Yoga is the experience of getting into our body and being in our body. While we may move through a set of postures and work towards a peak pose, yoga is not about “getting” a posture. Through the physical practice of asana, we step into the fire in order to discover, and eventually shift, our movement, thought, and emotional patterns as a path towards empowering ourselves in body and mind.
When we feel uncertain in life, it can be so beneficial to turn towards our mat. When we are faced with a physical challenge on the mat and work through that challenge by staying in the sensations that are arising, our mind becomes much more flexible. We are able to process emotions in a way that we may not have been able to before. There’s a few different reasons for this. One, we’re not avoiding or running from what’s coming up- we’re feeling it. Another is what’s happening in the brain. There’s a part of the brain called the insula that’s the place of proprioception and interoception. When it’s activated, it allows us to feel into the body and make sense of our internal experience. Yoga is so much more than the poses we are in. Yoga allows us to have a felt experience which in turn can create awareness and understanding.
Creating the opportunity to have a different relationship with self and our emotions. Staying in the heat of a posture can activate our sympathetic nervous system. Meaning we can begin to feel challenged, overwhelmed, stress, or even a bit anxious. This is okay, though. Feeling this discomfort and bringing our focus back to our breath helps us feel grounded and present. We are telling our brain that we are okay, that we are in the present moment, not in a past experience. Each time we stay in the heat, even for a second longer than we are used to, we are giving ourselves a different relationship with stress, with anxiety, with challenge, with discomfort. As we continue to stay in the heat, practice after practice, our bodies begin to remember these different experiences and with this repetition, we are creating new neural pathways in our brain so that when we are faced with stress, challenge, overwhelm, anxiety off of the mat, we can respond differently. Not only that, though, we can feel differently because those once intense feelings of stress, anxiety, overwhelm will no longer feel as intense because we have created a different relationship with that feeling.
What’s your narrative? We all have one (or a few). What do you tell yourself when faced with a challenge, an uncomfortable situation, or even when you look in the mirror? These scripts are based off of patterns of experiences and live in our body and the neural pathways in our brain. These scripts have served us in some way, and in particular situations they still may serve a purpose. But sometimes they don’t serve us. If they don’t serve us, we can decide to change the script, change the pattern. The yoga practice allows us to slow down and turn inward as a way of exploration so we can make a choice based off of our growing awareness as opposed to patterns that we’ve held onto.