The Psychology of Yoga and the Yoga of Psychology

[The following essay first appeared as an article in the March/April 2008 issue of The Los Angeles Psychologist, the bimonthly publication of The Los Angeles County Psychological Association. This publication is geared to mental health practitioners, and this particular issue focused on creative approaches to psychotherapy. As editor Meghan Moody states in her introductory comments, "This issue . . . offers a look at a few creative practices that go beyond traditional talk therapy, inviting you to color outside the lines" (5). As a psychologist and yoga teacher, I was asked to contribute.]

The challenge for me is how to be present. To my sensations, my feelings, my thoughts, and my actions. It's an awful lot to ask and very hard to achieve. But yoga has helped by providing a method. Its has given me a safe space in which to practice showing up.

One reason I love yoga is because it's concrete. I attempt to work my body without getting distracted. Without trying to escape the intensity of the moment. Bending forward, bending backward, twisting sideways, and lifting skyward. All without losing a smooth, balanced breath. All without losing a smooth, balanced mind.

But we invariably do yoga the way we do life, and the same unwholesome habits inevitably plague us. For some, it's overworking. For others, it's being distracted. For still others, it's not managing to get onto the mat. As Jon Kabat-Zinn says in the title to his book, "Wherever you go, there you are."

And that's how yoga works. We start with a posture and end up with ourselves. Increasingly aware of our distractions and habits. It's hard to see our weaknesses in all their florid glory, which is why practicing yoga takes so much courage. But the practice also encourages us to be kind, to practice ahimsa or non-violence on every level, to discern with compassion instead of judging with harshness. This makes it possible to tolerate others. This makes it possible to tolerate ourselves.

The great thing about yoga is that we get to keep practicing. And the longer we practice the more we can grow. Of course, it's always tempting to avoid growth at any cost. All we need to do is reinforce our old habits. But if we really want to change, yoga's a good bet. It gives us a chance to see what we're up to.

By revealing in living color our unconscious habits, yoga helps us cultivate non-attachment and presence. Over time, we can learn to optimize our practice. We seek sensation and avoid pain while maintaining our breath. We get stronger and more flexible and assume harder postures. We notice with greater speed when we're becoming disregulated. We think about why we are getting overwhelmed. And we change what we do so that it feels better.

Gradually, we're more able to observe our experience, to reflect on our observations, and to act on our reflections, all of which enables us to become much more present -- to maintain our homeostasis under stressful conditions. In essence, the practice helps us achieve quiet mind, which, more or less, is the definition of yoga.

And then there's psychotherapy. Being a patient is hard enough. But being a psychologist is infinitely harder. Especially when it comes to encountering yourself.

A thousand times a day, I'm challenged with feelings. Frustration with this patient for coming late again. Anguish for that patient who's binging and purging. Fear for this patient who's feeling suicidal. Sadness for that patient who's just lost his father.

Every session is another chance to be overwhelmed by the torrent of feelings that threatens to flood me. Every session is another chance to push the feelings away - by getting sleepy, becoming directive, or spinning cogent theories. These are some of the ways I unknowingly create distance, from the patient, from myself, and from the relationship between us.

This is where the yoga comes into play (not to mention the years of therapy, supervision, and classes). Because is a glacial sort of way yoga has changed me. It has helped me to notice when I'm not showing up, and it has helped me to figure out how to come back. It has also helped me notice when my patients are absent. They may appear to be there, but it's really an illusion. They're a million miles away -- angry, silent, or distracted. It's thrilling to bring them back. To guide them toward their core. To help them stay present to the pain they uncover.

How astonishing it is to be able to be present. If only for an evanescent moment now and then. Though the presence comes and goes, it's amazingly deep. It brings with it an indescribable feeling of intimacy. I can see it in my patients. I can see it in myself. It is thrilling. It is transformative. It is scary. It is sublime.

This is the hope that keeps me alive. To go deeper. To get closer. To stay longer. To be more present. To move nearer and nearer to a state of quiet mind. To move nearer and nearer to the essence of yoga.

You Are Not Your Yoga Posture

Years ago I was living with a jewelry designer who noticed the intensity that I brought to my yoga practice. In particular I was struggling with a posture called pasana. You crouch down with your knees together, keep your heels on the floor, twist your torso to the left, loop your right arm around your knees, reach the left arm behind your back, and (if you're lucky) clasp your left wrist with your right hand. Then, for fun, you do the other side. The literal translation of pasana is noose pose. There's no more to say. You get the idea.

In any case, my girlfriend watched me struggle with the posture. Though she didn't say anything about what she saw, one day she gave me a talisman for my practice. It spelled out in beaded letters: "You are not your pasana."

