zen like rock

Bake bread, knit a cap, build a birdhouse, design your own thank-you notes. Creating something may feel like a small way of enriching the world, but making something with your hands can be an active meditation, an opportunity to take a break from conscious thought and allow yourself to freely engage with your creative side. “Like other contemplative practices, knitting opens space in the mind,” says Tara Jon Manning, author of Mindful Knitting. “By simply creating a quiet state of being, you begin to notice—notice your thoughts, notice your feelings, and notice the workings of your mind and experience.” Like the practice of yoga, creative acts are about the process, not the result; your sense of satisfaction when you pull on a warm hat you made yourself, mail a beautiful card to a friend, or bite into a sandwich on homemade bread is just an added benefit.

adapted from Yoga Journal by Charity Ferreira

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silence helps build awareness

Spend some time in silence. “Silence is one of the best ways of cultivating self-awareness,” Boccio says. “When you’re talking, you don’t realize how noisy your mind is. When you’re practicing silence, you’re trying to step back from your reactivity to your mind. That alone is a profound insight.”

Practicing silence can also be a way of conserving prana, or “life force.” “When you speak a lot, you are using up prana,” Boccio says. So unplug your iPod, hide your BlackBerry, and commit to a period of silence—as short as a 10-minute tea break or as luxurious as a whole day. Initially, being quiet can feel agitating, but simply notice your urge to speak or to take in other people’s words or ideas. See if you can appreciate all the ambient noises: the sounds of birds, wind in the trees, the movements of other people, even traffic. Soon, you’ll likely find the respite from speech to be deeply restful. “After a period of silence, my students find that they are more alert and even need less sleep,” Boccio says.

adapted from Yoga Journal by Charity Ferreira

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quiet yoga poses

As an antidote to striving for success in all that you do (including asana), devote one practice a week to poses that quiet, nourish, and center. Begin your restorative practice by sitting quietly for a few moments and connecting with your breath. Next, warm up with movement that gently stretches your muscles, such as Cat-Cow Pose and Happy Baby Pose. Move into postures like Supta Baddha Konasana (Reclining Bound Angle Pose), Supta Padangusthasana (Reclining Hand-to-Big-Toe Pose), and Viparita Karani (Legs-up-the-Wall Pose), followed by an extended Savasana (Corpse Pose). If doing a restorative practice on your own sounds daunting, try a restorative class. Sunday evening is a good time for a restorative practice, helping you to wind down from the previous week and emerge revitalized for the week that’s about to begin. Over time, a regular restorative practice will offer you a depth of self-awareness that’s hard to come by any other way.

adapted from Yoga Journal by Charity Ferreira

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awareness

To radically shift your outlook, break out of your regular routine. Go a different way to work, try a new food, take a class from a yoga teacher you’ve never studied with before. Then notice how one seemingly simple change affects the way everything else appears to you. “Our whole world is basically what we perceive,” says Frank Jude Boccio, a meditation teacher and the author of Mindfulness Yoga. “The opening verse of the Dharmapada—an anthology of quotes attributed to the Buddha—says, ‘We create the world with our thoughts and our perceptions.’ This means that the only thing we know about this world we are living in is how we perceive it.”

To show how changeable our perceptions are, Boccio directs his students to visit a store and try on a hat that they would describe as “not me,” then notice how wearing it changes the way they feel. “Even without looking in the mirror, just having the hat on changes your perception of your reality in that moment,” Boccio says. Changing your perspective, whether it’s as dramatic as taking a trip to another country or as mundane as taking a different seat at your dining table, can make you more aware of how conditioned your perceptions are. This awareness can soften your attachment to your perceptions, says Boccio, and open your heart to change. “Seeing the conditioning of perceptions is an essential aspect of the yogic path of liberation,” he says.

adapted from Yoga Journal by By Charity Ferreira

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joy and happiness

If you live your life as though there is a fixed amount of happiness in the world, it’s easy to fall into an embittered, resentful state of competition with others. But happiness isn’t a limited commodity that has to be rationed or hoarded. There’s no chance that someone will get the last of it. Happiness, like love, increases when it is shared. When you feel truly happy for others, your own happiness increases, along with, as Patanjali reminds us, your peace of mind. What’s more, when you share happiness or love with all sentient beings, by the very nature of your own sentience, you are included! Cultivating mudita is a way of gaining a truer understanding of the interconnectedness of all beings, and it allows you to increase your own joy, exponentially. 

adapted from Yoga Journal by Frank Jude Boccio

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joy

The formal practice of mudita bhavana (cultivating joy) from the Buddhist yoga tradition celebrates the happiness of all beings, yourself included! In fact, through your growing insight into the interdependent nature of the world, you see that the happiness of others is indeed your happiness. Begin by recalling your own innate goodness. Bring to mind a time when you said or did something that was kind, generous, caring, or loving. Then begin to offer yourself these appreciative and encouraging phrases.

