Chapter Five

Too Clever for Your Own Good (Manomaya Kosa)

When my interest in yoga was first developing, I staunchly resisted meditation. To be perfectly honest, although in theory I could understand its benefits, deep down I considered meditation an absurd waste of time. “Why would anyone in good conscience choose to sit and do nothing when there are so many productive things one could and should be doing?” So I would dutifully sit and breathe with others at yoga classes when so commanded, secretly feeling extremely annoyed by the whole thing.

How did I, a determined non-meditator, transform into someone who is now peddling it as the next best thing to sliced, gluten-free bread? Let me reconstruct the path so you can understand how following the humble breadcrumbs of progressive change works. First, I began doing yoga. I felt a calling after my daughter was born. “I need to relax more,” I said to myself. So I took up yoga. It appeared to kill two birds with one stone—get a workout and chill out. Ironically, and this was not lost on me even at the time, I began practicing yoga in a very stressed out, obsessive way. I chose Bikram yoga, which is a series of static poses done in a very hot room. This style of yoga appealed to my obsessive nature due to its dependable structure and rigor. I was the one arriving almost late, at the front of the room, panting as I muscled into and fiercely held the various poses. I was also the one who more often than not skipped savasana, the final rest, at the end. So I took a step in the right direction (“I need to relax more. I’ll try yoga.”) and I brought my habitual patterns with me.

Let me pause here to discuss the role various teachers had in my development. The repetition of the reminders to breathe and to focus on the present, and the emphasis placed upon the importance of savasana in the integration of the yoga, were all extremely important to me, although at the time I apparently ignored most of this advice. I remember once when I was rather desperately holding dancer pose, which is quite challenging, gasping for breath but determined not to fall out, a male teacher gently advised that I try to breathe more slowly. “Look, buster, step away from the pose or you might get hurt!” I didn’t actually say this and only part of me thought it. A deeper and wiser part of me registered his words. Another seed was cast.

The next step was deciding to do a yoga teacher training. I chose to do this mainly to develop my professional therapy practice—“Perhaps I’ll teach my clients yoga rather than referring them to yoga,” I thought to myself. The training gave me something much different than the professional development I was seeking. I met a wonderful group of people who exuded warmth, humor, and openness. I learned about yoga philosophy, the breath, and anatomy. Even more importantly, I felt supported by and included in a community. I was still staunchly opposed to meditation and felt safe enough to be honest about this. I remember toward the end of the training the leader saying gently to me, “I think you’ll be surprised that you will be ready for meditation soon.” She saw this potential in me before I did and made it a possibility on my horizon.

During the ten months of training, my physical energy was slowly declining, though I was not fully aware of it. My lack of awareness was mostly due to relating to my body primarily as a tool to obtain maximum pleasure and performance. Yes, I noticed that “it” (my body) was a little more tired and slow than before, but I was still able to get “it” to exercise regularly, so I wasn’t overly concerned. About a month after the training ended, however, I became ill with a cold or some other seemingly benign virus. Little did I know that I had entered a ride that would take me on a frightening, at times apparently hopeless, journey into my body and eventually, my mind. The month of November, when I failed to recover, I chalked it up to being run-down. In December I felt a bit better, started my regular exercise routine, and fell back down into malaise. In January the same pattern continued. I went to my doctor, got some blood work and tested “normal.” My throat felt inflamed and swollen. I was dizzy and tired. Toward afternoon, I would feel wretched. I went on, still expecting that I would get better. I would feel a little better for a few weeks, start exercising, and get clobbered. It was frightening and bewildering. In May, I decided to consult a naturopath. I went in terrified and defensive. My self-assessment had always been identified with being healthy, “healthier” than average. I had a lot of ego invested in this image and did not appreciate the fact that my precious identity was being challenged by none other than my very own body! Because of my defensiveness, it took several months to get any real traction in the recovery process, and real healing did not occur for quite a long time. The experience has given me a deep respect for the fragility and complexity of human health and its inextricable relationship to the mental and spiritual health. I came to discover that there was no one problem that needed to be “fixed.” Healing has been ongoing and has involved several layers of letting go and opening up. The progress has been forward, but not linear. I realized about six months in, after suffering yet another setback, that I had to start addressing my mind. My entitlements and fears about health. My fixation on exercise and food. “Everything is mind,” Baron Baptiste (the founder of a popular style of power yoga) croons in one of my regular yoga CDs. His statement had been echoing in my mind for a while. The seeds that had been planted by my yoga teacher training, by the umpteen yoga classes I had attended, by the Pema Chödrön CDs I had been steeped in, took root in the soil that had been upturned by my physical breakdown.

The point here is twofold. One, you must work with your mind if you expect to make sustained progress on the physical level. By exploring the patterns of your mind, you are given the data to understand how you create and perpetuate your own misery. In Iyengar’s words, “We can go to a psychologist for advice, but in the end we are eternally obligated to fix our minds ourselves.” You can’t fix your mind if you are not familiar with its patterns and predilections. In order to develop this familiarity, you must quiet down enough to notice. The second point is that progress is not linear. Remember earlier when I discussed the common fantasy that you will go on a diet, take up yoga, go back to school, and wham, bam, you’re new? Change does not work like that, at least not for most of us. No, instead we are like Hansel and Gretel, making our way along through a forest on the lookout for breadcrumbs leading us in the right direction. How do you know you are going in the right direction? That is a hard one to answer. But likely, as you go along, you will begin to contact more of your own intuitive wisdom about what is right for you. Also, you will reap results, subtle but real, in other areas of your life that will reinforce your commitment to meditation and better health. Each commitment builds upon itself and opens new doors and new possibilities. As you begin to feel what works for you and experience progress, you develop increasing trust in your intuition.

A Yogic Perspective on the Mind

Iyengar compares the mind to a lake. The surface ripples and waves are your everyday thoughts, often of a random or repetitive nature, “Oh, I’ve forgotten to buy the carrots.” The author of Light on Life expounds on that thought, noting that your mind is very active, filled with useful and useless information
alike. “ … the point here is that a great many forces are constantly troubling the lake, muddying the waters, and agitating the surface.” Traditionally in Classical Yoga, the body is addressed first in order to prepare for meditation. Balance in the body is not an endpoint—it is a prerequisite for being able to focus the mind. The real work of yoga, according to the Classical view, is to still the movement of the everyday mind. In Iyengar’s words, “ … a pure mind can reflect the beauty in the world around it, and when the mind is still, the beauty of the Self, or soul, is reflected in it.” Now, this may sound like a rather highfalutin goal. “C’mon, sister,” I hear you saying, “I just want to lose a few pounds.” But really think about it. As long as you are wrapped up in your everyday mind, you are going to be bobbed around mercilessly by the whims of your appetite, your attractions, your aversions, and your fears (otherwise known as the kleshas). In essence, you must contact something larger inside yourself to sustain progress on the physical level.

