What The Cool Kids Do - Better Balancing Part 1

You know how your yoga instructor is always banging on about quieting your mind? Well, what's that all about?

Quieting your mind really means reducing the mind chatter so that focus occurs.

When focus occurs your poses are stronger and your balances are stable.

Focus is good thing, but it's not what this post is about.

This post is about what happens to your focussed mind when you fall out of a balance.

Your mind loses it's focus. 

Being happy because you are nailing a pose reduces focus. Your mind has to move FROM quiet TO joy.

So does feeling disappointment because you aren't doing the pose as well as last time or you've fallen out of a pose. Your mind has to move FROM quiet TO disappointment.

Now to get back into the pose, you need to move your mind FROM happiness or disappointment back TO quiet mind again.

What The Cool Kids Do

If you've ever watched seasoned practitioners, they operate a bit like robots. Not that their movements are robotic, but their faces lack emotion and their gaze is fixed firmly on their drishti (the gaze point for the particular pose).

Now the truly seasoned practitioners maintain this lack of emotion even when they fall out of a pose.

They don't smile or frown. Their face remains the same while they get back into the pose.

What they've done is reduced the effort it takes to get back into the pose. You see, they don't have to refocus their mind. It's already focused, even while they fall out of the pose and get back into it.

By practicing this way, you will get a better quality practice for the same quantity of time.

What The Really Cool Kids Do

If you really want to amp things up then you need to do what the really seasoned practitioners do, and that's entering a pose without caring about the outcome of the pose.

This doesn't mean that you aren't aiming for your best expression of the pose, it just means that best expression or not, you aren't going to let that outcome affect your focus. This is truly economical practice.

The funny thing is, that practicing this way - not caring about outcomes - actually improves the outcome of your practice.

How To Be A Cool Kid

Ok, how do we put all this into practice? Maybe start with the pose you are desperate to get into. This is the best starting point because it is the pose that affects your emotions the most. 

First, before you begin practicing the pose, affirm to yourself that irrespective of the outcome, you won't react to the result (good or not so good). 

Quieten your mind by taking a couple of focussed breaths. Focus on the tip of your nose.

When your mind is quiet, gaze softly at your drishti and enter the pose. 

If you start to feel an emotion, say joy or disappointment, during the pose, just observe that you felt that emotion. Keep your face neutral.

The very act of becoming an observer of emotion adds the layer necessary for you not to act on the emotion.

Pretty soon you won't experience the emotion at all. You'll just say, fall out of the pose and get back into it. No big deal. Nothing at all really.

This added observational layer also introduces something that wasn't there previously, choice.

As an observer you can now choose to react to the emotion or not.

Non-attachment - Vairagya

This whole thing about not caring about your pose is called non-attachment or vairagya in yoga-speak.

Being non-attached helps your yoga in general, but it really comes out in balance poses where you are really relying on focus.

Takin' It Off The Mat

Yoga is a personal development practice for living. This means taking the lessons we learn and practice on the mat out into our everyday lives. 

Practicing non-attachment in our everyday activities reduces stress and enhances happiness.

Once you've mastered non-attachment on the mat try observing your emotions in everyday life. 

This doesn't mean that we become emotionless robots, it just means that we are choosing the things we allow ourselves to react to. 

But won't all the negative things that we are not reacting to become bottled up inside us? Not at all. Remember, you went into the situation not caring about the outcome. Without care there's nothing to bottle up.

Does this mean that we don't care about anything? Of course not. We enter everything with the best of intentions.

In fact, by focussing and getting our mind straight at the start we are setting ourselves up for success. We just don't attach emotion to the outcome. 

This also doesn't mean that we don't learn from mistakes. In fact, a clear head helps you learn more from your mistakes so that you perform better the next time.

Are you saying that we shouldn't smile or feel happiness? No, you are just choosing the situations that you will or won't react to.

Practicing non-attachment while taking your partner out to a comedy movie is just silly. But if the comedy movie is a dud, then how you choose to react is another thing...this is where you can practice non-attachment. Learn and live. learn and live.

When you are observing your reactions to the outcomes of situations, sometimes you'll choose to react, sometimes things surprise you and you react anyway.

You will learn from your mistakes but without the negative emotional baggage, and the wasted effort of beating yourself up.

Rather, with a clear and focussed mind you'll get back on the horse quickly, learn from your mistakes and choose to joyously ride into the sunset.

Now like everything we practice, eventually it will happen subconsciously. This is the ideal outcome.

We begin the journey on the mat, it continues in real life.

Peace out, J