Power of meditation

Quiet moment at the National Arboretum (Photo credit: Yantar Yoga)

Meditation is often overlooked as an integral part of yoga. Certainly stilling the body and mind is not as instagramable as a flashy asana pose. But for anyone who tried meditation it’s obvious that sitting still and quieting down the internal chatter is no easier than whatever physical pose you find most challenging. The eight limbs of yoga point to meditation, or dhyāna, as a path toward self-knowledge. It makes our practice more holistic and complete.

There is a common misperception, especially among professionally-driven and constantly busy urbanites, that meditation is “doing nothing,” essentially just wasted time. Au contraire! When you’re meditating, you’re doing a whole lot - a serious task of lowering your brain wave frequency from the beta of usual alertness and cognition to either alpha associated with relaxation and visualization or theta, the state of meditation where intuition takes over conscious thought.

It’s not necessarily the case that we stop thinking when we meditate. Those pesky thoughts have their way of inserting themselves even into the most calming of states. The trick is not to dwell on them, picture thoughts as images on the screen or clouds passing across the clear sky. Acknowledge them, but don’t become attached, let them go.

When yoga first started, there was only one asana pose: sitting comfortably so that one could mediate for long periods of time. No super strength or flexibility required. All the other yoga poses evolved over time simply as a method of keeping the vehicle - body - supple and ready to serve the greater goal: cessation of the fluctuations of the mind, as Patanjali put it.

That is the essence of yoga, in the mind/heart as much as in the body. So next time you tell yourself you are “too busy” to meditate, that you’d rather drown the internal chatter in physical exercise than mental and spiritual one, think again. Or rather don’t think. Make meditation a habit just like the physical part of your practice and after a while you’ll find them inseparable and mutually reinforcing.