According to yogic philosophy, there are four components of consciousness. The outermost layer is manas. This is the information processor, the tracker of the carrots, the chore list, the repository of jealousies, doubts, fears, and wishes. “What should I wear tonight?” “Boy, I’ve been looking fat lately.” Manas is not bad: you need it to pay your taxes, get to work on time, and to remember the carrots. However, Iyengar cautions, “its nature is fickleness, unsteadiness, and inability to make productive choices,” so it is not equipped to guide you in your life. Chitta is memory, will, and the decision-maker. Buddhi houses the part of you that learns to act on your own behalf and that has the capacity for insight and self-reflection. The “little voice” inside (intuition) that whispers what choice to make, usually when it’s the harder choice, is buddhi. Iyengar makes a distinction between “cleverness,” a quality of manas and “discrimination,” a quality that belongs to buddhi. Cleverness often has to do with maximizing pleasure and avoiding pain, for example, finding a loophole in your taxes, while discrimination is making a choice in service of your personal growth. The deepest layer of consciousness is ahamkara, or the “I-maker,” referring to the Egoic-self. Ahamkara masquerades as your true self, but this perception is misguided due to the ego’s assumption that your individual self is separate and permanent. Ahamkara is preoccupied with attaining safety, pleasure, and permanence—futile preoccupations that fly in the face of the conditions of life on this planet, where uncertainty and change are the only constants. In Iyengar’s words, “The Egoic self is an exhausting traveling companion, forever demanding that his caprices be pandered to, that his whims be obeyed (though he is never satisfied), and his fears be calmed (though they never can be).”

According to yogic philosophy, identifying too closely with Egoic-self/
ahamkara sets you up for suffering. As Iyengar described above, it is a futile quest to satisfy your ego-driven self. You may identify with the wisdom of his words if you stop to reflect on your own patterns and preoccupations. When you stop eating, do you seek to fill the space left by food with a new partner, a new dress, or a promotion? Remember how Sophie came to therapy because after reaching her weight-loss goal she no longer had that focus—and she started eating again? Notice your own restlessness, your fixations with what is wrong in your life, and your preoccupation with getting more of this (money, cake, love) and less of that (suffering, loneliness, insecurity). These incessant, circling preoccupations reveal the downfall of living a life driven by Egoic-self/ahamkara.

It is natural to confuse your true self with ahamkara. One might even argue that there is no such thing as a “true” self, so what are we even looking for? That issue goes far beyond the range of this discussion. What is pertinent, and what I think most people can identify with, is the idea that we all share a small, Egoic-self that is concerned with short-term comforts and pleasures, and a larger, Wise-self that guides us toward more sustaining pursuits. The crux of the matter is how closely identified you are with Egoic-self/
ahamkara and whether you have any contact with something larger and calmer in your mind. In my own daily life, my Egoic-self is concerned with what’s for lunch, how many clients I have scheduled, and what so-and-so may think about me. My Wise-self is harder to define. I tune into this when I am working meaningfully with a client, during meditation, and when I manage to contain myself and show restraint when faced with something inconvenient or offensive. This is just the beginning, of course. The idea is that by gradually devoting more and more time to pursuits that feed your Wise-self (buddhi), this capacity of your mind will grow. This deprives your Egoic-self (ahamkara) of sustenance, so that it gradually withers. This does not mean that you become ego-less, rather, your Egoic-self is no longer blindly leading the way and you are aware of how your tendencies toward selfishness or petty concerns interfere with your larger goals. The challenge is finding ways in our ego-driven society to feed your Wise-self and not get suckered into the pursuit of a new this or that to buy short-term “happiness.” It is easier to do this once you start tasting the pleasures of living more in tune with Wise-self. The pleasure of insight, generosity, connection with another person, and doing the right thing, even when it is more difficult—like the enjoyment of a ripe peach, these deep pleasures are difficult to describe, though unmistakable when you experience them.

The following sections shall explore the manas, buddhi, and ahamkara in more depth to help you understand your mind in a different way, as well as help you understand how meditation may help you in your quest to become healthier. For ease of reading, from now on I shall refer to manas as “Clever-mind,” buddhi as “Wise-self,” and ahamkara as “Egoic-self.” First we shall explore the “problems” associated with Clever-mind steering your boat. We discuss the short-lived nature of changes that are driven by your Egoic-self, specifically with regard to your weight-loss or health-enhancement efforts. Next, we’ll explore how the delay between cause and effect presents a challenge when it comes to changing your health habits. Then we will be ready to move into the “solutions.” First, we revisit the topics of impulse control and tapas/self-discipline (from chapter 4) with a focus on your mind’s role in the development of these skills. Next, we explore the role of meditation in your growth process and go into some depth about how and, more importantly, why you should develop a meditation practice. Please hear this “should” in a kind, rather than controlling or moralistic tone. We will specifically address how meditation will help you understand, and eventually change, your relationship to food. The yoga of food involves making changes that are based on your greater well-being and not for the purposes of merely enhancing your image or creating a brand new, shiny “you” envisioned by your Egoic-self.

Reflections on the Workings of Your Mind

1. What is your reaction to the idea of working with your mind in order to address your issues with food and your body?
2. Can you relate the four components of consciousness to your experience of yourself? Can you differentiate between the chore-checking part of you (manas/Clever-mind); your memory, will, and decision-maker (chitta); the image you hold of yourself in your mind (ahamkara/Egoic-self); and the wiser part of your consciousness (buddhi/Wise-self)?
3. How much power does your Egoic-self have in your day-to-day life? What are the primary themes of your Egoic-self’s concerns? Common examples are safety, status, or pleasure.
4. How often do you get in touch with your Wise-self? Your Wise-self has the capacity for compassion, generosity and understands how your own well-being is inextricably connected with others around you. What fosters your ability to contact this part of yourself? Examples are prayer, music, connection with others, art, and nature.

Who’s in Charge?

