Many of us initially approached yoga asana practice attracted by what it can do for us physically and mentally. I can certainly remember being surprised how inflexible and unsupple I was in my 20’s even though I considered myself to have a high level of fitness. Yoga offered a different way of inhabiting my body and it wasn’t long before I was hooked on the benefits.

As we practice, we develop new movement patterns, range of motion, flexibility and muscular strength and if we are fortunate we are guided how best to think of our body in terms of bones, joints, muscles, orientation, shape, weight, muscular contraction and release. In turn we’re guided to push down, draw up, engage, tighten, to stack our bones, balance effort and ease, look for physical alignment and to feel and work with the force of gravity. These cues encourage the presence of tension, often to support release elsewhere or to help stabilize joints, and this tension in turn helps us sense our body’s position (proprioception) and to directly experience the biomechanical forces within our body.

Awareness of this sensing and our breath brings focus and concentration to the practice which then can calm our mind.
Developing and training our physical body in this way brings significant benefits, it allows the release of some gross and superficial tension, opens up our joints and helps rebalance the muscular skeletal system. It develops a somatic awareness that is often absent and gives us a language and lexicon of the physical body. For many of us the increase in wellbeing, vitality and mental clarity is more than enough justification to practice.

In this respect, a physical approach to yoga delivers tangible benefits, but what I hope to show is that this is not the full the potential of a physical yoga practice and in fact may make it more difficult to access that potential.

Yoga is not primarily a physical practice

The primary purpose of yoga is not to develop the physicality of the body. This is a wonderful by-product and there are texts describing the health benefits of individual postures. Its primary role is a different process of development bringing together varying levels of body, energy and mind into a comprehensive, integrated system for affecting real inner change.  Yoga is certainly a practice expressed through the physical body but the path of development described in various traditions invites us to transcend not augment physicality. Without that, development can stall.

How do we move beyond the physical body by using the physical body?

In many Eastern traditions progress on the path of transformation towards a wholesome body and a wholesome mind moves from the physical, to the energetic then to the mental and finally to an understanding of the nature of consciousness. The transition from a physical to an energetic practice is an important step in this progression.

How we perceive our body changes our experience of our body

The challenge here is that thinking of and using our body from a physical / mechanical perspective  cultivates a particular ‘bodyset and mindset’, a way of perceiving our body and using our mind. There’s nothing new about this. We know this just from daily life. Our mind is very powerful. If we believe a task is going to be difficult or unpleasant it invariably is. If we’re invited to think of ourselves as heavy and tired the experience often follows. This also applies to the way we invite our mind to think about our body in Yoga asana practice.

As a result we are continually inviting ourselves to relate to our body in these physical terms. It keeps us referencing the body and invites a holding onto the physical sensation and experience as the primary awareness of importance. If we are to move towards an energetic practice this will need to change.

Cultivating our energetic system

Within the teaching of yoga, working with the energetic system can start with the cultivation of the physical Bandhas and the Ujjayi breath. Both Moola Bandha and Ujjayi stimulate the PSNS and a relaxation response whilst also providing structural integrity and postural stability. The combination is effective at stimulating our energetic system and provide the gateway towards an energetic based practice.

As we tune into this different source of structural integrity and postural stability that’s not based on tension, our mind recognises that we can begin to release the muscular tension we previously used for support. With this release the energetic system becomes more effective and efficient encouraging further release.
 
Rather than think of our body from a mechanical perspective we start to think of it from an energetic perspective. Support comes from an energetic connection with the earth, movement with water, the breath with air, energy with fire and the release of tension with space. The classical elements are helpful here because they help us reconnect energetically.

As this process continues we begin to re-frame the way we view ourselves from a purely physical to a mixture of physical and energetic.  We become aware that deliberate contraction of our muscles reduces the effectiveness of our energetic system and so we begin to move away from bio-mechanical inspired actions and cueing, and with this our language, lexicon and direct experience of the practice begins to change. Increasingly our practice feels lighter, more flowing and effortless.

As we release more tension in this way our body becomes more sensitive to what our mind is doing and the importance of where we place our minds attention in order to keep our joints, muscles and mind more fluid and mobile.

Gradually the balance between the physical and energetic changes, and the source of movement comes more from an energetic intention rather than a deliberate physical force. The practice becomes softer and more deeply relaxed supported by an inner energetic toning. Movement becomes the natural consequence of transitioning from a state of greater to lesser tension. Balance is the expression of minimal tension. 

