Meditation in Motion

Not just a physical practice, yoga asanas can be a doorway to self-awareness.

By Judith Lasater

But beyond its current fashionability and undeniable health and fitness benefits, I feel the practice of asana has deeper gifts to offer to Westerners. More interesting to me than any specific practice techniques are two basic ideas about asana. First, I think asana practice can be a spiritual practice in and of itself. Second, I think this practice can help us bring the spiritual into our daily lives in the modern world, far from the ashrams and retreats of ancient India.

We in the West may be captured at first by the lure of healing, flexibility, and strength, but we stay with the practice of yoga asanas because it is a powerful nonverbal expression of the sacred. Humankind has always sought a connection with the transcendental. We may in fact be "hardwired" to seek a source beyond our selves, and this hunger to connect with the sacred unseen can be fed with asana practice.

To truly practice asana, you have to become present in the moment. You have to observe your sensations, your reactions, your sense of ease and difficulty as you stretch and bend. And this consistent willingness to be in the here and now is the basis of meditation. Part of what makes being in the present moment so special is that we rarely do it. Most of the time our minds are fleeing toward the future or lagging in the past. We tend to live in our thoughts about reality and not in reality itself. The problem with this way of living is that it makes us miss the present—and the present is all we really have. Our frequent dissatisfaction with life comes from never fully tasting it exactly as it happens. Asana practice can help us reconnect with the sacred by requiring that we pay attention to the miracle that we are and to the wonder of creation in which we live.

In chapter two, verse 46 of the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali clearly defines steadiness and ease as the two key characteristics of asana practice. It's ironic that most people think of asanas as the movements of yoga; actually, asanas demand that the practitioner learn to stay still. This staying still is a powerful practice. When you learn to hold a pose, the steadiness of the body becomes a backdrop against which you can clearly see the constant movement of the mind.

Through teaching you to be still, the practice of asana can be a doorway to deeper states of meditation. Yoga asanas—especially Savasana (Corpse Pose)—can provide the student with yoga's most important gift: dis-identification. In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali teaches that mistakenly identifying your thoughts as your Self is the root of all misery. He further teaches that all the practices of yoga aim to dissolve this false identification.

In the stillness of Savasana, you can begin to separate your Self from your thoughts. As you move more deeply into relaxation, you begin to enter a state in which thought is experienced as a surface phenomenon. You can begin to experience a little space between thought and what is perceived as Self. A teacher of mine once said, "The problem with our thoughts is that we believe them"—and the problem with believing our thoughts is that we often act on them in ways that cause suffering for ourselves and others. When you experience a little space between your thoughts and the consciousness that is the background for thought, thoughts begin to lose their power over you. With dis-identification comes choice: You can choose to act from the thought, or to release it without action. Ultimately, this kind of choice is synonymous with true freedom.

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