It has taken me a long time to understand what she meant. I grew up in a world, as so many of us do, where we learn to value ourselves on the basis of our achievements. For me, it was academics. Going to an elite school. For others, it is money, beauty, or sports. But whatever you're measuring, the bottom line is the same. Your are only as valuable as your achievements.

And achievement in this system is always comparative. Being the smartest, the wealthiest, the most beautiful, or the most athletic. Enough to join the ranks of the chosen few. Enough to prove definitively that you are truly special.

Because what's at stake is your lovability. Feeling special enough for others to love. When value is about achievement, and achievement is about winning, the only way to feel special is truly to stand out. If you win, you feel special and therefore worth loving. If you lose, you feel worthless and completely unlovable.

Moreover, we tend to treat ourselves with the same conditional judgment. If we go to Harvard, earn tons of money, become a model, or make the pros, we secretly believe we are God's gift to man. But if we're rejected, squeak by, get turned down, or don't get drafted, we attack ourselves harshly with hatred and loathing.

To make things worse we almost always equate possessions with achievement. We treat our houses, our cars, our clothes, and our offices as indications of success and thus as proof of lovability. And invariably we include everything else in our orbit. Our wives, our kids, our friends, and our acquaintances. They all become gauges of our success, and we need them to achieve for us to feel lovable. If they don't, we feel disgusted and push them away, afraid that their failure will somehow infect us.

Needless to say, this is a challenging way to exist. Always feeling judged, judging ourselves, and judging others. Afraid we'll be left if we don't constantly win. On the verge of leaving others because they fall short. More or less living life on a tightrope with no net.

For many people this is the only life that they know. And they're confounded when I suggest that there may be another way. It's as if I'm describing an unthinkable universe. They can't imagine a world where love isn't based on achievement.

Or to put it in terms of my girlfriend's talisman, they can't imagine a universe in which you are not your pasana. In which your value isn't determined by what you do, what you own, what you look like, or whom you know. In which your value isn't determined by achievement at all.

This was my experience when she gave me the talisman. Which is why I didn't understand what she was trying to tell me. She was saying that she didn't love me for my pasana -- or for any of the other achievements I had spent my life amassing. But if she didn't love me for them, what else was there to love? I couldn't find anything else of value to point to.

Then I realized that it wasn't about me. It wasn't so much that my girlfriend loved me, it was more that she loved how she felt in my presence. God knows what it was about my presence that worked for her. I'd like to think it was my integrity, my honesty, and my compassion. But it was at least as much my confusion, my self-deception, and my guilt. And all of this filtered through the lens of her subjectivity. None of it in any way an impartial measure of my value.

In other words, I realized that she loved the way we fit. And the fit had nothing to do with being the best and the brightest and had everything to do with the quality of our connection. She liked how she felt, and that was enough. My proficiency at yoga was completely irrelevant.

Which is not to say that she didn't enjoy watching me practice. Appreciate my professional and personal achievements. Or take pleasure in my appearance and how we looked together. It's just that they had no bearing on the nature of her love. They didn't affect our connection or change how she felt. They colored the landscape but didn't alter the ground. For her the ground was solid enough on which to build a life.

Unfortunately, for me, the same wasn't true. I was as hard on my girlfriend as I was on myself and unable to forgive her for her humanity. Only now, many years after I ended the relationship, do I understand how my girlfriend was able to accept me despite the many ways I was neither best nor bright: she cared about fit, about the connection between us, about how good she felt when she was around me and not about what I had managed to achieve.

Realizing this, even late in the game, allows me to shift what I look for in relation. Rather than scanning for objective achievement, I focus instead on subjective attachment. How do I feel in relation to the other? How do they feel in relation to me? What is the nature of the connection between us? And the same goes for the relationship I cultivate with myself. How does it feel? Is it wholesome or parasitic?

Understanding the distinction between achievement and attachment also enables me to empathize with any patient or student who has come to believe that love is based on performance. It helps me to understand why the stakes are so high. It helps me to recognize why the pressure's so great. And it helps me to invoke the unthinkable hope of striving to achieve because it feels good.

And this in itself is a wonderful gift. For without the risk of rejection to push us ahead, we can finally stop and ask ourselves what gives us pleasure. And even if we continue to do the same things, why we choose to do them can fundamentally change -- a change that can transform our experience at the root. Pasana for pleasure, who would have thought? That is an unthinkable universe, indeed!