When your Clever-mind (manas) is in the service of your Egoic-self (ahamkara), which is the common state of affairs, here is what happens. The cleverness of your everyday mind is used to accrue things that will hopefully solidify your Egoic-self’s strength and stature. Feeling renewed after buying a new item is a good example of how your Egoic-self is buoyed up by material items. I remember a car salesman wooing me into a sale by telling me how professional and successful I would look in my new car. I am sorry to say that such crude tactics worked on me, but they did, and I bought a too-expensive car based on creating an image of myself as successful, rather than thinking about my actual needs. When you buy that new thing and see yourself as somehow different or enhanced by that thing, you are feeding your Egoic-self with fantasy wrought from the world of the material. The solid image you hold of yourself in your mind, and the common belief that a new this or that (car, house, relationship, body) will somehow make you “happy,” is driven by fantasy that emanates from your Egoic-self. For me, identifying myself as “healthy” despite all the contrary evidence from my body is a good example of how the Egoic-self can fixate on solid beliefs that are not in sync with reality. Pushing myself to exercise when I didn’t feel well shows the insanity of behavior motivated by the Egoic-self. In short, when your Egoic-self is in charge, you end up taking orders from a part of you that is misguided at best, and downright delusional at worst.

If you struggle with food or your body, you often experience a conflict between your wish to fit a particular image as “thin,” “attractive,” or “healthy” (images generated by your Egoic-self) and your reliance upon food to bind anxiety and soothe inner fragmentation. You can conceptualize this as a conflict between your Egoic-self (“I want to be thin,” which is conceived as a solid, permanent state of being) and the straining of your Clever-mind for pleasure and avoidance of pain. If food is your primary soother, your Clever-mind is reflexively drawn to food. Your Egoic-self has little power to restrain the thrust of Clever-mind toward what it wants. Looking good for the wedding or fitting into a size 6 has no horsepower when facing the habitual groove of your Clever-mind, which over the years has reinforced your fixation on food for pleasure and relief from the toll of daily life. Due to the consequences of this habitual pattern, your Egoic-self resigns to labeling you as “fat,” “lazy,” or “a compulsive eater.” When you do this, according to Iyengar, your Egoic-self has solidified you into a solid thing—“monolithic—like a great stone idol.” This reduces your internal conflict and perpetuates the negative samskara/habitual pattern. After all, if you’re “fat” or “lazy” (designations of your Egoic-self), then why bother? There can be an odd comfort in this resignation, even though it reinforces negative beliefs. Now you don’t have to take the risk of making any uncomfortable changes. Your foreclosure, or collapse, dictates your future behavior, which is now just a repetition of the past. You justify your choices as inevitable due to genetics, secretly disdaining healthy eaters as “uptight.” Or you may use the common “I just love to eat” statement to legitimize your foreclosure. Your Egoic-self has labeled you into a fixed thing (“fat”) and then rationalizes your behavior based upon this label. The psychological term for this is cognitive dissonance—when your behavior is not consistent with your values (“I value health, but I am choosing to eat unhealthy food”), you manage this dissonance by rationalizing your inconsistent behavior, “Yes, I value health, but I just love to eat.” For me, when I saw myself as “healthy” but felt terrible physically, I managed this cognitive dissonance by feeling like a victim and seeing myself as somehow inherently flawed or punished. At the time, I was unwilling to look at what habits might be reinforcing my ill health. When you are caught in the grips of such a refusal to get real with yourself, your Clever-mind will come up with a new diet or food plan that promises relief without requiring any substantive changes in your habits or priorities. In the case of fixation on weight loss, you fixate on a new diet (thought up by Clever-mind) to lose weight, while your Egoic-self perpetuates the belief that a new this or that—a body in this case—will create a new, acceptable self. This is a fantasy because “thin” or “fat” you will still be you and you will be sorely disappointed when you discover this to be the case. Your Egoic-self will shrug its shoulders and resign to shifting back to your old, ingrained identity as “fat” or “lazy.” You feel relief along with disappointment because there is some odd comfort in knowing who you are, even if you don’t like it very much. The Egoic-self enjoys certainty, even when the certainty is based on negative beliefs about yourself.

Wanda just had to lose weight for her daughter’s wedding. (Remember Wanda, who eats compulsively in the evening?) Devastated by her divorce two years ago, she had cushioned herself from the serial blows of home foreclosure, transition to full-time work, and acceptance of her now ex-husband’s chronic philandering with evening TV and sweet comfort foods. She had re-joined Weight Watchers to prepare for her daughter’s wedding, where she anticipated having to endure her arrogant husband’s smug ways and watch him flaunt his new relationship. She quickly lost twelve pounds. Then her night eating began to exert its sinister grip. “I wake up from my nap and just find myself in the kitchen.” When she went to social gatherings, she described having to literally place herself away from the food tables or her arm, seemingly of its own volition, would automatically travel from food to mouth. As I previously mentioned, introducing some conflict into her experience by re-joining Weight Watchers was an important step for Wanda so that she was at least motivated to interrupt her pattern of mindless (buddhi-less) self-sabotage. However, doing it merely to look good at a wedding, to show her ex-husband that she was not “a loser,” was inadequate fuel to motor a sustained shift in such ingrained, compulsive behavior. These motivation were generated from her Egoic-self’s need to prove that she was “okay,” or “not a loser,” rather than emanating from something more stable and sustaining, like “I know that I am okay and I deserve to treat myself well.” Motivation must come from your Wise-self, and a determination to act on your own behalf, in order to have any staying power.

One of the techniques Wanda began using to interrupt her evening eating was looking in the mirror and saying, “I can do this.” This was effective for Wanda and signified a shift toward allying with something in herself that was deeper than the image in the mirror. For Wanda, affirming her competence, her ability to bear up to life and to her own impulses, was captured in this simple act of self-validation. We discussed other techniques, such as taking walks in the evening, journaling feelings, and painting to give her new ways of self-soothing. These techniques all give priority to the inside, which is invisible to others, rather than being motivated by the image seen by others, which is always in the service of enhancing the Egoic-self. Interestingly, when Wanda was able to withstand her compulsion to eat, she would feel a strong urge to call old boyfriends. Her Clever-mind, deprived of one satisfaction (food), strained for another thing to soothe and distract. Helping Wanda recognize this compulsive pattern of filling emptiness with “stuff” (in this case, old boyfriends are just fillers) was significant in her growth process.

