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Why Asana Practice in Yoga? (Integrating lessons from Chennai).






Yoga is meant to be about the mind, meant to be a spiritual practice, a way to know the true self & therefore the universe, truth and ultimately allow us to feel truly happy by doing so. So the question is: What does a physical body practice have to do with any of that? 

Sometimes, I still question it myself. As I go through my Ashtanga practice sequence of postures. I sometimes wonder, am I really bringing myself closer to knowing myself, or knowing what I consider as god, or doing anything more than just getting a bit more flexible and a bit stronger? I do feel at least I am ´´cleansing the system´´ as I compress and twist the internal organs, as I breath conscious ujjayi with lengthy exhale breaths-I feel yes I could agree this breath internally heats and then expels toxins-both physical and mental malas/toxins- yes it makes sense to me. I can agree that I am physically becoming healthier and I know this too impacts the quality of my thoughts. I can understand that my microbiome is impacted by the vagal nerve and altering the gut/brain interaction really does change how I feel and think. So there is a mental impact there from this alone, but is there more? 

Yoga philosophy (refering to interpretations of Patanjali) says that Asana practice has 2 reasons:

1. That as we make our body healthy we avoid that it is a distraction to the progress on the path to knowing the true self/consciousness. A simple example is how much easier meditation is when you do not have pain in your body- Asana quite literally prepares us for sitting in deep meditation for longer periods of time.

2.Asana practice is also directly impacting the inward journey towards the true self/consciousness -because of the relationship of the breath and body and the breath and the mind. The breath both influences the body heart rate ect, and the mind- when we are stressed the breath is influenced. There is a two way interaction, and so the breath being unified with both it is logical to assume than that through that the mind and body influence each other (mind-breath-body). I think in a simple way we can agree that we experience this as true -after movement with the breath our mind normally feels calmer & has more clarity.

Now let's not confuse that the mind is consciousness, but the mind is powered by consciousness. As we work on the mind, it is like a window that we clean and we can see consciousness, or our real self in other words. There is much more to say on this topic- on the relationship between mind and consciousness, and I will dive into this in another post. 

So  we have now seen that  to work on the body in asana serves first to stop it from distracting us and second to actually positively impact the mind in a way which begins the work of cleaning the mind in order to connect with our true self-consciousness. Now there are 8 limbs of yoga, asana is only one, so the work to clean the mind is not yet complete, and this we will see in future posts.


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