YOGA

This is not the place to go into the details of yoga practice. Suffice it to say that yoga is one of the great gifts on the planet, and availing yourself of it and bringing mindfulness to your body and mind through the gateways of yoga asanas and the flowing sequences of various postures can be extraordinarily uplifting, rejuvenating, invigorating, illuminating, transporting, and just plain relaxing. You can think of yoga as a full-bodied, three-hundred-and-sixty-degree musculo-skeletal conditioning that naturally leads to greater strength, balance, and flexibility as you practice. It is a profound meditation practice in its own right, especially when practiced mindfully. It develops strength, balance, and flexibility of mind even as it is developing those same capacities at the level of the body. It is also a great doorway into stillness, into the rich complexity of the body and its potential for healing, and, as with any other meditative practice, a perfect platform for choiceless awareness. Many of our patients in the MBSR Clinic find yoga to be an extremely congenial and powerful form of mindfulness practice.

While this is not the place to go into it in detail, for the purposes of whetting our interest and broadening our understanding, it might be useful to point out that sitting is a yoga posture (indeed, there are many sitting postures in yoga), standing is a yoga posture (called the mountain), and as we have already seen, lying down is a yoga posture (the corpse pose). And so is virtually every other posture the body can conjure up, especially if it is entered into with awareness. In hatha yoga, there are said to be over 84,000 primary postures, and with at least ten possible variations for each one, that makes for over 840,000 yoga postures, which means a virtually infinite number of ways of combining and sequencing them. So there is always plenty of room for exploration and innovation. What is more, mindful breathing is a key part of yoga practice. How we breathe while moving into and maintaining various postures, the qualities and depth of the breath in different configurations of the body, and most importantly, the quality of our awareness of the breath in the body and of what the senses and the mind are up to from moment to moment are of central and critical importance in practicing yoga mindfully.

In yoga, the postures themselves are of secondary importance compared to the attitude we bring to the practice in terms of both presence of mind and openness of heart. Of course, out of the 84,000 primary yoga postures, there are a relatively small number of basic sequences and practices, and these can be learned from a broad range of superb teachers who can be found in the many different yoga schools, programs, and retreat centers within the various yoga traditions, where you can not only learn the practices but practice regularly with others. The flowering of yoga in the West is one of the marks of the yearning for and the movement toward a greater consciousness of mind and body, and of a greater commitment to true well-being and health across the life span on the part of millions of people, young and old alike. The same is true for tai chi and chi gung.

Mindful hatha yoga has been an intimate part of MBSR since the beginning. It is also an important component of the Dr. Dean Ornish Heart Healthy Lifestyle Program, which has been shown to reverse heart disease, and of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program developed by Rachel Remen and Michael Lerner. Mindful yoga can be practiced extremely gently and slowly, and can be entered into by virtually anybody in some form or other, even if you are suffering from chronic pain, have a long-standing injury, or have been sedentary for decades. You can even practice yoga lying in bed, or in a wheelchair. You can also practice it aerobically. There are many different schools of yoga that present it in different ways, depending on their particular lineage. But again, in essence, yoga is universal, and the postures are a reflection of the extraordinary range of the human body’s capacity for movement, balance, and stillness.

Our patients are encouraged to visualize themselves doing postures they are unable to assume because of an injury or chronic pain. Curiously, that too can have its effects, perhaps by priming the nervous system and musculature for future attempts to practice, once the inflammation of certain regions has been reduced, as well as by increasing concentration, confidence, and intentionality just by imagining yourself doing it. Engaging gently in a few postures to whatever degree you can manage at first, with whatever parts of the body can be recruited for the purpose, begins the process of reducing disuse atrophy, speeding recovery, and mobilizing different regions of the body for greater activity. With ongoing practice, this frequently results in increased range of motion for many joints and thus greater flexibility—an increased number of degrees of freedom in moving the body, in addition to greater strength and balance.

Just as it is important to practice formal sitting or lying down meditation on a regular basis, so it is valuable to work with your body by practicing yoga in this way on a regular, even daily basis. There is nothing quite so wonderful as getting your body down on the floor on a yoga mat or well-padded carpet and working with it gently and systematically and above all, mindfully, using the various asanas and sequences of postures to gradually re-inhabit your body with awareness and explore its ever-changing boundaries, limits, and capabilities in the present moment. Over days, weeks, months, and years, you are likely to find your body and your mind changing in remarkable ways no matter what your age, and no matter what the condition of your body when you start. The secret is to be gentle and always work this side of your limits in any given moment. That way, you reduce the likelihood of overstretching or straining muscles, ligaments, and joints, and give your body the greatest opportunity to grow into itself, usually well beyond its apparent limitations. Again, there is no end to it, and even tiny efforts are sufficient and important. As always, “this is it,” so the inhabiting is always happening here and now. The journey itself continues to be the destination, even if you are setting progressive goals for yourself to motivate you and mobilize your energies. At the same time, there is also no journey and no destination. Only this moment.

The body, if attended to in this way, will wind up teaching you what you need to know to best insure its well-being moment by moment. It is feelable, knowable right in this moment if we let go into the experience with no expectations. If the body gets stronger and healthier over time, so much the better. Moreover, chances are the yoga will complement and help refine and deepen not only your sitting practice, but also and most importantly, your cultivation of embodied mindfulness in everyday life—the real meditation practice and the real yoga practice when all is said and done.

Through the practice of mindful yoga, we can expand and deepen our sense of what it means to inhabit the body and develop a richer and more nuanced sense of the lived body in the lived moment. In fact, the deep meaning of the word “rehabilitation” actually means to learn to live inside again (from the French habiter, which means to dwell, to inhabit). The Indo-European root is ghabe, meaning giving and receiving.

Now, what on earth does giving and receiving have to do with inhabiting the body? Well, when taking up residence in a new apartment or house, don’t we in a sense give ourselves over to the new space, its features and qualities, where the rooms are located, the flow patterns of moving through it, how the sunlight falls in different rooms at different times of the day, where the doors and the windows are, and what the energy flow in the space is like? And doesn’t the space, over time, if we are receptive to it, give back to us a sense of what should go where, how best to inhabit it, what kinds of renovations might in time improve its usefulness for us? We can’t know all of this by jumping to conclusions too early, on the day we first see it, or even on the day we move in. We have to slowly let the space reveal itself to us, and that can only happen if we are willing to “receive” it. This kind of sensitivity is a form of wisdom. In China, it is called feng shui, and there is an entire art and science to it.

The degree to which the body will respond is unknown, always uncertain, never to be assumed or taken for granted. But it loves the process. It loves the care and mindful attention. And… it responds in ways hard to imagine, and sometimes, even hard to believe.

In The Healing Power of Mindfulness, we will encounter an extreme and extremely remarkable example of deep rehabilitation in the case of the actor, the late Christopher Reeve, who was paralyzed with a spinal cord injury after being thrown from a horse. But the same principles of healing and recovery of function underlie the practice for anyone who is doing yoga mindfully or bringing mindfulness to the body exercising, and particularly, for all of the MBSR participants who engage in mindful yoga as part of their own rehabilitation and healing, each working at his or her own level in any and every moment.

The rehabilitation of the body—in the sense of fully inhabiting it and cultivating intimacy with it as it is, however it is—is a universal attribute of mindfulness practice in general as well as of mindful yoga in particular. And since ultimately it is of limited value to speak of the body as separate from the mind, or of mind separated from body, we are inevitably talking about the rehabilitation of our whole being, and the rediscovery of our intrinsic wholeness moment by moment, step by step, and breath by breath starting, as always, from where we are now.