Category Archives: yoga

Picture of a peaceful yogi in a crowd.

The Art of Centering

It is an image that will stay with me. During a large demonstration for freedom and democracy, thousands of people gathered at the start of the procession. There were loud speeches from a podium. There was music, drum rolls and the murmur of thousands of people. A soundscape so intense to my ears that I feared I would have to come to my senses for an hour and a half at home.

And there the man was. With long greying hair, clothes that indicated that he probably came from the yoga tradition. He sat cross-legged on the floor, hands in a mudra, eyes closed, meditating.

Balance

Undisturbed by what was happening around him. No matter how noisy and chaotic it was. When you walked past him, you just felt energetically that there was a field of soothing energy around him.

It was reminiscent of the Yin/Yang symbol. For in the middle of the large, white, curved drop-shaped plane of the turbulent, heated, agile and noisy Yang energy is a small black dot, which represents the opposite of Yang: the Yin. Yin stands for stillness, coldness, immobility. It indicates that there is no Yang without Yin, and that there is no Yin without Yang either. They keep each other in balance.

A symbolic ritual

That is why the ancient Chinese often built high, dead straight pagodas in landscapes that were otherwise completely horizontal and flat. The Chinese emperors had a summer palace in the North of the country and a winter palace in the South of their empire. At the height of the summer (Yang), the emperor and his court moved to the summer palace in the North (Yin). And in the winter (Yin) the court moved to the winter palace in the south (Yang). This symbolic ritual was there not only to avoid being subject to climatic extremes, but also to symbolically keep the balance between the two poles.

Centering

The meditating yogi at the manifestation was an illustration of what is called “centering”. It is the turning of one’s attention inwards, after completely detaching it from the external world around you.

Sometimes, during a relaxation moment at the end of a yoga session, yoga students become first irritated and then obsessed with disturbing elements from outside, which disturb or absorb their attention. It sometimes leads to complaints like “I could not relax because … ” there was that shouting in the street, that klaxon of that car, or the light snoring of the other yoga student next to them, who had gone from relaxation straight to deep sleep. Or it is about itching or itchiness which suddenly manifests itself.

An inner state of peace

These external disturbances are only disturbing insofar as you give them that power. However, they can also be the ideal elements and tools to learn to stay calmly at your own centre, no matter what is happening around you. Because accessing a quiet, calm, peaceful and neutral inner state is something that the current reality of our noisy planet rarely provides the ideal conditions for. That peaceful inner state, that point of rest and balance, is accessible to anyone at any time of the day, under any circumstances. We just need to learn not to cling to those elements of the outside world that we have labelled as distractions.

An image of bright child's eyes

The most intelligent question

2020 has caused a leap of consciousness in a growing number of people. The world will never be the same as before. That is fine, because the old model was in urgent need of change.
More and more people are questioning themselves and their way of life.
Wonderful! It was about time.

The most intelligent question in the world

In fact, the most important conversation you should have on a daily basis is the conversation with yourself. To challenge our mind and our heart on a daily basis. In this way we avoid living “on automatic pilot” and not consciously holding the wheel of our lives in both hands.
What question should you ask yourself in this context? What is the smartest question in the world to start with?

Well, anyone who has been a child or has children knows this inevitable question, which a 4 to 5 year old constantly asks the parents during a certain period of her or his life, until those parents become a little bit nervous or feel a slight annoyance rising.
And that question is: Why?
Yes, the most useful and intelligent question in the world comes from the mouths of small children. In order to know whether you have given up the steering wheel of your life without realising it, it helps, in your daily conversation with yourself, to ask the simple question: “Why?” regarding each of your choices and actions, and then answer it as honestly and sincerely as possible.

Continue digging

And after that first answer, ask yourself again the question: “Why?”. Just like that little child of barely 5 did.
Because one answer can sometimes hide a deeper answer. So you continue to dig down to the bare bone until you have identified the real motivation or driver behind your choice or behaviour.
Then, hold it up to the light today, and see if that choice still makes sense in 2021, knowing that life is short and fragile.
Bet that in 2021 a lot of old patterns of behaviour will be replaced by fresh, new choices!
Isn’t that just marvellous?

Picture of a winding forest road

Sitting still

You may be wondering what that picture of a somewhat neglected, winding road, half gravel, half earth, through a forest, has to do with sitting still.
Well, life sometimes makes strange twists and turns.
I ended up in the middle of Norway in 2009 after a peculiar coincidence. At the invitation of an organic farmer who had emigrated from Belgium, I stayed and worked there for a week. In the afternoons I left for long walks in the rather wild forest landscape.

Beyond the border

This was also the case on that day in October. The season was on the border of autumn and winter, with the occasional wet snow shower. The road in the picture finally took me past the border of civilisation, somewhere on a high plateau.
There, sitting on a boulder amongst the vegetation tending to all possible shades and hues of colour, suddenly a silence fell.
But a silence like I had never experienced before. I was eating a sandwich I had brought with me and was awakened … by the sound of my grinding jaws. I had never heard that before. I was perplexed and stopped eating.
Then it dawned on me that there was nothing, absolutely nothing to be heard there.
It was the first time in that moment that I caught a glimpse of absolute silence.

Perhaps life would have led me there, in the run-up to the discovery, more than 10 years later, that I am actually hyper-sensitive to sound from an early age. My brain can only select between the many separate sound signals in a “soundscape” with the greatest difficulty and at the cost of a lot of energy.

