Escape the relentless noise of the world and discover the sanctuary within, as we journey through the practice of pratyahara. This episode promises to guide you toward harnessing your energy for profound self-growth, urging you to question the nourishing value of your daily engagements. Join us for an enriching discussion that peels back the layers of life's distractions, sharing personal stories and insights that challenge you to discern between what truly feeds your soul and what drains it.
Dive deep into the essence of pratyahara, where the focus is on the delicate art of withdrawing our senses to embrace inner silence. We explore the transformative effects of minimizing sensory inputs, such as music during yoga practice, to fine-tune our body's inner dialogue. This is more than just an exercise in self-control; it's a pathway to healing, self-awareness, and ultimately, personal freedom. Learn to listen and honor the messages of pain and discomfort your body communicates, as they are often the first steps toward true understanding and connection with oneself.
This conversation culminates in the realization that self-connection is paramount to our overall well-being and relationships. Yoga emerges not only as a physical practice but as an intentional guide to inner peace and unconditional love. By sharing practical steps to silence life's incessant buzz, we invite you to rediscover moments of stillness that reveal your inherent purity and wholeness. Tune in and be inspired to lead yourself with intention, enhancing your relationships with others and the world around you.
Escape the relentless noise of the world and discover the sanctuary within, as we journey through the practice of pratyahara. This episode promises to guide you toward harnessing your energy for profound self-growth, urging you to question the nourishing value of your daily engagements. Join us for an enriching discussion that peels back the layers of life's distractions, sharing personal stories and insights that challenge you to discern between what truly feeds your soul and what drains it.
Dive deep into the essence of pratyahara, where the focus is on the delicate art of withdrawing our senses to embrace inner silence. We explore the transformative effects of minimizing sensory inputs, such as music during yoga practice, to fine-tune our body's inner dialogue. This is more than just an exercise in self-control; it's a pathway to healing, self-awareness, and ultimately, personal freedom. Learn to listen and honor the messages of pain and discomfort your body communicates, as they are often the first steps toward true understanding and connection with oneself.
This conversation culminates in the realization that self-connection is paramount to our overall well-being and relationships. Yoga emerges not only as a physical practice but as an intentional guide to inner peace and unconditional love. By sharing practical steps to silence life's incessant buzz, we invite you to rediscover moments of stillness that reveal your inherent purity and wholeness. Tune in and be inspired to lead yourself with intention, enhancing your relationships with others and the world around you.
Speaker 1:
Greetings my friends.
Speaker 2:
Hello everybody.
Speaker 1:
And welcome to Become One Living. We're here with the tools for living a conscious life with Jody and Dan Boisitz.
Speaker 2:
Welcome. We're happy to be here.
Speaker 1:
And happy that you're here with us.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, we're looking to put a little yoga back into yoga.
Speaker 1:
I love that, bringing the yoga back to yoga. Well, let's get serious now. We have been talking about the eight limbs of yoga and we are now on pratyahara.
Speaker 2:
Which means withdrawing the senses or turning in.
Speaker 1:
Pratyah means to withdraw or go against or to turn away from, and ahara means food. So pratyahara means to turn away from food, to withdraw from food, but not the food that we think.
Speaker 2:
Like food, you eat, food for thought, all sorts of food that nourish the human.
Speaker 1:
Anything that you take in. Anything you take in is considered food in this in ahara. So, pratyahara is saying turn away from distractions outside of you and turn back towards you. Now where does that fit in in the eight limbs of yoga? We just ended with pranayama, which is breathing, and before that you have asana. We have moved from bigger, denser, more external things. Now we're moving into more internal. The only way we can get internal is by turning away from the outside world.
Speaker 2:
Who knew there was so much more to yoga than just asana.
Speaker 1:
Probably not many people, because we live in a world that offers yoga as an exercise or a quick fix 20 minutes here, 20 minutes there loud music, heat.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, lots of distractions, distractions, but we've experienced all of the great residual or results of regularly practicing. For instance, you're at meditation now and we're going through the eight limbs, but I mean there's great things that a human can experience with using the tools yamas, niyamas, asana, pranayama, pratyahara. You know they're all tools and awareness to create a practice and rituals that can enrich and enhance anyone's life.
