The Yin Yoga Podcast
The Yin Yoga Podcast
Understanding Yourself and Your Practice Through the Prism of The Gunas
But we don't stop at the yoga mat. Imagine applying these timeless lessons to your everyday life - finding meaning in the changing seasons, and adopting an attitude of curiosity and joy instead of fixating on a particular state or rejecting others. Fascinating, isn't it? We also delve into the intriguing biological component of this experience, using the stress-strain curve of connective tissues as an analogy.
For those among us grappling with pain, we offer a unique perspective on its understanding and a potential path to alleviate it. So, if you're curious about how ancient philosophy intertwines with contemporary yoga and life, join us on this journey of discovery.
Get your FREE Practice Gallery Workbook: https://yoga.mandyryle.com/greatest-hits-practice-gallery-gallery-workbook/
Ready to apply your practice to healing your pain issue? Schedule a FREE discovery call to chat about your options: https://yoga.mandyryle.com/appointments/
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March 3-10, 2023
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Have you ever wondered why those long holds in your yin poses can feel so intense? Wondered how your pose could be blissfully perfect one moment and then nearly untenable in the next? Do you wonder if it's just you having this experience or if this is normal? In today's episode, we'll be exploring some concepts from Yoga Philosophy to answer these questions and more. I'm excited to connect the dots between your physical, mental and energetic experience in your practice, and I think that you will find that this will make your practice even sweeter and more productive.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the YIN Yoga Podcast. I'm your host, mandy Ryle, an experienced yoga teacher, strength and conditioning specialist and nutrition coach, empowering individuals challenged by persistent pain to reclaim their vitality and independence. Yoga, and YIN especially, are a big part of how I help my students and clients, so come along with me to learn about how you can leverage your practice toward vibrant health and well-being. Before we get started today, I want to let you know how much I appreciate you being a listener to the YIN Yoga Podcast. This episode is the last one of season four. I'll be taking a break over the holidays, but I will be back in January with some really big news, so we're all so busy this time of year, myself included. That's why I'm taking a break this year. I know that it can be a challenge to fit in a full hour of practice, and I so appreciate how many of you do that every single week. But in order to help you out, this holiday season, I'm doing something that I've never actually done before I'm offering my teaching offline with a free practice gallery workbook. So this workbook includes six of my most popular sequences, which are focused primarily on the hips and the waist, but I wanted this to be a really useful resource for you, so I've also included a couple of short chair YIN sequences that you can use if you're at work or traveling. One of those chair YIN sequences, by the way, is a little sequence that I use frequently with my clients who have neck pain. So if that's something you're struggling with, definitely download this workbook. It's very easy to follow along with the practices. It's just a gallery of images and it sort of step by step takes you through how the sequence should go, and you can use the workbook as a standalone practice guide or, if you'd prefer, you can actually use the galleries as a companion to the podcast, because each of the sequences in the workbook is actually associated with an episode from these last four seasons on the podcast, so it's a little bit like my greatest hits.
Speaker 1:So I know that when things get busy or when your routine gets disrupted, the first thing that has to go obviously for all of us, especially as women, is your self-care, your care for self. This workbook is my attempt to make it just a little bit easier for you to look after your own physical and mental well-being during this busy time. So, speaking of busyness, let's dive into our topic for today the gunas. On a personal note, I will say that I love this philosophy because it gives vocabulary, it gives words to experiences that we all have in common. What's amazing about these philosophies from ancient yoga to me is that they describe perfectly our modern struggles, even though they were conceived of thousands of years ago, and to me, there's a little comfort in knowing that people everywhere, for all time, are sharing some of the same challenges that I'm struggling with. So did you know that there is a physical, psychospiritual correlate to this feeling of overwhelm and frenetic activity, according to yoga philosophy? And so this busyness is external, but I think for a lot of us practicing yin, this busyness is also very much internal, and so yoga philosophy actually has some answers for us about what that is and how we might make harmony with it.
Speaker 1:So this philosophy that we're going to talk about today actually comes from the sankya, which is sort of like a precursor to a lot of the yoga philosophies, and it is now present, this philosophy, in all of the schools of Hindu philosophy, including the danta. So I'm connecting the dots here for you from these philosophies. So sankya, vedanta, which is really the foundation of classical yoga For many of you, you might recognize that as the yoga of patanjali, right, that's classical yoga. So today we practice a modernized, posture-centric form of classical yoga, and so it's almost as if this philosophy is in the DNA of what we're doing today. It's mostly invisible, but it's always there. It is an essential part of what we do. So the Vedanta explains that there are three interdependent modes or qualities of Prakriti. Okay, I'm going to stop right there.
