CAN YOU REINVENT YOURSELF THROUGH YOGA?

One promise that many yoga teachers hold out is that it's possible to reinvent your life, reconfigure your mental and emotional attitudes, and radically shift your vision of what life offers.

The claim is that yoga, when practised correctly, is capable of, for example, turning a pessimist into someone who can see the perfection in everything; or an angry person into one who can channel their rage into creative energy.

Yoga's fundamental premise is that all of us, at our core, are made of the powerful, loving intelligence that gives rise to all life, furthermore, that this intelligence is fluid and infinitely creative. Because this is the actual truth, according the philosophies from the East, it is theoretically possible to change just about anything about ourselves and our life.

Indeed, some Yoga teachers and New Age teachers do believe that we can change absolutely anything. But is it true? Is it actually possible to change our personality? Can we heal a chronic or terminal illness by transforming our attitudes? How about trying 'changing the world' on for size, when your middle name isn't Hussein?

These are important questions. The truth it seems, is that the answer is both yes and no, and sometimes, maybe - depending on who, and what, you are talking about. On the one hand, certain aspects of our basic personality and physical constitution are ours for a lifetime - no amount of stretching will lengthen your thigh bones. On the other hand, there's no question that when we enter deeply into our consciousness, extraordinary shifts can take place. Some people have indeed healed life-threatening illnesses. Others, managed to change themselves enough to make a huge impact on all of our worlds - Sadat, Gandhi, Mandela and maybe now - Obama - come to mind.

Neurophysiologists say that each time we react in a certain way — getting angry, for instance, or procrastinating yet one more time — we strengthen the power of that pathway. Yoga texts make the same point, calling the pathways samskaras. Once these pathways have been set, most people just keep running down them, like rats in a maze, reacting with the same old patterns and feelings over and over again. It is these patterns that - ultimately - create our character, our ways of thinking and acting, and our perspective on life.


Unfortunately, Samskaras are powerful, which is why knowing better does not always change our behavior. There's a weight to those accumulated impressions. They are, on a daily basis, the reason we think and feel the way we do.


Yoga can help,in that it help you more clearly 'see' a pattern and, then, with any luck, 1) disidentify from it a bit, while at the same time take ownership of it. This is because the various practises work at increasing awareness of ourselves (our minds and our emotions, as well as our bodies), increasing our compassion and sensitivity for our selves, while at the same time honouring higher principles of truth - like non-violence, and non-stealing. Yoga can help us become aware of and change certain emotions and entrenched views, and improve the quality of our inner state. Yogis can honestly claim, verifiable by results, is that the regular practise of yoga produces radical improvement of overall well-being.

Over time, and with dedication many changes can, and do indeed take place.


Loosely based on an article from Yoga Journal by Sally Kempton. www.loveyoga.co.uk

Is yoga for you? try a Love Yoga class and find out. Visit Ihttp://www.loveyoga.co.uk/ for more details and timetable