What is our yoga practice supposed to do for us?

This post was inspired by a lovely conversation I had with two students after class tonight, Katherine and Mark (thank you).

In yoga, we want to take the body and the mind into the opposite place of where we normally take it on a day-to-day unconscious, unmindful basis. We want to break habits and patterns to free up space for potential, for change, for growth. All of life is growth. Don't kid yourself, that is the point.

So, during our practice, we want to try to move slower if we normally move too fast. We want to be more patient if we are normally impatient. We want to be compassionate where we are lacking; we want to soften where we are hard and stiff; we want to strengthen where we are weak and unstable. We want to find a healthy balance where we are working and we are challenged but we are not torturing or overexerting ourselves.

To understand this best, it is useful to understand the yogic idea of the three gunas, or modes of life: rajas, tamas, and sattva. Rajas represents activity and work; tamas is rest and lethargy; and sattva is purity, joy, bliss meditation. We ought to be balancing these modes throughout life, but most of us are dominant in one or the other at certain points. Many of us give little or no time to sattva, to quiet, blissful meditative time spent celebrating life; we move straight from rajas to tamas, often staying geared up in rajas when we are meant to be letting loose in tamas or letting tamas drag its heaviness into our appropriate rajas time. Meaning, we wake up in the morning and instead of taking time in sattva to be grateful for another day and to sit and pray or meditate or sing or do something we genuinely enjoy, we go straight to work, rushing from here to there, getting this and getting that done. Many of us will stay in that mindset even after leaving work, and then we cannot wind down in tamas time and sleep well. Others of us will at times wake up and never actually "wake up," staying in tamas and letting depression, laziness, and lethargy dwell in our bodies all day.

This is relevant because in order to practice yoga in a way that is healthy and beneficial and enjoyable for us, we have to realize what mode we are most dominant in. Physically, most bodies come to yoga for the first time in a tamasic state; few of us will be in a rajasic place. We want to arrive in sattva. However, we must first move to rajas in order to come back to sattva. We have to first wake the body up if it's been tired and unmotivated all this time in tamas; we cannot stay in the hyper, overactive place of rajas though because it is exhausting and can lead to restlessness and injury. So your yoga will feel very difficult at first and you will have to challenge yourself a lot and work what may feel like "too hard" for some time before you can find the peace, quiet, and stillness in your yoga practice.

Driving in Meditation

As far as I am concerned, driving on Long Island is one of the more stressful activities you can be forced to endure throughout the day. If you can meditate while driving, you'll find other endeavors far easier.

When I say "meditate," I do not mean close your eyes, or daze off, get all dreamy, and end up traveling from Point A to Point B without knowing how you got there. That's not meditating. That's called not being present, and is in fact, the exact opposite of meditating.

When I say meditating, I mean you must be fully present, fully focused, and completely immersed in the moment in the act of driving -- while remaining balanced, content, and peaceful. That means, you're not harshly accelerating because you're in a rush (as everybody seems to be on Long Island). That is rajas, over-activity and aggression. That means you're not blocking intersections, even if it's just the 711, because you had the where-with-all and the foresight to see that someone would need to turn out of that parking lot or make a left-hand turn into that parking lot while you're still braking at a traffic light. That means you're not swearing the person tailgating you, even if he/she flashes his/her lights at you or honks his/her horn. That means you're not missing your turn or missing street signs or signals or sirens because your mind went somewhere else. That means you don't have to slam on your brakes because you looked down to change the song and when you looked up traffic was stopped or a pedestrian was walking in front of you. You are not la-la-ing around, admiring scenery, gazing at the stars, marveling at flowers in bloom... this is laziness, tamas, not what we are looking for while driving. You are arriving at sattva, present, alert, focused, you hear what's going on around you too, because you're not on a call wrapped up in someone else or something else that is not on the road in front of you. This is meditation. Being focused on the road, on your environment, on the affect you are having on the environment and other people on the road and the affect that they are having on you.

The next time you catch yourself curse the person who cut you off, stop. See if you can take a deep breath. You'll notice that when you are in that kind of rush or panic, the stress registers in your body and your breath will get shallow or inconsistent in some way. Witness the effects that driving has on your body physically, mentally, and emotionally. How does it affect your musculoskeletal structure, your posture, your breathing, your mood, your attitude, your thoughts, and your feelings?

See if you can transport yourself from one place to another, without rushing but without being in another world, but being fully in this world, anticipating other people's moves, using judgment and awareness when it comes to your moves, and trusting that you are going to get to where you need to go when you get there, so abandon the controlling, the rushing, the worrying, the aggravation with other people, and allow yourself to just be.

The Balance Between The 3 Gunas: Rajas, Tamas, Sattva

I like the way my teacher, Mokshapriya, explains the 3 Gunas, or modes of life: look at nature, she says. Look at the birds. When the birds wake up, what do they do? They sing. This is their sattvic time. They rejoice; they don't think about work yet, they don't worry about when and how and where they are going to get their food, they just sing. When it comes time for forage for food, they go about their business, moving into rajas. At the end of the day, no matter what they did or did not get done, they put the beaks in the wings, and they sleep, because it is time for tamas. Very simple. Learn from the birds.