Train the Brain

Since Spring appeared in Phoenix, I have been hosting weekly yoga sessions for my friends in my back yard. During our sessions, my friends play my students and I play their teacher, and we basically play with yoga. I show them tricks that other teachers have taught me, they share with me their body experience while experimenting with these tricks and I become their student. It is an amazing exchange of personal growth and inspiration.

Yesterday, I was sitting with two of my backyard yoga friends, Darla and Labrena (names changed to protect the innocent :-) Darla made a poigniant observation about how she reacts to challenging poses and what these reactions are teaching her about herself. In a difficult asana, she feels physically uncomfortable, which leads quickly to mental discomfort. Her brain then gets involved in a sort of panic mode. What she has realized after pushing beyond this discomfort and mental panic is that by staying with the uncomfortabe sensations, she is training her mind not to panic. She is developing positive mental talk, telling herself that she can tolerate the physical discomfort without letting her mental talk exacerbate the situation.

I think Darla's mental discomfort represents fear of the unknown, fear of how her body will react if she lets herself go in the pose. Through her asana practice, Darla is finding a level of detachment from the physical body in favor of a stable internal wisdom. She has touched on the realization that we are not victims of our experiences, but rather we control our experiences with our reactions. If we panic in the face of shaking legs as we try to hold boat pose, the experience becomes negative and we likely lose our connection to our core and fall out of the pose. If we go with the flow of shaking limbs, honor our body's reaction and keep our focus on the foundation of the pose, we transcend fear and find peace an a more stable pose.

Jivamutki yoga school writes a monthly focus and this month's focus relates to my topic.

"Asana practice helps us further connect to the root of our fears because it allows us to feel the sensation of tension and tightness housed in our bodies. It also affords us the opportunity to observe our fearful reactions to certain postures and the mental and emotional discomfort they elicit. Through asana we are able to explore the edges of what is known and unknown allowing us to uncover resistance in the mind and body."

I was replaying my conversation with Darla and Labrena in my mind today as I hiked a steep but wonderfully short hill in downtown Tempe. My body was responding appropriately to the rapid elevation change: elevated heart rate, increased respiratory rate, fatigued muscles - basically very uncomfortable sensations. I tried to keep my mental talk focused on the positive, in spite of my physical discomfort. It was here that I realized the larger application of Carla's realization. So many situations represent physical and mental discomfort for us, and using our yoga lesson we can try to train our brain to not panic and instead take responsibility for our reactions.

Take illness as an example. When one is sick, the physical symptoms of the illness may overwhelm the mind. A person may become obsessed with her physical symptoms. This obsession may take over her mental talk, such that she only thinks of how uncomfortabe the illness feels in her body. This of course makes the physical symptoms worse. If she can find a detachment from her physical symptoms, and train her brain to avoid reacting to each and every body ache and pain, her experience will be less of suffering and more of growing.

Yoga is unleashing body and mind lessons for my friends. As witness to their yoga journey, I am learning yet another dimension of how yoga can transform and connect body, spirit and mind.