Speaker 1:
Beautifully said. Beautifully said, what I've heard was practice. All of the past podcast we've discussed yoga, the eight limbs of yoga. The eight limbs are a framework that you can return to over and over again to check yourself, how to check your progression, to check if it's working. Am I happier? Do I feel more ease in my life? Is there less stress? Am I less reactive? There's so many different ways that you can check the eight limbs against how you're living, to see if there's growth, if you want it.
Speaker 1:
But here, right now, we're diving into internal awareness, not the outside, not the body with the asana, not the breath, but what's inside. And it is a continual practice to turn away from distractions. But you first have to know what is distracting you. The question I would like to pose to you all is when does your energy go every day? Where are you looking on Instagram for three hours? Are you watching YouTube? Are you listening to podcasts? Are you at work? Are you gossiping? Are you eating, sleeping? Where is your energy and your focus, and is it feeding you or Draining you? How is it impacting you?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it's big. It reminds me of that story of Buddhist monk coming to Time Square for the first time in New York City and seeing all the signage and the flashing lights and he says they're trying to steal my mind. It's just distractions, so many distractions and now we hold them in the palm of our hand on our phone and you really could go down a rabbit hole there.
Speaker 1:
Yes, which I have multiple times. Dan is looking at me sweetly and trying not to tell you all that when I feel stressed, I have a part of me that goes right to the phone not as much now, actually, barely now but would start scrolling and he would say to me what are you doing? I'm trying to calm down or I don't know what I'm doing. I was stuck in a loop, but what I realized was it was either enraging me, exhausting me.
Speaker 2:
I'm dating you Adjecting yeah, you know, and that's a good, noteworthy story there job, because it's a great thing for any of our listeners in the audience to become aware of, and it's not a judgment. It's like so, if you go to a certain something, your phone or TV show or Another distraction of your choosing, don't I would, I would always say, don't judge it, but become aware first of okay, if I go there, if and I keep going there Try to get that flashpoint right before you go there. What's going on right before that? Are you? You know what's triggering you to be stressed out that you go there instead of Choosing wellness or breath or going to a yoga class or something like that instead, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1:
There is no judgment, and that's where I want to go. Next is music in yoga. People ask me why I don't use music and and the answer is it's an extra distraction. It doesn't mean yoga is good or bad. As a yoga teacher, you need to know what you want to offer your students, and as a person who takes yoga, you want to know what your goal is. And if your goal is Pratya Hara, it will be challenging if you're listening to music and it's invoking emotions right, that's what music often does.
Speaker 2:
It, he it creates a, it evokes emotion or thought patterns or brings you somewhere outside of the space in your practice.
Speaker 1:
Which isn't a concern if you weren't doing yoga, which is trying to bring you inside to your internal body and to start to learn more about yourself not yourself in dance class or yourself with music yourself and that's what these limbs are about. What's happening out in the world was the first two limbs. What's happening with your body now, with your breath. But if we start to go more and more, we have to control our senses, and the word control I looked up because I always feel that control has a negative Cognitation connotation Yep I.
Speaker 1:
I always feel that it has a negative Cognitation connotation connotation. Why don't you say it instead?
Speaker 2:
Jody always feels like control has a negative connotation.
Speaker 1:
Yes, so I looked it up and here are different words for control, to direct your behavior, nice, to direct people's behavior or the course of events. So you're directing your behavior again towards something. It can also mean to regulate, to manage and to oversee. Pratyahara is overseeing and managing your senses, your sight, your smell, your hearing, your taste, your sensory, and bringing it back to you, turning away from the attraction. Oh, shiny object. Right, I'm over here, I'm over there, where are you? I can't stay still, I can't focus.
Speaker 2:
That in my asana practice that singularly is this great thing that I listen deeply. I've had a couple of injuries in my life that have taken me decades to get with and listening inward to the feedback my body gives me in particular spots For me it's my neck and my shoulder from an injury but I've spent so much time undoing tissue that has been moved from accident in my body and it just feels like this never ending unwinding. But it's not possible if I had. It would not be possible if I hadn't taken the time to slow down in my practice and really listen to my body and feel, and it almost gosh in a great way. It almost controls or guides or dictates how I thirst to move.
