The Practice of Postures
By Eddie Stern
Practically speaking, when it comes to trying to figure out who we are and what our purpose is, our body is an obvious and easy place to start. Easy because we can see our body, we can feel it, and we can put it into different shapes. Sometimes starting with our body can be as simple as sitting down in a cross-legged position and doing nothing but breathing and listening. As children, we played with our bodies very freely, moving about, putting ourselves into different three positions, standing on our shoulders or doing cartwheels—I remember standing on my head against a wall when I was five, just to turn upside down. My best friend in elementary school used to do backbends, out of the blue, that were advanced yoga poses—somehow they came naturally to him. Kids love to do backbends and spin around in circles. We express ourselves through our bodies and through movement, and movement wires our nervous system (neurons) and our brain. We are born with pretty much all of the neurons that our brains need to function, though it is true that we also grow some new neurons later in life. Our neurons begin to wire themselves to each other as we grow and develop. Each new movement that an infant learns to do creates a pathway in the brain, which also reflects how information is processed in the brain.¹ Our first movements include learning to lift our head and neck, roll over, crawl, and eventually walk. Many of these movements occur in yoga practice as well, and can help reinforce through our body how the brain processes information, which it does in the following directions:
• Back to front across the motor cortex, translating thought into action
• Up and down, from the bottom to the top of the brain, for emotional processing
• Side to side, through the corpus callosum, for Comprehension.
In yoga practices we find up and down and forward and backward movements in the sun salutations; in standing postures there are side-to-side movements; in seated poses and back-bending poses you also go up and down—when we decide that we need to look at our lives through a new lens, moving our bodies into new shapes will help to change our perspective on ourselves and life because we are directly using our bodies to influence the way we process incoming information; our worldview can easily be altered by putting ourselves into postures. Through neuroplasticity—or the ability of our nerves to wire together in a myriad of ways as we learn new things—we create pathways that lead us to have insights about our body, our emotions, our thought patterns, our relationships, and, most important, our sense of self. It’s more than likely that this is what the yogis did when they began experimenting with postures, and that they did it with innocence, curiosity, and sincerity.
Concentration does not mean screwing the mind into a fixed state of focus, and the practice of postures does not mean forcing the body into complicated poses: both are about achieving calmness and filling the mind with a natural state of goodness, uncovering a natural, underlying trait that has been covered up by too much thinking. Postures, when done in a calm manner, help us toward this goal, because the mind and
the body are not two separate things but one continuous process. The body, in yoga, is a manifestation of the mind. Our thoughts, feelings, and emotions are felt, held, and expressed through our bodies. We can see on someone’s face if they are happy or sad; we can see in someone’s posture whether they are feeling dejected or confident. Feelings and mental characteristics that we think of as existing in the mind exist equally in the body, just as two thousand years ago, mental states were assigned to organs and other tissues. Hippocrates is credited with developing the theory of the four humors, which, though rejected by modern medicine, is still sometimes used to describe psychological states (melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric, and sanguine). Both Ayurveda, the Indian science of medicine, and traditional Chinese medicine have similar theories. Organs, emotions, thought patterns, and temperament are interconnected. By working with our bodies, we work with the mind, heart, and emotions at the same time.
The practice of yoga postures, called asanas in Sanskrit, is found in yoga texts from as long as two thousand years ago. The word asana is made up of two parts: as, “to sit,” and ana,“breath.” To do an asana is to literally sit with your breath, or to sit in a special way and breathe. When you sit with your breath, you sit in awareness. While the universe is a mystery, our bodies are equally mysterious, so it’s natural for our body to be the first and most obvious place to begin an inward investigation into the great mystery of who we really are and where awareness exists within us.
This is an excerpt from the book One Simple Thing by Eddie Stern.
Eddie Stern is a yoga teacher, author, and lecturer from New York City. He is known for his multi-disciplinary approach to furthering education and access to yoga, as well as his teaching expertise in Ashtanga Yoga. He recently released his first solo book, One Simple Thing: A New Look at the Science of Yoga, which examines in clear and simple language the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms that make yoga an effective practice. He is also the creator of The Breathing App, which guides the user in a paced breathing exercise that balances the nervous system, helping to improve sleep, and reduce stress and anxiety.