How does practising yoga make you happier?
Thanks for your questions and feedback. Keep them coming. Sometimes I do not answer your questions immediately because I am pondering over them. I am not at enlightenment yet! Sometimes, like in this case, I wonder if I should answer them or let you learn to live with the questions. Sometimes, I wonder also, which way should I answer them as this depends on who is the one who asked the question in the first place: what do you need to hear that will help most? All in all, nowadays, I just keep the questions at the back of my mind and do my meditation and live my life as usual. I find, and you will find too, that the answers are already within. Sometimes, spontaneously, without asking, the answers arise from the depths of your own wisdom and you realise them just like that. To allow this to happen, rather than by accident, we practice yoga. Why? Because yoga gives us the systematic tools to realise ourselves: our wisdom, our silence, our happiness, all that is already within us. This brings me to the question one of you asked:
“How could us by practising yoga, be happier? I know I would be very happy if I could get my head to touch the floor when doing the forward straddle but I think you are not talking about this nor about the rush of endorphin that comes with exercising. Are the asanas designed to change one's mental and emotional makeup?”
You will often hear this definition of yoga: Yoga is union. Union of what? Mind and body. Unite for what? We live as if our minds are somewhere and our bodies are somewhere else. This is unnatural. Sometimes we live as though we have no body! (Think of all those times you starved to finish your office work.) Or we live as if our body’s perfection and satisfaction is primary! (Think of all those times you would walk from shop to shop in pursuit of that brand of chocolate bar.) Because this is not natural, we feel ill at ease with ourselves. We are unhappy. As Kabir the poet said long ago:
The truth is you turned away yourself, and decided to go into the dark alone.
Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew.
And that's why everything you do has some weird failure in it.
Yoga is any practice that allows us to be right here, right now, dwelling well in our body and mind – that is, to return to our nature. What’s our nature? Return for what? Sharon Gannon, co-founder of the Jivamurkti Yoga (quoted in Yoga Journal, Aug’04) puts it very well:
“You cannot do yoga. Yoga is your natural state. What you can do are yoga exercises, which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state. What is this natural state? Eternal, everlasting happiness: bliss.”
We are not talking about yoga asanas changing your chemical constitution and improving our mood and leveling out the extremes of your emotions. We are also not talking about how an improvement in physical health has an effect on the health of the mind and how this mutual reinforcement sustains a sense of well-being. These happen for sure, yet these are merely the outer layers. There is something more marvelous and sublime at work through the practice of yoga asanas or other methods like meditation or mantra. There is nothing occult about it. It is in fact quite logical.
With the practice of yoga asanas (poses), we master the mind (in yoga, we understand the mind to be a conglomeration of thoughts) through reuniting the mind and the body. We learn to stay present to ourselves through observing our breathing in poses whether these are easy or challenging, whether it is a pose we like or do not like. We learn to maintain an even mind in the face of external changes, independent of likes and dislikes. With continued practice in this way, we will realise for ourselves that our moods can be independent of external circumstances. Then we experience a sense of well-being that transcends external factors, which are often beyond our control anyway. It is not excitement, but a kind of deep pervasive joy. Some people call it inner peace. My teacher called it silence. The silence of a mind where the thoughts have been stilled.
It is encouraging when we say that yoga practices allow us to RETURN to our inner nature of happiness. “Yoga teaches us that happiness is always available to us. No matter what our circumstances.”, as Sally Kempton says in the heading in an article from the latest Yoga Journal on happiness. According to her, there are, in Sanskrit, 4 words for happiness: sukha, santosha, mudita, ananda – they refer to different depths of happiness and provide us with an idea of the path that we can take for ourselves on our return to our natural state.
Sukha: is the kind of happiness that comes from pleasant experience.
We all know how long this lasts! The length of time it takes to fill your mouth with enough chay kway teow to make you regret ordering it. Hahaha. Maybe two or three mouthfuls sometimes? Oops. We are all familiar with this.
Santosha: is contentment (read my earlier blog entry on “What do you contain”)
This is one of the prerequisites to Ashtanga yoga practice. Being happy in the containment of your present experience cultivates gratitude for all that is already available to you in the moment. This soothes our internal agitation that we need to pursue more and more things outside of ourselves to be happy which is a method doomed to failure as it leads to further agitation and further perceived needs.
Mudita: some call spiritual happiness. This is a spontaneous bubbling up of inner joy.
With contentment and gratitude comes a sense of calm – “exaltation, equanimity and the capacity to see beauty even in things we don’t ordinarily find beautiful, like sidewalk litter or fast-food hamburgers” as Kempton puts it in her article. I call this my “Naked Lunch moments”: the moment when I see the reality of that which is at the end of my fork, to steal a coinage from William S.Burroughs. You feel a sudden unity with all beings and a clear joy in that sense of belonging to such a miraculous creation.
Ananda: “the bliss that passeth understanding”
When we experience the fleeting sukha, we learn to practice santosha, then we experience mudita and we might get an inkling that a big fat happy bear hug of Ananda is imminent! This is what yogis ultimately aspire towards: when mudita fills our entire spectrum of experience, you get ananda, a state of bliss that we cannot comprehend right now with our untransformed mind. The delicious lure here is that this ananda is ALREADY within you. What you need to do is to peel away all the layers of conditioning (artificial artifices that we picked up from society as desperately primitive coping mechanisms) that you have acquired to return to this state. Yoga practices provide the tools to do this. Whether through asana, meditation, devotion, inquiry, or even better, a combination of these yoga practices, you stand a pretty good chance of reaching this ananda with diligent practice. There are so many who have tested these methods through personal practice and who have reclaimed their inner joy. (This is the reason why the yoga practices have survived for so long: those who travelled the course of the way to joy are the ones who pass on the methods to us.) This is why practising yoga makes you happier. This is why a good gauge of how you are progressing in your practice is how much happier you have become.
