Yoga is Magic
Born and raised in a family of intellectuals, I am hardwired for uneasiness when it comes to talk of spirituality or anything approaching the unscientific. (This orientation can be something of a liability in the yoga world, but that’s a story for a different day.) So I was surprised, when, after a year or so of enjoying yoga for its stretchy exercise benefits, the practice began to deepen for me, morphing unexpectedly into something much more intense and slightly destabilizing, something for which I had no useful frame of reference and no adequate language to describe.
I was familiar, of course, with endorphins and the many ways in which the body can be coaxed into releasing them (“runner’s high,” etc).
But this was different - more than a sensation of warmth and well-being, more than that uptick in mood that I had experienced with various forms of physical exercise. Something was changing me in profound ways that I just could not understand. Privately, I started to think of it as MAGIC. It was the only thing that made sense.
So what was I experiencing? What was the magic? The fact that it was neither predictable nor replicable - it would come over me when I least expected it - was confusing, and made me doubt both “it” and myself.
Hoping for some logical explanation, I asked a few of my teachers for recommendations - what could I read that might help me understand this effect yoga was having on me? My request was clumsy - I didn’t know how to describe what I was feeling or asking for - and the suggestions were all over the map. One teacher thought I should dive right into Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita. Another recommended I read the poet Rumi. Neither of these did the trick. But I persisted and asked a teacher I’d recently met. And she got it instantly. What I was experiencing in yoga, she said, was the phenomenon of embodiment. She directed me to the 1997 Master’s thesis by a grad student at UCLA (which, being a librarian, I located immediately in the UC system’s digital library.) And that’s where I finally began to trust that what was happening to me wasn’t completely wacko and I wasn’t alone in feeling unmoored by what I was experiencing. The grad student would become the great visionary yoga master, Shiva Rea, and her thesis is an investigation of this very topic, analyzed through a variety of frameworks. I return to her seven “Principles for an Embodied Approach to Hatha Yoga ” fairly regularly and I share them here. It’s not exactly magic, but it’s pretty close.
“Hatha yoga as bodily practice can be viewed as a way of exploring, cultivating, observing, transforming, and knowing all aspects of oneself as expressed through the body.
The primary techniques of hatha yoga [asana, pranayama, drishti, bandhas, mantra, and svadhyaya] are the means for achieving [embodiment].
Through the techniques of hatha yoga, there is a release of inhibiting patterns . . . and the development of awareness grounded in the changing sensations of the body.
The techniques of hatha yoga enable the practitioner to naturally ease the dominance of verbal/mental activity to experience a non-verbal state of embodied awareness.
The awareness developed through the techniques of hatha yoga extends throughout the body from the surface into the interior.
The practice of hatha yoga can thus be seen as a practice of embodiment that permeates the body with consciousness.
That embodied consciousness is cultivated during the practice as a tool for self-awareness in everyday life.
Underlying this approach is the recognition that hatha yoga can be an intensive exploration of the entire body to evoke change within the practitioner that can effect [sic] all aspects of the person. ”