What asanas or pranayama would help eliminate grasping?
Grasping?
Not sure what you mean. If you have a specific purpose for your yoga practice. You might be best served by working one on one with a teacher.
Asanas and pranayama are not one size fits all. Would you go to the doctor with pneumonia and expect the same treatment for a baby, an athlete or an older person???
Best wishes.
Vic
Before I or anyone can really answer: What do you mean by grasping exactly?
I think you mean grasping as in reaching for things, constantly desiring, longing?
Grasping is holding onto old ideas that no longer serve you. Such as an old habit that you can’t break and once you start trying to break it, your mind holds onto that habit even tighter.
Personally I found the opportunity to observe grasping (and therefore to practice non-graspingness) in standing balance poses, especially half moon. My intense desire to have a strong and serene asana interfered with my ability to achieve it. While I think this is true in lots and lots of poses, the illustration of it was most intense for me in half moon.
[quote=Techne;17214]Personally I found the opportunity to observe grasping (and therefore to practice non-graspingness) in standing balance poses, especially half moon. My intense desire to have a strong and serene asana interfered with my ability to achieve it. While I think this is true in lots and lots of poses, the illustration of it was most intense for me in half moon.
http://www.yogajournal.com/poses/784[/quote]
The state of mind conducvie to a fruitful practice is one of non-grasping(accepting,observing, non-reacting,not striving),easier said then done of course.
asana, for me,can be like meditation in motion, and meditation is like a state of non-doing,artfully and skillfully.I’d imagine Allan watts saying something like M is the art of doing nothing, but doing it rather well. Matthias Alexander in his ‘Use of the Self’ cauitions against end-gaining and says that doing nothing may indeed be our very cure.
When hoped for results don’t come as expected ot wanted this feeds into our practice as frustration and/or force or awareness deficit possibly, and our very practice suffers.
Will yoga cure your longing or desiring perhaps?- i do believe yoga can cure us( Well not everyone,all problem all thetime as it requires your involvement and participation, the “magic” comes from within you,not an external agent,doctor,outside manipulation or drug)Thoughi do belive yoga can cure some people some of the time, butnot everyone all of the time… Otherwise maybe we would’nt need yoga.& most of us,at least are’nt immortal …yet.
i remembr some yogi saying yoga may not delliver what you necessarily want or expect; but it can deliver what you need. that remark resonates,makes sense and sounds v yogic.
regard to specifics of asana, forward bends may be more passive and receptive as opposed to back bend which maaybe more active.
by grasping you might mean desiriing after hoped for fruits of practice that never come, a better you etc. this too is end-gaining and i would’nt personally encourage it. most desires possibly dissapoint cos they never fulfill or are never compeletly satisfied perhaps.
I wonder if there is a chakra associated with non grasping?
Don’t make things complicated that are not complicated.
[U]Just stop grasping[/U], and be. No posture alone will cure anyone from any habits and tendencies. You need to be decisive. Once you had enough of grasping and are fed up with your self, you will let go and be… Zen…
Until you haven’t had enough, nothing will help. It is a decision that you make. A choice in every moment: To either indulge in your tendencies and desires, or to be present and not obey them. It truly is a choice. It is as simple as that, but not until you truly want to. Somewhere inside you still believe you can gain something out of grasping. If you wouldn’t believe that somewhere, you wouldn’t be grasping anymore. Again, it is as simple as that.
It is kind of pointless to ask “can yoga cure me?” You don’t need to be cured. And even if you would need to be cured, that very tendency you would like to be rid of (grasping in this case) is something you [I]do[/I]… Can you see this? It is in [I]your[/I] control.
Don’t be a victim, take responsibility and either accept completely that you are grasping, or stop it. But don’t stay in the middle pretending to be a victim of something that is beyond your control. You are the only one doing it.
Likewise, you can be free of it by your own decisiveness and persistence.
Love & Goodluck,
Bentinho.
Give it up!
I did’nt mean to sound flippant or rude, more provocative.
But what i meant was whatever you are trying to reach or hold onto has more chance of being grasped( cos your statement is somewhat crypticaly expressed) by not grasping.
The harder you try to reach something, the further inevitbaly it gets to reach.
Less is more, and that applies to effort.And yoga is about effort. Often, i think, using the least amount of effort, in a skillful way.
This what i do-
Just accept.(If that means surrender too , well sometimes it is the only thing left…)
Be.
It is Zen-
The grasping is acheived/eliminated by non-grasping.
This is the state of mind you find in asana pranayama etc-accepting(like when you hold an asana) , with focus( say when you focus on ajna chakra, or between the eyes, and breath into manipura).
Be persistent, patient ,dedicated, and sincere and earnest in you prractice.Content with what you’ve got.Stop chasing/grasping. Then if there is anything to reach/grasp, you will have more chance of grasping it…i.e by refusing to grasp.The tendency is that the more or harder you try to grasp something, what i’ve learnt so far i feel ,the more un-graspable it becomes.
just be and accept.
just move on.
