Have you ever felt like your mind was spinning so fast, that you just couldn’t think in a straight line? Or felt so confused about something really important to you, that you literally didn’t know what you thought about it?
Have you had a time when you had to make a really important decision, and you just couldn’t figure out what you really wanted?

It might seem like a weird thing to say, but in these kinds of situations, a skilful yoga practice can help you to sort through all the crazy thoughts and get in touch with what you really care about.

One of the most respected ancient texts about yoga, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, gives a definition of yoga which may not be what you expect. Although in our culture, you could be forgiven for thinking that yoga is a physical activity designed to help you turn into a human pretzel, Patanjali’s take was quite different. The definition given in the Yoga Sutras is:

Yoga is the calming of the waves of the mind into stillness.

That’s what its job is – not that there’s anything wrong with being a human pretzel if that’s what you want, but yoga was designed to do something else.

So how can we use yoga to read our own minds?

Have you ever been nutting away at a problem trying to figure out the solution, given up in disgust, and then gone away and done something else – only to have the answer come to you in a flash? Sometimes when we get our conscious mind out of the way, the other parts of our brain can get to work finding a solution.

In yogic philosophy, “mind” is actually a big concept. There are a whole bunch of words and ideas around what “mind” even is. But in a nutshell, the practices of yoga are designed to quiet the busy, surface level of the mind, so that we can access the wiser, less reactive parts of ourselves. It’s as though that surface level of the mind is a radio that’s turned up so loud that it’s smothering the sounds of what’s really happening around us. Yogic practices help us to turn down the volume of that noise.
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So that’s the theory – how can we use it?

If you’ve been practicing yoga for a while, you’ve probably noticed that you come out of a class feeling a lot different from how you went in. You’ll probably have also noticed that most classes start with an awareness of the breath. Once we start paying attention to the breath (or the sensations in the body, if breath doesn’t do it for you) most of us find that we start to find ourselves more firmly in the present moment. The mind doesn’t necessarily calm down completely, but we can look at it more objectively, with a little more distance from it. 

If you haven’t noticed that before, you might like to experiment next time you go to a yoga class – what do you feel if you give as much attention to the breath as you can? How does that feel different to how you might have done yoga before?

For many of us, paying more attention to the breath will help us to feel more calm, more centred, and take us out of that busy loud-radio kind of mind. 

Once you’re comfortable with that kind of awareness in your yoga practice, you might try to experiment even further. Often a yoga teacher will give you time at the beginning of a class to connect to your intentions for the practice – they may also have their own suggestions about that, which you can feel free to take or leave as you wish. If you’ve got an issue that you’re facing, you might like to dedicate your practice that day to creating space for an answer to arise – and then just letting go of thinking about it completely for the next hour or so.

This approach works particularly well in more intentionally mindful yoga classes such as restorative, yin or slower classes. But with time we can learn to have this kind of mindful approach in any kind of yoga practice (and off the mat as well).

If we ask ourselves powerful questions, and then create space for the answers to arise without grasping for them, it can be amazing what comes up!

Any meditators who are reading this might recognise that their experience on the meditation cushion can also create space for answers and insights, just as a yoga practice can. This is absolutely correct, of course. The lines between the physical practice of yoga and the more explicitly mental practices of meditation can be much, much thinner once we bring greater awareness to our breath and movement on and off the mat.

Have you tried using yoga in this way? What was it like? If not - don’t take my word for it – try it and see if you can read your own mind! I’d love to hear about it if you do!
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Photo by Vlad Tchompalov on Unsplash
Photo by Amauri Mejía on Unsplash