Downward Facing Blog

I’m getting less dogmatic (I think) about what yoga is or needs to be. As I understand it, yoga is a state in which we access the unlimited field of potential, and perhaps, for a brief moment or longer we merge with it taking back just a bit of light to use in the objective world. Yoga asana and pranayama prepare us for it. Concentration alters the brain waves and perhaps we slip into that wordless, thoughtless state of awareness with no object inside it called meditation and eventually samadhi. It’s NOT esoteric. It’s part of every humans potential and I would argue that it’s in every humans experience.

Beta waves in the brain:

Alpha waves in the brain:

Theta:

Here’s a little factoid that I learned about brainwaves,: there’s four speeds that the brain oscillates at: Alpha, Beta, Theta, and Delta. Yoga says there is waking (beta), dreaming (theta), deep sleep (delta), and awareness (theta). The idea in meditation is to immerse oneself often enough and deeply enough into awareness, (called TURIYA in Sanskrit) that awareness begins to permeate the other three states. This way we become aware in waking, aware in dreaming, and aware in deep sleep, this state is called TURIYATITA.

But back to the brain waves: waking state, awareness of the five elements in their gross form is beta. You’re probably in beta now. This is where people do their thinking, and their usually ineffective problem solving. The twilight state just before sleep is Alpha, a trance state, the state of meditation. Now why is it that researchers called the first level beta (Greek for the letter B) and the second, more relaxed state alpha (Greek for the letter A)? Because the early EEG machines only registered brain waves once the person relaxed. When you relax, the mind becomes more powerful, evidenced that they discovered this level first and called it alpha.

The more you immerse yourself deliberately and consciously into alpha and theta, the more you access your higher potential. If you practice visualization (you should if you don’t already) producing trance will increase the likelihood that you manifest what you desire. Why? because the brain literally sends its request out with more force when you relax. Or, perhaps you’re in touch with pure potential. It’s so so easy. It’s not mysterious at all. You can simply roll your eyes up to look towards your third eye and your brain starts generating alpha waves. Take a deep breath in, hold it, and exhale even longer… alpha starts to flow. Concentrate on an object, a mantra, a color, a yantra… whatever then let it dissolve as you go thoughtless.

To me, we can develop the ability to get better at producing trance/meditation. I hear that Tiger Woods was taught to go into a trance when golfing. You can get answers to your dilemmas, solutions to problems. What’s more, it refreshes all the senses, and improves health. We become more intelligent. I run my business this way.

Yoga is the ancient technology to produce this, to access higher states of mind. It’s possible to dress this up with a lot of esoteric terms and rituals but why? It’s universal, it’s part of who we are. Simply learn a technique or a have a whole arsenal of them… then practice it.

I’ll write about states of mind and stages of development tomorrow…