yoga away

Personality/Behavior

Extraordinary Health — Key # 4
The ancient teachings describe personality as a collection of attitudes, beliefs and “conditioned” responses that affect how you perceive your life and relate to your experiences. This deeper blueprint is often an expression of things that have happened to you in the past, which influence how you behave — and strongly shape the person you’ve become.

The challenge and opportunity that yoga offers is the possibility to change these conditioned responses and dysfunctional patterns and replace them with beneficial ones. How does this happen? First — by becoming aware of them, second — by understanding them, and finally — by working to change them. This is true transformation on the level of the personality.

In yoga, the tools for refining both behavior and personality come from the science of meditation. Meditation gives us the tools to recognize, refine and transform how we behave and who we become. Ultimately, the study of

meditation, and the “study of the Self” are one and the same.

Returning to Oneself
These days, self-exploration typically is done in little, fragmented ways. For your mind, you take a class, or you read a good book. For your personal development, you join a therapy group or see a counselor. You keep checking out all the different options, trying to accumulate a variety of techniques to help you learn about the different parts of who you are. But none of these alone seems to help you as much as you think it does. That’s because the study of the self needs an integral approach and doesn’t come from simply reading a book, listening to a lecture, or taking a kick-boxing class.

Self-study comes from personal experience — knowing what your mind is doing, feeling what your body is feeling — every single day. Self-study is when you examine what is inside of you. It’s when you return to yourself, and reveal yourself to yourself. In yoga, there are at least four

developmental stages to this process. (See “A Framework for Self-Study”)

Achieving your full potential at the level of personality and behavior is defined as having positive attitudes, deep interest in life, passion, psycho-emotional balance, improved relationships, intellectual discrimination, positive lifestyle choices and self-care.

Meditation — Sustaining Your Attention Meditation is the process of intentionally directing your mind in a certain way for a period of time. You establish contact with an idea, emotion, or object, and prolong that contact. Whatever happens between you and the object is the beginning of meditation.

Meditation is like a stream of flowing water. When the flow is continuous, it appears as an idea in the mind moving in a desired direction — from meditator to the object of meditation. It is as though you are having a conversation. This is not a logical process, but rather the creative continuation of deepening your focus.

Meditating is like opening up the view, on the inside. Opening up the view means finding a different way of seeing the “hows” and the “whats” of your life. Once you are open, you simply take a look and appreciate the view.