Integration of body, energy system and mind

For our energetic body to express itself fully we must integrate the mind and the body, bringing together our intention, attention and awareness of tension. When we do this it supports the deeper expression of our energetic system that comes when we fully relax to a degree that not available from a physical / mechanical  perspective in many postures.  This integration of body, energy system and mind signal the transition from a physical and mechanical to an energetic “mindset and bodyset”. It takes time and patience not only to find this energetic system but also building the confidence that it can provide the structure, support, stability and integrity we need to take the first step in the transformation from a practice focused on the physical, to the energetic, then mental. When we finally allow this to happen it feels like we have stepped out of the way,  we no longer do the yoga and the yoga starts to do us.  The integration of body, energy system and the mind now become a gateway for a deepening exploration of the subtle nature of consciousness.
​

We’re all familiar with situations where we’ve been on the receiving end of someone else imposing their will, and how that closes us down rather than opens us up.  The challenge for us all is to recognize that whilst our will is the route to productivity and achieving results, it’s a blunt tool on its own.

When we attempt to impose our will the wider impact gets missed along with the opportunity for connection with others. Words and behaviour can become ungenerous and cause harm in ways that slip under the radar whilst ‘getting the job done’ ‘meeting the goal’ or perhaps most aptly summed up with the phrase ‘getting our own way’. We’re often left with a feeling of ‘winning or losing’ rather than ‘finding a wholesome way forward’. 

It’s easy to notice this when it’s our perspective that’s not being taken into account, when we can find it difficult to express ourselves or act in a balanced way ….like when the energy of anger takes over or our energy drains away. Whilst times like these can be very challenging, these experiences are also the opportunity to see how our internal whirlwinds or the sensation of “pulling the plug” happen. If we can observe this we can begin to reshape our engagement in a way that’s balancing, helpful and wholesome. 

It’s less obvious for us to notice the way we too can have tunnel vision. It’s like our own will locks on to a ‘mental target’ and with it a satisfying certainty about the direction we are headed and our gathering momentum. If we don’t know how to pay attention and listen at this point, we risk missing out on any peripheral information that lies outside our focus, including how we and/or others are closing down in the face of this certainty. 

2500 years ago the Buddha’s extraordinary vision and wisdom enabled him to set out a framework of personal growth for us so that we can practice to see more clearly the power of our personal inner lens and intervene where it will make a difference to states of mind – such as when we face the internal whirlwinds, the sensation of “pulling the plug” or tunnel vision, that are out of balance. 

His pioneering investigation into the nature of mind revealed new insights about how it operates and a way to pay attention to retrain it towards wholesome states of mind, including the ease, contentment and happiness “Sukha” and the expanded deeper states leading towards liberation “Nibbana”. 

The process he taught for us to explore how the movements of our mind operate, is meditation. The way he taught this process to be effective is by developing the capacity to pay attention and listen – the practice of mindfulness “Sati”. He changed the traditional focus of meditation from the observation of something outside of ourselves to something within, the movements of our own mind and directed the skill of mindfulness towards seeing this.

As we practice and our capacity to pay attention and listen grows, we see our tendency to impose our will involves the somatic experience of tension and tightness around our brain as well as other parts of our body. It’s a reaction to incoming information, filtered through the senses and conditioned by our inner library of past experience – our habits, beliefs, stories and expectations. What’s also clear is it’s happening all of the time, from petty preferences to strongly held convictions, it’s how the mind shortcuts information to make speedier decisions and ward off threats. 

The difficulty is that our personal lens is, by its nature, not objective and so the shortcuts that are made are not always skillful or wholesome. Meditation is a subtle somatic practice and can help us find a different approach and restore balance in situations of familiar distress. In it, we keep practising releasing and relaxing the tension (and the drive to control what happens next), choosing instead to move into the next moment from a place of inner balance, smiling. 

The key here is repetition, the more we repeat this, the more quickly we embed a new habit of meeting tension generously, and this means we will feel our tension levels dropping, energy levels rising and more peace, calm and balance arising. We’ll get hijacked less and recover faster when we meet situations that triggered us in the past until there’s no longer any reverberation knocking us out of balance. 

It’s easy to recognise that the choices we make from this place of inner balance have the benefit of much wider vision and wisdom from which to proceed. We’ll also notice a difference in how interaction with others plays out: when we succeed in sidestepping the usual pitfalls within ourselves, others too find they are on new ground from which to respond. When this happens, a more dynamic playground opens up in our relationships as we step off the habitual merry go round of the past creating a more wholesome present experience.