As long as your Clever-mind is in service of your Egoic-self, you will get nowhere fast whether you are on a diet or not. When you are attempting to feel good merely to feel good, or to prove that you are good, your motivations will quickly wear thin. This is why you may have a string of “failed” diets in your past—they are all essentially the same! Iyengar suggests that “yoga points out how we generally react to the outside world by forming entrenched patterns of behavior that doom us to relive the same events endlessly, though in a superficial variety of forms and combinations.” The Clever-mind keeps coming up with new strategies, but the issues remain the same. In order to break out of these samskaras/habitual patterns, you must harness of the power of your Wise-self. “The trick is to recognize which is which and then act on it. The paradox arises in that to train ourselves to achieve this, we have to start by doing a fair bit of what we don’t want to do, and rather less of what we think we do,” according to Iyengar. This may be translated as “No dessert unless you eat your vegetables.” And the ongoing work is translating this punitive tone into a voice of nurturance and self-care. The yoga of food is about making food choices with a tone of nurturance. This does not mean being “perfect” or impeccable with regard to your food choices. It does mean being mindful and nurturing and allowing the answer to the gentle question “Is this good for me?” to guide your choices.

Reflections on Your Dominant Mind

1. Are your wishes to lose weight and be healthier in the service of your Egoic-self or your Wise-self? How can you tell? If you are losing weight for an event in order to impress others, this is a sure sign that your Egoic-self is calling the shots. If you are changing your eating habits because you are tired of the pain poor food choices have created in your life and your body, then you are acting more in the service of your Wise-self.
2. How do you feel about the idea of training yourself to do more of what you don’t want to do and less of what you do want to do? Do you believe that practicing new, sometimes difficult behaviors consistently over time will result in you actually wanting more of what is good for you?

The Delay Between Action and Consequence

Iyengar points out that due to evolution, the delay between action and consequence has been considerably extended compared to days past. In the old days, Clever-mind, which functions in a binary way (repeat pleasure/avoid pain), was well suited to deal with threats such as typhoid or cholera. “Drink contaminated water on Monday, sick on Tuesday, dead on Wednesday.” Since the calculus of Clever-mind is exceedingly simple (“pleasure good/pain bad”), it is equipped to successfully cause you to avoid the contaminated water. By contrast, “We nearly all recognize that there is some connection between the way we live and such illnesses as cancer, heart disease, and arthritis, yet since the process of decline is so gradual and the deadly payoff so long deferred, we find it terribly difficult to make the necessary reforms in our habits of life, even if, at one level, we are actually longing for them.” Iyengar goes on to say, “The longer the delay between the primary action/inaction and its secondary effect, the more tempted we are to prevaricate, lie to ourselves, refuse to jump our fences, and take the downhill path.” So now you are dealing with eat cheeseburgers regularly and get heart disease in twenty years. Or eat junk food today and feel uncomfortable at the wedding next month. Clever-mind is not designed to process this kind of information usefully, particularly when your energy and emotions are focused on getting you through the day. This chasm between cause and effect is where we so often lose our bearings and go astray.

The fact that this pattern is so deeply human, so stunningly predictable, can give you heart along the path. It’s not just you. It’s not just me. “Hence, we must train ourselves to do actions now that we would rather not do in order to reap consequences that we desire at some later point in the future. Do something now that would be easier not to do (math homework instead of TV or get up an hour earlier for some yogasana practice) and reap the benefit a bit later. Repeat it often enough and harvest the compound interest as the future unrolls.” Do you notice how Iyengar’s advice is somewhat repetitious? Do something now that is hard and get the benefit later. Isn’t that the advice your mother gave you? Or should have given you. Rebelling against this rule of reality does you no good.

Cindy recently had a hysterectomy. She made the decision due to having been quite compromised by pelvic discomfort for several years. After the surgery, she was beside herself with fear regarding her healing process and the possibility of a negative outcome. Her biggest fear was prolapse of her bladder, and she knew that carrying some extra weight in her abdomen made this outcome more probable. We addressed her fears in a session not long after the surgery. Addressing her feelings without dramatization, which would add to the klesha/obstacle of fear in a way that she would find overwhelming, was important. Yet it was also important to not minimize, or dilute, her grasp on the very real potential consequences to her current health choices. During the session, I reminded Cindy that she has the power of choice in her life and that she did not need to be a victim of her fear and the eventual physical manifestation of this. Cindy wept during the session as she confronted her fears about living life without the ready comfort of food. “I just want to eat and die young,” she sobbed at one point. Interestingly, the next week she walked in looking much brighter and lighter, having just made some changes in her eating habits. Go figure. Despair and determination are more closely juxtaposed than you might think. There is something invigorating about facing life on life’s terms, coming to terms with despair, and making the decision to not succumb to its downward pull. Cindy’s case illustrates this key fact—that swinging between the extremes of motivation and collapse is not unusual. Growth occurs when the polarities become less extreme and the delay between progression and regression diminishes, as I will discuss later on.

Another less dramatic, but still quite relevant illustration of the empowerment wrought from facing the consequences of health choices is illustrated by Mandy. Mandy is a former homecoming queen. Her hundred-pound-plus weight gain was the slow creep that occurs for those who just “love” food and no longer participate in team sports of their youth. Now in her late thirties and highly uncomfortable due to extra weight, she made a decision to reform. About two months in to her new commitment to health, she was having a moment of temptation and confided to a coworker her strong desire for a cheeseburger. Expecting commiseration and collusion, she was shocked when her coworker replied, “Okay then, go get a cheeseburger, go home, and take your clothes off and eat it in front of the mirror.” Wow! This shot of reality was significant enough for Mandy to go on to lose eighty pounds. She came to see me when she was floundering in her weight-loss efforts long after this comment from her coworker. Though the comment still rang in her mind, it had lost its power to motivate her. This illustrates how easy it is to lose sight of the consequences of our daily behavior, the inevitable problem with the delay between cause and effect that Iyengar describes. Another problem with her coworker’s motivational tip was that it focused too much on the outside (the image in the mirror, or her Egoic-self) and not enough on the inside, and the regretful feelings Mandy had about not taking good care of her body.

It is through discrimination, which is guided by your Wise-self/buddhi, that you begin to make choices that are truly in your best interest and aligned with the reality of life in a body. The power of discrimination must be based on love for yourself, which is generated by your Wise-self. When you struggle with your weight, using discrimination has to do with entering the inner domain of your body and making choices based on your health, the actual reality of your body/annamaya kosa, rather than image that is perpetuated by your Egoic-self, or the momentary whims of your Clever-mind. When you make this step, you harness the cleverness of your Clever-mind to create future health and well-being. Clever-mind is now in the service of Wise-self. This shift requires you to bring some discipline (tapas!) to the perpetual straining of Clever-mind for pleasure. And this brings us back to the topic of impulse control.

