If you ask any yoga practitioner why they began practicing, a circular theme of answers abound. From stress reduction and decreased anxiety, to better sleep, weight loss and increased strength. In short, yoga is good for you. But as we continue to practice our motivation deepens. It becomes a focused process of befriending yourself, getting to intimately know all your patterns, quirks, reactions and tendencies.
The Revealing of Our True Self
Yoga is immersing one’s self in concentrated awareness while keeping in mind that our awareness is always fluctuating on a continuum based upon context. Western culture has expertly adopted a host of ways to prevent us from looking at parts of ourselves that we have deemed unwanted and unwelcome. So what really happens when we are unavoidably faced with our less than desirable traits?
The truth remains that this shadow, the projected image of a blocked light source, doesn’t go away simply because we turn away from it. The shadow is part of us. It develops as a response to the events of our lives and becomes our contours. Jung wrote, "Everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the darker and denser it is.” And to really blow your mind, what is disowned in us we often energetically attract in others in an unconscious, maladaptive search for wholeness.
Yoga Meets Psychotherapy
Incorporating our shadow into our consciousness is imperative and the only way to do this is to turn and look squarely at our disowned parts, the ones that we're not proud of, those that make our stomachs cringe. To invite them in and treat them as the crucial messengers that they are. To have a real and searching internal dialogue about who, what and why they are and what they have to say to us. This is where the medicine lies.
Svadhyaya, meaning “one’s own reading” or “self study” is a process of identifying and sifting through the granthis, or psychic knots, in our character structure. It allows us to do the methodical work of untying those that bind us and have become a barrier to our freedom. Stepping on our mats gives us the opportunity to really look inside and be present with all that is: the good, the bad and the ugly.
"Study thy self, discover the divine." Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 2.44