Inherently yoga in all its forms and manifestations will lead you to non-grasping, however that depends on you, your attitude and awareness of this state.
From my side, persist and just do your yoga as it is offered to you and make sure that you cultivate the right attitude and right awareness and along the progression non-grasping will slowly lift its head and manifest itself.
Good luck. 
[QUOTE=SpiritSeeker;17193]Grasping is holding onto old ideas that no longer serve you. Such as an old habit that you can’t break and once you start trying to break it, your mind holds onto that habit even tighter.[/QUOTE]
Sounds like an addiction.
Yoga helps in the way that it leads one to live a healthy life. But it takes more than yoga stretching for some.
The three unwholesome roots of delusions, greed and hate are very basic to a a Buddhist practice. Out of these three, delusion is the foundational root, for without seeing delusions for what they are, you cannot distinguish the other two unwholesome roots of greed and hate.
We can go in 3 directions…better, worse or sideways.
I find that if we ‘look for direction and forget perfection’ we can find a semblance of peace with the subject of the imperfect human.
We can always get a quick snapshot of our direction by asking the question: Is our progress frozen? Is our growing? Or is it declining?
I heard a story one time in a Yoga lecture that illustrates this point.
“Range is of the ego - Form is of the soul.”
The only thing we need to be concerned with is how is our form when it comes to our practice.
An important thing to remember with recovery is the 3-D’s: Desire, Determination and Diligence.
Desire:
Desire is the foundation for all recovery quests. You cannot help someone without the desire in them to be helped. Desire is what gets us taking that first step in the right direction when all seems hopeless.
Have you every tried to give advice or help someone in need and they respond: “I don’t care.” They lack the desire or at least this is what they say. Desire must come from within, you cannot force someone to change, they must change themselves.
To develop a desire to change, we must first recognize there is a problem or sickness in us. Recognition or awareness is the first step leading to desire. After we recognize we are sick or an area of our lives is out of balance, we can start accepting the fact that we need to take action in this area.
When we label addicts or people as “in denial,” we are saying the person is not able to recognize there is a problem in their lives that needs addressing.
Now some people recognize there is a problem in their life, but still don’t develop a burning desire for change, but at least they have a somewhat true picture of things and just haven’t made the crossover to developing the desire to change bad enough.
Whether their block is out of fear, laziness or staying in a comfortable place, they will have to figure out what is blocking them before they can take the next step. As I said, we cannot force someone to change, they must change themselves and it must be from the inside out.
Determination:
Determination serves two purposes here. When something is “determined” it is accepted as fact. We have determined that we are powerless over our addiction and our lives are unmanageable. We have determined we must abstain from certain people, places or things that we cannot comfortably have in our lives.
We are in the process of determining a new set of rules on how to live. We have also determined what injuries we have caused and what needs to be repaired through taking personal inventory.
Determination serves a second purpose and that is it keeps us on the long road to recovery. We cannot keep on this long road without being determined to change our lives day in day out.
Whether it is debt recovery, clutter, restructuring our complex lives or losing weight it all takes time and determination to stay on the path of recovery. Many distractions, detours and set backs along the way, but we should always be determined to keep pointed in the direction of recovery.
Diligence:
Diligence keeps us from going backwards once we finally arrive at the recovery place we are aiming for. It takes diligence once we get to where we want to be to maintain that serene spot, otherwise we fall back on our old “natural” ways of living.
Once you lose the fat, once you pay off your debts, once you lose the clutter, once you get sober and abstinent from your drug of choice it takes diligence to keep you that way. James Allen calls this watchfulness.
“Victories attained by right thought can only be maintained by watchfulness. Many give way when success is assured and rapidly fall back into failure.”
As A Man Thinketh by James Allen.
Putting our complaints down on pen and paper first crystallizes in our heads what needs to be changed or accepted in our lives.
Getting it all out and putting it all down is the first start of this recognition process that leads us to recovery.
Without this recognition, that we are sick or something is wrong in our lives, we cannot develop the desire for change.
We don’t even know what is wrong to change!
Writing your complaints down is the first start to making the roadmap for restructuring your life.
Restructuring our lives is very important if we want to get peace from our addictions.
Those things that cannot be restructured need to be accepted.
Either way we can find peace – by change or acceptance.
When you write, it uses a different part of the brain that mere speaking uses and I seem to get amazing results from writing as compared to just talking.
Writing helps crystallize your thoughts, it shares recovery with other addicts and they can know they are not alone.
Just remember what the Buddhists say in the eightfold path about right actions.
We have to use the right thoughts, the right actions and take the right direction with recovery.
Just spinning our wheels in the wrong direction does little for recovery, so write about things that matter to you and your recovery.
Wonderful! Thanks so much! Absolutely awesome and hopeful.