“Pratyahara…The movement of the mind toward silence rather than toward things.”
Dear Yogini,
Withdrawing from the world is not so challenging for the introvert in me personally. What I find more provocative is removing my attention from the constant deluge of information and swarm of online activity which test my patience and lead me to adopt an all-or-nothing sort of approach to dealing with it! How do you manage this in your life dear yogini? I have found that resisting this sensory and digital overload is of little use as it just seems to invite more of the same.
The practice of what yoga calls pratyahara, retiring the senses, serves in a powerful way to manage the uncontrollable stream of data that makes its way to us. Instead of getting pulled towards these myriad sources of distraction (which have a tendency to make me feel anxious and ungrounded), pratyahara allows us to shift our senses, and thereby our attention, inwards. In this practice, my feelings of nervousness begin to dissipate, and I become a little more anchored in the solidity of my physical being and the steadfastness of self.
Your commitment to the process of noticing your breath and becoming aware of your breathing with all its subtle and not so subtle inflections is commendable. Your dedication to your yoga will enable you to attend to the ebb and flow of the sensations and experiences that arise and fall away with each breath. The breath not only draws the light of your awareness to your body; it also has the capacity to quite captivate your sensing organs—eyes, ears, nose, skin, and tongue. Each of these, in turn, is associated with a particular sensory sensibility—to see, to hear, to smell, to touch, to taste. Meanwhile, your senses continuously and incessantly draw raw information from the reality you are experiencing in this moment, as the mind, in its thinking capacity, is always thinking. They send this constant stream of information to the brain for framing (labeling), understanding (that is, conceptualizing based on your personal experiences to date), analyzing (what you decide to do with this raw data), and determination (how you ‘package’ this information for use further down the line).
So now, we move into the realm of the subtle energy body and pratyahara. You now ask your senses to turn their focus away from that which exists outside ourselves: The seeking of gustatory, olfactory, auditory, tactile, and predominantly visual satisfaction (as in our use of devices, or the ways in which we measure ourselves up against others, engage gossip, spread rumors, etc.); and the getting caught up in the stories that the mind contrives to make sense of, gain excitement from or avoid the painful parts of life and living.
As you engage with this practice of retiring your senses from the world outside yourself, you invite the possibility of finally sitting with your felt-sense, the way you actually feel on the inside. Take your gut instinct for example; if we could feel its energy and understand its significance in the moment of its manifestation, we wouldn’t need to put all that mental “figuring out” energy into overriding the discomfort it creates within us. When this energy has an underlying temperament of fear, uncertainty, distress, or the unfamiliar, it is common to shut ourselves down to it. What energy we do have is expended resisting these feelings, pushing them away, denying them, and finally packing them up in metaphorical boxes that we shove into attic-recesses of the brain or into basement storage within our cells and tissues. It takes a whole bunch of energy to store and hold onto all those unwanted expressions of who we have come to believe we are at our core or who we think we should be in the eyes of others.
Dear yogini, do you ever feel like you are not an entirely true reflection of who you want to be or know yourself to be in your universe, teacher of yoga or not? Allow the yogic process to reveal its wisdom to you as you march forward in practice, and trust that you shall live into the answers to your question and the questions to come you have not yet asked! The more you are able to practice pratyahara as a common occurrence, the more you are then able to catch yourself in the midst of your own reactivity.
Over time, you begin to perceive and feel into the ways in which you come into conflict with yourself, its external expression polarizing the situation with blame and shame, he said/she said, wrong and right, good and bad, not guilty, guilty: I really want to attend this yoga festival! But I really need to be home for the kids. Guilt is polarizing like this, the no-win situation, such a perfect opportunity to tune in and ask which truth feels more right in this moment.
In the Eastern perspective, or the Pancha Koshas (five sheaths) model, on health and well-being, the vagus nerve (18) essentially serves as a bridge between our gross bodies (the outer-lying, most general, physical sheath, annamaya kosha) and our subtle energy bodies (the underlying permeating sheath of pranamaya kosha). The vagus nerve acts as a central ‘switchboard’ between the central nervous system (which includes the central processor, the brain, and the spine) and the autonomic nervous system (which controls the involuntary functions of the body, such as heartbeat, digestion, sex drive, and breathing), essentially connecting our conscious and unconscious minds. This may well be of the utmost relevance to our overall well-being because our yogic practices have the capacity to powerfully effect the vagus nerve and therefore, quite literally, our peace of mind and happiness (or lessening of our suffering). In yoga, this subtle nerve plexus is called kurma nadi, named for the turtle who withdraws his head into his shell when threatened or agitated. When energy moves through kurma nadi, all systems are subdued and the mind becomes quiet.
I find it fascinating that some ninety percent of the nerve fibers of the enteric nervous system (our gut) run one-way from the ganglionic mass (plexus) of nerves in the belly (above the navel, below the base of your sternum), commonly known as the Solar Plexus, via the vagus nerve up to the brain. It is not for nothing that our enteric nervous system is referred to more and more as our ‘second brain.’ When your gut feeling travels from the gut to your higher brain at the moment of its showing up in your overarching awareness, the ‘light of consciousness’ allows you to bypass or categorically override your instinctual response or reactivity to the situation. That’s a pretty intricate system we have at our disposal. Isn’t this worth knowing more about?!