Speaker 1:
Listen. That's the word that stood out as you shared. Pratyahara is asking are you listening to me? Are you listening to yourself? What are your needs? What do you want? How do you feel? Are you hungry, are you tired? We lose this connection to ourself because we override internal signals on a daily basis.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely.
Speaker 1:
Interoception. We override I'm hungry, oh, and just five more minutes. Or we override when we're tired. The other night it was late seven and Dan and I had to go to Whole Foods and in my mind I thought bed, go to bed, go to bed. But I overrode that and we went to Whole Foods and a couple of minutes later Dan says you're being mean, I'm being mean, I'm tired, I'm cranky, and I overrode the signal of tiredness. What Pratyahara offers on this path of yoga is an opportunity to look out and say do I really want to go to Whole Foods right now? Look out, look out at the external circumstances and then say no, no, no, no, what's here? Listen inside.
Speaker 2:
Whatever important.
Speaker 1:
When we withdraw our senses, it could seem like we're asking you not to look, not to listen, not to smell, not to taste. That can't happen. Pratyahara means to turn away from when I'm meditating, I can hear Gabby, our dog. She's the cutest little thing. She's got a beard.
Speaker 2:
And big ears.
Speaker 1:
And big ears, Baby Yoda with a beard. She looks like I'll hear Gabby's feet Now. I could open my eyes and go with that, or I can turn back and say what's here right now.
Speaker 2:
Would you say that this, then, can become an opportunity where Pratyahara is you're turning in so much that you're becoming aware and listening deeper to your body.
Speaker 2:
So like, for example, like I don't know what I do without listening to my pain sensation to greater and lesser degrees, like chronic, the chronic pain that I have, I feel and I've witnessed and seen on the table with with my practice and body work, where, essentially, people are adapting to the pain that they're experiencing instead of listening to it and working with it. Because, with all that I've witnessed and all that I've heard and all that I've been educated on and all that I've seen, pain is our most sophisticated signal that's telling us simply something's not right, something's not in the right place. And so Pratyahara in your asana practice, when you're listening to your body, feeling it, feeling deeply the sensation in your body and working with it instead of running away from it, is such a great experience. You can come to this threshold where you realize that pain can be Sweet, it can be productive, it can be rewarding and it can create a sense of freedom if you have the courage to work with it.
Speaker 1:
Wow, we do move away from pain. Pain changes us and the body signals us over and over again hey, I'm over here, just stretch. Or hey, I'm over here, maybe don't eat dairy. Hey, I'm over here, I'm over here. And we ignore the signals. And once we ignore the signals, we then create stories about the signals, excuses, rationalizations and fear around the signals. Oh my God, I have a headache. Oh my God, this is happening.
Speaker 1:
Instead of meeting it, the practice of asana with breath offers sustainability and discomfort. When you can sustain discomfort, sit with it, meet it. Even uncertainty doesn't have to be pain. But when you can meet it long enough, not get distracted, right, prathya Hara, not get. Oh over here, I'm over here, I got to go to this doctor, I got to go to this healer, I got to do this, I got to do that. If you can stop that for a moment, turn in and say I want to be with you, I want to be with my pain, I want to be with my joy, I want to be with my sorrow and learn how to not change it. Be with it. It will inform you, it will share with you.
Speaker 2:
Big time.
Speaker 1:
The reason it's there.
Speaker 2:
That's right.
Speaker 1:
Then transformation occurs. In modern yoga, prathya Hara is practiced by focusing on a drishti, and a drishti is a gaze. In a stanga yoga, that's a style of yoga. In a stanga yoga, they focus on a drishti, a gaze, and that gaze helps people. That focal point, whether it's the fingers or the tip of the nose or the wall, whatever that gaze is the person is asked to keep returning or stay focused on that gaze. So you're practicing withdrawing from the room and staying at that one point over and over and over again. I don't know if our listeners have ever heard this, but some teachers say stay on your mat, don't look around the room, stay on your mat. That's Prathya Hara. Sally may be huffing and puffing. Tommy may be breathing like Darth Vader in the corner.
