The Case for Meditation by Gabe Hopp

Modern yoga is largely a physical practice of poses with a little bit of breath sprinkled in. All yoga studios and classes have a slightly different flavor and emphasis, but 99% of the time, you can expect your yoga class to be based on shape-making. In the large-scale yoga realm, this focus on the body is relatively new. We can loosely pinpoint it to the mid 1900s. This is when the yoga teachers of Krishnamacharya’s lineage moved westward and brought the roots of yoga, as we know it today, to North America.

Let’s pause for a second to consider the scope of yoga overall. The oldest texts of yoga, the Vedas, are generally dated to 1500-1200 BCE. That makes yoga about 3500 years old, up to this point. And, for the first 3400 years, or so, the focus of a yoga practice was a deep state of meditation. The ancient seers, those who experimented with the first yoga experiences, separated themselves from society so as not to have earthy distractions. In the quiet and austere settings of caves as dwellings, they played with energy, breath and long periods of silent concentration and focus. Out of these experiments, they developed more systematized approaches to meditation and breath work, which we call pranayama.

We have to jump ahead more than a century to bump into the first scriptures and treatises on yoga. Up to this point, not much was written down about the practices and processes. The first important one, the Bhagavad Gita, which outlines three ways to practice yoga (all of the mind and heart) is dated around 200-400 BCE. The second being the Yoga Sutras, which is dated around the turn of the century from BCE-CE. The Yoga Sutras, while used present-day as the guidebook for yoga, is, in fact, a manual on meditation.

The heart-mind was what the yogis were really after. The word in Sanskrit for heart-mind, the citta was the main focus of practices to achieve oneness (samadhi) and enlightenment (kaivalya). The body, as the focus for practice, doesn’t really come into play until around 1300 CE through the text the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the first time in which we see postures written down. But even then, it only had like 8 poses coupled with lots and lots of meditation and breath.

Current day, the focus is obviously much more on the body. We have cultivated this amazing system to keep the body healthy and functioning optimally, and I think we should use it as such. And we do! You know I love yoga asana as much as you do. But, I also believe that we are not getting it quite right if we think that the body is the path. A steady mind was the goal for thousands of years, and to truly honor the intention of the ancients, we would work as diligently on the mind as we do on the body.

But how, you may ask? One great place to start, if you need a little meditation assistance is on the OTY youtube page. We have several guided meditations to get you on your way. meditation playlist If you’re more of a book or podcast person, just ask your yoga teacher for a recommendation. There are lots of different approaches and our knowledgable staff is able to share what has worked well for them.

Another great meditation resource is the Flatwater Collective group who meet on Sunday afternoons at 4pm at the East studio. This group cultivates many different ways to approach mindfulness and meditation. All are welcome to join on Sundays!

 Happy meditating.