Play at Your Peak

Let yoga show you how to become one with whatever you do, so you can perform at your best and enjoy yourself more.

By Stephen Cope

It was a midsummer evening in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. The high blue sky of late afternoon had given way to a starlit twilight, and Seiji Ozawa Hall was packed with concertgoers. But 20 minutes or so into the recital, the crowd grew remarkably still. All eyes were riveted on the action at center stage: American pianist Garrick Ohlsson was bent over a nine-foot Steinway concert grand, pounding out the gut-wrenching dissonances of Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata—a 37-minute work of such breathtaking difficulty that few pianists even consider performing it.

I have been studying the piano since I was seven years old and have heard hundreds of pianists play Beethoven. But I had never seen anything like this. Ohlsson was performing the entire cycle of Beethoven piano sonatas at the Tanglewood Music Festival—all 32 sonatas over the course of less than three weeks. It was an astonishing feat of memory, concentration, and emotional and physical stamina. The music moves quickly through intricate developments of themes, dark and sometimes thunderous fugues of often-beastly complexity, and startling moments of tsublime lyricism. Only the greatest pianists have undertaken the challenge of performing the entire exhausting group of sonatas at virtually one sitting.

As the concert series progressed, word of the phenomenon spread around the Berkshires, and the crowds grew ever larger. But as the audience grew in size, it also grew quieter, until those of us who were packed into the hall that warm July night were joined in a remarkable harmony of concentration and rapture. Time seemed to disappear. When Ohlsson played his final note, none of us doubted that we had experienced a feat of extraordinary mastery. Walking home from the final concert, my friend Alan and I mused on what we had just experienced. Curiously, we both had the same thought. Alan said it out loud: "That was total yoga."

Just weeks earlier, I had finished writing a book about the various altered states of consciousness described in the ancient yogic text, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali. Alan was right. The profound states of concentration and absorption (which Patanjali called dharana, dhyana, and samadhi—concentration, meditation, and union) were all undeniably present in the concert hall. In the transcendent moments when these states were present, there seemed to be no separation between music and musician, audience and performer.

Over the past two decades, Western psychologists have become particularly interested in states of concentration and absorption such as those experienced by Ohlsson and his audience—and described almost two millennia earlier by Patanjali.

Today, they are sometimes called flow states, and though we tend to hear about them in reference to athletic skills, they're not the exclusive property of elite performers. They can arise in any endeavor that requires a refinement of attention and a development of subtle physical and mental skillfulness. In fact, each of us has stumbled into flow at some point, often in seemingly ordinary moments: preparing a complex meal, say, or playing a game of tennis. While involved in these tasks, we're present, undivided, undistracted, and wholly absorbed.

Most of us who do yoga postures have slipped into flow while on the mat—probably many times. We know those wonderful moments when postures feel effortless. The body seems to move on its own, without force or strain. We know the posture in an entirely new way, and we come out of these experiences somehow changed. At ease. Knowing ourselves more fully.

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