – Yoga for weightloss, back ache, anxiety, stress management, reducing the mighty power of Yoga to a transactional exchange for pitiful physical and mental relief. And with the limited understanding it is commonly misconstrued that Yoga is only for those who have enough time to spare and spend on the mat to gain these benefits. Both are misconceptions that aren’t true.
While these benefits are very much legit, yoga has so much more to offer to transform ourselves and our lives beyond our wildest imagination. Second, Yoga is also not something that’s done only on the mat and it doesn’t have to be time consuming.
Curious to know more about Yoga, its relevance in today’s fast-paced lives, and how you can practice it using one simple technique without interrupting your busy schedules? Let’s jump in!
Hello and welcome back to a brand new episode on the Own Your Everyday series. I’m your host and self-awareness coach Shwetha Sivaraman. In today’s episode we will break down a key misconception about Yoga, explore 1 simple but potent way we can practice Yoga in our modern day to day lives without adding to our overscheduled agendas, and discuss the many benefits we can hope to achieve from embarking on this glorious path.
Im at the receiving end of a lot of jokes since I publicly talk about my journey on the path of Yoga. I go by many nicknames Monk Shwetha, Satvik Shwetha and what not. But jokes apart, I realised that the underlying impression remains that Yoga is equivalent of saffron clad rishi munis in the himalayas standing on one leg.
But that’s far from the truth. Yoga is not something that’s only practiced in isolation, cut off from civilization and the material world. Yoga is much more than that. It is a way of life – a means to navigate modern life and relationships with ease and grace. Its utility and relevance lies in applying it amidst the chaos of modern world as much as away from it.
While I’ve been formally on the path of yoga only since 2018 here is my humble take on what Yoga is and what it can offer you if you’re open up to Yoga.
The goal of Yoga
We cannot apply Yoga to modern times if we don’t understand Yoga and its purpose. So let’s first spend a few minutes understanding the goal of yoga.
The word yoga has many definitions but the most popular one is union or to join. Union of what you might ask? There are multiple interpretations of that too – union of the individual self with the supreme or universal consciousness, union of the mind body spirit, union of the heart and the mind, union of the masculine and feminine energies.
Why is this important in today’s world?
But you might ask, why is this important? why did our ancestors and intelligent sages spend so much time and energy discovering the path of Yoga? This is because of a common observation they had of humans. They observed the universal suffering or sorrow that accompanied being human.
Despite scientific innovations and technology, the suffering and sorrows of being human persisted. Even today with all our material comforts, peace remains elusive. We are constantly stressed, anxious, afraid or in an emotional whirlwind of anger, envy, jealous, sadness accompanies only with a few moments of peace, joy and bliss. Our true nature of joy and bliss is experienced only in brief pockets amidst many turbulent emotions and mental fluctuations.
Yoga believes that the root of this suffering is avidya or ignorance. Avidya of what? Of our true nature. The belief being that the moment we come in touch with our true nature our sufferings can be controlled/managed/diminished/completely removed.
The ultimate purpose of Yoga is self-realization or Kaivalya. To remove this ignorance by removing the misapprehension of who we think we are i.e. our identification with our bodies, mind, desires, wealth and wordly pleasures, and to establish us firmly by realizing and identifying with who we truly are.
You must be wondering, how on earth is all of this applicable today in our modern paced lives?
A lot of our suffering even today comes from this total identification with the material objects and the world around us. We continue to believe our happiness lies in the next promotion or raise only to realise we never find that. But if we were to practice Yoga regularly, we can create some distance between us and our desires, us and our ambitions. We don’t need to give them up or live like a recluse. But we work towards it with complete knowledge and understanding that our happiness is independent of the result of our efforts. Can you imagine the peace with which we can go about our daily activities if we could integrate this learning?
So how do we practice this?
You must be thinking, all of that sounds great but I don’t have endless time to spare to sit on a Yoga mat and twist my body left and right.
The fundamental misconception is that Yoga is something you do on the mat for 30 mins or 1 hour each day or three times a week. When in fact physical aspect of yoga or asana is but one part of Yoga (and a very small part at that. Of the 196 Yoga sutras written by Patanjali, only 3 talk about asanas – so you can do the math).
The fundamental aspects of Yoga are not asana or pranayama (while those certainly help on the path). They are – **observation and awareness.**
Continued observation of the self and awareness of what we are doing when we are doing it are the gateways of higher consciousness. We don’t need to be on the mat to do this. This is a practice we can do 24*7 where ever we are whatever we might be doing.
- When we are walking, we can keep our awareness completely on every step we take.
- When we are cooking, we can keep our awareness on every ingredient we add as we cook.
- When we are working, we can keep our awareness as we write emails, sit in meeting rooms, and converse with people.
This might sound easy to do but is probably the most difficult. I’ve read somewhere that if we can keep our awareness for 32 mins straight without losing focus we can achieve enlightenment. First I thought that was just some misrepresented fact in the internet but when you see how hard it is to hold your awareness for a minute, you’ll realize why 32 such minutes can be such an achievement.
Are you wondering what you’ll achieve by practicing observation and **such awareness?**
Let’s face it – the world of logic we’ve created for ourselves today will not allow us to undertake any endeavour without clearly knowing what’s in it for us.
So I’ll try detailing the many benefits of being this witnesser and practicing the act of awareness in our day to day lives and actions –
1. Awakening – A lot of our lives we lead on autopilot. Our bodies know the drill and the mind simply follows from the time we wake up till we go to sleep. When we start sowing the seed of awareness we start to awaken from our deep slumber and start to really look at our lives and how we spend our time and energy.
2. Realization – When we start getting conscious of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, realizations start to follow. We start realizing what responses, situations, people, and actions work for us and what doesn’t. We start noticing patterns that are harming our well-being and patterns that are counter-productive.
3. Realigning– Such realizations pave way for realigning our lives in a way that’s more aligned to who we are and what we value most. We can start to take corrective measures to fix thoughts that demoralize us, feelings that spiral us out of control, and actions that feel out of alignment.
4. Disidentification – A lot of our suffering happens because of our identification with the mind the fluctuating thoughts that arise in it. Awareness puts distance between the thoughts in our mind and us. Because the very nature of a witness is that you distinguish between the seen and the seer. When we are aware and become the seer we automaticatically create a distance with the seen (the contents of the mind). Over time this continued space between us and the contents of the mind helps us detach and disidentify.
Ultimately all these benefits are describable. The potency of Yoga is that it is transcedental, impacting us physically, mentally, physiologically, and even experiential spiritual realization. It is a tool to experience the indescribable. So let all this talk of Yoga and its benefits not be only on International Yoga Day or on a mere transactional level. Lets unleash the power of yoga and make it our way of life not some day but today, here and now.
Swami Chinmayananda says this beautifully in his commentaries on Vedanta that, “In life, it is unrealistic to expect to be completely free from the thraldom of worldly entanglements and then to take to the spiritual path. To wait for such a contingency is absurd—it is like waiting for the waves to subside before taking a bath in the sea.” It’s not going to happen.
We cannot wait for our world to stop spinning before we get started on the path of yoga. We must do it right here right now wherever and whatever stage of life we might be in. Every sight we see, every breath we take, every word we utter, every gesture we make, every act we undertake can be an act of Yoga. So let’s raise our consciousness and make Yoga our very nature of being.
Until we meet again, this is Shwetha Sivaraman signing off.