Asana practice is much more than physical activity. If we practice with mindfulness, we can learn a lot about the nature of our mind and develop non-reactivity.
Learning Non-Reactivity
What happens when you stay in a pose like Paśchimottānāsana or Sālamba Sarvāṅgāsana, and after a few minutes you feel an urge to come out of the pose?
Do you follow this urge? If you do, you won’t learn much from this experience.
You may want to come out because of discomfort, stress, some worry, or simply because of distraction—and before you know it, you are out of the pose.
However, if you don’t react automatically to this urge and decide to stay in the pose, even though it may be uncomfortable and perhaps a bit stressful, then you may learn something very important.
You may discover that you can breathe and relax into the situation—into the unpleasantness or the stress—and go beyond your automatic tendency to react by moving.
This is a very important lesson, because you learn non-reactivity, which is an essential step on the way to equanimity. Equanimity is even given in the Bhagavad Gita as a definition of yoga (see Shloka II.48).
In our practice, and even more so in life, we often go through unpleasant experiences and encounter stress. How do we act in such situations?
We all like pleasant experiences and dislike unpleasant ones. If you observe your actions since you woke up this morning, you may notice that many—perhaps even most—of the things you did were meant to avoid unpleasantness and seek what is pleasant.
If the temperature is cold, you dress in warm clothes to avoid the unpleasantness of cold. You eat breakfast to avoid hunger. You can easily continue this list on your own.
Now, there is nothing wrong with pleasant experiences or with feeling good. However, there are at least two reasons why it is important to also be able to bear unpleasant situations without aversion and without the need to escape or shut down.
The first reason is that if you are constantly busy arranging your environment to please you, you will always be moving and never be able to truly rest and find peace. When you feel bored, you may go to the fridge to look for something nice to eat, or you may look at your cellphone to find something stimulating.
Boredom is unpleasant. But if, instead of looking for distraction, you become curious about the experience and ask: What does it mean to experience boredom? Can I observe my mind when it is bored?—then boredom may even turn into interest, and you may learn something about the nature of your mind.
What do you do when someone makes you angry or insults you? Do you immediately react with aggression? Do you compensate yourself with something sweet? Or do you simply suppress the unpleasant emotion?
If you learn to look at the nature of the experience on a deeper level than your likes and dislikes, you may learn to meet this experience—and ultimately any experience—with acceptance and calmness.
Your likes and dislikes will have less control over you. You will stop being so picky. You will not constantly move restlessly in search of satisfaction, but instead learn to rest in the present moment and find peace in any situation, – pleasant or unpleasant. You will not need to escape into fantasies or pleasant memories.
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Fostering Equanimity
The second reason why it is important to be able to stay with unpleasantness is that in life we often encounter unavoidable unpleasant experiences—some of them even painful. I experienced an unpleasant experience in the US immigration, and described how I maintained my mental serenity during this experience (see also my post about Equanimity in asana practice).
How do we react when we have a painful experience? Do we feel that it is too much to handle, that we cannot cope with the situation beneficially?
In Buddhist teaching, there is a well-known list called the “eight worldly phenomena,” which are:
• Pain and pleasure
• Gain and loss
• Success and failure
• Praise and blame
All of us—even the wisest—experience these opposites, these dualities. The difference lies in how we respond to them.
If you do not become overly excited when you succeed or when people praise you, and if you do not see failure or blame as a disaster, you begin to develop equanimity—and you may find a kind of peace that is not easily shaken.
In our asana practice, we learn to postpone automatic reactions, to breathe and relax even when there is stress. This allows us to evaluate the situation with discernment and respond accordingly.
The key is to respond rather than react. A response comes after discernment, mindful consideration, and a wise decision. When there is no immediate threat that requires an instinctive reaction, a thoughtful response will usually lead to better action than an automatic reaction.
If you learn to respond wisely, you may save yourself much trouble—and your life will flow much more smoothly.
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