Practicing Yoga Physically, Mentally & Emotionally
By Gurudev

Let your mind be the Silent Witness to hear the Voice of Wisdom that is Inherent in your Body.

As you enter, hold and change yoga postures, listen to your body with unconditional attention. Pay attention to the sensations that come and go. As you deepen your unbiased attention to your body, you must let go of labels you have given to the sensations of pleasure or pain or of a good or bad performance.

When you are able to do this, it leads to pure perception and purity of sensation without conditioned labels. Behind labels is fear. As you release them, you let go of conditioned reactions to your bodily experience. As you let go of the labels, you connect with the body's true inner wisdom.

Listen and you will hear the voice of wisdom speaking to you. As you Practice, you will likely discover your Body's Shortcomings, such as Inflexibility or Stiff Joints. At this point there is a tendency to judge the body, fear the hurt or criticize your performance. This leads either to fighting the sensation or avoiding it. These reactions are an insult the body which is the temple of the soul.

When you enter yoga, you enter sacred ground. When you perform yoga postures, treat your body with unconditional awareness rather than judgment or self-criticism. Lovingly attend to all the feelings and sensations that arise without labeling them. The purpose of a yoga posture is to discover the limitations of your body, mind and emotions, not to deny them, ignore them, ridicule them, or fight with them. The purpose is to transcend these limitations through witness consciousness.

Our relationship with our Body is embodied with our past Conditioning. Practiced consciously, yoga postures are effective in exploring the limitations of our physical boundaries. More importantly, we encounter the mental and emotional reactions that continually reinforce our limitations as we perform postures.

Even as we perform the physical postures externally, there is a constant stream of mental distractions and emotional reactions going on internally. All such disturbances that arise as self-criticism, fear, self-rejection, guilt or resistance are unconscious reactions that represent mental and emotional blocks. To transcend them, we must encounter them consciously.

Yoga practice that deals only with Physical Limitations and ignores Mental and Emotional Blocks misses the Cause of the Physical Barriers. To focus solely on the body to release the physical blocks and ignore the subtle tensions created by ongoing internal reactions makes the practice of yoga superficial. If you work with physical postures only to remove the tensions but fail to recognize the workings of mental and emotional bodies, you will unconsciously produce new stressful reactions, not yoga or integration.

Tensions are caused by Mental and Emotional Reactions and deposited in the Body. Most of the tensions we come across are not produced by the body, but are induced by our ongoing mental and emotional encounters in daily life situations. The practice of yoga postures will help remove tensions and blocks already stored in our body, but it does not change your unconscious mental and emotional reactions where the stress is created.

Imagine how much tension we create through strained relationships and stressful job situations. We overload our body with indulgences in food and sensual pleasures in order to release the stress of life. Now consider how many different ways we continually produce toxic emotions and overstrain our body with so-called relaxing diversions that actually introduce even more toxins into our bodies. Consider how many hours in a day you produce toxic thoughts, feelings and actions that build up tensions in your body. Consider how many hours you practice yoga to counteract all the tensions created on the mental and emotional plane. How much physical exercise would be needed and for how long?

If we are not practicing the Yoga of Consciousness, we are not practicing true Yoga. We gain tension by the tons emotionally and lose by pounds physically unless we practice yoga consciously.

Yoga that deals not just with physical but also mental and emotional blocks. It is not easy to work out our backlog of karma.

(10/29/97)