Why yoga?
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Yoga helps us get in touch with our feelings and emotions
How often do you have to say, “I don’t know”, when someone asks, “How are you?” and you want to be honest? Well, yoga does not just enhance our physical awareness. Through the body we can become far more aware of what we are feeling.
There are forms of psychotherapy that depend on body-work to contact deeper feelings. Well, yoga is not therapy, but it certainly helps to get in contact with your feelings!
In the modern world most of us use our bodies primarily in a more-or-less automatic manner to service labor-saving devices at home or at work or in a limited way for pleasure. Our experience of the body is usually restricted to our head, chest, belly, and genitals - unless we have pains somewhere else. Yoga helps us extend our experience into the back, hips, legs, and - very important indeed! - the feet.
It’s no coincidence that the most fundamental posture in Iyengar yoga is “Mountain Pose,” just standing on your own two feet, grounded like a mountain. (In fact, you can learn to ground yourself more and more.)
By learning to feel the back half of the body and the lower half of the body, it may even seem like you’re discovering your body for the first time. And you feel - physical, energetic, and emotional sensations.
When you are more experienced, you can even develop more positive, subtler, or more pleasant emotions through your programor emphasis. For example, strong intensive backward bends done carefully and with awareness can bring out strong and kind feelings of joy. Or sequences of forward bends held for a long time can bring calm and peace.
Yoga really helps you discover what your emotions are, which is increasingly important for us modern people, who are not exactly famous for knowing what we feel unless it is of an overwhelming character. But self-knowledge is necessary for meditation: to work appropriately in meditation, you have to know what is happening inside you.
Over time when we meditate, we churn up the contents of our mind; this is not always pleasant. In fact, it can be quite disturbing. Iyengar yoga can strengthen our emotional robustness (for example, the intensive practice of standing poses).
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