When to Consciously & Intuitively Let Go of Techniques
Concentration is the narrowing of focus on the object of attention. While you are holding the asana, you practice directed, deliberate attention, learning how to pull together scattered attention into a single point within the body. Your energy follows your attention, and this creates powerful concentration. As you practice deliberate, directed, focused attention, you are simultaneously bringing energy into the area where sensation, tension, or resistance appears.
Your energy is like the light of consciousness. When you bring this light into the darkness of an energy block, tension, or an “edge” in the body, the darkness begins to disappear, not as a result of force, but as a result of awareness meeting what was previously unconscious. This is the shift from a mind that engages the edge through fight or flight interaction into responsive, co-creative interaction between body and mind.
While practicing asana in this way, you are creating a shift from the unconscious, habitual way of reacting on the edge to a deliberate way of co-creative, responsive interaction. This is the shift from unconscious, conflict-creating interaction between body and mind into subconscious, co-creative interaction.
This shift from reaction to response, and from unconscious to conscious, creates the foundation for the practice to move from concentration, Dharana, into meditation, Dhyana. Ordinarily, those who practice Hatha Yoga for concentration focus on a flame or a dot on a board. That is not the same as practicing concentration within the living experience of the body, where the entire body-mind becomes the field of awareness.
Convergent focus is like bringing the scattered rays of the sun into focus through a convex glass that can burn cotton. Similarly, when you learn to focus your scattered attention and the energy that comes with it, this focus can dissolve tension. When you bring the energy of consciousness to the darkness of the edge that appears in the body, the energy does not engage in fight or flight reaction. As the light approaches the darkness, the darkness simply receives.
On the contrary, when yoga is practiced as a physical discipline, the ego-mind engages in fight or flight interaction on the edge, which means that the edge is not only in the body, it is in the “edgy” ego-mind. Because the ego-mind sees the edge through the self-image and body image, it engages in fight or flight interaction with its own creation in the body.
Your ego-mind focuses on the outer world of material objects. When it faces an edge in the body, it is focusing on the external, materialized expression of that edge. When someone or something triggers these edgy memories, the ego-mind reacts to the person who is triggering the memory.
Whenever you are reacting from memory, it carries a narrow focus on objects of attraction to pleasurable memories or fear of painful memories. The majority of the time, almost 95 percent of your interaction with the outer world is lived within an extremely narrow focus.
Fear or addiction creates this narrowing, closing down the spaciousness of perception so that it becomes like looking at the world through a keyhole. When your mind is focused on disturbance created by fear or attachment, the rest of your brain shuts down from the positive, creative options that are available, and this is when you are functioning in survival mode through stress hormones, engaged in fight, flight, or freeze.
This is called the materialistic view of life, where you are functioning through the first three survival centers in the body, and the subconscious interaction between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems becomes imbalanced. In contrast, in this practice, you are learning how to meet the edge consciously.
The Art of Dynamic Stillness
After the completion of the asana, the body comes into stillness, and attention is no longer required to hold the posture. Here, the practice shifts from focusing to releasing focus. It is the shift from convergent to divergent awareness, from centripetal to centrifugal movement.
Centripetal focus is the single-minded, narrow focus on material objects that is used in everyday activity, where attention is directed outward toward what is seen. In the first part of the practice, this focusing is cultivated consciously. In the second part, you are learning how to allow that focus to dissolve.
As attention is no longer held on an object, awareness begins to return to its source. You move from the seen to the Seer, from the outer body to the inner body, from doing into non-doing Being. You are not creating this shift through effort, you are allowing it by no longer holding attention in a fixed position.
You are learning how to move from focusing on form to resting in formless Being. This is experienced as a continuous shifting from object to subject, from outer to inner, from the seen to the Seer, from the effect to the cause, from Shakti energy to Shiva consciousness.
Spiritual Anatomy: Outer vs. Inner Focus
The more you focus on the outer, material world of objects, the more you find yourself in body-mind conflict. This is what we call living on the material plane through beta brain waves. The more you live in the external world of objects, the more you create body-mind conflict and operate on the survival level through adrenal-draining hormones.
