Applied Yoga

The ancient sages believed that thinking was at least as important as Downward-Facing Dog in reaching our full human potential.

By Douglas Brooks

Once a student of mine asked me if any television character embodied the ideal yogi. "Not perfectly," I said, "but how about half perfectly? I would pick Mr. Spock. You know, the half-Vulcan, hyper-logical, emotion-free character on Star Trek."

She immediately protested, "But I thought yoga was about getting into your body and your emotions."

"It is," I replied, "and I said Spock was only half perfect. But his example reminds us that yoga is not only about the body and the emotions; it's just as much about learning to think with crystal-clear logic. Yoga teaches us to use all our resources, body and mind."

Unlike the Western philosophies where reason and emotion are often treated as separate forms of experience, yoga locates feelings and thoughts in the same "place"—in the faculty called the manas—and teaches us how to integrate these essential human experiences. We usually translate manas as "mind," even though it often means something more like "heart": the seat of true feeling, the place where thought and feeling are fully present. To value our feelings over our thoughts or vice versa brings us to only half our true potential. But when we cultivate our physical and emotional experiences, as we do in an asana practice, yoga traditions teach that we will naturally want to go more deeply into our intellectual and rational abilities. All practicing yogis are, by necessity, yoga philosophers. At stake is whether we will become as supple in our minds as we are in our bodies.

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