Reflections on Action and Consequence
in Relations to Your Health

1. Reflect on what your health will be like in ten, twenty, or thirty years if you continue your current patterns. Do you tend to avoid these considerations? Is this too much reality?
2. Again, reflect on your relationship to the idea of “discipline.” Does the word evoke harshness or kindness?

Learning to Act on Your Own Behalf—
A Buddhist Perspective on Impulse Control

Your daily thoughts are full of “shoulds” and judgments. These can be quite toxic and not at all helpful in the change process. In fact, “shoulds” and judgments can feel like hammers that you use against yourself in a way that breaks down your self-esteem and diminishes your motivation. But sometimes these seemingly toxic thoughts contain important information. Perhaps you could benefit from more exercise or a change in your diet. Perhaps your current habits in these areas are causing you pain. The challenge is to act on this knowledge from a place of self-affirmation without the toxic effects of judgment. The key to doing this is determined by whether the “shoulds” are emanating from Wise-self or Egoic-self. As discussed above, if the “shoulds” are in the service of creating a nicer, shinier, more acceptable you (your Egoic-self), they will be no match for the habitual, pleasure driven Clever-mind (remember, Clever-mind is designed to maximize pleasure and has little grasp of long-term consequences). However, if the “shoulds” are in the service of Wise-self, if you really are aware of how your health habits are causing you suffering, then you are aligned with your own best interest and impulse control feels somehow “right,” rather than depriving.

After her daughter’s wedding, Wanda’s efforts toward reforming her health habits began to falter again. “What’s it going to take for me to get this?” This was a question she often repeated in our sessions when she was lamenting her eating habits. “I ate again last night,” she informed me one day. “After dinner I ate twenty of those mini peanut-butter cups, a granola bar, and a bowl of cereal.” She shook her head in disgust, yet somehow seemed distanced from her regret. A few weeks later, Wanda informed me that she had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. She had been aware of this consequence for a while, having been “pre-diabetic” for a few years. But a quiet transformation took place. She stopped eating sugar. She stopped talking about sugar. I asked her how she was doing with her eating habits in a session about a month after her diagnosis. “It’s just not an option,” she stated matter-of-factly. She is not happy about this and admits that it’s “hard,” but she has accepted it. Her Wise-self is calling the shots now, and Clever-mind has quit complaining and bargaining.

Pema Chödrön, a Tibetan Buddhist nun who writes and lectures on the power and process of meditation, provides a helpful framework for developing impulse control in her lecture series, “Getting Unstuck.” Her formula goes like this: “Recognize. Relax. Refrain. Resolve.” Let’s break it down and see how a Buddhist perspective can enhance your understanding of how working with the mind can facilitate positive changes in your body.

“Recognize”: This is where the process of establishing more intimacy with your patterns comes in. You say to yourself, “Aha! here I am again craving a quick fix of carbohydrates when I am feeling depleted in the face of afternoon demands.” It is important to note here that this requires a mild dissociation from your experience—you are not just craving chips, you are noticing yourself craving chips. The other important point is that this recognition is not used as a hammer to beat yourself with: “Dammit, I just had lunch. Why the hell am I wanting to eat again?” The concept of mitri, unconditional friendliness toward the self, is vital here. Mitri neutralizes the judgment that so often accompanies self-recognition.

“Relax”: This is way to bring mitri/self-love into your direct experience. We habitually tighten up when confronted with conflict, be it from the outside or on the inside. Inner conflict, although unseen by others, is still very real. Your stomach clenches, your jaw tightens, and your shoulders hunch. You will not give in. This restraint can only last so long because it’s exhausting. When a client informs me that they are “white-knuckling it,” I always worry. In contrast, when you are cultivating intimacy with your patterns, and more acceptance of your cravings and impulses, you gradually develop ease with the rise and fall of your habitual cravings. Instead of fighting your hungers, you breathe into them, name them, and allow them without necessarily acting on them. They no longer have power over you because you are in a relationship of non-resistance with them.

“Refrain”: This word brings a subtle difference than the word “resist,” which connotes strong-arming yourself into good behavior. Refrain means setting a mindful boundary that is in your own best interest and respecting this boundary even if you don’t necessarily like it—just like Wanda demonstrated above, firmness without harshness. Refrain also has a double meaning, a repeating measure in a piece of music. Think of refraining as a repeating measure of restraint that you bring to your daily life.

“Resolve”: You may not find this one to be particularly inspiring. It is tied to the fact that when you are working with deep habitual patterns/samskaras, you do not refrain once, twice, or even one hundred times. Rather, you resolve to repeat this process of self-recognition, relaxation, and refraining over and over and over again. The good news is, as with practicing a piece of music, this process will become easier and easier over time until it becomes a graceful, seemingly effortless flow in your daily life.

This formula is more conceptual than practical. Meaning, if you are poised before the cupboard, hand reaching for the Oreo cookies, it is unlikely that you will say to yourself, “Now what was that again, am I supposed to refrain, or was that relax? What the heck … ?” Rather, this formula is meant to illustrate a basic attitude that you begin cultivating toward your less laudatory impulses. The basic attitude is one of acceptance and mindfulness. You are committing to acting on your own behalf and willing to evaluate your behaviors based upon this basic tenet. “Is this good for me?” is your new refrain.

Janice had joined a medically supervised weight-loss program and was fifty pounds into a journey she deemed to be two hundred pounds total. Egoic-self likes solid numbers, and though there is nothing “wrong” with this, it does not have a lot of staying power when thrust up against the power of Clever-mind’s attraction to comfort. A few months into the program, Janice found herself triggered by the group leader. Janice is the meticulous employee with the messy home and a body that she once described to me as “a garbage disposal.” As a child, she was the apple of her father’s eye. Her father was a cruel, primitive man who alternatively comforted and punished her with food. He would bring her Happy Meals to help her through the school day, imprinting her with a deep sense of security tied to fast food. At another time, as you may recall, he forced her to eat a whole can of chocolate syrup when she accidentally put too much on her ice cream. These mixed messages about food and love were deeply confusing to Janice, who now used food to both comfort and punish herself as an adult. We learn to treat ourselves as we were treated. When Janice was in junior high, her father decided she needed to exercise. He would sit in his armchair and force her through a series of calisthenics on a daily basis as he sat comfortably and imperiously observing her. Janice found the experience humiliating and enraging. Afterward, she would go to her bedroom and stuff herself with her stash of junk food. She’d show him! She exerted the only power she had at the time. This story illustrates how in our own psyches the deep traumas continue to repeat and shape our experience until we are able to fully process them.

