Stop what you are doing. Stand up, take a deep breath and have a really good stretch. Standing on tiptoes, make yourself as tall as possible with your hands reaching up to the sky and your fingers splayed. Breathe out slowly, and slowly resume normal standing posture. Now doesn't that feel good? Can you feel the blood tingling in your hands and feet? Do the muscles in your arms and legs feel relaxed and yet energized? Does your mind, be it only for a fleeting moment, seem to have taken a breather from it's daily round of thoughts and worries? If your answer is yes, then you are feeling the benefits of yoga already.
Yoga is a system of physical and mental exercises designed to instill a sense of tranquility and wellbeing in the practitioner. Some believe it to have been inspired by the contemplation of animals, particularly cats, as they stretched. Observers noted that, after a good stretch and arch, the animal's energy and alertness was increased, and so they sought to utilise this knowledge for human benefit. To this day, many yoga positions are named after the creatures they were adapted from: the tortoise, the cobra, the butterfly.
Yoga is a technique of self-awareness that integrates the mind and the body. By uniting the two, yoga helps to control negative and destructive thought patterns and assist the mind to work with, rather than against, the body. Hatha yoga teaches techniques of physical control of the body through postures known as asanas (poses) and breathing techniques called pranayama.
('Prana' means 'Breath of life' and 'ayama' means 'interval' so combined it means 'the interruption of breath') The asanas make the body supple and benefit the neuromuscular system, each posture combining mental acuity with breathing techniques and a specific body movement. Pranayama builds up the body's energy.
Regular practice of the asanas and breathing exercises will induce a more positive frame of mind, not just during the exercises but throughout daily life. You will find that you are less prone to mood swings, and that you feel less at the mercy of external forces as you have developed an increased degree of inner strength.
Knowing yourself the yoga way is quite a different thing than knowing your habits, likes and dislikes. In fact having fixed ideas about yourself can often obscure your true nature, as you shut yourself off from experiences, or tell yourself, in advance, how you are going to react. For instance, if you believe that you are an impatient person who needs fast results, then you will become frustrated by the slow results of yoga, and perhaps give up without giving yourself a chance. If , instead, you try turning this assumption about yourself on it's head, and tell yourself that actually you have infinite reserves of patience, you will surprise yourself by having just such reserves. Bear this in mind when you practise your asanas too. If you believe that you are stiff an unsupple, the exercises will be tough. If, instead, you convince yourself that there is a super-supple person inside you just itching to get out, you will begin to feel a real difference. It is important to approach yoga with an open mind, and to shed feelings of pride and desire. This is called 'transcending the ego'. Far from being the self-abnegation that it sounds, transcending your ego is actually extremely liberating.
If you are still resistant to the idea of finding your true self, perhaps because you feel that your are already very well acquainted, thank you very much, then consider how many times in your life you have felt that you are acting 'out of character'. An occasion when you said things you didn't mean, or had unaccountable mood swings. We do this when we are unhappy and out of touch with ourselves, usually due to stress and being constantly bombarded by external pressures that give us no time or freedom to look into ourselves. Occasions like this often leave us feeling unworthy, and lacking in integrity. The impulse to behave this way generally arises from a lack of self-confidence and a lack of a sense of self.
Discovering your true self produces feelings of awareness and oneness. Some people feel afraid of uncovering their true selves regarding it as a sort of therapy process wherein they will be forced to confront aspects of their nature with which they are uncomfortable. This is not so. Rather it is tapping into the essence of your being, the spirit from which you sprang. Indeed, this realization of the inner self can provide enormous support when dealing with difficult personal problems, and a way of giving yourself temporary release from them.
Even when we are free of deep troubles and have sufficient confidence to be ourselves, we live in a very manic, busy world, which bombards us with multifarious messages about how we should live and what we should think. Women especially tend to feel that they are pulled this way and that by contradictory demands, to be feminine but independent, good mother's but also good workers, and so on. Sometimes we need a touchstone, a talisman, a place or even a person, towards which we can reach when we feel the need to 'touch base' and work things out. When we achieve self-knowledge we become our own touchstone, the person we can rely on.
Yoga is a means of seeing things as they really are rather than as they seem. In yoga, all body and mental tensions have to cease if this end is to be achieved. Accordingly, one of the basic techniques is meditation, which turns our consciousness towards the inner calm helping us to achieve samadhi, or pure consciousness. - Yoga & Meditation-Strathearn Books Limited 2001
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