Embodying Beginner's Mind and Working Less in Flow.

You arrive at yoga class, set your mat down in your "spot", grab the props you prefer, and then you sit down and wait for class to start.   As you practice, you move through the familiarity of the postures with the same alignment, the same work, the same tools, the same breath as the last time you got on the mat, and the time before that and before that, etc.  As creatures of habit, we tend to apply this habitual tendency to our yoga practice.  We begin to rely on our tools (or habits), our egoic sense of how things "should" be.  Yoga Anatomist,  Leslie Kaminoff,  talks about how we can become attached to the tools of practice, because those tools have previously facilitated a transformation.   These are methods we have employed to bring our practice to where it is today - and as a result, we have probably seen transformation in many places such as our physical ability, our mental focus and ability to access the feeling of stillness (yoga), and we've probably even seen changes in our lives off the mat.   We are not the same now as we were when we began our practice.  Yet, we continue to employ the same tools again and again.  We can become stuck in patterning, without recognizing that our practice is a continual exploration, a continual transformation - sometimes requiring new tools, or a new perspective on our familiar tools.

Ekhart Tolle, non dualist philosopher and author of the books "The Power of Now" and "A New Earth" speaks about how we tend to move through life on autopilot, stuck in habit, stuck in thought and as a result miss out on an experience of seeing things with a sense of newness or wonder.   He speaks about this in relation to nature specifically. We often overlook nature, we recognize its beauty but rarely do we allow ourselves time to experience nature.  To fully experience the essence of a single flower, for example.   Our yoga practice can take on this same mundane quality.  We essentially move through the motions of our postures, without truly embodying them.   The simple vinyasa - plank, chaturanga, updog, downdog becomes robotic and uninspired as we are already thinking about upward dog while we are lowering into chaturanga rather than experiencing chaturanga as it is on that given day.   Often we do the postures the exact same way, every. single. time.   And we have the same "story" about the pose every single time as well.  

What if we began to embody our postures with a sense of beginner's mind?   Ekhart Tolle suggests looking at a flower without labelling it.   He isn't suggesting we forget all we know about that flower, but rather to look at it with a sense of newness.  When we close our yoga practice we end with corpse pose, death. That particular practice is over.   We shouldn't bring the karmic imprint of that practice into our next experience on the mat.  Rather, we take with us an intellectual understanding of the mechanics of our practice and leave behind what we think we "know" about yoga, and how yoga unfolds in our body.   When we return to the mat, it is like a rebirth.   Like a baby, we can experience our practice with a sense of newness.  

When we practice in this way, we are tapping into the present moment.   Tapping into stillness.   We are shifting away from the thinking mind, and the underlying narration of our practice dissolves as we begin to embody the movements.   Tolle writes about the "inner body" in his book, "The Power of Now" .  

The body that you can see and touch cannot take you into Being.  But that visible and tangible body is only an outer shell, or rather a limited and distorted perception of a deeper reality.   In your natural state of connectedness with Being, this deeper reality can be felt every moment as the invisible inner body, the animating presence within you.  So to "inhabit the body" is to feel the body from within, to feel the life inside the body and thereby come to know that you are beyond the outer form. 

Yoga practice gives us a perfect opportunity to feel the inner body.   We can practice with attention to the experience of the body, and as a result create an experience of present awareness.  When we simply move through the motions without experiencing them with our inner body - the practice is more like going to the gym and exercising.  

How do we make the connection to the inner body?  Patanjali's Yoga Sutra outlines 8 limbs of yoga  - 1. Moral Conduct 2. Observances 3. Posture 4. Control of Breath 5. Withdrawal of senses 6. Fixed concentration 7. Meditation 8. Absolute Absorption (enlightenment).   The first 3 limbs describe the external practice of yoga.  The fourth limb - Pranayama, or control of breath, is the bridge between the first three limbs and the last 3 limbs.  The breath happens externally - but it also happens internally.  The breath is our connection to the inner practice of yoga.  The breath is always happening now.  Awareness of breathing is our tool to turn our practice from mere exercise into an experience of yoga, or stillness.

When we practice with an awareness of the inner body, we can become tuned into our experience.  We can bring beginners mind to our practice and feel our experience with that sense of newness.   When we bring excess thought, narration and clutter into the mind - we are creating a disconnect with the present moment, and often a sense of discontent with the present moment as well.   We are creating extra work for ourselves.

The Taoist philosophy, Wu Wei, is about letting go of excess work in order to allow nature to flow seamlessly.   This is such an important tool in our yoga practice.   I often see students, and have been such a student myself, so attached to their "tools", they work too hard to do each pose exactly right, just as they have learned to do them.   Yet our practice should be opportunity to explore detaching from the tools.  Finding a new place to lay your mat, using different props, using props, not using props, exploring different ways of aligning your body, letting go of the inner voice and trusting an intuitive sense of movement, exploring new ways of using the breath.  Letting go of too much work and allowing nature to unfold.  Letting go of the way the "ego" wants us to practice and truly embodying the experience instead.  Flow yoga is one style that allows the practitioner to access an intuitive sense of fluid movement during practice.   I also find the yin practice to be another style that fosters a sense of keen interest in, and present moment awareness of, the inner body.

I teach my flow classes with an awareness of moving into the inner body, how to work from a deep sense of self in order to make the practice feel less like hard work.  Yes, you will sweat and you will get stronger when you come to a flow class.  But, you should also leave a flow class (and this is true of all yoga practices) feeling nourished, present, still, and relaxed.   When we work too hard, we stress our nervous system.  Some stress is good - and we need to learn how to effectively manage good stress so that we can trigger our body to remain relaxed amidst the stress.   Obviously, the ability to do this extends its usefulness to life off the mat.

When we practice, we should do only the work necessary to feel the effect of the posture,  no more.   We engage deeply within - we feel our centre with our mind, actively with our breath and sometimes with the use of our deepest core muscles or an awareness of the bandhas.   We give from and pull into that sense of centre, and then everything else relaxes.  Particularly those places we tend to grip needlessly like the face, shoulders, gluteals, low back, breath, and mind.   If we feel relaxed, we can more easily allow ourselves to embody our flow.   We can let go of habitual patterning and come to the practice again and again with the mind of a beginner.  Through this path we can continue to always experience the transformative quality of yoga.

Namaste.

Join me for flow yoga at Yoga Mala.

Mondays 9:30am
Tuesdays, Thursdays & Fridays 6:00pm
Saturdays 11am.