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Tension Tamer

The first step to "undoing" tension and finding relief for neck pain is deep relaxation. Relaxing deeply is a sanctuary, yet ... (continued)

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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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Reader Comments

Carol

JP, rather than use the term move toward suffering, yoga has taught me to move through it, not to ignore it or stuff it or negate it, but to recognize it, recognize its inherent inability to control me, move beyond it. It's almost like the process of moving from the first down dog I ever did to the down dog I do today.

suguna

To make the prints bigger, on your key pad press control and plus key at the same.

jp

i'd like to hear more on the line: "(At the same time, we need to uncover the causes of negative experiences so that we learn to avoid them and thus to become more free from the sources of negativity.)" For me, I think yoga cultivates the capacity to be with/work with in relationship to that which 'causes negative experiences', rather than avoid them. Perhaps the word 'avoid' is what my hang up is. Yoga has taught me to locate and move toward suffering, rather than avoiding... just a few thoughts...

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