You are probably using your computer to perform all kinds of tasks like writing, calculating, communicating, getting informed, managing pictures, videos, and music, etc. so can you imagine what a loss it is for those who only use it to send and receive emails?
Well, as a matter of fact, there is a similar situation of wasted potential and underuse affecting Yoga in the western world!
Indeed, only a minority of practitioners know and properly appreciate this fantastic spiritual discipline from India, while most only use it to “get in shape”, which is roughly a tenth of all the blessings Yoga normally has to offer.
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Connecting things together
Yoga is more than just a practice for well-being, health, and relaxation. To understand Yoga, we need to look at its etymology. Yoga is Sanskrit for “Union.”
Union joins two elements to work together, creating something greater than the sum of their parts. Yoga strives for union, connecting things together. But what does it aim to connect?
It aims to connect you.
Your awareness stands apart from the rest of the universe, other beings, and even your subconscious mind.
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Why is this?
Humanity’s willpower is too weak and immature to free itself from the fascination with its own thoughts. This phenomenon is recent in human evolution.
Hypnotized by its thoughts, willpower dreams of life as a reflection, an echo of reality. It dreams of a story where the self stands supreme as a separate being.
A dysfunctional mind’s dormant awareness separates the subject (you) from the object (everything else).
Have you ever wondered why there is no cognition or sense of “you” in deep sleep? Deprived of anything to know, the subject cannot hold itself together. It disappears.
Yourself only exists when a “hypnotic” cognitive process disturbs your awakened state of consciousness. This process separates the subject from the object through fantasy.
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Awakening Through Yoga
Yoga was created to wake you from that state of hypnosis. It binds the subject and object separated by cognition and cleanses your consciousness from your ego. This joins you with the universe, with the Whole.
By the way, the Latin word for “to bind” is the root of the word “religion.” Religion and Yoga are legacies from wise ancestors. They help us restore the natural bond between individual consciousness and the consciousness of the Whole.
We can spoil these legacies by thinking religion is the opium of the masses or Yoga is just a weird gym exercise. However, the essence of these spiritual paths holds the power to release you from the illusion of being a separate being. This self is riddled with fear, pride, greed, hatred, anger, jealousy, lies, and other troubles. Religions have called these “sins” that the ego will never be cured of, as they are consubstantial to it.
Yoga helps you see the importance of ending the dysfunctional egocentrism of your mind. It offers the opportunity to connect your individual consciousness to the Awareness of the Whole.
Be the wave and the ocean!
Western Yoga
For your initiation into the world of Yoga, a discipline that is complex and exotic, why don’t you try really simple methods designed by westerners for westerners?
Yoga without poses
Philippe de Méric, a Yoga pioneer in France, designed “Yoga without poses.” This extremely easy form of Yoga relieves stress using simple exercises involving contraction, relaxation, and steady, controlled breathing.
This approach is interesting because it comes from a Western Yoga master. He strove to remove all the specifically Indian parts of Indian Hatha Yoga. This left the essence that meets the universal need for inner acquisition, enlightenment, and self-transformation.
According to him, Indian Hatha Yoga was designed for people very different from modern Westerners. They have different metaphysical concerns, mindsets, and attitudes toward their bodies.
Although adapting to Indian Hatha Yoga is possible, he designed “Yoga without poses” to free us from pointless efforts to adapt.
The word “asana” means “easy, comfortable, stable, pleasant.” The Yoga Sutra confirms this etymology, teaching us that “the pose becomes perfect whenever any effort to adopt it disappears.”
Therefore, Westerners should not perform what could be seen as feats of acrobatics. Instead, they should choose Yoga poses among natural and usual ways to stand.
The greatest teachings of “Yoga without poses” explain how to stand up, control tension, breathe, and enhance awareness.
Standing up
Instead of doing an hour of Yoga and then returning to bad habits, focus on Yoga that fits daily life. This kind of Yoga aims to change these bad habits precisely.
For example, one of our most common activities is standing up. However, no one ever teaches us how to do it properly.
How should you stand up? Simply by aligning your legs, torso, neck, and head within a balanced, almost vertical plane. The goal is to allocate effort from muscles and tendons harmoniously, reducing their effort to a minimum.
This is the point of Hatha Yoga: avoid any contraction in a pose and strive to be as natural as possible.
We are focusing not on sitting poses but on something more universal: standing up.
