Since my first yoga class ever, I’ve been asking the question, “So what. What is yoga, how does it help me discover who I am? Why is it beneficial, and what does it have to do with a regular guy?” I asked myself, "Is this just another heath program? Is it meditation in motion? Is it maybe a physical rite on the way to spiritual end?” These are the questions I’m still asking and what I try to answer in my Yoga Nidra Trainings.
And 20 years later, I realize that it’s all of these and much more. I suppose that all these years later, I'm still asking that same question, “What is this?” Over the years, when I think that I’ve maybe got a handle on what yoga is, when I’ve think I’ve figured it out, I experience or discover something new about yoga and I have to expand my definition to include something bigger.
Yoga Nidra is yoga. It feels like a relaxing guided meditation but it’s yoga. How come it’s considered yoga? Well, I think according to the definition of yoga it is a practice that helps to move us toward yoga’s end: to connect body, mind, and spirit and as we “cease the fluctuations of the mind,” definition as per the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Instead of moving the bod to be aware of the bod, we are simply aware of it as sensation. No movement necessary.
I believe that everybody must have their own definition of yoga. My current working definition (subject to change):
Yoga is the processes of understanding who I am through the method of listening.
That’s it. It’s pretty stripped down. You may notice that I didn't even say anything about asana. Of course, one of the ways I “listen” is by feeling and becoming aware of my body.
There are many ways to understanding what and who I am. I think understanding myself begins with understanding the grossest levels of awareness. The Yoga Sutras suggest how I treat other people and the ways I choose to organize my life is perhaps the first way of understanding myself. Then, I get to apply that same sort of attention and organization to something practical and close to home: my own physical body. If I'm paying close attention to my body in my poses and how I take care of myself, it might help me become more sensitive to more subtle parts of myself like my energy body. I will then discover how my body and energy dance together.
By the way, I'm convinced that the body isn't merely something to transcend on our way to higher understanding. The body is one of the most practical ways of feeling and experiencing my own divinity. After all, if you've ever seen someone who is extremely physically adept, like Michal Jordan or Mikhail Baryshnikov, it looks like you're witnessing God. And indeed to some degree you are. You're witnessing someone so developed in that line of understanding that they are reaching a sublime state of being.
Our physical body gives us such immediate and practical information about our being. And, because this is the vehicle, the container, of heart and mind, it makes sense to not only learn from it, but to also keep it healthy so that it can take us where we want to go. Besides, it's fun. It feels good. What could heaven possibly be but some variation of those two things. Even when I experience love, I can only do that through the nuts and bolts of this body. When my heart feels like it's going to grow bigger than my chest and burst out of it, or like it's being stepped on and smooshed black, it's still within the container of my body that I experience and understand that.
Yoga Nidra Training
In a Yoga Nidra practice, one way I use my body to cultivate greater Awareness and come to “cease the fluctuations” of my mind, is to do a Sanctuary Practice. The Sanctuary Practice uses visualization and an incitement of one’s senses to evoke the feelings one has in their most favorite place. This use of one’s senses to evoke one’s personal inner-sanctuary acts like a metaphor to help someone experience the way they most naturally feel as an expression of the Oneness. Whether there in real-life or visualizing the sanctuary, each acts as a metaphor for how one’s most natural comportment.
Similarly, the body acts as a metaphor for us to help understand that eternal part of us that cannot be defined by something so limited and finite. Nonetheless, it’s a great tool to bring context to something that is otherwise perhaps unknowable.
As I think about this question of ‘what is yoga and how does it help me understand who I am’ when I’m doing yoga and Yoga Nidra. Please enjoy my free Sanctuary Practice which you can download/listen to below.
Someone who understood this beautifully is Mary Oliver in her poem about this discovery of who we are through listening and how the body plays a vital role in that discovery. I'm convinced that Mary Oliver is a yogi but who works with a pen rather than a mat. Check it out.
POEM (The Spirit Likes To Dress Up)
The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes,
shoulders, and all the rest
at night
in the black branches,
in the morning
in the blue branches
of the world.
It could float, of course,
but would rather
plumb rough matter.
Airy and shapeless thing,
it needs
the metaphor of the body,
lime and appetite,
the oceanic fluids;
it needs the body’s world,
instinct
and imagination
and the dark hug of time,
sweetness
and tangibility,
to be understood,
to be more than pure light
that burns
where no one is –
so it enters us –
in the morning
shines from brute comfort
like a stitch of lightning;
and at night
lights up the deep and wondrous
drownings of the body
like a star.”
― Mary Oliver, Dream Work