Wednesday, 29 August 2012

But does all this help me in my daily work?


There are at least 3 different ways in which I believe yoga can help us normal people in our daily lives - i.e., through exercise, awareness and focus.

1. To begin with, some parts of yoga (asanas and pranayama) involve physical exercises, and via TV (Baba Ramdev's extra-political contributions), these parts have become highly popular in India these days. Needless to say, the right kind of exercise at the right time, etc., can help us in various ways. As for the need for expert help, some believe that these exercises are completely harmless, but common sense suggests that before taking up anything strenuous, it might be better to take expert advice. That risk is perhaps common to all kinds of exercise. I believe some research has been done on the helpful effects of Yoga Nidra and other such exercises for different kinds of health issues (cardiovascular problems, diabetes, etc.) and yoga is gaining acceptance as a helpful aid in reducing medication and helping patients manage their ailments better, in general. It seems that part of the benefit is because yoga is also supposed to be a training for the mind, in addition to the body, and that helps patients manage their diseases better, overall.

However, that is not what we typically want to discuss in these kinds of discussions, is it? So let me also go into some of the less researched aspects which give yoga a little mystique and make such discussions more charming.

2. Besides physical exercise, yoga typically involves some training of the mind too and this is likely to help practioners in their daily work as well. The most fundamental of these is the idea of Nivritti or Nirodha, i.e., consciously getting out of, or controlling, the whirlpools of the mind. The impact might depend upon what your daily work is. If your work involves making some important choices each day (or each week, say), then this habit of nivritti for a few minutes every day is likely to provide you with crucial seconds to think from different perspectives and break monotony and its consequences. I believe that yoga can help reduce errors in execution too, but I don't have a research study to support this and it is possible that this is just because of "more oxygen in the right places," etc. Either way, I believe yoga has this effect.

3. This nivritti is also a great stress buster - but that's intuitive, isn't it? Anything that consciously trains the mind to get out of its "rot" on days when it is in misery does this trick. This teaching is integral to yoga. Not integral to performing asanas and exercises, but an integral aspect of the preaching of yoga, i.e., an integral part of the training of the mind in Raja Yoga. Before we jump to put Raja Yoga in a separate box, I would like to draw your attention to Swami Swatmarama's opening shlokas in "Hatha Yoga Pradeepika," where he says more than once that Hatha Yoga is mainly (or, basically) a preparation for Raja Yoga. So let's not put all yoga away by classifying Raja Yoga as a branch dealing with "esoteric aspects," not to be considered the "mainstream" of yoga. What is the importance of stress-busters? I think it will be clearer when I give it the name "dukkha-buster" too. It takes the mind away from dukkha, stress being a common kind of dukkha, a common whirlpool (literally, vritti) of the mind.

4. To end the nivritti discussion, let me illustrate the impact of unconscious living, by which I mean a zombie-like state where the mind is caught-up with something unhappy, and work gets done mostly mechanically. I think the term "going through the motions" says it all. The Bhagawad Gita mentions the following when discussing anger, but I think the jist holds for any emotion that causes the zombie-like state. It says, in chapter 2, that anger causes a mesmerized state of the mind, which, in turn, causes forgetfulness. This kind of forgetfulness (perhaps in its advanced stages) "destroys intelligence", which in turn is the cause of decline of the person / practitioner. By making awareness (or, consciousness) an integral part of the training of the mind, yoga tries to take practioners away from these harmful effects.

5. Renunciation is often misunderstood as being the reason for not paying attention to one's work. However, yoga texts do not advocate taking one's current tasks lightly, and the Gita is a great example of that. In fact, focus is one of the grandest themes in Raja Yoga. Focus, or concentration, when cultivated sincerely, would probably help day-to-day work unequivocally. To go one step further, the highest state of samadhi, called nirvikalpa samadhi, is said to be a state in which all bodily functions can be performed with attention, yet with the mind being in touch with universal consciousness (or, God). Why would anyone speak of these elevated states this way if they thought that daily work should be neglected, or rushed through? Of course, I agree that those who feel that their calling lies elsewhere, should perhaps take that idea seriously and do those other things, but that is not about neglecting. It is very much a positive state of focusing!

If material life was not reconciliable with yoga, could the disciples of Paramahansa Yogananda have created a course titled "Material Success through Yoga Principles"? I have not purchased it, but please feel free to if you are interested. It will be there on the Ananda Sangha website.

Sadanand Tutakne

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