On the Only Requirement for Yoga Practice

The practices of yoga are simple.

You alway already have

the only thing you ever need:

your attention.

Everything else is nonessential.

COMMENTARY:

• In yoga, we cultivate awareness so that we may become aware of—before becoming consumed by—the automatic habits of thinking, feeling, acting, and perceiving that prevent us from seeing how our efforts to acquire peace might be reinforcing the very suffering we are trying to escape.

• When you notice a particular pattern, you’re no longer inside the pattern (your perception is no longer possessed by the pattern)—just like when you notice that you’re daydreaming, you’re no longer daydreaming.

• This capacity is always made more difficult by craving some version of permanent inner peace—just as a stronger desire for money, fame, or status produces a stronger awareness of lack, obscurity, or powerlessness—keeping us blind to the structures that shape us, including those that position us to see ourselves as incomplete.

• Cultivating the capacity to become aware of our instinctive patterns before becoming consumed by them gives us choice (even if we ultimately decide that our habitual response is appropriate).

• No longer consumed, we are better able to see not only our personal, idiosyncratic habits—especially those that produce and reproduce our suffering—but also the dimensions of experience that are not optional and on which we are irrevocably dependent and in which we are irrevocably embedded (i.e., the true dimensions of "transcendence")—including such things as embodiment, memory, time, mood, other people, etc.). In yoga, this self-awareness is self-transcendence.

FURTHER READING:

• How to Practice: Reframing Yoga Method

• What is the Objective of Yoga?