Yoga Philosophy: Or is your mind the b*tch?

In our last blog post “Is Karma a b*tch?” we concluded that the circumstances of our lives, the cards that we are handed cannot be chosen, but we can play our cards to our best to make a difference. We also realized that the game of cards starts in our mind.

Yes, as topical as it can sound, the only thing we can control is our mind. An uncontrolled mind can cause much more suffering than any of the facts happening to us.

It is the mind who gives meaning to things; who can for instance make us review, over and over, a painful experience; who changes our emotional state and our behavior.

Our thoughts give shape to our behavior and our actions and hence influence our future.

We don’t want to control our minds, though. What we want to control is what happens to us. What’s wrong with that? Well, the problem is this:

We don’t do many of the things we should be doing to shape our present and future because we are scared, lazy, depressed, anxious, distracted...And who can manage all that? “Yeap”, our mind.

Even worse, many of the things that happen to us are totally out of our control, the only thing we can control is our response and interpretation (so again back to the mind).

And it’s really hard to control it, we are not trained for that. We are very well used to managing our body, we have been training since we were babies. We learnt to move our arms, to grab things, to crawl, to walk, but...have we learnt to manage our mind, our thoughts and emotions?

Yoga is like this person yelling at us with a megaphone “Master your mind!”. Yoga is a helpful fellow though, giving us hundreds of techniques to do that. And yet we don’t understand, we think Yoga is just asking us to do “funny” shapes with our bodies.

And still we are not to be blamed: Perfecting how we move, how we control our body is relatively easy. Also we can see it but, where is our mind anyways? Can we even visualize our mind being under control? 

Despite that, Yoga has the tools, it is willing to help; as soon as we remove that “sport for the flexible” tag that we mistakenly have put on it and are willing to listen to all that it can teach us.