Speaker 1:
I've heard that I know Nuke, I am your father Breathing to the point where they're burning their lungs. It's funny and endearing Because we don't know how to breathe. We work the breath, and sometimes too hard, but there's always one person. I shouldn't say that. There's sometimes one person looking around the room at all those people annoyed with them because they can't focus. Right, there's the work. Right, there is the work Is. Stop focusing on them and fighting it. Notice it? Oh, there it is, and I'm going to come back to me on this mat, right here, right now.
Speaker 2:
Powerful. It's a challenge, though.
Speaker 1:
Well, when in our life are we taught to withdraw from the outer world and to sit and be still with no music, no TV, nothing, no books?
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
But it's in that time of stillness and quiet where what has been kept at bay comes to be seen.
Speaker 1:
And if we don't have the skills to do that, to see it and to be with it. We then distract again. I'm thinking of a story. Dan and I went on a silent retreat for our honeymoon up in yogaville in Virginia. Oh, down in yogaville? Listen, I know about yoga, not geography. Okay, so I have a little story about a silent retreat. Dan and I went on and we're at this silent retreat and these women are talking and these women are talking all the time, not loudly, but it's bothering me because it's supposed to be a silent retreat. Now me and Dan go to bed and we're sleeping in separate beds. We're not talking. It's a silent retreat, I play by the rules and the people downstairs are doing yoga, talking.
Speaker 2:
I remember.
Speaker 1:
I go downstairs. I knock on the door. It's a silent retreat. I'm so angry that people are talking during this silent retreat that I talked to the event planner.
Speaker 2:
I said you talked to the host.
Speaker 1:
No wait, first the event planner and I shared that. Listen, people are talking and I'm not going to have it. I paid for a silent retreat and they're they're bothering you, yeah you meant business, I meant business. Well, I didn't think she was going to tell the spiritual teacher but, she did.
Speaker 1:
And spiritual teacher cornered me and said can I talk to you for a moment? And she said yes, she brings me in a room, an empty room, and sits me down and says I hear you have a problem, that people are talking. And I said absolutely, it's a silent retreat and they're bothering me. And she said hmm, I said they're being noisy. And she went hmm. I said, oh, my God, I'm the problem, aren't I? And she said yes, the problem isn't the noise outside that's bothering you, the noise inside is bothering you. I cried and I realized that I couldn't sit still with the noise inside, that I needed to keep running and doing things and if not, I needed to be so silent so I could focus.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, that was some challenging times for you health-wise, and you know so. It would be hard to figure out exactly.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it doesn't matter what's causing it. That's also important. It doesn't matter why we do what we do. What matters is doing practices to support us to change and transform if we want to.
Speaker 2:
So you discovered a piece of work that you had to do.
Speaker 1:
Yes, if we cannot cultivate the ability to turn in, we will never meet our true essence. And what I mean by our true essence is underneath it all. We're all connected Underneath it all. Innate goodness and love lives there. Hatred does not come from the womb. We don't come out with hatred. We don't come out with division and divisiveness and natively we're whole and we want wholeness. We gravitate towards wholeness, but through life we turn out for validation, for love, for multiple reasons. We turn out but the goal of yoga and the progression to mastery of self. According to yoga, if you want to master self, you have to turn away from the distractions and the noise and be in stillness and silent for extended periods of time to meet peace and unconditional love.
Speaker 2:
Which, beyond asana, is a loftier, larger goal that all these tools are bringing you toward Is, you know, concentration and meditation, all of the things that pre our predecessors of that, all the limbs before that, are tools we're using to get us in shape, such good shape that we're able to sit still. My experience with craniosacral energy work is that, in that deep stillness, the opportunity for you to experience the essence of who you are, of what you are, whatever you want to call it, who you are, what you are the stillness creates an opportunity for you to experience the essence of yourself, the essence of what you are, of who you are, and that essence I experienced to be love, purity. But it's in the stillness, it's not in the asana, it's not in the breath work, although those are the tools that are taking us on this path to be able to be still. It's in the quiet, it's in the stillness, it's in the calm. You get to experience who you are, truly, deeply, purely.
