Becoming More Aware

We are living in a new world that is going to continue to change. It must. What we, the most evolved beings ever to walk the face of this planet, have created is not sustainable. How has this happened? Why have we not known we were living out of harmony with the earth itself? You can certainly make a case for one of the reasons being a lack of awareness. There is a loud call for everyone to become more aware of the impact of their choices, habits, and the things they are doing on and to the planet, to others, and on ourselves.

It’s crucial to our survival that we increase our awareness, that we increase our ability to notice when things are out of balance and to simply be more present in our life. Being more aware is intimately connected to raising the level of consciousness on the entire planet! I’m talking about being more aware of not only what we see or experience but also the just as powerful unseen energies and forces that are all around us whether we acknowledge them or not. 

I wanna share a little about my journey to becoming more aware. 

When yoga found me more than 20 years ago, I was in the best physical shape of my life. Even after having two children! I made a point of getting my body back as soon as I could after being pregnant and it bounced back quickly. I worked out 3x or more a week lifting weights, walked about 15 miles a week and ran around behind two little boys.  I’ve always been active. I was a jock growing up and loved playing sports and competing with boys if possible! I’ve always thought it was important to be fit and watch what you eat especially if you are mixing in some alcohol and partying which, and I don’t think i’m alone here, was my primary means of socializing. In fact I'm sure I'm not alone in that then or now.  If you did not drink and party you were and are considered an oddball and of course there’s always the excuse that there’s nothing else to do anyway.

Working out was the primary way I justified my partying, and ultimately helped my body process my excesses. So it was a good habit I’m glad I developed. 

You could definitely say I was very aware of my body and how to use it physically. But I was just as aware of how my body looked and how I could get attention using it. It seems our society demands that we place a high premium on getting attention and many people spend most of their days doing just that on social media. So society encourages us and our ego absolutely loves all that attention and gets hooked on it. It’s almost like a drug, the more you get the more you want. I’m sure many of you know how to use your body to get attention, and hopefully you also know that feeding that need for attention will ultimately not make you happy. The ego is running that show and it may or may not end well. That’s been my personal experience so I share it with you. I’ll talk more about body image and attachment in another show so please stay tuned. 

But let me get back to becoming more aware. So I brought a certain level of awareness of my body to yoga as a new student. Because I was strong and aware in and of my body, I started out being able to do things in class that other people had been working on for a long time. And I was no spring chicken! I’ve always been flexible and even did yoga poses as a child. When I played girls softball they actually called me “stretch”!! It’s kinda funny now, but they did! That’s a true story! Anyway, I caught on quickly because I’m very observant and detail oriented already and I practiced as much as I could. Oh, and I looked good in yoga clothes which was also very important right? We certainly get that message these days. But it’s not right and that is actually keeping people from getting on the mat. And that’s not yoga. It’s not about what you are wearing. When I taught my qualifying class to become a yoga teacher, we had to wear all white baggy clothing. But I didn’t get the message that that was sending for a long time. I was about to take a long journey that continues to this day of becoming more aware of just how firmly attached to my body and the experience it’s having and how it looks and what it can do, I was. Slowly but surely, a teaching I first heard at the ashram began to repeat in my head and in my classes, “you are not the body” began to, at a snail's pace, mean something to me. 

This identification with the body is something yoga makes a point of talking about. I guess you could actually call it an over identification with the body, this idea that the body is who you are. Do you really think you are your body and that when it dies, that’s the end of you? It’s ok if you do but most of the time what I find is that people haven’t actually thought that much about it and definitely not in depth. For me, the body is like your car for your soul, consciousness or awareness. I will admit I do like driving a nice car and so I do take good care of my body from what I consume on all levels to exceptional self love routines. Yes, I could call it self care but what I’m focused on is self love so I call them self love practices. Many of us have heard an enormous amount about self care and why we should be doing more of it and I certainly have suggested ayurveda practices that could fall into that category.  But a lot of what I suggest is mostly aimed at restoring balance and harmony to the system which just makes life more pleasant. And aren’t we choosing pleasant for the kinds of experiences we want to have? We could be if we were more aware.