Speaker 1:What is Prakriti? Okay, prakriti is the original or natural form or condition of anything, of everything. It's the fibers that make up our conditional existence. It's the primary substance of everything that is in the world that you experience. It makes up your body and all bodies, right? Not just human bodies, but animal bodies and insect bodies, right, it makes up nature, it makes up the seasons, right? This is Prakriti. It is the primary substance of your personality and your thoughts.
Speaker 1:And Prakriti is composed of these fibers, we could say, and these fibers are known as the gunas, and there are only three of them, three qualities that together make up all of our conditional experience. I know this is deep stuff, right? So what we have is a universe which is full of Prakriti, which is created by these fibers of qualities, which are the gunas. So if you have done a yoga teacher training, you've probably heard about the gunas. But if this concept is new to you, no worries, I'm going to keep it very, very simple and, as always, you know, I like to teach experientially. So I think that when we kind of get into what this looks like in your yin practice, it'll make more sense. So if you're feeling a little overwhelmed at the moment, no worries, it's going to get more clear as we go. But remember, everything in your conditional existence is derived from these three elements which together constitute Prakriti. So the gunas make up everything, which sounds kind of weird because there's only three of them, three interdependent qualities which, in their blending and perpetual changing, make up the world you live in and the way that you experience it. So that's important here. And it's hard, I think, to get your head around for those of us who live in the West, right, because we think of these things as separate. But in Eastern philosophies, of course, they're not separate. So the gunas are never static, they're not just set, they're constantly changing.
Speaker 1:One of my favorite modern yoga teachers, richard Freeman, says that the gunas are like rock paper scissors. But when I teach this philosophy I usually describe them as a puppy pile. So think of a litter of cute and wiggly, fluffy, little adorable puppies rolling around, right, how they like to pile on each other, right. So sometimes one is on the top and then they kind of tussle around, and then another one gets on top of her and then they tussle around and they wrestle and then pretty soon those two are both on the bottom and now there's another puppy on top. So what you see, even in a puppy pile, of course, is that there's usually a dominant one, right? They're all sort of moving around, they're all sort of exchanging places, as the top, we could say, but there's usually one that ends up on the top or more dominant.
Speaker 1:More often, the uniqueness of you is defined by your guna constitution. Okay, so you have all of the gunas in your personality, which I'm going to explain in a second, but one is probably a little bit more dominant. So another way of thinking about the gunas is as energy, because they are all different. Each of the three gunas are different, sort of similar to a concept that we're quite familiar with in the yin practice yin and yang right. So remember that yin and yang are opposites, but they are also dependent on one another to manifest. Without one, the other simply does not exist. There's not a good one, there's not a bad one, they just are and they compete with each other, but they also balance each other.
Speaker 1:So the three gunas, the three gunas very, very simple. There's only three of them are Thomas, rajas and Satva. So Thomas is the quality of heaviness and lethargy. It's dull, it's dense, it's dark. In some ways although let's not go too far with this comparison it is like yin right.
Speaker 1:Note that there are other qualities associated with Thomas that I don't think you can associate with yin, and that would be things like illusion. Thomas is associated more with the feeling of being depressed or tired. And Thomas is also the quality of chaos, of chaos Okay. So I don't think we can put those last qualities in the Yin category, so we're not going to take that analogy too far. But I just wanted to give you something that you could kind of compare it to in your, in your current level of understanding.
Speaker 1:So Rajas is the opposite, it's the opposite of Thomas. It is the energy of passion, activity, desire. It's also the, the Guna associated with sorrow, with anxiety. It is the Guna that is associated with egotism, it's the Guna that is dominant when we have like we just talked about that busyness, whether it's external or internal. So Rajas, just like Thomas, is not good or bad. It simply is. When there's too much of it, things not so great. Same with Thomas Too much, not so great, right amount, fine, neither good nor bad.
Speaker 1:And then, finally, this third quality is Satva. Satva is harmony, it's balance, it's perfect. Satva is knowledge, it's happiness, and I always like to break it down even more to the root of the words. Satva, which is Sat. Sat means truth, or that which is unchanging, that which has always been and will always be exactly the same. That is Satva.
Speaker 1:Now, as you're listening to this. I wouldn't blame you if you're thinking oh yeah, satva, that's what I need. I need more Satva, I should be more Satvik. I hope she tells me how to be more Satvik, but unfortunately, that's not the way the gunas work. Remember, they're changing all the time, like a puppy pile due to their own whim and seeming randomness. They are constantly shaping, altering our moment to moment experience within our existence.