How to Stand Up Correctly
To stand up well, the vertical axis running through the body must land between your feet, which should be slightly apart and parallel.
Keep your legs straight and your pelvis naturally tilted without contracting or slackening the backside and abdominal muscles. Your spine should be as straight as possible, relaxing the muscles in your rib cage. Keep your arms and shoulders loose, with your head in a natural position.
This might seem simple and obvious. However, several bad habits and misconceptions have disturbed this ideal position over the centuries.
For instance, many people believe that sticking out your chest is healthy, but the opposite is true.
Do not extend your chin. Instead, keep it close to your throat to reduce the curve of your neck. Do not keep your shoulders up, hollow your chest, or sit on your hips improperly.
To achieve ease in this pose, find your balance using your center of gravity. This is located a couple of inches below your navel, specifically between the fifth lumbar vertebra and the sacrum.
Now, get used to standing in that position as often as possible until it becomes natural and permanent.
Sitting down
Eastern people have been sitting on the ground daily since the dawn of time, so they do not find it especially hard to cross their legs to perform a perfect Padma asana or any other classic pose.
Conversely, western people need to work on their joints for a long, hard while to reach the same results, if that.
And yet these classic asanas absolutely aren’t mandatory, since several masters – even Indian ones – never practiced them.
It is better to learn how to sit down properly, in your own way. First, you should try to see the awful habits most of us have learned, to sit down in a bad, bad way, sagging down, arching your back, and lumped over the back of your chair or slouched on your elbows.
The sitting position of the Yoga without poses consists in sitting on the edge of a chair, legs crossed, feet touching the ground on their external side, knees apart in a position clearly below the hips in order to control your center of gravity.
The hands are simply at rest on the thighs, the head is looking straight ahead, and the stomach stays in a natural position.
In this position, you simply need to extend your spine, from your hips to your neck, as if you wanted to be taller, but never stretching your shoulders back or puffing out your chest.
Once again, this attitude of your body must progressively become second nature, even if you need to practice for a long while before you succeed.
Relaxing
No surprise there: if you want to relax, classic Yoga and relaxology agree that the best position is to lie on your back.
You need a solid surface, like a carpet for instance, in a rather quiet and well ventilated.
Once you are free from any clothing constraint, you can relax with your heels apart – or even with your legs slightly apart – with the top of your feet pointing out, arms straight along your chest, palms up, fingers slightly curved, head in the same axis as the rest of your body, which must obviously be straight but not stiff. You can put a little cushion under your waist, neck, or knees if you need it.
Any relaxation session must be performed perfectly still. You cannot change position halfway in, or scratch, or blow your nose… Just relax! The basic protocol consists of focusing on various part of your body in succession and striving to relax them. Some are more important than others like the neck, face, or tongue, and you should spend more time on them to relax.
You should also breathe through your nose, also relaxed, with special care when you breathe out because this is where all the tension will be released.
A session should last a minimum of ten minutes, but of course, it can last up to twenty, thirty, or even sixty minutes.
Controlling yourself
According to the same principle, you should not be satisfied with a single relaxation session from time to time, but to drive your tension away throughout the day, specifically on focusing on the day-to-day attitudes of your body.
Right now, for example, if you are in a sitting position, in what position is your back? Are your shoulders pushing forward or backward? Are your legs crossed? Is your face relaxed? Etc.
For each of these questions, you need to try and see whether or not you find some useless tension.
Likewise, when you’re walking down the street, try to be aware of the way your arms fall, if they are flexible or tense if your head naturally stands straight…
In a car, it’s even easier to adopt some bad habits. Your head, mostly, is very often tilted forward, as if you wanted to see further ahead, triggering some painful tension in your neck. Just get your chin slightly closer to your neck, and let it extend more naturally.
Some might find this kind of control to be dull: but it means they kind of missed the point of Yoga. In India, Yogi practice their asanas almost constantly.
In the western world, where no one can settle for good on the pavement to perform these exercises, a different kind of Yoga better suited to our way of life has been designed. The point is to make it possible for us to practice it more steadily and regularly.
Of course, you can just as well practice this western Yoga for just thirty minutes every day, but it has not been designed for that.
Breathing
Now that you know what to look for, it will be easier to try and breather naturally while being aware of this usually unconscious act: breathing.