Yoga can provide endless opportunities to become more aware or to go deeper with an awareness you may already have and allow it to expand it into something new. It is truly an extraordinary beautifully designed system that starts out exactly where we are most identified which for 99% of us is with our body. It meets us right where we are in this body. It creates experiences with the body through asana practice that most definitely create more awareness of the body and how tight it is! One of my favorite teachers says, Body is not tight. Mind is tight.” Hmm. Give that one some thought. It may also make us more aware of how strong we are along with how well we listen and follow directions! Through asana practice we become more aware. More aware of many things depending on who we are, our lifestyle and habits, and beliefs and choices. In a yoga class, we experience many different sensations right? That is how the body communicates with you, through sensation. So each time you get on the mat, you are becoming more aware of different holding patterns and stuck energies in your body based on the sensations the body is sharing with you.  The sensations are a kind of information the body is offering you. How you respond is another opportunity to become more aware of your own patterns and how you respond to different kinds of information like pain, for instance. Do you back off or push harder? Do you give up or work that much harder when something is challenging? So the opportunities for becoming more aware truly are as endless as you are conscious of them.  

Whether you ever progress beyond the merely physical aspect of yoga, you will still have been well served so don’t get me wrong. But the way the poses and practices are designed is meant to address far more than your physical experience. So they certainly address your physical experience extremely well. Proper practice is absolutely about becoming more aware on any of a wide range of levels. However, Yoga is not exercise and is not meant to be used as such exclusively. But for many students, yoga is just another workout option, another way to work on their attachment to the body and how it looks and what it can do. Or they could use it as a way to balance out their excesses in food and alcohol like I did for a while. It’s not wrong to only use yoga for exercise so please don’t misunderstand me. The truth is it offering you so much more and until you become aware of this, you may not take advantage of it. Imagine that the time you set aside for yourself from your busy day provided appropriate conditioning for, not just the body, but also the mind and soul. What else are you doing that does that? Bringing a new awareness to the mat will reward you in ways you never imagined! There is one variable that can make a huge difference and that is the teacher. 

There are a plethora of yoga teachers out there with widely ranging understandings, skills and talents. So choosing a teacher instead of a class may be a better idea. Look for a teacher with at least 5 years of consistent teaching experience or get a referral from a trusted friend for a teacher they found stimulating. As you become more aware in your practice or as you pay a different kind of attention in your pratice, you will appreciate the differences in teachers much more. I trained teachers for many years and new teachers would often tell me they had never heard of the yoga sutras, didn’t know what yoga nidra was and never meditated on top of, and this was really bizarre to me, they never did any practice teaching. Even though they were training to be a yoga teacher, they did not practice teach in their training. That kind of seems mandatory to me. How will you know if what you are saying is understood by students if you have none? Makes no sense of any kind to me but oh well. This is one of the reasons I created and taught my own yoga certification program. So that I knew they were receiving more than just practicing asanas for 200 hours. Yoga teaches us to become more aware of the body through the asana practice. Some of us may feel we are already highly aware of the body due to pain, injury, imbalance or disease. But I would suggest you are aware of the pain, not the body. That’s not the same. I promise the body shared some information with you at some point about whatever is going on. And if you were paying closer attention to the body, or were more aware of the body, you wouldn’t have missed it but you still could have swept in under the rug and did nothing which doesn’t demonstrate to me that you value the information you are receiving. 

A consistent practice with a well trained teacher will also teach you to invite the breath into the practice. I can’t begin to tell you how becoming more aware of your breath will change your life. It has the potential to increase your vitality and improve your health on all levels.  As you integrate all this new input into your body and mind and clear out the old patterns, unprocessed experiences and undigested or unexpressed thoughts and feelings, you naturally become more aware. Yoga provides us countless opportunities to become more aware. It’s easy to see how this new level of awareness would benefit you.

I am still becoming more aware of how to cultivate a knowing, loving, kind relationship with my body. I spent a lot of time forcing my body to practice a certain way, eat a certain way, breathe and meditate a certain way, and talk a certain way. At times, I pushed beyond what felt good in my physical practice to the point of injury. AND I also broke my back in two places which actually developed more awareness of the body than anything else so far.

I hope you have a better idea of how your everyday life is literally a tool to help you become more aware. And yoga is a great way to build that awareness.

This blog is truly a labor of love for me and the realization of a goal I set for myself long ago. If I can help one person with these words, that means more to me than anything else. Service or seva in yoga, is not separate from life itself and I’m very grateful for this opportunity to make a positive contribution to your day.