Speaker 1:
Breathe that in, take a deep breath in my friends and breathe that in. There's a part of us deep within that has never been altered. We just have forgotten. We've forgotten peace, we've forgotten love, we've forgotten community.
Speaker 2:
We've gotten busy. Yes, we've been preoccupied, we've gotten distracted, but all this lies in waiting. All this lies here. All these tools, they're nothing you can't do, and if you're considering going to a yoga class and you don't know exactly what to expect, you just have to start to clock your experience with it. Asana is a great way in. You want to go to a yoga class, just bust down the door and get in there and have the experience and develop the experience and cultivate your experience with it and listen, and listen, and listen.
Speaker 1:
And become comfortable with yourself.
Speaker 2:
Then you'll be living.
Speaker 1:
Yes, Asana is the body. The breath moves the body feeds the body nourishes the body. You're in it. What pulls you out? Who pulls you out? Music can pull you out. Tv shows can pull you out. People.
Speaker 2:
Processing your own challenges. If you're not keen, if you're not really working it, you know your own challenges, your own stress can.
Speaker 1:
Yes, but you're not aware of.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
So I ask you that, in this moment, as we just shared some of this stuff, can you bring to mind something that distracts you, or that you allow to distract you, or that feels safe to take you away from you, that has to take you out of you? Is it TV? Because coming home on the weekend and watching TV isn't relaxing. It may feel relaxing, but relaxation is active. So what is distracting us? Who is distracting us? It could be food.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, and we're humans too, We've had those distractions. But it's really cool when we come around around full circle and to that moment we're like, how about? How about? After seven o'clock we shut off all the electronics and it's amazing what that does. It's amazing how our systems turn down, turn in and we fall asleep in no time, whereas if we're on our phones or watching a movie, it like amps us up and the next thing you know, we're up late hours and it's just that that magical thing is literally just turning off.
Speaker 1:
I am. I am an IFS practitioner internal family systems practitioner founded by Dick Schwartz, and I work with people in guiding them through the IFS practice. I work with multiple addictions, people that have addictions even to caffeine, and what happens is people will say, oh, it's not that bad, I just I love it. I need the coffee, I need this to function.
Speaker 2:
I am, I choose it.
Speaker 1:
And so I offer this what happens if you can't have your coffee? What happens if you can't have it for three months? If we cannot live without a substance for a certain amount of time or a thing? That is when I would start to be concerned, or I would start to communicate with that. So if there's a point where I can't stop watching a certain TV show, I like to binge watch. When I watch TV Bosch or MacGyver, or MacGyver.
Speaker 1:
Monk Monk, monk Monk. Dan giggles at me because I can watch 30 episodes in one day. When I feel driven to something that I have to watch it, I have to do it. That's when I start to have a deeper conversation. So the offering is with Pratyahara. If you want to really meet yourself underneath the stories, underneath the persona, underneath the pain, you will need to turn away, pratyah, turn away from the external world and be with yourself long enough to get to know yourself again.
Speaker 2:
Right, and it doesn't always have to be weighty or negative. Yeah, I just wanted to say a client recently said it's just like quitting anything. She said have a warm bath every night before you go to sleep and then have somebody tell you you can't take a warm bath tonight. It's that same thing. It's not always so stark or deep or bold or alienating, but get tuned in.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, here's some homework. Would anyone like homework?
Speaker 2:
Homework from becoming living.
Speaker 1:
I think I heard the crowd go wild homework.
Speaker 1:
Just to contemplate that. Where is your energy going? Where do you feel you're focusing on the external world, and is there one place or one thing you can do to release it, to change it, to come back home to yourself? Turn away from the outer world. You need you, you're waiting for yourself, and we long for this sense of connection, and yet most of us are so disconnected from ourselves. So may we take time to see where are we focusing our energy. May we see our importance of self, because once we can lead ourselves, then we can be with others more deeply. And to me, that's why I do yoga.
Speaker 2:
Same here.
Speaker 1:
Thank you for listening, thank you for being here. If you have any questions you can email us the questions at become one living at gmailcom, and you can follow us at become one living on Instagram.