You should start by observing the way you breathe when you are at rest, when you speak, when you make a physical effort… Take note of the ways your breathing pattern changes, any jolt, irregularity, or specific location…
Of course, do not try to change your breathing yet. Now the point is to learn to know yourself through the way you breathe. Is your breathing steady or unsteady? Deep or superficial? Is it located in the upper or mid-section of your thorax?
Once it is over, just lie down in the relaxation position described before, and slowly and deeply breathe out through the nose, then wait until you start breathing in naturally, without effort.
As you keep going with this exercise, little by little, start to fix your breathing by using your stomach.
Usually, breathing in is not a problem. First, because it starts automatically and because it is usually enough.
However, breathing out usually requires some learning practice.
A rather easy breathing exercise consists in breathing out all the air you can while sitting down, then to pinch your nose and try to breathe in two or three times while extending your ribs.
Then release your nostrils and breathe out a little bit more… and start the false inhalations again while holding your nose. Finally, breathe out one last time and let the air enter your lungs normally.
This exercise should obviously be performed several times in a row. It can decongest and detoxify, and most of all it lets you re-educate your diaphragmatic function.
Enhancing your awareness
Everybody knows the story of the disciple asking his master how he can reach Enlightenment and receiving the following reply, “When hungry, eat, when tired, sleep”.
The poor disciple was dumbstruck:
“But everybody does that!” The master replies, “No. When people eat, they think about other things and let themselves be distracted from what they are doing. When they sleep, they do not sleep, they dream about a thousand useless things”.
Another good exercise would be to take a watch in your hand and look at the secondhand tick. Try to be aware, second after second, of standing here and now.
How long will it be before your mind starts wandering, away from the here and now?
Just like Indian Yoga, the goal is first and foremost to be aware of your own presence, as often as possible. To never leave yourself. Or try to, at the very least.
Eutony
Devised by Gerda Alexander in 1957, Eutony is not called “Yoga” but many still consider it as another branch of Yoga firmly rooted in western culture.
The word comes from the Greek and means “harmonious tension”. In other words, Eutony is supposed to be the state in which you can achieve optimum psychophysical balance. But for Gerda Alexander, who had a lot of disabled students, Eutony was first and foremost a method of self-discovery through the body.
It was first inspired by the principles of eurhythmics designed by Jacques- Dalcroze, which little by little convinced Alexander how important it was to listen to your own rhythm to perform true and organic movements.
To that end, she quickly understood how essential it was to relieve excessive tension and dissolve any block.
Eutony was born.
Deliberate movements
According to Gerda Alexander, a movement can be either eutonic (which means regenerative) or dystonic (which means degenerative).
In concrete terms, the main difference showcased by Eutony lies between mechanical or repetitive movements, like typing text on a computer, and careful movements. The first ones always end up generating contractions and blocks: the second ones never do.
With that in mind, the quality of your movements is the main factor behind your tonus – which impacts your organism every step of the way.
On the other hand, various kinds of reactions to stress can also trigger blocks and malfunctions. Each of us reacts in our own way: some clench their teeth, others draw their shoulders in, and others flex their muscles…
Most of them, anyway, block themselves while trying to protect themselves, which makes them unable to deal with the problem head-on.
What’s worse is that these inappropriate reactions slow down regular brain irrigation and prevent proper thinking. In other words, a handful of bad habits are responsible for your being unable to overcome any stressful situation.
Conversely, when you try to single out these detrimental habits of your body and then dismantle them whenever they happen until you can quite simply prevent them from being triggered in the first place, it becomes possible and even relatively easy to face any tough situation in existence with a steady and open mind.
This is the main goal of Eutony.
Dismantling bad habits
The advantages of Eutony practice thus seem obvious. When you learn how to stop being on edge and how to get rid of degenerative movements, a practitioner will progressively start a process of self-improvement that will broaden their perceptions and enhance their relationship with themselves and with other people.
Granted, this will not happen overnight! Bad habits, especially those that began in your childhood, can be hard to overcome.
When a fifty-year-old person has been crunching their own frame with every disappointment since they were five, it is obvious that they won’t learn how to reflexively stand straight up in a single one-hour session.
Case in point, Eutony should not be limited to its exercises with regenerative movements. It also teaches you how to be aware of the causes behind degenerative movements, in other words working to enhance your awareness of your own thoughts and feelings, and most of all of the way you use your body.
As a matter of fact, from its very nature, this enhanced awareness could on its own automatically trigger the decrease or even disappearance of any mechanical movement.
