The relationship between your mind and your body: disconnection, domination and control

Conscious TV

September 28, 2020

When you practice yoga a world of sensations come into your body and mind. Not only stretching takes place relieving any blockage or muscle tension, yoga goes much further.

When someone approaches this discipline there are many reasons why they do so. Stress, anxiety, difficulty falling asleep and many other things. Well, yoga brings much more. Among other things you can experience changes in your body and mind. It is a way of getting to know the relationship between them, when you begin to enter into the subtlest part of you, that which really touches something so delicate with many sensations that cannot be explained with words.

We are often disconnected from all information that brings us closer to knowing ourselves. What goes through the mind is not felt by the body and vice versa. It is as if each one goes its own way. They are not integrated, there is no harmony.

In yoga postures you work on parts of the body that you often don't feel at first. Areas that have been dormant for years and no intelligence has been created in them and that have hardly any movement, they are lost when a particular gesture has to be made, it is as if they do not respond, there is no connection.

Many reactions are common when you move a particular area of the body, it can produce crying, uncertainty, fears that you don't know where they come from and you don't understand why they let themselves be seen in that way. That is when the realisation begins, the work that as a yoga practitioner must be done.

In many occasions, the yoga student tends to be unconsciously carried away by the teacher's instructions and does not take responsibility for what happens inside him, therefore, he has to take responsibility for how to carry out everything that his body and mind generate during the yoga session.

The attitude with which the practice is approached is fundamental for a proper mind-body connection.

  • What is your attitude towards yoga postures in general?
  • Are you able to go deeper and go beyond your body to more subtle sensations?
  • Do you feel that you enjoy your practice despite the effort or do you only feel a pleasant sensation at the end of the session?
  • Do you feel that your mind is stable or do you tend to have distractions in your practice?
  • This will help you to realise how you live your practice more superficially or in a deeper way. In this way you will be able to see if your Sadhana or 'spiritual practice' is more or less mature.

    An attitude of mastery or control when executing the postures is not to perform them in a perfect way (from a mental image or as it should be) but to feel how the internal form is generated until we reach the correct posture, focusing it in a stable and calm way in order to go deeper. For this we must be connected with the present without mixing preconceived ideas or stereotypes of postures.

    From the point of view of the energy centres, an excess of energy in the lumbo-sacral area can generate feelings of dominance or excessive possessiveness, violence and self-destruction. In my classes the whole pelvic segment from the coccyx to the diaphragm is of utmost importance to generate feelings of strength, calmness and sensitivity at the same time. From here it is easier to achieve a more stable, calm and therefore controlled posture.

    In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the reference text for yogis, in the second Sutra it is defined as "Yoga cittavrittiNirodhah" which means: Yoga is the control (Nirodhah) of the thought patterns of the mental field. So this mastery occurs when the attention is internalised and from that deep stillness the mental process is mastered in order to transcend it.

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