Can yoga expand your consciousness?

But yogis know that consciousness emanates from the soul of the world, BrahmanWhich means “swelling of the soul” or according to what it is 2800 years old Chandogya Upanishad“What is real and what is true.” Consciousness permeates everywhere, everything, every time. “It’s in the plant,” he says. Sri Aurobindo“In metal, in the atom, in electricity, in everything related to physical nature.”

Consciousness is the “animated spirit” of yoga, and its goal is simply to remain forever in the immediate awareness of consciousness. Every cell in our body then, as John Woodruff observed The power of the snake“He has a consciousness of his own.” These cells combine to form the body’s various components – fluids, skin, nerves – and create an entirely new consciousness. It can be said that we are a community of diverse voices, each contributing to the harmony of the group, while still maintaining a unique message that needs to be heard.

Yogis “scratch the surface” of consciousness through its most visible manifestation to them, their bodies. like BKS Iyengar He asks: “If you can’t see your little toe, how can you see the self?” In other words, self-actualization begins with a detailed inventory of our physical condition. Traditionally, the “tool” used by yogis in this first phase of practice, is called the “initiation phase” (Aramba Avastha), is an asana or posture.

Here, our interest in asanas is generally on the more superficial structures, such as muscles and bones, and after a while we become experts in awareness of the hamstrings, for example, or the hip joint or spine. These structures do indeed proclaim the essential qualities of our being and our becoming, but to take a complete inventory of – and understanding of – the entire community of our consciousness, it is necessary to penetrate these borderlands into the “heart” of the country.

One promising approach is the “test flight” explained by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen Focus body and mind. She compares the external body to a “container,” and describes its play and display of consciousness—which we embody when we initiate movement from muscle and bone—with words like “form, force, clarity, grace, intention.”

The “contents” of the container, the inner body, consist mainly of organs, but also of glands and fluids. Organs fill our “inner space” and provide us with “our sense of size and completeness, inner vitality and support for our skeletal alignment.” They “embody” us and set the “tone” of our emotional life, whether flabby, fixed, or rigid; Moreover, since organs are connected to muscles through branches of the nervous system, their “state of mind” largely determines how we move, hold ourselves, and “interact with the world.”

Bainbridge-Cohen suggests that we usually inhabit only a small portion of the enormous range of movement possibilities available to us. We unconsciously limit ourselves backwards—or upwards, or inwards, or downwards—and thus limit where we go, what we do, and how conscious we are. For her, we are multi-layered creatures who must learn to embody—or perhaps disembody—every aspect of our physical (and spiritual) selves.

What happens when you move from limbs in asana? My students report the following experiences: that the pose feels “calmer” and less stressful; That movement in and out of posture is closely aligned with the “core” of the body; The different parts of their bodies and the sequences of movements are coordinated and integrated in every joint.

The physical benefit of starting a pose with limbs, says Bainbridge-Cohen, is that it easily increases range of motion and strength, and helps prevent injuries. But she continues that there has also been an increase in awareness. Through the “mind” of the activated organ, we can connect with the “universal symbols and myths” – what we might call the faces of Brahman – so that we can finally understand and enter the community of consciousness that unites our individual lives for all.

Continue exploring how awareness intersects with the physical practice of yoga in this companion article on Vasisthasana (Side Plank Pose).