Many people are drawn to yoga because they enjoy the movement and stretching. They may even keep coming back to class because yoga opens up tight muscles or relieves pain from an old injury.
What they may not realize is that a regular yoga practice can also have a profound impact on the state of their system. In turn, this affects how they perceive the world around them and how they react during difficult times.
In the classic text the Yoga Sūtras, Patañjali lists nine obstacles that you will run into that can prevent you from practicing yoga regularly. These include illness (vyādhi), mental fatigue (styāna), doubt (saṁśaya), laziness (ālaysa) and others.
Most of us have experienced one or more of these at some point in our life. They are also not just obstacles to practicing yoga. These are things that can knock us out of balance and keep us from feeling calm and focused throughout the day.
Practicing Yoga for Difficult Times
While we can’t avoid these difficulties, how we respond to them depends on the state of our system. You may have already experienced this.
If you don’t sleep well the night before, it can be harder to deal with an illness. Or if you just spent an hour stuck in rush hour traffic, you might find that it’s more difficult to focus at work.
The state of our system also affects how we respond to other difficult times in our life, whether it’s a death in the family, an argument with a spouse, or even a global pandemic.
If we are feeling out of whack or agitated, we will react differently to these situations than if we are calm and balanced.
Often, when we are out of balance, we fall back on our old patterns, responding the way we always do in stressful situations. This could be snapping at the person nearest to us, having trouble sleeping, or grabbing a bag of chips and binge watching television.
However, we can use yoga to change the state of our system — bringing ourselves back into balance. Then our mind will be quieter and our attention will be more stable. This allows us to see these difficult situations more clearly. We are then able to pause before reacting, and respond in a way that better fits our authentic self.
The difficult times won’t stop happening. We still have to deal with them. But when we are balanced, we can deal with those situations with more calmness and skill.
“What happens with you when you begin to feel uneasy, unsettled, queasy? Notice the panic, notice when you instantly grab for something.” ~ Pema Chödrön, When Things Fall Apart: Heartfelt Advice for Hard Times
