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Awareness - The Key Benefit to Yoga
Awareness is the key benefit of yoga and the key to yoga. With a clear awareness of Self, anything we do or experience can become a form of yoga.
Self-awareness is connection with all of life. With connection comes joy and deep inner fulfilment. If we can expand and stabilize our awareness then we have achieved something of great importance in our lives.
Awareness and consciousness are synonymous; however, one distinction is that awareness can be defined as the illumination of consciousness. Awareness is that part of us that allows us to be conscious, to know, feel and experience.
Each of us has an aware part and an unconscious part. Awareness shines its light into those areas of us that are normally hidden. In fact great philosophical texts state that our true nature is consciousness. Awareness, consciousness and Self are synonyms within yoga philosophy.
To understand what awareness is, contemplate its opposite - lack of awareness, or the unconscious state. When we are unconscious, or even semi-conscious, we do not feel anything. We are numb to life, disconnected from experience and from ourselves. Lack of awareness predisposes us to mental instability, states in which we are more easily overwhelmed by our thoughts, emotions, desires and memories. Unstable awareness destabilizes our ability to have a continuous sense of self.
The essence of yoga practice is cultivation of awareness and the application of awareness into life. If we do not consciously cultivate awareness we do not cultivate the core of our being. Even practicing asana without awareness is not yoga.
The prize we receive from Awareness
Self-awareness transforms any experience into a yogic process. Eating with awareness, moving with awareness, working with awareness, relating with awareness, being ill with awareness, can all be forms of yoga.
Whenever we are connected to what we are doing, and aware of ourselves as the one who is engaged in the action, we are in a yogic process.
Awareness is the transformative principle because it is only when become aware that we have the ability and skill to change and transmute ourselves. We can access all the elements of our life and our personality and form them into a more integrated, more authentic personality.
The prize of awareness is that it gives us access to the totality of us, and to all the skills, talents and potentials that lie within. Physical and mental health, peace and liberation are all benefits of yoga, however, they are only by-products of the most precious benefit of all, which is our awareness.
About the Author(s):
Dr Swami Shankardev Saraswati is an eminent yoga Acharya (authority), medical doctor, yoga therapist and internationally acclaimed author. As a direct disciple of Swami Satyananda Saraswati, he lived in the Bihar School of Yoga India for 10 years (1974-1985), where he trained to teach the highest practices of yoga-tantra.
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