What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is, simply put, an elevated state of self-awareness. Being aware of the state of one’s internal mental and emotional states can be extremely empowering. Awareness can be the first step to choosing to shift one’s mental and emotional focus.
How does yoga aid in self-awareness? The practice of being on the mat, moving through the asanas, paying attention to alignment in each pose, together with the breath, aids the practitioner in developing an awareness of their own body sensations, thoughts, and feelings.
CONNECTING WITH THE BODY
Being fully present on the mat brings the practitioner’s attention to details that we overlook in everyday life: How each muscle flexes in a pose. How your lungs fill with air. How your hands or feet connect with the ground. When you start to waiver or lose your balance, you pay attention to your foundation to regain stability.
The more you practice connecting to your body on the mat, the more you can bring this into daily life. When you start to feel out of balance in your life, the body memory of finding your balance in a yoga pose helps you to focus inwards to find your internal foundation and determine what your mind, body, and spirit needs to feel balanced and whole again.
RELEASING AND REPLACING THOUGHTS
A guiding principle of yoga is the practice of welcoming any and all thoughts, even negative ones. This does not mean we accept these thoughts as absolute truth; rather, we aspire to acknowledge them and their effects on our being, make peace with our humanness; and then let them go and replace them with positive statements of truth.
This practice of Noticing, Embracing, and Replacing thoughts improves your self-awareness on and off the mat, and helps give you options when you find yourself stuck in a negative mental feedback loop. Acknowledging and seeing the thoughts or emotions that are present, without efforting to push them away, knowing that they are not permanent, and will pass, helps create an attitude of friendliness and self-love inside your own being, which can have profound positive ripple effects on your relationships with others and with life as a whole.
SEEING LIFE AS A JOURNEY
Experiencing your body and its varying state from day to day, encourages an attitude of acceptance that the yoga practice and each asana is a journey, rather than a destination. Even the transitions from one pose to the next, in a yoga practice, offer moments of self-awareness.
This awareness of the process has the potential to translate into your life off the mat. When we embody the acceptance of life as a journey, we are more able to acknowledge our skills, abilities, and mental/emotional state at the present moment and know not only that it is ever-changing, but also that with time, energy, and practice we’ll grow.
QUIETING THE VOICE OF INNER JUDGMENT
The process of increasing self-awareness, self-acceptance, and taking deep breaths in yoga, has the potential to increase the feeling of inner peace. As noted in earlier sections, the practice of yoga can have very calming effects on the psyche, and tends to invite spontaneous moments of inner stillness and temporary freedom from busy “monkey” mind.
However, in our culture, it is common for the inner critic to be activated and take the practice as a challenge to achieve the most complicated pose or to go further into a pose than our neighboring practitioner. Bringing self-awareness to this tendency invites the opportunity to begin to internalize the wisdom that it’s okay to be exactly where you are in your practice each day, moment to moment, and to focus on your own experience, rather than comparing yourself to your neighbor. As we come to accept ourselves in this way, the inner critic often begins to soften, even momentarily, allowing more room for confidence and peace in our lives.
When your mind tries to feed you negative thoughts such as that you you’re not good at your job, you’re a terrible spouse or parent, or you haven’t achieved anything with your life, you’ll have more bandwidth and resilience to stop and notice these thoughts, allowing them to float away, or choosing to replace them with positive, constructive statements. Through yoga therapy, you may find that your thoughts have less control of you and you’ll have an increased capacity to rise to whatever challenges you face.