Yoga Practice for Beginners:
The Practice of Self-Awareness

Ultimately, the practice(s) of yoga just are just variations of no longer fleeing yourself.

 

‘No longer fleeing yourself’ usually means simply sitting with your anxieties rather than reinforcing the habits you’ve inherited and developed in order to avoid your anxieties, and to avoid the people and situations that produce your anxieties. Being able to sit with your anxieties means that your life won't be determined by your anxieties.

 

Being able to sit with uncomfortable aspects of our inner life requires the cultivation of inner stability. We sit with them rather than run from them, because running from them means that they are in control. In sitting with them instead of running from—or trying to destroy—them, we eventually experience ourselves and the world in a way that is relatively free of our own self-interest, and thus free from the various rigidities involved in self-protection.

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Trying to combat our anxieties with techniques isn’t enough to reduce our suffering. Stress management techniques don’t address our core anxiety of inadequacy. Craving anxiety relief is still craving. And fighting our anxiety typically just results in more anxiety. And anxiety reduction—if it is the quest of an ego looking to further self-protect/elevate—only re-produces the suffering we were attempting to eliminate in the first place (if even only about sanitizing ourselves of our anxiety).

 

No longer habitually absorbed in our own inner/outer world, we could re-possess our attention. We could notice—among other things—the radical and ungrounded dependence of our individual existence and the nature of its impossible (and relentless) quest to ground itself by trying to matter more, by way of having more, doing more, being more (and, in some instances, even giving more)—or by trying to purge its inner life of all defects/badness—so as to no longer be vulnerable to unpredictable sources of internal/external discomfort. 

 

Yoga just is no longer fleeing yourself—a process which may or may not include āsana practice. No longer fleeing yourself, the ego becomes transparent. As the ego becomes transparent, the soul—the sense we have of our innermost self—is set free. This is yoga. ​

 

​​That said, benefits of these yoga practices abound, and these yoga practices often make the process changing your life/self much easier: it is easier to change your habits from a place or space of focused, stable awareness than from a place of reactive avoidance. We explore what this looks like in our section on yoga and personal growth. We also offer content about the philosophical foundations of yoga. These are all part of our guide to yoga.

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Videos on yoga practice and articles about yoga practice (beyond everything commonly associated with yoga practice(s), such as yoga poses, mind/meditation, body/fasting/abstinence, cultivating resilience, etc., will be added below. We also answer frequently-asked questions about yoga practice below.