Janice had to miss a few meetings at the weight-loss program due to a preplanned vacation followed by an unexpected work meeting. Participation required weekly weigh-ins and group attendance. Members were allowed to miss one session but would be dismissed from the program if they missed more than that. Janice was diligently working the program and expected the leader to recognize her dedication and not hold her to the letter of the law (or program rules). The leader granted the additional absence, but only on the condition that Janice come in twice that week to make up for her second missed session. Janice was furious. She complied with the seemingly arbitrary rule and sat through the required meeting with unconcealed anger toward the leader. Janice was terrified of her own anger and was usually an assiduously congenial and accommodating person. And here she was, openly defiant and outraged in a public arena! Following this incident, Janice ate like a demon had been unleashed inside her. She ate a whole gallon of Cold Stone Creamery ice cream in a day, “And I don’t even like ice cream!” she later recounted.

Janice found this experience deeply instructive about the magnitude of rage she feels for arbitrary authority and her use of food to rebel. She “recognized” herself at a deep level. She was able to “relax” into this self-recognition and get back on track with the program and the group leader. Relaxation is signified by her not beating herself up for her lapse, but rather being interested in what it had to teach her. She “refrained” from the compulsion to continue her self-destructive behavior. Her “resolve” to stay with the process was strengthened by this ordeal and the insight she had wrought from it. In this scenario, Janice was initially at the mercy of her Clever-mind, which strained for relief from painful feelings of shame and anger by the use of an ingrained, dysfunctional behavior. Her Egoic-self was tied to this behavior as a way to assert her autonomy, even if it was at her own peril. “I’ll show her,” her Egoic-self chimed in, egging on her self-destructive behavior. Eventually, she was able to harness the power of her Wise-self and use this experience to deepen her commitment to her growth process. Her Egoic-self’s fixation on the number (200 pounds!) was no longer the most prominent motivator. Numbers lose their power as we engage more fully with the energy of growth.

Reflections on Impulse Control

1. Do you habitually try to “control” yourself when you are on a diet? How can you relax when you feel tempted to sabotage your well-being?
2. Can you relate to Janice’s self-sabotage? Can you see the importance of allying with yourself even after “bad” behavior?
3. Can you imagine recognizing your impulses to eat, get angry, or act out in a self-defeating way, without acting on the impulse?
4. Further consider your relationship to self-discipline/tapas. Does the word “refrain” resonate with you as a gentler way to conceptualize limits?

How Meditation Can Help

Your Clever-mind/manas is not bad. Remember, your Clever-mind is the part of you that takes care of life’s little details to help you solve everyday problems. In fact, it can be of great help to you as you commit to taking better care of yourself. Clever-mind will help you with your food choices and will help you find time to fit meditation into your busy schedule. In order to harness the “cleverness” of your mind, however, you must strengthen contact with your Wise-self/buddhi. Buddhi is the part of you that helps make decisions based upon your long-term needs. Hence, when you refrain from the gustatory temptations that are part of our everyday life here in the West, you will not be storing up feelings of deprivation and martyrdom because your restraint is emanating from your conviction that this is truly in your best interest. You begin to realize that when you set boundaries and make wise choices (exercise impulse control), you just plain feel better. You realize that what may feel good going down in the moment has effects you will have to live with for many hours, and if you do it over and over, it will have effects you will need to deal with in many years. So when Clever-mind says, “You should (or shouldn’t) eat this,” or “You should exercise,” these directives are not heard as commands to make you into a better object or product (in the service of your Egoic-self). Neither are you as vulnerable to Clever-mind’s intention to make you as comfortable as possible in the short term, regardless of the long-term consequences. Instead, Clever-mind is now increasingly allied with your Wise-self and its directives are aimed to help you stay on a path that is more aligned with reality and your own well-being. So when your Clever-mind says, “You shouldn’t have eaten that,” you do not use this as a stick to beat yourself with, but rather as information to help you make better choices tomorrow. In this case, your Clever-mind is in dialogue with your Wise-self, as you realize that the choice you made did not necessarily serve your greater aspirations for health and enhanced well-being.

By training your mind, you can learn how to differentiate the thoughts that serve your Egoic-self from the thoughts that serve your Wise-self. By focusing your attention, you strengthen the attentional wiring of your brain. You also become more familiar with the trains of thought populating your inner world. Daniel Siegel, a psychiatrist who advocates meditation as an adjunct to therapy, uses the metaphor of lifting a weight when he describes learning meditation. He uses this metaphor to explain how the very act of bringing your attention back to your breath when it wanders is the lifting of the weight. Analogous to actual weight lifting, you don’t curse at yourself and accuse yourself of being irredeemable when you bring the weight down during a set. No, you understand that putting the weight down is integral to the process of building muscle and you lift the weight back up. So it is with meditation. Your mind wanders (puts down the weight of focused attention) and you bring it back to your breath (you lift the weight). The very act of noticing that your attention has wandered and subsequently bringing it back to your breath is what constitutes the practice. And it’s okay if your attentional muscles are very flabby at first. How could they not be? This is the very reason why you are practicing! Through consistent practice, you learn to differentiate between Clever-mind in the service of function, “I need to buy carrots” or in the service of Egoic-self, “I need to lose weight before I can take up yoga,” and Clever-mind in the service of Wise-self, “I will feel better if I order the salad,” or “I should meditate today so that I stay consistent with my goal to follow through on commitments.” Over time, strengthening your attention builds enormous internal power because it allows you to more consciously choose where you want your attention to go, which of your thoughts you want to feed and which you don’t. Do you want to be incessantly preoccupied with a biological need of your body? Or with changing the shape and size of your body? Having these thoughts is both your choice and not your choice. It is not your choice in the sense that you cannot control your thoughts—they run of their own accord. However, you can begin to control the volume button on your thoughts and grow in your capacity to disregard thoughts that are not useful and even defy thoughts when they are destructive. Meditation will help you learn to use the controls in your mind with more acuity and discrimination.

How to Meditate

Describing how to meditate is a bit like describing how to watch paint dry. Sit down, choose an object to focus on, breathe. It is apparently such a simple thing to do. There are no fancy bells or whistles, no colorful control panel to master. It is a practice of subtlety. Because the practice is so subtle, because you will not lose weight or burn calories, earn money, or have anything tangible to show for your efforts, motivating yourself to practice it will likely be difficult at first. But, really, this is the essence of why the practice is so good for you. It is a deep affirmation of Self. It is an affirmation of your right to “Be,” regardless of your output or mastery. It is also an affirmation of the importance of your interior world, as opposed to what you look like and what you have to show for yourself. The interior world is a mysterious landscape, full of incongruity, drama, and tedium. It takes time to familiarize yourself with this terrain because it is so different from the terrain of daily life, which is often populated by loud noises, bright lights, and “reality” shows. Karen Horney, a well-known psychoanalyst from days past (way before insurance companies), stated that the first goal of psychotherapy was to get the patient to become interested in him or herself. This idea of getting interested in yourself, as opposed to “fixing” yourself, nicely frames an initial goal of meditation.