Meditation

Yoga is a complete system conceived to prepare oneself for meditation.
Meditation has to do with crossing borders as well as confronting silence.
There are countless meditation traditions. All of them offer methods to “silence the mind”. To bring consciousness beyond the noise.
Because apart from the fact that our contemporary world with all its traffic, machines and other incessant human activity, must seem like a deafening hell for our ancestors until about two centuries ago, there is another sound that never seems to stop.
And that is the incessant “chat” of the thoughts that pass through our brain.

The current that controls us

Those thoughts make up for an automatic, endless flow. A mess, in which interesting ideas, ingenious insights or whisper-smooth intuitions drown in an excess of automatic, coarser chatter. The latter consists largely of fantasies about the past or the present. Most of these we are not even aware of.
But that flow does control us. And is responsible for our emotions and our state of mind, day in, day out.

In Indian philosophy the world was created by sound. That is a beautiful metaphor for what modern science has understood in the meantime. Because first there is vibration, or energy, and the matter of what we call the real world is no more or no less than coarse, “condensed” energy.
So you create your own world from the energetic vibration your thoughts constantly create.
All that exists in your world is the materialisation of your own thoughts. If there is chaos around you, then that is a projection of the chaos that probably exists within you and that you fuel by means of your thought stream.

Tips for a first step

Without attending a particular meditation school, you can already take a first step in meditation at home.
What do you need?

  • A place where you will likely not be disturbed
  • Use a chair or meditation cushion to sit on that allows you to relax with your back upright
  • A clock or meditation timer with an alarm function

How do you go about it?

  • Book 5 to 10 minutes at a fixed time in your day. Early in the morning or in the evening before bed are good moments
  • Set your clock or meditation timer
  • Sit with your back straight and eyes closed
  • Breathe in and out slowly and regularly
  • Stay quiet

And become aware of your own thoughts.
Observe them one by one. Every time a thought comes up, take note of it, and then let go of it. Bring your awareness back to your breathing.

Do you want more control over your daily life? Then start by listening to the sound of your inner thoughts and get to know them.
Start with five to ten minutes a day. And let it gradually become longer.

What we experience on a global scale this year 2020 can be nothing more or nothing less than a clear and compelling invitation from a higher consciousness to stop our insanely exaggerated outer activities. And to stay at home – at least for a good while – and learn to sit still with ourselves.

What does it mean to sit with a straight back?

Our backs are not straight by nature. The spine is clearly S-shaped.
Sitting with a straight back means: keep your spine in its natural, upright shape.
It means that you do not allow yourself to “sag”.

How do you bring your back into its natural curvature?

  • Go sit on a chair or on a meditation cushion on the floor
  • Tilt your pelvis forward, as if you were pushing your navel to the front
  • Mark how your lower back becomes slightly hollow at the back
  • Open your chest by bringing your sternum a little forward and relax your shoulders
  • Finally, place your head and neck straight and balanced rignt above your shoulder girdle.

How do I know if I hold my lower back in the right position ?

  • Put your hand behind your back and touch the middle of your lower back
  • If you feel a cleft, like a little valley between your lumbar muscles, that’s when you know you’re good
  • On the other hand, if you feel the protrusions of your lumbar vertebrae sticking out, you are sagging. Adjust your posture by tilting your pelvis forward until you no longer feel the protrusions.
Print of a monkey on a jungle background

The monkey in our heads

Contemporary yoga practice is largely and excessively focused on physical postures. However, it is worth recalling that in any case it was never the intention to place such an emphasis on the asanas. This inflation of the asanas is a contemporary phenomenon, because today’s people lead a mainly sedentary existence. And they yearn for compensation in physical activity.

The real work

In ancient yoga texts such as the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, another standard work, hardly any postures are described. And then, mainly a few sitting postures to allow the practice of meditation.
Yes, that’s right: the physical exercises were meant as a preparation for the real work: meditation.
In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras the purpose of yoga is described in the following verse:

“Chitta vritti nirodnah – Stopping the movements of the mind”

After all, in our heads there lives a cheerful monkey. A monkey that swings constantly rom one branch to another in a tree. That’s the way our mind works when it’s on autopilot. We go from one thought to the next impression, you can’t think of anything more crazy. Thousands of thoughts thus pass through our minds. In this way the mind does everything to bring our attention everywhere except here, in the present moment. Consider how many of the thoughts you have during a whole day are about the past or the future. These are all fantasies that take place at a different time than here and now. If you let that monkey guide you all the way, then you risk your life just passing you by.

The tyranny of screens

So by nature we are hardly able to concentrate at all. In our time, this is exacerbated by the ubiquitous media and what is known as “social engineering”. They constantly kidnap our attention by means of our own senses, mainly through screens. As a result, we live in an (electronic) fantasy world more than ever before. And so authentic yoga practice must have a strong mental component. Not your body, but in the first place your mind needs to be put to work. By concentrating and by bringing your attention constantly back to what you feel in your body every time it is hijacked by yet another fleeting thought.

And above all: beware that you are much more than what you think. The monkey and the voices in your head, they are just phenomena that take place in your brain. That awareness is the beginning of freedom:

  • It gives you the ability to become an observer of what’s going on in your head.
  • By that concentration exercise you start to evolve.

From a distracted and impressionable individual, you develop into someone who knows what he or she stands for, what he or she wants and why. Imagine!
Finally, a nice quote I found somewhere in an old book about the mythical Findhorn garden in Northern Scotland. One of the pioneers of the garden wrote he had had a conversation with a kind of “nature spirit”, who entrusted her with the following:

“People generally don’t seem to know where they are going or why. If they knew that, if they were on the right track to what needs to be done, what an incredible power station they would be!”