January 19, 2024
Broken Record
Elizabeth Brass
Certified Senior Iyengar Yoga Teacher & Yoga Therapist (IAYT)
It's the small progressions in ourselves that often go unseen.
By not recognizing our own progress, it's easy to become frustrated.
The positive changes in our posture, in our energy, in our outlook over time are impossible to measure.
Because we can't measure the transformations that occur in us from our yoga practice, they go under valued.
It's only the middle of January and the push/pull has begun. The push of the outer world, calling us to be engaged in work and the pull of the inner world calling us activities that nourish our peace of mind.
Duality is familiar to yoga practitioners because our yoga tradition is based in a dualistic belief system, Sāmkhya, and the self/world dualism has been explored by philosophers from aroud the world. Every person who has even learned yoga asana learns about their body and mind and explores the relationship between the two. For example, when we move fast, we notice how we mentally feel opposed to when we slow down. Speeding up, we may feel relaxed and focused and when we slow down, bored or anxious. Or it could also be the other way around? We notice that our body gives us mental signals and that our thoughts affect how we feel physically. The duality of the body/mind relationship into light.
What can be a turn off is when we don't like what we see in ourselves. Years ago, I was taking a yoga workshop with a teacher with whom I had studied before. I had loved his teaching the first time and was looking forward to learning from him again. I was expecting a repeated experience and was blindsided when he taught completely differently (or so it seemed to me). I became impatient, waiting for class to return to what I wanted, and then when it didn't, anger started to rise.
With some distance to the experience, I began to wonder what had happened to me? I spoke to others who had been at both workshops, and they confirmed that this workshop was different but no one reacted the way I did. Yoga texts write about samskaras, translated as mental impressions or habit patterns that each of us carry in our unconscious. When I started yoga, I learned the image of grooves on a record to understand samskaras. Each of us has our unique grooves that make-up the music of our life and if we don't understand the roots of our samskaras, our life becomes like a broken record, on repeat. Clearly, the workshop experience had touched in me deep samskaras because of my strong reaction! I wanted the world (at the time of the workshop) to go one way and when it didn't, my reaction of impatience and anger blinded and deafened me from the teacher and from being present with myself.
I'm not proud of my reaction, but remember it today when I feel and see the push and pull of the world playing out. I try to step back, see that I'm seeing red, and, as we yoga practitioners do, look for balance, for equanimity, where there is none.
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