I will describe some of the basic practicalities and technicalities of starting a meditation practice. First, choose the place where you will practice. This is important, but not to the point that you should let it stand in the way of getting started. I have had clients wait to start a practice because they want to create a peaceful room in their home, but first they have to clean the room out, decorate it, and buy a fountain to create ambiance. This is a delay tactic! There is nothing wrong with creating a nice place in your home, but your practice is going to be about sitting with the messiness of your thoughts, and if you are fantasizing that a nice room with a fountain will make this any easier, then you are fantasizing. So just find a quiet place in your home. I suggest not using your bed for the simple reason that your bed is associated with sleep, and meditation is not something you want to associate with unconsciousness. Also, it is better to have a firm place to sit. If you have back trouble or some other physical problem, sit with your spine straight in chair. You may choose to sit on a cushion on the floor if you can do this comfortably. Sitting against a wall or a piece of furniture can help with your posture if you choose to sit on the floor.

In this form of meditation, you use your breath as the focus for your attention. Breathe through your nose, counting lightly on the exhale. You may keep your eyes slightly open or close them if you prefer. I suggest that you experiment with different techniques to focus on your breath and see what feels right. You may count your breaths, starting at 1 and counting to 10 or 20 before returning to 1. When you forget where you are, and you will (the first lesson of meditation is that your mind will wander), you start over at 1. Alternatively, you may focus on the sensation of air entering your nostrils or on the movement of your chest or abdomen. You can set a timer or use a clock and set a reasonable goal, such as 5 minutes if you are totally new to meditation. I suggest doing your practice twice a day at the beginning in order to acclimate yourself to the technique and the very idea of sitting quietly doing “nothing.” After about a week or two of sitting for 5 minutes twice a day, you may double the time to 10 minutes twice a day. In another week, you are ready for 15 minutes. You may stay at 15 minutes for a while, several weeks if you wish. You may choose to shorten your meditation if you find yourself dreading, avoiding, or resenting the practice. The trick here is calibrating your practice so that you are not sabotaging yourself by making it too overwhelming, which increases the odds that you will quit. The eventual goal that I suggest you work toward is 20 minutes to 30 minutes a day. Longtime meditators have told me that 30 minutes is a good baseline because it takes at least 10 minutes to quiet your mind and get to a deeper level of awareness. But the biggest thing is to do what you can and respect your own schedule and needs. You don’t need to take a big portion (30 minutes) just because someone else has that much. Experiment to see what feels right for you and stick with that. The yoga of food helps you begin to assess your needs and meet them respectfully in all areas of your life.

Steps for Developing Your Meditation Practice

1. Find a place to meditate in your home. Make sure that you are comfortable in the place you have chosen. Use a chair that will assist you in sitting up straight if you have back problems or use a cushion on the floor if you can keep your spine straight. Have a clock that you can see or use a timer to keep track of your minutes.
2. Decide when you will practice and for how long. I suggest starting with 5 minutes twice a day and building from there. After a week, try doubling to 10 minutes twice a day. After another week, go for 15 minutes. You will be surprised that this amount becomes doable, perhaps even something that you look forward to.
3. Keep a journal logging your practice. It is helpful to note your reactions, especially any benefit you notice from the practice. Reflect on why you are meditating and what your goals for practicing are. I suggest keeping your goals very limited and focused on showing up, not on achieving some miraculous state of mind. Showing up on your cushion and learning to sit with whatever state you are in is the first goal of meditation.
4. Notice how much you think about food when you meditate. Notice your response to noticing how much you think about food. Relax your judgment and practice just noticing.

Beneath Your Chattering Mind

You must enter this new endeavor with a commitment to develop patience with yourself. Your mind will wander. A lot. This is not due to a character defect. Rather, it is the nature of your Clever-mind to chatter. You can consider it like a CB radio, broadcasting over the airwaves particular stations that you are tuned into. Underlying your particular choice of broadcasting is your Egoic-self and at times your Wise-self. As you gain more facility with the practice, you will have more discrimination regarding the airwaves you wish to broadcast.

At the beginning, meditation is a process of learning to not identify so much with your thoughts and to instead watch your thoughts. Through observing your thoughts, you get to know yourself better. You begin to understand your Egoic-self’s preoccupations better. What beliefs about yourself are you attached to? Are you often rehashing interchanges with other people? Are you thinking about your children? Your dog? What you will wear that day? What you will eat that day? All of the above? You will begin to notice themes to the thoughts that come up most frequently. Certain thoughts are more repetitive and captivating than others. It may seem like an odd concept, but you are actually using meditation to get to know yourself better. Many of us think that we know ourselves quite well, after all, we are “ourselves,” right? But actually, we are often quite blind to our most prominent issues. You may have a vague idea that you have “control” issues, but you need some distance from being caught up in your thoughts so that you can see yourself more clearly without all the noise. You may discover that your “control” issues are masking a great deal of fear or shame. You learn this about yourself as you “watch” your thoughts, which incessantly hover around social interactions and whether or not you said the right thing, or what so-and-so may think about you. As you “see” this recurrent theme, you begin to recognize the limitations of this preoccupation and you have more distance from this concern in your daily life.

Meditation cultivates distance from the immediacy of your thoughts, you see yourself thinking rather than being captivated by the drama of your thoughts and then mindlessly acting them out. For example, with regard to food, in your daily life you may find yourself “starving” in the middle of a big project at work. Intent on finishing the project, you go to the candy machine and quickly scarf something down to get you through the project. During meditation, you may notice your thoughts repetitively going to food after considering all the things you have to do that day. “Hmmm … ,” you may say to yourself after some time on the cushion, “I seem to use food to deal with pressure.” Or “I tend to eat when I really need to rest.” Knowing this about yourself on a more conscious level enhances your ability to choose how you will respond to these ingrained patterns. You may choose to eat well at lunch knowing that you are under a lot of pressure in the afternoon, and you don’t forget to pack a protein-rich snack to see you through the rough spots. Or you choose to take a break and lie down on floor for fifteen minutes in the afternoon. When you notice your mind going to food, you say, “Oh, there you go again,” with a gentle smile.