The enteric nervous system executes most of our everyday tasks once they become second nature, or habitual. This explains then why the more repetitive tasks, like the practice of asana, or the synergy of breath and movement known as vinyasa, shift from originating in our conscious (or ‘thinking’ mind) as newcomers to yoga to happening in our subconscious (gut) when we become more adept at the practice. It would take far too much of our brain’s capacity to have to focus on every small aspect of the tasks of yoga over and over and over again. Instead, they get handed over to our autonomic (automatic) background systems, and the consciousness is then free to apply more and more the qualities of discrimination and discernment to how we engage with our practice and, by extension, our lives. Until such a time as we arrive at unwavering experiential knowledge which illuminates truth and non-truth, fact and fiction, real and imaginary and leaves no room for doubt. This is, according to Patañjali, viveka-khyati. (19)
And so, to change or shift the dynamic of habitual behaviors or conditioned responses—positive or negative—you must engage the motherboard of the brain to prompt change and to inspire re-patterning of undesirable habits in the direction of more desirable patterns of thought, speech and action. This capacity for your brain (like your muscles) to repattern with repetition and frequency over time (and thus reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life) is the science of neuroplasticity and is a built-in effect of the yogic process.
When you begin to touch into your physical body and allow yourself to be with the primordial and conditioned sensate experiences that arise from your gut feelings, you engage a process known as self-regulation which cultivates resilience. Resilience is the ability to bounce back from stressful or traumatic events with less and less reactivity. Your yoga empowers you, dear yogini, to discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.
Pratyahara strengthens your emotional intelligence. It is the way your sense perceptions shine upon your conditioned mental impressions, recollections, and psychological imprints. This collective conditioning is known in yoga as samskara. You have come across this concept in relation to yama, you may recall. In order to see ourselves more clearly in relationship to others we need to perceive, get to know and understand our patterns of reactivity, our samskaras. I urge you to get to know them well, dear yogini, for you are in constant relationship with your samskaras throughout your practice.
The energy that drives your emotions gains or loses significance and momentum based on how your rational mind understands and interprets the barrage of information that comes its way. This then has the potential to pave the way for the six “poisons:” anger, lust, greed, desire, pride, and envy. Also known as the six passions (for the fiery, or rajasic, quality driving them), these ‘enemies of spiritual practice’ come up all the time for anyone who is remotely human, with more energy driving some of these states and less underlying others. These states can quite literally suck you into their energetic vortex as the funnel cloud of a cyclone rotating all manner of dust and debris beneath it. This we call drama!
In practice, you will tend towards avoiding pain and gravitate towards all things pleasurable, unable to hold the space between stimulation and response. Your consciousness provides greater discernment, perceiving the energy as energy, without judgment and without being consumed by it. In asana, you can apply the practice of pratyahara to discerning the sensory ‘edges’ of a posture or movement: Do I need to apply restraint to my actions (which may be true for a practitioner who inhabits a ‘flexible’ or hyperarticulate body)? Or conversely (if my body is tight or restricted by injury), can I soften my effort? Does my body feel safe here? Does it feel held? Does it feel loved?
The more you practice pratyahara, the more you will be able to catch yourself in the midst of your own sensate experiences and reactivity to what is. Honor the things you need to do for yourself. Learn to trust yourself through the wisdom of your experiences so you can hold safe space for yourself not just in practice but at all times. Come back to your practice of asteya, the third yama or restraint, dear yogini. Do not rob yourself of your own valuable sensory experiences by comparing yourself outwardly to anyone else. Here, the poet Galway Kinnell reminds us of our own brilliance:
“Though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing”
Make way then for pratyahara. Become familiar with your feelings and your passions so their qualification becomes the substrate of your practice. Withdraw into yourself like a caterpillar into her cocoon. Unlike the intellect which operates along the lines of reasoning, your sensate understanding moves from looking out to seeing in, from outer listening to inner hearing. Your head is where all your sense organs abide (although the skin covers your body’s entire surface to protect from damage or harm), so draw your metaphorical turtle head inside its shell, retreat to the sanctuary of your heart, tune into that quiet voice, the kinesthetic sensitivity in the deepest layers of your being that serves you in your valiant quest for an answer.
Somewhere, in one of those metaphysical boxes you stashed away a long while back, lies the solution to your dilemma dear yogini. Go exploring. Venture forward! Use the safe sanctum of pratyahara practice to become curious about what lies within. As the caterpillar undergoes the process of metamorphosis, the energy freed up from your practices of being with yourself and feeling your feelings allows you to take flight in the direction of your dilemma unfolding, as a teacher or not as a teacher of yoga, but certainly as a beautiful butterfly.
Peace and patient pratyahara practice.
Sincerely yours,
Nicole