May I learn to appreciate the 
happiness and joy I experience.

May the joy I experience 
continue and grow.

May I be filled with joy and gratitude.

adapted from Yoga Journal by Frank Jude Boccio

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meditation practice

Experiences and sensations don’t necessarily have to be positive in order to bring us joy; neutral experiences, too, can help grow more joy. Thich Nhat Hanh uses the example of the “non-toothache.” When you last had a toothache, you knew for sure that it was unpleasant and that to not have a toothache would be pleasant. But now, you overlook the joy of the nontoothache, because it is neutral. By bringing your attention to the fact that your teeth do not hurt (or indeed, to any part of you that doesn’t hurt!), you may feel a gentle smile of appreciation arise. With this kind of mindfulness, you have access to a new category of experiences that can nourish greater joy.

adapted from Yoga Journal by Frank Jude Boccio

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happiness

Take delight in the good fortune of others to create more happiness for yourself.

The Dalai Lama speaks of mudita as a kind of “enlightened self-interest.” As he puts it, there are so many people in this world that it’s simply reasonable to make their happiness as important as your own; if you can be happy when good things happen to others, your opportunities for delight are increased six billion to one!

This is a teaching I try to keep in mind throughout the day. I recently went to collect my weekly box of produce from the community-supported agriculture program I belong to. I was looking forward to buying a dozen eggs laid by the farm’s grass-fed, free-range chickens. These eggs are delicious, and quite precious, because only a limited number of them are available each week. When I got to the pick-up center, I invited two women who had arrived at the same time I had to get into line ahead of me. As you can probably guess, they bought the last two dozen eggs! I could feel my body beginning to constrict as I realized that I was not going to be able to buy any eggs that day. I smiled and thought to myself, while looking at the two women, “May you really enjoy those eggs.” Remarkably, before I had even completed the thought, I felt my heart center expand and a real sense of joyful energy flow through me.

The root of the Sanskrit word mudita means to be pleased, to have a sense of gladness, or, as Patanjali is often translated, “to be delighted.” Although mudita is often discussed as “empathetic or altruistic joy” in the context of overcoming envy at the good fortune of others, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master, points out that there is a broader way to think of mudita—one that doesn’t depend on defining the Self as separate from others. In Teachings on Love, he writes: “A deeper definition of the word mudita is a joy that is filled with peace 
and contentment. We rejoice when we see others happy, but we rejoice in our own well-being as well. How can we feel joy for another person when we do not feel joy for ourselves?” Feeling joy for ourselves, however, is not always easy to do.

adapted from Yoga Journal by Frank Jude Boccio

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yoga for taming stress

Keep in mind that no matter how well you condition your nervous system, you also need to change the way you perceive stress. You can start this process by practicing svadhyaya, or self-observation. “There is a connection between how you experience a forward bend and how you react to the world,” says Elissa Cobb, a Phoenix Rising Yoga practitioner and the author of The Forgotten Body. Take Paschimottanasana (Seated Forward Bend), a pose that can produce strong sensations in even the most flexible practitioners.

One common response is to ignore sensations and force yourself forward, fighting against your tight hamstrings. Another is to come out of the pose to avoid the challenge entirely. Both strategies are variations on the same theme: fight-or-flight. In all likelihood, they create tense muscles and rapid or held breathing—not to mention a total lack of joy.

Paying attention to how your body and mind react to the “stress” of Paschimottanasana or any pose offers clues about how you typically react to stress in your life. By training yourself to actively observe while staying calm in poses, you’ll be able to do the same thing when difficult sensations, thoughts, or emotions arise in the face of stress. Instead of going into your habitual reaction mode, you’ll notice what’s happening while staying present enough to choose an appropriate response.

When it comes to transforming your own response to stress, it’s tempting to search for that one pose or breathing exercise that will work its magic. But there isn’t one magic pose. The process is a gradual exploration rather than an easy solution. “If you’re practicing yoga every day, you’re preparing for what life brings. You don’t have to have a strategy for what yoga technique you’ll use in a difficult situation.” According to Weintraub, when challenges arrive, they will begin to flow through you but not overwhelm you. “When life hits, it doesn’t explode or roll over us. We’re not so caught up in the stress of it, but we’re present for it.”

This is the real story of how yoga can help you manage stress. It doesn’t just provide ways to burn through stress or escape from it. It doesn’t only offer stress-reduction techniques for anxious moments. It goes deeper, transforming how the mind and body intuitively respond to stress. Just as the body can learn a new standing posture that eventually becomes ingrained, so the mind can learn new thought patterns, and the nervous system can learn new ways of reacting to stress. The result: When you roll up your mat and walk out the door, you can more skillfully take on whatever life brings.

adapted from Yoga Journal, by Kelly McGonigal

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