Speaker 1:And what this philosophy tells us is not that we're doing something wrong because we've got too much Rajas. What it tells us, actually, is that it is not our job to cling to a certain state or to reject it, but to learn to accept, to learn to, to practice Santosh, to practice being content, regardless of the direction that the gunas send us. Because it's not the excessive Rajas that brings us our suffering, it is our resistance to it, it is our trying to shape something which is inherently unshapeable. Right, you can't control that puppy pile and you can't really control the gunas. And so when I talk about yoga philosophy, I want to let you know that I love these philosophies and that they are extremely important, not just to how I teach and practice, but also to how I live. But I also want to let you know that, to me, these are a model. To me, they are a useful, comforting model which helps to give me a sense of direction, to feel understood, to feel a part of the entire human condition. Right, I don't personally believe that there are these fibers that create existence, but I wanted to put that in there in case you're getting a little squeamish if these things seem to conflict with some of your other beliefs. They could be a belief, they could be a model, they could be somewhere in between. The choice is yours how to use these philosophies. It is 100% yours. There's no way, no perfect way to conceptualize these. Okay, so let me help you see how this model, these gunas, manifest in your yin practice.
Speaker 1:To give you a little bit of context, so imagine you're in your practice and you have your props all around you, and the next pose is caterpillar. So that's the pose. That's a lot like basjimottanasana, right? It's the pose where you're seated with your legs out in front of you and you round forward for a period of time, and let's just say, for the purposes of this example, that you have supported yourself with maybe like a bolster ramp between the thighs, and so, as you round forward. You're feeling very supported and yet there's also some sensation in the back and in the back of the legs, maybe your butt, if you got kind of a tighter glute area. And so you settle into this supported pose and in those first moments maybe it's a little bit something, but the more you settle, the more lovely it becomes, the more pleasant.
Speaker 1:We could say. It's satvic, right, you're perfectly poised on these props for this really beautiful present moment, experience of your body and you can feel your body, but there's nothing that is uncomfortable. And then, as you hold for a little while, you might begin to notice that things get a little more intense, right, and the intensity feels like maybe a restlessness. It feels like should I come out of this? The sensations are getting bigger and your mind is going faster, trying to contextualize what you're experiencing. And then maybe you move for a moment and you adjust your props and you settle back in and suddenly you're just there and you feel so heavy, you feel so dense, so settled, almost tired, sleepy, so just like that we went from Satva to Rajas, to Thomas, right, you're feeling a little sleepy, and then that sleepiness just becomes this beautiful floating feeling that you have and as you're sort of floating and enjoying again in a little brief moment of Satva, you start to think, wow, this is great, I love this, this is awesome. I should do this every day. Why don't I do this every day? This is the practice I should be doing every day.
Speaker 1:So then Satva becomes Rajas right, and so what we have is the gunas manifesting themselves over and over and over in our puppy pile, even within a single pose. We've all experienced this right and the directions are to remain still for a time, and the teacher is perhaps encouraging you to be still, and yet you're anything, but still, anything but still. As this pose is ripening, the gunas are expressing themselves. And even though we think I must be virtuous and still and calm if we acknowledge the gunas, we have to acknowledge also that that's impossible, that our experience is ever changing, ever changing. Interestingly, I think that there is a biological component to this ripening experience, a tissue behavior which is occurring within you, which is informing the experience that you're having in your body and your nervous system and your mind, and this biological experience, I think, is related to the stress strain curve of connective tissue. So I'm not going to go into that, that's too much for today and it's way beyond the scope of this particular episode. But if you would like to put this philosophy with the biological component of the experience, I definitely recommend that next you listen to my episode Understanding Yin Yoga and Fascia. I think that'll really round out your understanding of this and I think that would be a really, really lovely way to show up to your practice next time.
Speaker 1:So let's imagine this experience of observing the natural ebb and flow. So instead of wanting to cling to the sattva or cling to the thomas in your pose and rejecting that busyness and the frenetic activity and the restlessness, instead we'll just imagine that you're observing it. So you're in your pose and the gunas are puppy piling and changing and transforming your experience moment by moment. And instead of fighting it, you decide to be curious. Curious about the gunas, curious about the behavior of your tissues and how the behavior of your tissue's, via the nervous system it lists. It's an emotion. Right, you start to get to that kind of tight spot, gets a little intense. There's an emotion with that. It could be one of a million different things in a single yin class with a group of people. Each person will be having their own emotional association with the sensation that they're experiencing right. And then from an emotion, seamlessly, comes a thought and from a thought a reaction. Maybe you'll shift around, maybe you'll move your props, maybe you'll go deeper. It's contextual, right. So let's imagine that experience instead of fighting it or clinging. We're curious and imagine that curiosity is suffused with joy. The curiosity is suffused with joy in your ability to observe the gunas in the body.
