Let us understand our brains to know our lives. However, right at the outset, I would like to clarify that my writings are derived from my own understandings, discoveries, and insights gathered from 25 years of being a yoga teacher, and an avid practitioner.
Life Confined in Labels
Our lives are a sum total of moments. These moments are defined by our perceptions. During many such moments we are thrown into despair, pain, and confusion, and disease.
Disease is a much-labelled phenomena. Hospitals, doctors, medicines, scientists, and researchers all contribute to it becoming an organized sector in our lives. Any problem that occurs in the body or the mind straightaway qualifies for a label: "You are suffering from..." migraines, or depression, or autism, or fibromyalgia, or lupus, and so on. A problem that does not qualify for a category becomes a greater issue without a prescribed recourse; that is, to be in an unknown place with a doubtful future.
Life Liberated from Labels
What if we had a world in which there were no labels? None. Not just in the disease sector, but if all of life was stripped of labels, where would that get us? Fully and thoroughly into the unknown.
Suppose the unknown itself was a way of life. Imagine that we would live like explorers, open to the next moment. Completely open, with no previous constructs. Diseases would just be episodes and we would respond to them through our presence of mind and common sense. If there was no continuance of a state, there would just be a smattering of happenings, separate and unconnected in a deeply connected universe, and with an equally varied and individualized smattering of solutions emerging from this unseen, instinctive, collective, cosmic connection.
Knowledge Unhooked from Interpretations
All knowledge is seeded in the universe. It can be plucked off the branches, just like that. It comes to us when we seek it. It has always to me. Knowledge is useful only when it is a presentation of facts, devoid of interpretations. Then it is free to be used and applied subjectively, in any context.
Goraksh Sataka, ancient Indian text, is attributed with mentioning 8,400,000 postures with no prescription on how to use them. It was obviously meant to be an unlimited individual experiment to find our own remedies.
Channeling the Brain to Write Our Own Courage Story
Apparently, the brain, an organ of much study, despite being unraveled to a large extent, still throws up mysteries unparalleled. In these mysterious zones lies the potential to walk the untrodden path. The brain has been found to have a tiny structure called the amygdala with two sides to it. The right side is supposed to process emotions in an automated mode, storing negative memories. The left is the intentional side that can consciously transform the same experience to a positive one. So, the possibility of courageously claiming our experiences lies within the brain, and its mysterious bylanes.
There are many parts in our brain like the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex that are capable of responding consciously, through the use of logic and rational thinking. The insula is a part that has the capacity to throw us into a habit trap, by building a simulation map, using our past experiences and response to them, but it also allows us the opportunity to take a conscious leap.
Research Looks at Yoga to Take a Leap
There is ample research dedicated to the transformational effects of yoga on the human brain. Yoga interventions demonstrate the following changes:
- A decrease in the volume of the right amygdala
- An increase in hippocampus density, which decreases feelings of stress
- Changes in the brain structure to elevate mindfulness towards chosen modifications of our behaviors and responses
- The rewiring of our 'simulation map'
- A shift in our brain chemistry by enhancing restorative neurotransmitters like the GABA receptor, which switches off the stress response, having a calming effect on our nervous system and allowing us to feel at ease.
Yoga Techniques That Help
There are many techniques within the practice of yoga that can help us shift gears in our lives. Nasikgara drishti with the ability to affect the limbic or emotional systems through its proximity to the olfactory bulb, is a known neurogenesis pathway. We can consciously cultivate effortlessness in an effortful posture, thus building a similar approach to life situations.
Breath control can be a powerful tool to calm the brain and cut an amygdala hijack short, Ujjayi or the ocean breath brings an instant calm in the eye of the storm.
Lastly Yoga nidra, the practice of conscious sleep erases conditioned reflexes, replacing them with conscious, chosen behavior.
Mindful Labeling, a Brain Pattern Hijack
Inversely, we can use the practice of labeling (which I have criticized above) mindfully to our advantage by building positive associations. Here is a list:
- Suffering is an opportunity for learning
- Disagreements are an opportunity to examine one's assumptions
- Anger is an opportunity to dive deeper within and forge understanding
- Mistakes are an opportunity to correct course
- Dissension is an opportunity to drop one more opinion
- Physical pain is an opportunity get stronger
- Emotional pain is an opportunity to overcome attachment
- Hunger is an opportunity to practice detachment
- Losing someone or something is opportunity to be grateful for what we have
- Shopping or hoarding is an opportunity to practice contentment
- Harm is an opportunity to foster trust
- Hurt is an opportunity to forgive and move on
- People are an opportunity to love, revere, and connect with, despite our differences
- Challenges are an opportunity to change the wiring of your brain
A final note: Medicine and medical interventions have helped save countless lives. The references to medical practices were made to serve my point and not to dis-serve any field of study or undermine the pain or helplessness that one goes through when suffering from any disease.