The first three chakras represent the subconscious autonomic system of polarity, functioning through the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. As human beings, you are born with a subconscious inner body, a self-conscious ego-mind, and a super-conscious Divine potential. The self-conscious ego-mind evolves from the subconscious polarity, yet separates itself by dividing co-creative polarity into self-conscious, conflict-creating duality.
The self-conscious has the freedom to choose, and when it chooses one side of polarity, it creates fear of the other. This is the evolutionary function of the ego-mind. This new mental faculty of reason, logic, imagination, memory, projection, and creativity allows human beings to explore their potential in the outer world through the dimension of time, and this represents a transitional phase between subconscious experience and the super-conscious realization of Oneness.
During deep sleep, you withdraw the ego-mind and return to the subconscious body, restoring balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. When you wake up, the ego-mind resumes its activity, and you return to habitual patterns of interaction in the outer world. The Posture of Consciousness opens the door to consciously explore the super-conscious Divine potential, creating a shift from the outer world of objective focus into the inner world of subjective, witnessing Presence.
The more you keep narrowing your focus on people, places, and things in the outer world, the less you are able to feel the inner world of energy that manifests through your body, and this creates body-mind conflict. Human beings have evolved with strong identification with the thinking mind, making great advances in the outer world, yet this one-sided focus prevents the restoration of balance between creation and the Creator within.
The Seer sits behind the five senses. When identification shifts into the ego-mind, the Seer perceives through reactive memory, and it loses the ability to see reality as it is, instead seeing through a constructed self-image that lives in separation from the Being that I AM. Every reaction reinforces this separation, not only from what is present, but from the Presence that manifests through the body.
In reality, the Seer is not separate from the Seen. They function in co-creative interaction, just as the sympathetic Being is not separate from the parasympathetic energy. This reflects the deeper unity of polarity, which is the direct extension of the unified state of super-conscious Being that I AM, symbolized as Ardhanarishwar Shiva, the integration of male and female within a unified field of consciousness.
The Two Parts is the Experience of Oneness
Combining Asana and Dynamic Stillness opens the door for exploring the super-conscious Divine potential, creating a shift from the outer world of objective focus into the inner world of subjective, witnessing Presence within, which is the movement from the outer material body of creation into the inner non-material state of Being that I AM.
While you are holding the asana, you are developing skillful action. This is the meaning of what is said in the Bhagavad Gita, “Yoga is skill in action.” This skill is cultivated through your interaction with sensation, effort, and the edge that appears in the body, where you are practicing how to convert tension into relaxation, not by withdrawing from the experience, but by learning how to meet it consciously. Ordinarily, when people practice yoga postures as a physical discipline, they are attacking tension with tension through fight or flight reaction.
This is why, in Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga, the practice of concentration precedes meditation. In this first stage of the practice, you are bringing the body-mind from conflict-creating interaction into co-creative interaction, which is the shift from unconscious duality to subconscious polarity. This polarity is the most essential preliminary step to enter into the unifying experience of Oneness that yoga is. Polarity is the direct extension of the unified state of super-conscious Being that I AM, therefore polarity is active unity, and unity is inactive polarity.
Once the asana is complete and the body comes into stillness, you learn to move from co-creative, responsive interaction into the integrated experience of Oneness. The effort that was required to bring attention into focus begins to dissolve, and awareness is no longer directed toward an object. Thus, I AM Yoga® follows Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, where in physical discipline the practices of pratyahara, dharana, and dhyana are often approached as separate parts, while in this practice they are experienced as a continuous movement through the energetic connection among the body, mind, heart, and deeper awareness.
Practicing in this way develops skillful action that extends beyond the mat into your life, where the consciousness that you cultivate while holding the posture becomes available in your relationships, your work, and your interaction with the world. This skill helps you move from conflict-creating duality to polarity, restoring harmonious interaction in your life, while you are simultaneously cultivating the conscious ability to meet external challenges without falling into habitual reaction.
This is why I say, “If yoga doesn’t change your life, it is not yoga. If it only changes your body, it is just exercise.”