Welcoming your thoughts as beloved friends.
Welcoming your thoughts as beloved friends.
BY: Clara Lazaroff
Most meditation advice tells us that our thoughts and emotions are unwelcome and undesired intruders in the meditative space. We are told that the mind is a “chattering monkey”, or to visualize our thoughts as clouds gently floating away. What if, instead, we allowed our thoughts and emotions into the meditative space as beloved friends? What if we welcomed them into our soft inner body, and listened deeply? Would that be considered meditation? In somatic therapy it is!
“Only dead people have quiet minds” – Bjorn Natthiko
It can be a long bridge between our busy, big city lives and a meditative mind. We spend much of our day immersed in manomaya kosha (the mental/emotional body). Through the brilliance of manomaya kosha we decipher how to respond appropriately to the world around us. Our breath and anatomy, wisdom and bliss bodies are also always recalibrating to the here and now so we can safely navigate the world. Then suddenly, in the yoga room, we expect the mind to suddenly float away like a cloud.
Picture this: You had a terrible day at work. You get into a fight with your boss. You are so excited to get to your favorite yoga class to chill out. You roll out your mat and sit on your folded blanket, ready to listen to your breath….except all you can hear is your anger, you just can’t find your slow, resourceful, breath. You have a few choices on how to deal with this:
Option 1 : Keep trying to dispel your anger, telling yourself over and over to calm down.
Option 2 : Spend all of class, and possibly the rest of the evening, having an angry conversation with your boss inside your head.
Option 3: Welcome your here and now, just as it is.
Next time your thoughts are louder than your breath or your asana, try this manomaya kosha integration. Your stillness exists on the other side.
As you soften your orientation towards welcoming thoughts and emotions, don’t put an artificial time limit or judge yourself about how long this process takes. Even starting over starting over shows that you are in a state of awareness.
Welcome + Listen: Listen to yourself tell the story. This story is your here and now. This is already Dharana (concentration), which directly leads into Dhyana (meditation).
Clarify + Own : “I am frustrated because it is important to me that my ideas are respected” (Instead of “he made me mad, what a jerk). Boil the story down to a single sentence. Use an I at the beginning of the sentence to own how you feel.
Find + Breathe it: Where do you feel the emotion in your body? What does that part of your body feel? As you give it more space in your body, you may find your breath deepening. Nice job, you have moved from mind to body to breath, further into alignment of the wisdom from each kosha.
Even as your asana unwinds and grounds you, you will most likely have to repeat this cycle again. Consider it a conversation with your beloved. Invite your anger into class to do asana with you. You can even thank your anger for helping you to set a boundary. How is your anger supporting you?
Use your yoga practice to improve your mind-body connection instead of striving for an elusive state of stillness. In your elegantly designed system, all the koshas can be doors into your meditation. Welcome your whole beloved, wise self back onto your mat.
Please think of this blog as a conversation! I would love to hear about your experiences with this approach. Email me at Claralaz@gmail.com