Pain vs. Suffering: A World of Difference

There's a comment in an essay by Sylvia Boorstein that has proven extremely suggestive for me. Boorstein is a therapist, a meditation teacher, and a yoga instructor. Her essay appears in a book edited by Stephen Cope entitled Will Yoga & Meditation Really Change My Life? "I was consoled by the idea of the end of suffering," she writes playfully,

long before I had any ability to calm or focus my attention. I remember the chagrin I felt when, after some significant period of practice, I realized that I had confused the promise of the end of suffering with the end of pain, which was what I really had hoped would happen. I was embarrassed not to have figured out something so obvious -- really, what could I have been thinking? (17)

Boorstein doesn't explain the difference between suffering and pain, but it's clear that the distinction is powerful for her. This difference seems to come from the The Four Noble Truths, but I leave it to those who know Buddhism to say for sure.

Whatever its origin, I find this distinction very useful. It suggests that there are feelings that cannot be avoided that arise as the result of the most human experience. The death of a child. The collapse of a marriage. Violation of one's body. Rejection by a parent. These are a few of the commonplace traumas that define what it means to live in this world, to be subject to change, to be a victim of chance. These are a few of the traumas that cause pain.

The difference Boorstein points to implicitly suggests that how we manage our pain determines whether we suffer. If we sit with our pain and don't try to block it, we have a chance to experience it, understand it, and act on it. We may not be happy about it, but we learn to accept it. And with this acceptance comes insight and wisdom.

If, on the other hand, we try to avoid pain, this invariably leads us to suffer. Drinking, doing drugs, abusing sex, binging and purging. Or any of the myriad other ways we numb ourselves. All these attempts to avoid pain make things worse. First by bringing harm to ourselves and often others. Second by leaving our pain unattended. Rather than gaining wisdom by dealing with our pain, we add suffering to the mix by trying to avoid it.

This is the state that most of us are in when we finally decide that we're ready for therapy. We know we are suffering. And we know we're in pain. Even if we don't know the difference between them.

The work of psychotherapy is to bring an end to suffering by helping us to deal with our underlying pain so we no longer have to anesthetize ourselves. This work requires us to turn our gaze inside, to notice how we feel, and to reflect on our feelings. Though challenging, it allows us to get to know ourselves so we don't live in constant fear of who we are. It doesn't eliminate the pain that comes with life but it does eliminate the suffering we add to it.

Maybe it's not the happiness we hoped for, but it's light years away from the place where we started. And there's nothing like distance to give us perspective.

No Pain, No Gain? No Gain With Pain!

Every athlete knows the aphorism, "No pain, no gain." And anyone who watches television knows the Nike motto, "Just do it." Both of these expressions share a disrespect for the body. Specifically, for its capacity to identify pain as a means of protecting it from possible injury. The unspoken message is don't trust your body. Your body will steer you wrong. Trust only your mind.

We Americans are very good at distrusting our bodies. The Puritans treated the body as an instrument of temptation. Trust your body and you risk burning for Gluttony, Lust, and Sloth. Deny your body and you find salvation through Abstinence, Chastity, and Diligence.

It's not hard to see the modern fruit of these roots. Skinny is good, fat is bad. Sex is dirty, refusal clean. Leisure suspect, work productive. From the beginning, we've associated pleasure with guilt. And, more to the point, pain with success. "No pain, no gain" crystallizes these American values. "Just do it" transmutes them into an actionable plan.

Yoga offers an alternative approach to the body by teaching us ahimsa -- the principle of nonviolence. We can always hurt ourselves by doing too much. We can never hurt ourselves by doing too little.

Yoga helps us avoid committing violence against ourselves by teaching us to distinguish between pain and sensation. This distinction is crucial for physical development. In order to grow, we must challenge our limits. This generally means cultivating powerful sensation: we burn, we cramp, we strain, we stretch. Yet if we push our limits too far we end up in pain. The body's way of telling us we're about to get hurt: we tear, we pop, we break, we crack.

In teaching us to distinguish between pain and sensation, yoga enables us to optimize physical growth. We work as hard as we can without injuring ourselves. Instead of "No pain, no gain" we pursue "No gain with pain." A radical departure from the Nike approach.

Even so, especially when we first start to practice, it's tempting to apply Nike's directive to yoga. We willingly kill ourselves to be the best in the room. To be the strongest, the most flexible, the one with the greatest stamina. The most admired by the teacher. The one to stand out.

If we're lucky, yoga helps us to see what we're up to, to understand why we're doing it, and to find a better way. It teaches us to observe, to reflect, and to act. A systematic approach to achieve lasting change. A methodical way to optimize growth.

Ultimately, this is the great gift of yoga. And if we can do it on the mat, we can do it in life. We can optimize not only our physical growth, but our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual growth as well. After all, the definition of yoga is not perfect abs. The definition of yoga is essentially quiet mind. A state that no amount of pain let's us gain.