The power of awareness
My previous Yoga experience is akin to my experience in life. My attitude towards asana practice over the years has been built upon an unconscious notion of holding on to something. This manifests in many ways, such as striving to achieve a full expression of a posture, or a want to achieve a perfect relaxed mind in Shavasana. My entire life has been characterized by a kind of grasping for achievement, a need to create and imitate expectations. I now understand the paradoxical nature of this perspective.
If the principal objective is the fulfillment of expectations, will the actuality of the moment ever truly be experienced?
The answer to this is clear, yet the question seemed to slip unnoticed by my mind for years since one’s sense of self is carried up in the thoughts themselves.
In my yoga experience during teacher training, I glimpsed the power of awareness. Through understanding yoga in a philosophical, anatomical, and experiential sense, I became aware that my previous pattern of habitually being driven by my ego to fulfill ‘achievements’ rooted in expectation was really effective at providing me with what I want, not what I actually need. I learned that if you can observe without judgment the thoughts, sensations, and experiences of the body, you are better equipped to ethically pursue what is best for you long term.
If you surrender to whatever happens and allow yourself to be present with awareness, the truth will sing so loudly that you will wonder how you never saw what was always just beneath the surface.
Surrender yourself to growth
In the west, yoga experience is often thought of as consisting solely of asana practice. In actuality, yoga encompasses much more. In Patanjali’s 8 limbs of ashtanga yoga, asana is simply one of the limbs. Despite asana being that which I had thought was the sole definition of yoga, throughout my teacher training, relaxation and meditation practice had an incredibly profound impact upon my capacity to surrender, and gain understanding into deep processes of change in my mind and body.
The first understanding I gained through meditation was the importance of surrendering the ego. Identifying the difference between my ‘self’ and my thoughts was initially helpful. Yet I still found myself constantly caught up in planning about the future, or memories of the past. After some time and practice, I realized the triviality of all of these make-believe situations my brain was circling. The pointlessness of my mind’s charades revealed themselves as completely devoid of substance and productive purpose. Though many times throughout my life I had been instructed to consider the importance of remaining in the moment, it wasn’t until experiencing the significance of this in meditation that I was fully able to surrender to the present. Though in honesty, each time I meditate will be an ongoing process of learning to let go, to simply glimpse the present moment with awareness is for me to see sanity I had never before known existent. This site is one of the profound benefits of surrendering.
Throughout my life, I have experienced many times in which the world I had thought stable completely threw me upside down. Why I wonder, are we so reassured by the notion of controlling our lives? When I try to control my life, it tends to manifest in slightly obsessive disorders or anxiety at the lack of control I have in actuality. In this course, I learned that control is an illusion created by the ego to serve its needs. The path my life will take is not in my hands, so why do I keep trying to hold onto it? If one can surrender, and develop the capacity to relax in the face of uncertainty, so much suffering will automatically vanish. So much anguish and anxiety have been caused by my mind alone, simply through extreme efforts to control my life. A lot of pain is rooted in the futile quest for control.
It is astounding to me that despite my years of searching for insight and understanding into the true nature of the pain in my subconscious, all I needed to do was surrender with awareness.
The body-mind connection – true Yoga experience
Learning in yoga anatomy about how problems in the spine can be related to emotions had strong resonance with me personally. I recognized that I have difficulty with my 1st thoracic and 1st cranial vertebrae. I frequently have symptoms connected to these vertebrae.
Learning about these connections between body and mind provided me much insight into my own emotional blockages surrounding surrender. It also encouraged my understanding of the ways in which physical manifestations in the body impact the mind and vice versa. To clear the mind, one can clear the body through detoxification and yogic practices, and to clear the body, one can clear the mind through ethical awareness and meditation. The key to both of these ways of healing is surrendering fully to the process, otherwise, the transformation will not occur.
I now see that there is the potential to heal these emotions and the physical pains associated with them. I need to practice relaxing and surrendering. I am excited to pursue a journey of completely surrendering through yoga experience.
Your inner voice, your inner guide
It is supremely important to be able to distinguish which voice inside you speaks the truth. In both anatomy and philosophy, we learned how the heart functions as a kind of another brain. The heart voice always speaks the truth and will illuminate the right path. The voice of the ego must learn to surrender to the heart which knows the way forward.
These teachings became very applicable to my experience. Following the afternoon asana practice which was focused on the heart space, we were continuing opening the heart in relaxation. The instructions given directed us to fill ourselves with gratitude and love. In the beginning, I felt a warmth flood my body. I pictured the beautiful people in my life and felt how grateful I am for them. However, despite my trying to sustain this emotion, it passed after a few minutes, and my heart spoke to my eyes which began to cry silently. I was bewildered; I had no idea what had caused this sudden and overwhelming sadness. I gave myself space to feel the sadness. It is supremely important to let the energy flow. Surrendering to emotions when they arise can prevent them from being blocked, built up, and ready to explode through the next gate which opens, or remain inside and cause harm to the body and mind.
All of a sudden, as I was feeling both love and sadness, a vision of a face arose very clearly in my consciousness. I felt a wave of anxiety flow throughout my body. In just a few seconds I understood fully the true nature of the dilemma I had been trying to solve, and the pain I had been trying to cure for years. These feelings have to be given space and be accepted in order to let true healing begin.
