Hey this is Ish and today I want to talk to you about why just taking yoga classes isn't enough to mature your spiritual practice.
So this is not a bashing on yoga,
I'm actually a yoga teacher and yoga has definitely transformed my life.
But I feel that a lot of people stop short in just doing yoga classes and they don't go further in deepening their meditation practice and their inner experiences.
So a lot of people are introduced to spirituality in general through yoga.
They might be at a Gold's Gym or Lifetime Fitness and they just see a yoga class at 7pm and they decide to take it.
And that is kind of their first introduction.
But often times they stop there.
So yoga does a lot of great things for you.
It makes your body very light,
Makes you more free and it also makes your mind slightly more calm and ready to sit for meditation.
But I personally found that in the yoga community that a lot of the yogis that teach at more of the more asana based practice,
This is just more of like the physicality,
So kind of like core power or any of those kind of like more physical poses,
That they neglect their meditation practice and as a result it kind of,
Kind of certain things I've noticed is that they tend to be less in control of their emotions.
So if certain bad things happen they kind of just go off center really fast and they are kind of ungrounded in sense and they tend to be full of attachments to their practice and other things around them.
And they kind of forget why yoga was created in the first place and that's to sit for meditation because it trains your body so you can sit longer and longer.
And I sit in longer periods of meditation without having done the yoga poses like the asanas that I feel really achy and my mind kind of just all of a sudden shoots in and I'm also off pace as well.
So it is a balance of both.
But you should definitely incorporate more meditation practice if you have just started to take yoga classes and are interested in deepening your spiritual practice.
And Patanjali has,
The yoga sage has written in his yoga sutras that there are eight limbs of yoga.
So these are eight steps that you can take or experience union.
And asana which is the poses are just one step in the eight limbs.
So you're just doing one eighth of the entire system of practice.
And if you just do yoga you kind of get control of your body but not your mind and your emotions.
So to control your mind and emotions you can include practices such as pranayama which is the breathing techniques that you can take on to control the flow of energy in your body.
And then obviously the meditation itself will quieten your mind and tame it.
But you do need that prerequisite step of handling your body and making sure it's light that you can sit and then also quietening your mind.
So it is a step by step process.
And I do have another talk on a series of talks actually on the eight limbs of yoga.
So you can go check that out and learn more about it.
And so once you've kind of done the pranayama you can now start to focus on the concentration aspect of the meditation.
So before you can get to this place of oneness of being you first have to train your mind to focus on one single point over and over again.
So you might have heard of,
And this is by the way is called dharana concentration or one pointed focus.
You might have heard of vipassana.
So in these retreats you focus on just the breath as it hits your nostrils in and out over and over again.
So that's one method.
You can also follow the Zen tradition and they have a similar thing of putting immense focus on just being as it is.
And they have a whole system of that as well.
So you focus on dharana which is that step.
Another thing you can do to kind of mature your practice is doing self inquiry meditations.
So this is kind of unlocking your true self as they say.
So you can do that by just simply asking yourself you know who am I.
And it's not something that's meant to be answered verbally or logically but rather when you ask who you are you further investigate where that person who that entity is asking who asked this question of who am I.
And you kind of go deeper into stillness or space.
So this is kind of your true nature essence.
And you can kind of repeat this throughout the day to get deeper and deeper into that stillness and reduce attachments to the external world.
And then another thing you can do the Zen tradition does koan so that's riddles that get you into that space of stillness.
And the Neo Advaita practice or non duality also kind of goes deeper into this aspect of realizing the self and inquiring who you are.
So I think you should incorporate all of this.
So you should incorporate the yoga poses so you can be able to sit in meditation and then focus on that one pointed focus which is dharana.
So concentration based.
So when you actually do a concentration based practice you'll experience a lot of great benefits in your life not just the concentration itself but a lot of other things that come with the practice itself.
But then from there you can also start to lose the attachment that you have from things and get more in touch with the space of stillness by doing the self inquiry and other methods that I discussed.
So yoga isn't just the poses itself but a combination of different factors.
You'll find that as you start to incorporate more of these things your practice really gets deeper and you really experience the inner joy within.
Thank you.
