How Mindful Yoga Helps

Mindfulness practice is the heart of Yoga. One of the fundamental principles of Yoga is to learn to work with your mind while you work with your body.

To be mindful means to observe and become aware of what happens as you go through life, whether in a controlled environment such as a Yoga pose, or out in your daily life.

When you are mindful during a Yoga pose, you are cultivating the ability to be mindful while engaging in an activity. This is great practice for responding mindfully in the greater contexts of life.

What follows is a comparison between identical outer circumstances, but with different inner awareness.

Afternoon Yoga with the Untrained Mind

You’re in a boardroom at work, following the guidance of a Yoga teacher for a chair yoga session. This sounded like a good idea when you signed up, but today is a busy day. You’re restlessly hoping it ends quickly. You want to get back to work. It’s the middle of the afternoon, so you’re also tired.

As instructed, you’ve been holding your arms up over your head for a while now. Your mind wanders. The teacher speaks and you hear one word out of ten. All you know is you’re still supposed to have your arms up, but they’re getting tired. You want more than anything in this moment to put your arms down and get a coffee. You’ve got other things on your mind. Things that have to be done before you leave work today.

Your thoughts are louder than the teacher’s voice is, though you’re not quite sure what they are.

Other people in the boardroom put their arms down. You release your arms. Glad that’s over.

A sense of rushing is all you feel and it moves you to get up. Smiling at the teacher, you nod and back quietly out of the room.

As you leave the boardroom dull frustration comes over you. That felt like a waste of time. Why? It seemed like a good idea, you had high hopes that you’d come away feeling relaxed, but you found yourself frustrated instead.

Afternoon Yoga with Mindfulness

You’re in a boardroom at work, following the guidance of a Yoga teacher for a chair yoga session. This sounded like a good idea when you signed up, but today is a busy day. You’re restlessly hoping it ends quickly. You want to get back to work. It’s the middle of the afternoon, so you’re also tired.

As instructed, you’ve been holding your arms up over your head for a while now. Your mind wanders. The teacher speaks and you hear one word out of ten. All you know is you’re still supposed to have your arms up, but they’re getting tired. You want more than anything in this moment to put your arms down and get a coffee. You’ve got other things on your mind. Things that have to be done before you leave work today.

You look objectively at your situation. Without judging yourself harshly, you realize that you’re tired and feeling moved by a sense of concern.

You know you won’t enjoy the class or benefit if you fail to be present. You bring your attention to your breathing and direct your focus to take in the teacher’s voice. You decide to settle into your seat and relax.

You listen to the teacher and feel into your arms again. The body relaxes some.

You notice that you’re worrying. Two items, in particular, have to be addressed by end of day. You make a mental note of those two things. You feel clarity.  

You direct your attention back to your body and your breath. The mind settles again.

The teacher asks you to become curious about the sensations in your arms. You feel into the arms. You hadn’t realized how good the stretch feels in your forearms. There was tension there from all of the time on the keyboard. Feeling that one good stretch relaxes the body as a whole. It’s like you’ve hit a reset button internally.

Before getting up from your chair you take another deep mindful breath. You rest your mind and body for just a few seconds, making a mental note of releasing the need to rush.

You are feeling focused on next steps for the day. There are two things to get to before you leave work. They feel more doable now that your body is relaxed and your mind feels clearer and more awake.

Rather than frustration, you feel a calm resolve to move on with your day. Taking another deep breath, you start the next task while recognizing that you’ve actually taken a healthy break.

Reactive Moments or Mindful Moments

The external situation in both scenarios is the same. What changed was your inner dialogue and your own ability to self-direct, given the mindful awareness of what was happening as it happened.

In the first scenario, the inner dialogue and emotions created the external effect of rushing, confusion, and failure. In the second scenario, attention was given to the inner dialogue and emotions, and you worked with what was happening.

Mindful Yoga & Mindfulness Change Outcomes

Imagine how the same process affects communication with others. When you’re aware of your own internal objections and categorizations, you are able to work with your own biases and habits of mind.

When you’re actually aware of what is happening outside of you, you are able to be present and interact with what is happening effectively rather than moving on autopilot.

Life itself may not change. Circumstances may remain as they are. However, when you have the ability to attend to the very same things differently, you create different relationships with people and with tasks.

The ability to change the relationships we create is one skill practiced in mindfulness training and mindful Yoga.