Getting lost in thoughts in between asanas

Yoga Discussion General Yoga
#1

Everytime I hold an asana for long, when I have stretched my muscles considerably, after I release it, I feel overwhelmed by a stream of thoughts and accompanying feelings.

The thoughts and feelings are not intense - in the sense that I am not laughing or crying or trembling with fear - but they do take away my attention and mindfulness of being on my yoga mat, in the middle of a yoga session. For several minutes, I may sit or lie on my yoga mat lost in these thoughts.

The content of the thoughts and feelings is usually the same as it is the rest of the day. At times, things I might have been avoiding feeling come to the fore. But mostly, it is not the content but the fact that I get so lost in this stream of consciousness that is the most relevant part of the experience. I have experienced this ever since I began yoga 10 years ago.

Has anyone else felt the same?

How do you understand it?

What is your response to it?

To me, it seems that the nature of modern life is such that we are forced to not be spontaneous and have to suppress a lot of our mental energy at all times. Whether I am working, or being with people with who I feel I cannot be my real self, or just walking on a street full of cars and noise, it is not easy to be spontaneous and natural in the deepest sense. Hence, suppression is a constant fact. Suppression on the mental level is accompanied my contraction of the muscles, the deformation of the skeletal structure, and the constriction of the prana. Yoga undoes all this slowly, and hence, on the level of the mind, the overwhelming stream of thoughts and feelings.

I respond to this by not suppressing my thoughts and not forcing myself to concentrate on the yoga. When I realise I am lost in thoughts, I gently return to my practice.

#2

I feel overwhelmed by a stream of thoughts and accompanying feelings

Yoga can not be enforced nor it should be. If you feel what you have said then just surrender yourself to it. Don’t resist. Allow such thoughts and feelings to come and be just witness to it. Get dissolved into it. Only after complete melting into it, you will reborn again…and that is the real experiene of yoga.

#3

so you think that this stream of thoughts during yoga is a kind of release, a resurgence of mental activity that was suppressed during the day. If you welcome these thoughts so much then how can you hope to keep your attention on your yoga. Do you enjoy doing yoga, do you want to be present?

#4

Asana is something you do. Yoga is something you are.

The physical part of the practice is most efficacious when it has a purpose or intention. Asana is designed to churn up your stuff. Otherwise how on earth could it be a “practice”?

As for mental activity, it’s discussed at length in the Sutras. Though I imagine after ten years of practice you’ve read it many, many times over. That having been said, there is a lovely discourse by I.K. Taimni in The Science of Yoga which I feel is a worthy read.

Yet there is very little which instructs students on how to deal with citta vrtti or mental fluctuations (what science calls electroencephalographic waves). Sadly, there is a common misinterpretation of the Sutras that fosters a belief that meditation [I]is[/I] the cessation of these waves. However a more refined understanding is that meditation [I]requires[/I] the cessation of these waves. Ergo what I would suggest to students, and what is built in to the Purna Yoga practice, is an active meditation which centers the mental force and moves it into the heart center for transformation.

Obviously, based on the above, this isn’t fodder for internet transmission. But I do think it’s worth mentioning because what you broach is not at all odd, unique or uncommon among practitioners of both asana and yoga