Speaker 1:So, as you know, to me yin is not about stretching, it's not about stressing tissues, it's not about harmonizing key, and I spent many, many years apologizing for that. And strangely, as I've been doing this podcast and I get to talk to the people for whom this is the point of yin, I feel more comfortable now being who I am, because I know that there are really really great teachers out there who can teach you how to stress your tissues and harmonize key. But that's just not me, right? So, definitely, I don't think that that approach is wrong. It's just not why I do yin and it's also not why most of my pain care coaching clients receive yin in their programs. Contrary to popular belief, I don't add yin to a client's program to stretch them out or to improve flexibility or range of motion.
Speaker 1:To me, yin is about awareness, deep, profound learning at a cellular level, at a subconscious level, and we have all experienced how the learning we do on the mat is effortlessly applied in our lives, right. A situation that we may have reacted to in the past. We can just move through with so much grace and equanimity and when we look back we realize how beautifully we navigated it. And it's not because we had to think through it this is how I should do it it's because we've practiced so much. It's so many times on the mat. We have experienced that deep, cellular, subconscious learning, and so I think a good way to consider how this model and what we learn in our practice can be applied to our lives is to consider the seasons.
Speaker 1:So, as I am recording this, we're moving into the fall season, right. Things sort of look like they're dying, everything is getting brown, it's cold, it's dark, right. So this would be this season, really, of Thomas, this lethargy sleeping. And for me personally I grew up in Texas, I now live in the Northern Midwest and I have never adapted to this season. I despise it. I want it to be summer all the time. So this is an example of resisting right Of this natural occurrence of Thomas and we can either accept with joy or we can resist.
Speaker 1:And then, after the fall, we have the winter, which is still a very deep form of Thomas, I would say personally, but this is based on my own bias and after the winter, we have the beautiful spring. The spring is maybe a little suffused with satva. It's perfect, it's harmonious. Things are growing, birds are singing, trees are blooming. It's just harmony. It is the natural cycle of growth, and this cycle of growth would not have been possible, by the way, without Thomas, without everything going to ground and developing and expanding below the earth.
Speaker 1:And from spring, in this satvik season, we have summer, and to me, summer is Rajas. It is frenetic activity. Things are growing, growing, growing. As we move toward the end of summer we have like this, almost like Rajas on steroids right, all of your plants get really leggy, they're sort of frenetically growing. It's not even healthy anymore.
Speaker 1:And so, even though all of us in our life would probably always prefer to be in a season of Rajas growing, moving, I think what we can take from the seasons is that that's not how it's supposed to be. We're not always supposed to grow. Sometimes we're supposed to rest, we're supposed to regenerate, we're supposed to regroup, and I find that so charming. I find this philosophy so charming and compassionate and kind, because what it tells us is that we are not to fight it, but to accept it, to enjoy it, to be content with it. That is where we find harmony. That is where we find harmony in our practice and in our lives.
Speaker 1:I use this philosophy with most of my pain care coaching clients. So I'll give you another example of how the gunas show up in our lives. So when we can reframe our body's sensations, even the unpleasant ones, as the natural expression of our constituent energies, we can begin to unravel our distress from certain sensations. So to me and many of my clients, they would designate that experience of pain as Rajas it's too much, it's frantic, it's restless, it's get me the hell out of here, right? And then often pain can also be that feeling of Thomas, of heaviness. But also Thomas manifests as the inability to get motivated, the inability to really live fully engaged in our lives, because so much of our life is consumed by pain. So when we reframe this, we reframe these sensations as just Rajas and Thomas. These are just energies, and we can dismantle our distress, we can turn down sensitivity immensely.
Speaker 1:This is a technique that I use very frequently, so I hope that this discussion about the gunas, how they show up in your practice, how they show up in nature, how they show up in your life has been useful. If you are interested in learning how you can apply your practice, your philosophy, to healing your pain issue, I would love to sit down and chat with you. So I will leave a link to my calendar in the show notes in case you would like to schedule a free, totally free, 25 minute discovery call, just so that I can learn a little bit more about what's going on with you and I can help you to understand better what I do and if it might be of use to you. And, by the way, that link to my calendar will be right next to the link for my free Practice Gallery Workbook link, so be sure to snap that up while you can. Thank you so much for being a listener and I will see you in 2020.