One of the biggest misconceptions about meditation is that you are doing it to relax. If you are under this impression, I give you about a week before you cast the whole endeavor aside and declare yourself a lost cause. Meditation will not relax you, at least not at the beginning. In fact, it can be quite the opposite because you come face to face with your internal turmoil without traffic, screaming kids, or unreasonable spouses to blame it on. No, it’s just you and your thoughts, up close and personal. In your daily life, you may swim in negative thoughts without even being aware of the milieu. Like a fish swimming in murky water, you don’t even know it’s murky until you emerge for a moment and look in your fishbowl from the top—“Aha,” you may say, “what a cesspool!” Because you are not so identified with the “rightness” of your thoughts, you are able to look at them with more discernment and objectivity. You notice that you tend to be very negative without judging yourself, but instead with an eye toward understanding your conditioning more fully.

Currently there is a movement toward “positive thinking.” People are diligently making gratitude lists and wrenching their miserable minds into a state of thankfulness. This movement was epitomized by the movie The Secret, which promulgated the law of attraction—think it, and it shall be so. Obsessed with negativity? Then you are creating your own bad luck. In my opinion, this line of reasoning can be somewhat dangerous. I have nothing against gratitude, mind you. However, suppressing your negativity and labeling it “bad” is no shortcut to gratitude. Rather, unconditional positive regard for yourself, including your negativity, is important to cultivate. The intent is counterintuitive, especially in our problem-solving culture. The intention that I am describing is not to change or fix the “problem” of your negativity, but rather to grow more familiar with its edges. For me, this means getting curious about my fears and doubts. “What is this worry? Where is the tightness? What is the fear?” By letting go of your agenda to “fix” yourself, you create an atmosphere of acceptance for yourself that goes a long way toward diluting your negativity.

Reflections on Your Chattering Mind

1. Do you notice prominent themes in the thoughts that your mind replays during your meditation practice?
2. What information does this give you about yourself? How might this be useful for you in your growth process?
3. How much negativity do you notice in your primary thought patterns? Are there prominent themes to your worries? Examples of common themes are money, health concerns, or social status.

Food for Thought

Meditation strengthens your ability to be in the present moment, in the reality of your present, breathing body. Focusing your mind on your breath is both a literal coming back to your body as well as grounding yourself in the here and now. Most people have a very hard time being in the present—Clever-mind is dutifully checking off the chore list, planning dinner, or rehashing something from yesterday or ten years ago. When I meditate now, I often experience moments when my thoughts are less persistent, and I feel as though my consciousness drops in to my body. I am aware of a warm buzz of internal energy, my breath feels fuller, and I experience my whole body for a few moments. This is more than a “feel good” moment. Rather, it is an integrative moment—integrating my body into my awareness so that I am in the present and in my body rather than caught up in the chatter of my Clever-mind. This is powerful because when you experience this level of integration during meditation, you will be more aware of the disconnect when you are hijacked by your thoughts in your day-to-day life. When you are far from home, you forget what home was like. Meditating reintroduces you to being at home in your body, as opposed to panting and obsessing, or robotically maneuvering your way through life. Experiencing this feeling for 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, and eventually 30 minutes when you are meditating makes it more likely you will recognize when you are not present in your body during your daily life. When you can recognize this, then you can relax and recalibrate—that is, you can self-regulate. This greatly mitigates the power that reflexive patterns have over your behavior.

Let’s look at this in relation to overeating. The reflexive need to binge, or self-soothe with food, arises from a place of stress and disintegration. You are not grounded in your body or in the present moment. Current brain science allows us to visualize what this state might look like on an MRI. Likely, your brain stem and limbic system (specifically the amygdala, which regulates fear) are lit up and your prefrontal cortex (which regulates higher level awareness) looks rather gray (no blood flow). Due to your habitual pattern/samskara of regulating stress with food, your primitive brain says, “Me must eat!” Out the window go your aspirations for better health and well-being, ideals housed in your prefrontal cortex. These ideals just plain don’t exist for you at the moment because your prefrontal cortex is offline. Well, if you need more convincing regarding the benefits of meditation, here it is! Meditation actually strengthens your prefrontal cortex. Yes, quite literally, MRIs prove that people who meditate have a thicker prefrontal cortex, which indicates more neurons and more myelination, according to Daniel Seigel and Jack Kornfield, creators of The Mindful Brain. Consider meditation a workout for your brain. As you “work out” your prefrontal cortex during meditation, you strengthen its wiring, making it more likely that you will eventually be able to shift from a place of primitive self-soothing to a higher level of awareness. This means your prefrontal cortex is able to pipe in, “I am feeling really raw right now. How can I take care of myself in a way that is not self-destructive?” You are able to integrate your higher aspirations for good health and well-being even when you are at your wits end. Wise-self/buddhi is online!

Reflections on Food for Thought

1. Do you have a hard time being in the present moment? How might this be related to your food issues? Notice how “present” you are when you are eating. Are you tasting your food? Taking time to swallow? Try putting your fork down between bites.
2. When you meditate do you become more aware of your body? What do you notice?
3. Can you relate to the idea of being hijacked by your primitive brain when you overeat? Does conceptualizing it this way help with your shame about overeating?

The yoga of food has to do with relating to food with more conscious, loving intention. We started this journey by helping you to appreciate the materiality and physicality of your body with heightened awareness. This is the realm of the annamaya kosa. Our work in this area involved helping you harness the power of cause and effect by helping you to choose higher quality food with which to nourish your body. We then moved on to explore the role of emotions and energy in your food choices and explored how the physical practice of yoga could be of service in finding alternative, health-enhancing ways to calm jangled energy patterns. This is the realm of the pranamaya kosa. Next we stepped into the realm of your mind and addressed the role your thoughts have in your creation of self. This is the manomaya kosa. Throughout this journey, we have stayed in the realm of your personal self. The philosophy of yoga guides you toward grasping your interconnection with others, and ultimately with the universe, and hence brings you toward spiritual development. This book is not meant to take you toward this level of yoga. However, we are now approaching a greater awareness that reaches beyond mere self-awareness. We are set to explore your capacity to have insight, or what is also referred to as your Witnessing consciousness. The next chapter explores the process of developing your capacity for a more objective level of self-awareness, called Witnessing. We are still at the level of your personal self, but moving incrementally toward a higher level of consciousness, which, don’t forget, is the larger purpose of yoga.

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