Twisted and Unbent: The Spirit of Yoga

Peace can be reached through meditation on the knowledge which dreams give. Peace can also be reached through concentration upon that which is dearest to the heart.

Patanjali

So there I was, a twisted pretzel of flesh and bone, when the yoga instructor’s reassuring voice reminded me that if I did not breathe soon I risked an aneurysm. "What an irony that would be," I thought to myself, "blowing out brain cells while trying to calm my mind." The fact that I was having this thought was my first clue that I was resisting the very lesson that I had come to learn, which was to use this ancient practice to slow down the racing thoughts in my head. Most everything else I had tried had failed, and even imbibing in a glass of fermented grape juice had lost its magic. Why not try yoga? Sure I hadn’t really stretched a muscle since high school, (pulled a muscle, most certainly) but I was ready to risk days of a sore body if it meant even a brief respite from my restless mind.

Despite my naivety and my frozen shoulder, and mostly because I have access to a wonderfully talented instructor, I ventured forth. I found that the effort did have the benefit of taking my mind off of itself. This relief was incredible and made me eager to return to the yoga mat despite pains in body parts that previously had gone about their business unnoticed. Eager to catch another break from the incessant thought train that had been circling for several weeks, I went headlong into a more advanced yoga class (like a boy who conquers subtraction asking to be taught calculus). I saw this as the ultimate opportunity to force my mind and body to get along again and give me back my sanity, ability to sleep, desire to eat and perhaps even catch a glimpse of the elusive nirvana I had read so much about. If you are thinking "I bet that didn’t work," you are correct. Instead of staying quietly on the sidelines, my mind took on the role of frenetic coach and was determined to win this yoga match. "Come on, powder puff, raise that leg higher," it screamed. "You’re going to let these women show you how it’s done, nancy-boy?" it chided. "I got your nirvana right here," it mocked.

When the session was over, I was drenched. Body and mind, far from being joined, were no longer speaking to each other. It felt good in a "thank God I survived that" kind of way but it was not what I had expected. Or was it? In the silent exhaustion that followed I began to realize that my expectations were the problem. I was thinking about something that I should have simply been experiencing. My brain had stepped in and turned the yoga session into a contest.

Yoga literally means "to join." The union it refers to, I later discovered, is not mind and body. It is essentially joining with the universal or eternal self. This meeting takes place not in the mind but through what the great yoga master, Patanjali, called "the cessation of mind." When the mind is busy working to make the body stretch, bend and breathe with complete focus, it is not able to run down the laundry list of "things I should have done better, things I should never have done at all and things I will do when I finally find the time." Minus this constant chatter, one is able to make contact with one’s true essence, the divine light hidden behind the shroud of thought.

Patanjali suggested that yoga creates doors and windows within us that allows this divine light to enter. It is not an exercise as much as it is an exaltation; an invitation to a deeper knowing. That it often gets packaged as a new age form of the game Twister, is a function of the Western mind-set that needs to know the rules behind every activity. "Right hand red, left foot green," makes sense to the mind. The goal of trying to stretch oneself to the tipping point fuels the competitive spirit of the ego. The goal of yoga is not to see how far you can extend yourself before you fall, but to get you back on the straight and narrow path you fell from when your egoic mind decided to play hide and seek with itself.

If you get the chance, take a yoga class. Pull on those somewhat tight fitting shorts and throw caution to the wind. The benefits of increased flexibility, balance and muscle tone would be enough for your efforts but you also get increased awareness, balance of mind and spirit and, if you stick with it, the chance to become a metaphysical Arnold Schwarzenegger.