Yoga Is NOT the Absence of Mind 😵‍💫🧠

Before we start, in my latest reel, my caption below read - "Torque is cheap". If you didn't get that absolute humdinger of a pun. The issue is with you not me. That may have been one of my proudest moments 😏. Anyway. Onto Philosophy Friday. This won't take long.

I hear a lot in the yoga world that yoga is about creating some kind of absence of mind, and I think much of this comes from Patanjali’s famous opening definition of yoga, often translated as the stilling or cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.

But like so many things in yoga, if you take one line, translate it into English and remove everything around it, you can make it mean almost anything you want 🧐

You really have to read the rest of the Yoga Sutras, and probably have a much more global understanding of the philosophy, before you begin to understand what Patanjali might actually be getting at.

Yoga isn’t against the mind. Man is against the mind 🧠😵‍💫🤷🏾‍♂️

And I think there’s a difference.

The mind isn’t something to be fought, it’s something to be understood, and that is a completely different mindset. Excuse the pun for once that wasn't intentional.

If we take the yogic understanding of mind, memory and imagination are part of it, and these aren’t terrible things that we need to somehow spiritually transcend.

When I sit down with Zachary (my 6 year old) and we laugh about something he did when he was a baby, or something ridiculous he did when he was little, that’s memory. When we sit there imagining what we’re going to do next, where we might go or what game we might play, that’s imagination. So the very mind that has somehow been made into this great spiritual nemesis is also responsible for creating so much of the joy in our lives. Of course, there is another side to it.

The same mind that allows me to remember something beautiful can remember something painful, and the same imagination that allows me to think about something exciting in the future can also imagine 47 things that might go horribly wrong.

And this is the part of the mind that we seem so desperate to fight. But you can’t create a disconnect with something that is part of you and call that yoga. Surely the whole point is integration (it is by the way). It’s becoming aware of these unconscious movements of the mind without immediately being dragged along by every single one of them.

And here’s the irony. The more desperately you try not to think about something, the more attention you can end up giving it. You don’t have to fight the mind. You just let it do it's thing.

This is why I always say that the simplest form of meditation you can possibly do is just to sit down and let things be as they are. I normally put on some of the Indian subcontinent music that you often hear in my classes 🎶🪈, although obviously you don’t have to do that, and I sit. If I start thinking about dinner, I think about dinner. If I start thinking about work, that’s fine too. If Laura pops into my head, I don’t suddenly get irritated with myself because I’ve failed at meditation. I just try to notice it and let it pass.

And over time, I think that has helped me understand myself, and probably understand yoga, far more than trying to achieve some imaginary state where there’s absolutely nothing going on inside my head. And just a note, guided meditation is still use of the mind. Just 2 sides of the same coin. Once the guidance is over, the "bad" side of the mind still goes into overdrive.

There’s an old metaphor that appears in the Sufi tradition that has been used time and time again, where thoughts are compared to clouds passing through the sky. Clouds come and clouds go, but we can become so preoccupied with watching every individual cloud that we forget about the enormous sky that is there all along.

Maybe that’s a better way to understand the mind. You don’t need to get rid of the clouds (the frustration that is the mind). The art is to not fight them. Dance in the rain as the sufis would say. Or even as I imagine Nietzsche would say.

And if your mind tells you that you can’t do something, perhaps you don’t need to immediately fight that either. If it tells you that you can’t do a headstand, it might be limiting you, protecting you or, at times be making a perfectly reasonable assessment of your situation.

I know that isn’t what people want to hear. We have become obsessed not just in yoga, with the idea that every doubtful thought must be overcome, as though the mind is always the enemy and proving it wrong is always personal growth. But understanding the mind also means becoming curious about why it is saying what it is saying, and learning when to challenge it, when to reassure it and, occasionally, when to admit that it might have a point.

I personally don't see yoga as the absence of mind. To me it's the absence of a constant war with it.

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Namaskar - Eternal Seeker

Zahir Akram

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