Yoga, Awareness and Tendencies

Yoga, Awareness and Tendencies

In the journey to greater awareness, it is useful to zoom into specific techniques for presence. Other times, it can be helpful to zoom out and take a look at our own process from a wider perspective. Today we are zooming out to reflect on the relationships between yoga, conscience and our tendencies.

Yoga is a call to Action

Whatever you practice you get better at. Every time you practice, whether practicing consciously or unconsciously, you strengthen the patterns you are cultivating. Yoga is presence, and presence can be practiced, so the more you practice being present, the more present you will be.

As we attempt to participate fully in life, distractions tend to draw our attention elsewhere. These distractions often arise from our opinions and beliefs, with opinions manifesting as objections to what is happening, and beliefs emerging as conditions we impose to accept ourselves as we are in order to accept life exactly as it is. Accepting what is is not the same as resignation or a call to inaction. Instead, accepting what is is the prerequisite for having the necessary clarity to act with wisdom.
Yogic actions call for participating in each unique moment with enthusiasm, intelligence, and wisdom. As a result, distractions and limitations diminish, and movement, breathing, thinking, and feeling are optimized. Wholehearted and conscious living awakens recognition of the magnificence of life within you, around you, and everywhere. Through practicing awareness, yoga makes evident the patterns you have cultivated, consciously and unconsciously, in your attitudes, thoughts, emotions, breathing and movements. Knowing your patterns and tendencies empowers you to choose the options most conducive to keeping your heart and mind open and expanding in awareness, love, and compassion. Liberating yourself from the limitations imposed by your beliefs enables you to flow in harmony with the miracle of life.

Yoga is awareness

As a reminder: the philosophy of yoga we’re exploring is the art of living with wisdom, and living with wisdom is predicated on living with awareness. The Yoga Sutra invites us to show up to each and every single moment of life, knowing that each of us is the only one who can commit to living life with awareness. Awareness begins with exploration of what is closest to us, hence yoga is awareness of body, breath, mind, emotions, and their interdependencies. Because all humans have the tendency to develop habits, one of the most universal and important skills to cultivate is knowing our own tendencies. Being aware of our tendencies enables us to gauge if a particular tendency manifesting at this moment is helpful or unhelpful. For instance, being meticulous is quite helpful when preparing a tax return, but not so helpful when brainstorming or improvising a dance.

As awareness of our tendencies grows, it’s inevitable our shortcomings will become more apparent to us. In fact, as this awareness expands, it becomes more and more difficult for us to continue to ignore attitudes and actions that are detrimental to our physical, mental, and emotional well being. Far from being a system for torturing ourselves by exposing unyielding personal flaws, yoga provides a way of approaching ourselves – flaws and all – with kindness and understanding. Every single person on earth is a work in progress; all of us are trying to learn and trying to do the best that we can. Each and every one of our actions has effects, some positive and some negative. The effects of our actions provide accurate feedback to everything that we do, even when we act unconsciously. When we experience discomfort and agitation, we may choose to react by getting aggravated or by thinking that the world is unfair. Another option is to see our discomfort and agitation as teachers, offering perfectly calibrated, appropriate feedback to our actions. Indeed, everything that is happening around us is constantly providing feedback to fine tune our attitudes, intentions, and actions. Yoga invites us to act with enthusiasm, wisdom, and humility to resolve every situation we encounter – even those situations triggering discomfort and agitation – with awareness and grace.

Awareness of your tendencies naturally leads you to notice how one of your systems influences another. For example, worrying about something will probably have some effects on your physical posture as well as on your breathing and your emotions. Similarly, changing the pace of your inhalations and exhalations can help you feel energized, or agitated, or relaxed, in body and mind. Pay attention to how you feel at all levels when you are inspired and hopeful as opposed to when you are sad or filled with negativity. Yoga is a system for becoming a connoisseur of the exquisite interactions among all your systems, so that you may regulate them expertly, according to the changing circumstances of every single (unique) moment.

Yoga is awareness of your tendencies

The more you observe yourself, the easier it is to notice that you have tendencies in your body, posture, and movements. You also realize that you have tendencies in your thoughts, ways of thinking, and ways of feeling. And it is also possible to notice that you have most likely cultivated tendencies, consciously and unconsciously, in your ways of breathing.

Becoming an expert on how your organism works will help you optimize your actions. Bear in mind, becoming an authority on how your systems interact and interrelate is not an exercise in narcissism. Yoga is not about developing an excessive interest in, or admiration of, yourself. On the contrary, yoga is about seeing yourself quite clearly, including being aware of what you don’t know. Knowing yourself well helps you see the difference between who you are and the stories you believe about who you are. The less your investment in those stories, the more clearly you can see yourself. Separating your self-awareness from the stories and beliefs that inhibit your vision allows you to be, without having to be right or wrong, or better or worse than anyone else. The more you know yourself, the more you see the similarities between you and everything else around you. You recognize that you have never truly been isolated from anything around you! Yoga is a system for cleansing your perception and clarifying the ways you interpret what you experience. Yoga empowers you to explore yourself and your life without preconceived notions and without expectations. Since it is impossible to ever know what will happen next, you then invite the spark of curiosity to guide you in greeting each new moment with clarity, enthusiasm, and peace.

Yoga is awareness of your relationships

Yoga, that is, living with awareness, also reveals tendencies in your relationships with your body, with your mind, with your being, with those around you and with the whole world around you.

As usual, here are some questions to guide your contemplation:

What happens when you try to live with conscious awareness?
Regardless of how many times you might get distracted, is it possible to keep returning to awareness?
What are the tendencies that you discover in your body, your posture, and your movements?
Which tendencies do you notice in your mind and ways of thinking?
What tendencies are you aware of in your ways of feeling?
How do your tendencies color your perception of yourself?
How do your tendencies influence your relationships with the people around you?
Do you notice your tendencies influencing how you relate to strangers and to the world around you?

As you refrain from coloring your perceptions with stories and predictions, your own inner-connectedness begins to highlight the inter-connectedness between all that is. You start to see yourself not as an isolated individual, but in terms of relationships. Once you consciously attend to your relationships, you become cognizant of your relationships to self, to others, and to the Universe around you. Yoga is realizing the unity with all that is. This growing awareness of being deeply embedded in the ever-changing web of life suggests a question to guide your life: How can I be useful?

If you prefer, you may listen to the podcast:

This is an excerpt from the book Unravel the thread: Applying the ancient wisdom of yoga to live a happy life

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