So what are you waiting for? Practise yoga. Be happy.
Thanks to KH for your question, namaste.
“How could us by practising yoga, be happier? I know I would be very happy if I could get my head to touch the floor when doing the forward straddle but I think you are not talking about this nor about the rush of endorphin that comes with exercising. Are the asanas designed to change one's mental and emotional makeup?”
You will often hear this definition of yoga: Yoga is union. Union of what? Mind and body. Unite for what? We live as if our minds are somewhere and our bodies are somewhere else. This is unnatural. Sometimes we live as though we have no body! (Think of all those times you starved to finish your office work.) Or we live as if our body’s perfection and satisfaction is primary! (Think of all those times you would walk from shop to shop in pursuit of that brand of chocolate bar.) Because this is not natural, we feel ill at ease with ourselves. We are unhappy. As Kabir the poet said long ago:
The truth is you turned away yourself, and decided to go into the dark alone.
Now you are tangled up in others, and have forgotten what you once knew.
And that's why everything you do has some weird failure in it.
Yoga is any practice that allows us to be right here, right now, dwelling well in our body and mind – that is, to return to our nature. What’s our nature? Return for what? Sharon Gannon, co-founder of the Jivamurkti Yoga (quoted in Yoga Journal, Aug’04) puts it very well:
“You cannot do yoga. Yoga is your natural state. What you can do are yoga exercises, which may reveal to you where you are resisting your natural state. What is this natural state? Eternal, everlasting happiness: bliss.”
We are not talking about yoga asanas changing your chemical constitution and improving our mood and leveling out the extremes of your emotions. We are also not talking about how an improvement in physical health has an effect on the health of the mind and how this mutual reinforcement sustains a sense of well-being. These happen for sure, yet these are merely the outer layers. There is something more marvelous and sublime at work through the practice of yoga asanas or other methods like meditation or mantra. There is nothing occult about it. It is in fact quite logical.
With the practice of yoga asanas (poses), we master the mind (in yoga, we understand the mind to be a conglomeration of thoughts) through reuniting the mind and the body. We learn to stay present to ourselves through observing our breathing in poses whether these are easy or challenging, whether it is a pose we like or do not like. We learn to maintain an even mind in the face of external changes, independent of likes and dislikes. With continued practice in this way, we will realise for ourselves that our moods can be independent of external circumstances. Then we experience a sense of well-being that transcends external factors, which are often beyond our control anyway. It is not excitement, but a kind of deep pervasive joy. Some people call it inner peace. My teacher called it silence. The silence of a mind where the thoughts have been stilled.
It is encouraging when we say that yoga practices allow us to RETURN to our inner nature of happiness. “Yoga teaches us that happiness is always available to us. No matter what our circumstances.”, as Sally Kempton says in the heading in an article from the latest Yoga Journal on happiness. According to her, there are, in Sanskrit, 4 words for happiness: sukha, santosha, mudita, ananda – they refer to different depths of happiness and provide us with an idea of the path that we can take for ourselves on our return to our natural state.
Sukha: is the kind of happiness that comes from pleasant experience.
We all know how long this lasts! The length of time it takes to fill your mouth with enough chay kway teow to make you regret ordering it. Hahaha. Maybe two or three mouthfuls sometimes? Oops. We are all familiar with this.
Santosha: is contentment (read my earlier blog entry on “What do you contain”)
This is one of the prerequisites to Ashtanga yoga practice. Being happy in the containment of your present experience cultivates gratitude for all that is already available to you in the moment. This soothes our internal agitation that we need to pursue more and more things outside of ourselves to be happy which is a method doomed to failure as it leads to further agitation and further perceived needs.
Mudita: some call spiritual happiness. This is a spontaneous bubbling up of inner joy.
With contentment and gratitude comes a sense of calm – “exaltation, equanimity and the capacity to see beauty even in things we don’t ordinarily find beautiful, like sidewalk litter or fast-food hamburgers” as Kempton puts it in her article. I call this my “Naked Lunch moments”: the moment when I see the reality of that which is at the end of my fork, to steal a coinage from William S.Burroughs. You feel a sudden unity with all beings and a clear joy in that sense of belonging to such a miraculous creation.
Ananda: “the bliss that passeth understanding”
When we experience the fleeting sukha, we learn to practice santosha, then we experience mudita and we might get an inkling that a big fat happy bear hug of Ananda is imminent! This is what yogis ultimately aspire towards: when mudita fills our entire spectrum of experience, you get ananda, a state of bliss that we cannot comprehend right now with our untransformed mind. The delicious lure here is that this ananda is ALREADY within you. What you need to do is to peel away all the layers of conditioning (artificial artifices that we picked up from society as desperately primitive coping mechanisms) that you have acquired to return to this state. Yoga practices provide the tools to do this. Whether through asana, meditation, devotion, inquiry, or even better, a combination of these yoga practices, you stand a pretty good chance of reaching this ananda with diligent practice. There are so many who have tested these methods through personal practice and who have reclaimed their inner joy. (This is the reason why the yoga practices have survived for so long: those who travelled the course of the way to joy are the ones who pass on the methods to us.) This is why practising yoga makes you happier. This is why a good gauge of how you are progressing in your practice is how much happier you have become.
So what are you waiting for? Practise yoga. Be happy.
Thanks to KH for your question, namaste.
