Yoga Practice for Beginners:
The Practice of Self-Awareness

Ultimately, the practice(s) of yoga just are just variations of no longer fleeing yourself.

 

‘No longer fleeing yourself’ usually means simply sitting with your anxieties rather than reinforcing the habits you’ve inherited and developed in order to avoid your anxieties (both “destructive” and “constructive”), and to avoid the people and situations that produce your anxieties. We become hypersensitive to what we fear—skilled at how to prevent ourselves from feeling it—which distorts how we perceive ourselves and others. Most importantly, however, we crave things that we think will make our discomfort disappear—the job, the car, the house, the partner, the child, retirement, healing, enlightenment—which only amplifies the sense that we lack it, just as a stronger desire for money, fame, or status produces a stronger awareness of lack, obscurity, or powerlessness. Being able to sit with your anxieties means that your life won’t be determined by by (avoiding) them.

 

Trying to combat our anxieties with techniques isn’t enough to reduce our suffering. Stress management techniques don’t address our core anxiety of inadequacy. Craving anxiety relief is still craving. And fighting our anxiety typically just results in more anxiety. And anxiety reduction—if it is the quest of an ego looking to further self-protect/elevate—only re-produces the suffering we were attempting to eliminate in the first place (if even only about sanitizing ourselves of our anxiety).

 

Being able to sit with uncomfortable aspects of our inner life requires the cultivation of inner stability. ​No longer habitually absorbed in our own inner/outer world, we could re-possess our attention. In sitting with them instead of attempting to escape/destory them, we are given to—among other things—our pursuit of a kind of invulnerability, our striving to never again feel anxious/unsafe or unworthy/small or guilty/defective, etc.; we are given to our relentless desire to outrun a feeling. And we notice—among other things—the radical and ungrounded dependence of our individual existence and the nature of its impossible (and relentless) quest to ground itself by trying to matter more, by way of having more, doing more, being more (and, in some instances, even giving more)—or by trying to purge its inner life of all defects/badness—so as to no longer be vulnerable to unpredictable sources of internal/external discomfort—no longer subject to its own vulnerability, relationality, contingency. We begin to become self-aware. What is self-awareness in yoga?

1. Awareness of our habitual ways of feeling, thinking, behaving, and perceiving—especially our automatic habits of avoiding uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, or clinging to whatever we think will eliminate them—so that we might become aware of these patterns before being consumed by them. This opens the possibility of exploring the structure of experience itself:

2. Awareness of the non-optional dimensions of experience—i.e., our irrevocable embeddedness in structures of dependence that precede and exceed us—and the ethical consequence of this recognition: I am better when everyone is better.

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Regardless of one’s specific practice, one must remain mindful that even the practice of self-awareness can be colonized. I-making [ahaṃkāra, often translated as the noun, “ego”] turns self-awareness into self-improvement. It strives to “do” the practice well, to feel less, to purify the self of discomfort. In this way, yoga becomes just another strategy to avoid vulnerability—another way to secure a self no longer dependent on anything or anyone.

 

Yoga just is no longer fleeing yourself—a process which may or may not include āsana practice. No longer fleeing yourself, the ego becomes transparent. As the ego becomes transparent, the soul—a deep structure of self-relationship, a lived sense of inwardness—is set free; it is no longer imprisoned by its own quest for self-existence, to overcome its dependence. And when we stop organizing our lives around relief, we might be able to organize it around meaning.

 

Our section on yoga philosophy explores a phenomenological view of the philosophy of self-awareness, and our section on the yoga of leadership explores how yogic wisdom can be applied to modern leadership challenges. This are all part of our comprehensive guide to the Purpose of Yoga. Below you will find articles and videos covering topics in yoga practice.