Being there for yourself
Once more, like every branch of Yoga, the main focus is to be self-aware, to be there for yourself.
In the teachings of Eutony, being self-aware implies both clear and unbiased awareness of the outside world and noticing the living aspect of physiological processes like tonus, blood flow or breathing. And of course, it requires some perspective about yourself, a kind of benevolent neutrality, which is the only way you can observe your reactions to anything that happens without judgment but with discernment.
This is neither any meditative absorption nor any process of autosuggestion, but serene observation aiming for a state of psychophysical balance.
In a nutshell, the main goal of Eutony is not to perform successful movements but to be there for yourself when you perform these movements. This presence is as essential as it is rare.
One of the most common exercises for beginners simply consists in drawing your own body in order to express your current awareness of your own body, and it shows how different our self-image can be from the truth.
You will need to work on that self-image in every step of your Eutony training.
Daily exercises
Eutony mainly focuses on the necessity to develop a certain spirit of independence, both when working in a group and during the exercises, you will do at home.
Case in point, classes only teach the essential basics, and teachers keep their interventions to a minimum to correct wrong movements.
To sum up, all the students must understand on their own, and be aware of the effect of their own movements. Eutony is not looking for docility, but for direct experimentation of the harmony found in every movement, in a constant struggle to check what you have learned about your own body.
That being said, the most important part is to include the movements you have learned during your sessions in your daily life. In order to do so, you absolutely need to avoid any mechanical practice.
A few very brief movements performed slowly and with a lot of focus are better than a large number of exercises performed carelessly in a routine.
Only by developing a disposition toward awareness during the sessions will the student naturally become aware of their own body, even in the essence of their daily life, and thus reduce the amount of tension they will create for themselves and manage to correct their wrong movements on their own.
Actions will become more meaningful and yield a wealth of new experiences, day after day.
Egyptian Yoga
Did ancient Egyptians practice Yoga? Not Yoga, obviously, since it is a Sanskrit word for an Indian discipline. However, they had something very close, called “Smai Tawi.” This means “Union of the Two Lands,” or the “union of the higher and lower nature of Man.”
Today, Smai Tawi is called Kemetic Yoga, or simply Egyptian Yoga. On a spiritual level, it is based on the Neteru, the ontological functions of deep awareness. These cosmic principles guide the Yogi or “Nebedjer” through increasingly subtle states of consciousness.
On a psycho-mental level, Kemetic Yoga offered a system of integration for new adepts’ personalities. It addressed willpower, emotions, intellect, and actions, which are usually fragmented.
Egyptian Yoga developed methods similar to those found in Indian Yoga. It aimed to harmonize and unite these sub-personalities. Meditation (Raja) for willpower, devotion (Bhakti) for emotions, wisdom (Jnana) for the intellect, and justice (Karma) for actions.
You might wonder what this has to do with people from the Western world. Well, the poses of this Yoga, like in Philippe de Méric’s “Yoga without poses,” are much closer to the usual physical habits of Western people than those found in Indian Yoga.
A kind of Yoga to discover Yoga
With the exception of the famous “Seated Scribe”, anyone can see that most bas-relief, engravings, and statues from the time of the Pharaoh in Egypt depict characters in a standing position or sitting on a throne.
There are indeed some poses that are perfectly identical in both Traditions. Most notably, characters depicted in a lotus position, or in the pose of the royal cobra, bridge, or plow, have been found in several temples or mastaba. These are all typical asanas in Hatha Yoga. But most of the Egyptian poses are not that hard for someone living in the western world, who is not used to sitting on the ground.
Doctor A. de Sambucy initially presented this branch of Yoga as “Iranian-Egyptian Yoga.” Doctor Hanish later developed it by adding several poses from ancient Iranian and Egyptian civilizations.
This Yoga combines movement, breathing, and sound harmoniously. Practitioners perform the poses standing up or on their knees while singing the vowels on a scale.
Finger exercises are particularly important. Each finger is associated with a specific bodily function.
Like true Yoga, the union of breathing and specific poses offers education, enlightenment, and evolution to human beings.
Kemetic Yoga has recently come back into the spotlight. Babacar Khane, founder of the first International Yoga Institute, used it to create a new method. This method combines Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga, Chi Kong, and Kung Fu. The main goal is to let beginners practice Yoga gently and improve without pain or risk.
