The New Year brings an opportunity for deepening your commitment to your wellbeing. The strength and stability gained through committed action allows you to accomplish one of the main benefits of yoga – to discover and live your dharma or find and fulfil your purpose in life.
One of many approaches is to clearly define those actions and thoughts that bring you closer to living Dharma and those moving you away. Then, focus on the actions and thoughts moving you toward Dharma and renounce those moving you away. By living your life this way you are engaged in Abhyasa and Vairagya. Abhyasa is what you take in, what you study, what you practise, do or think, and therefore what you create in your life. Vairagya is what you remove, thoughts or ideas you reject, negative habitual actions you stop. Abhyasa is the practical application of yogic principles in life. Vairagya is a cessation of the mind energy you send out that brings obstacles into your life.
There are several ways to begin to apply Abhyasa and Vairagya. One way is to use your asana practice. What do you want out of your asana practice? What would you feel like if you did your practice with that intention as the foundation? For example, say you want to reduce stress and sleep better. What if every time you stepped on the mat you clearly intended to release stress and sleep better as a result? Once you can easily bring this intention to the mat then deepen the practice by using the inhalations to focus on a well-defined, positive representation of your intention and the exhalations to release any thoughts or feelings experienced as an obstacle. In the case of the ‘wants less stress’ intention, you would focus on inhaling thoughts and feelings associated with being stress free. On the exhalations you would release the tension or weight of stress and the frustration of sleeplessness into a ball of white light.
Another way of applying Abhyasa and Vairagya is through the foods you eat. By eating nourishing foods like fresh fruits and vegetables, nuts and whole grains (especially the ancient grains: quinoa, amaranth, kamut and spelt) you increase the efficiency of your body. By rejecting processed, additive filled foods you ensure that you are not undoing the effect of eating the higher vibrational foods above.
How about applying Abhyasa and Vairagya to your thoughts? To do this you practise thoughts that resonate with both a sense of joy and belief. What do I mean by that? Let’s say you want to learn to speak a foreign language. Your thought process might go something like this, ‘I want to learn to speak Spanish. I don’t really have enough time but it would be nice. I actually don’t have the money to enrol on a proper course anyway so I should probably forget about it for now. Spanish is a lovely language to hear spoken. I wish I could read Cervantes in the original. Oh well, someday I might get the opportunity but now’s not the time……etc.’ Through the use of Vairagya you would start to reject the negative thoughts and replace them with more positive ones. Then the thought stream might be more focused: ‘I want to learn to speak Spanish. When I have time I’m going to enrol on a course. It will be interesting to read Don Quixote in Spanish. I really look forward to finding a course. It makes me really happy that I’m going to learn a foreign language.’ Sounds simple doesn’t it? Of course, for most of us, when a negative thought appears, we dwell on it. Then we feel negative about the thing we want to do. The attention to Abhyasa and the discernment of Vairagya make it possible to break this cycle.
