Beyond the Mat: Integrating Yoga and Meditation into Everyday Life
If you read the last post about When to do Yoga, this will help you to understand meditation and begin to incorporate it into your healthy lifestyle. If you haven’t, check it out “When is the best time to do yoga?”
We talked about yoga being a restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff in that last post, and I could easily replace the word yoga with meditation, (or even pilates, but I will address that in another post).
The first image most have of Meditation is sitting crossed legged, with hands poised and the eyes rolled back in the head while whoever is inside the body is off in outerspace somewhere. While that image is not necessarily wrong, its the assumption of what its for or what else is occurring that is misconstrued.
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is where you will read “The restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff is Yoga.” If we build off of that, and the last post about that. Meditation follows suit. When we understand that, we can see that yoga is a form of meditation. We could also see that cooking or playing with kids can be a form of meditation also. A conversation could be. Consoling a friend could be. All of these as meditation, all of these as yoga.
Understanding this and reflecting on the when to do yoga post, you can develop a meditation practice in a similar fashion. A natural way. A way that makes sense and has an inherent motivating factor within it. When your mind is astray with worries, wants, anger, that is a good time to meditate. Meditate with yoga, or meditate with a sitting or lying down practice of breathing and clearing away the mindstuff that arises. Meditate while cooking and focusing wholely on the task, or while playing or listening. Being present to the mindstuff that arises and clearing it away so you can relate fully to the task or the person at hand.
This is yoga, this is meditation. This is a simple way to incorporate them both into life, and go through a process that builds a lifestyle that can support a regular practice of both. As you gain benefit from the practice, you will want to do it more, or with regularity. You can fit a regular sitting or yoga practice into your life at anytime as part of this process, this is not saying do not commit to a regular schedule. This is saying, make it a lifestyle, which includes doing them both regularly, and is giving some direction of how to do that naturally if you’ve ever struggled with jumping in head long and fizzling out, or just lacking motivation all together.
Good luck, and reach out with questions or to share your success anytime!