The Yoga of Consciousness
Yoga Chikitsa
A deeply healing revitalizing form of practice and healing pathway…
Many people are unaware of Yoga Chikitsa. Yet in truth it is the form of practice most people need more now than ever.
I have been a practicing yoga therapist for a very long time, incorporating YC into my work. It is now central to all our offerings through Shantarasa. When people surrender themselves to this ‘undoing’ method of practice a new quality of experience of themselves emerges. Peoples bodies and minds need decongesting and rejuvenation more than they need more push and unintelligent overuse of energy.
There is a need to find the pause button and a relearning of how to work respectfully and kindly within ourselves.
The dominance of postural yoga in our world of contemporary practice is physically based and often without the subtlety that guides people deep enough to access the intentionally healing and awakening benefits of yogic practices.
Yoga Chikitsa follows a different path that is profoundly wholistic. Yoga Chikitsa is traditional yoga intuitively oriented to guide a powerful healing response. While asana will provide relief and remedial support to physical discomfort, YC operates at the level of correcting the cause of pain which is so often deeper and more subtle than physical realignment
Asana without conscious breath is of little use. Asana without a special quality of body awareness is of little use. Asana without direct experience of prana and subtle energy is of little use.
When we reduce asana to a form of exercise only it loses its power to deeply change us from the inside. It can yield a feel good high that dissipates the next time we are crossed; it rarely reaches deep enough for real change to take seat within us.
Yoga educates a very different perception of the human vehicle and experience.
It educates through the four body or five kosha teachings. They are essentially the same
Both describe a Yoga of Consciousness
Four Bodies – Physical, Subtle, Causal, and Supra causal with the associated states of waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and transcendent.
Five Koshas (sheaths) – ananamaya kosha (physical sheath), pranamaya kosha (energetic sheath), manomaya kosha (mental sheath), vijnanamaya kosha (higher mind sheath), anandamaya kosha (bliss sheath)
The chart below shows two views that are essentially similar in how they encourage us to understand our physical, subtle and more liminal layers of being that describe our true humanness multidimensionality.
a map that connects the four bodies (shariras) teaching with the Pancha Kosha (5 sheaths) model of our subtle layering
Yoga Chikitsa is a form of yoga as a therapy so to speak, to resolve the separation and obstruction to the experience of our wholistic and essential nature and potentials including our innate potential to heal all disturbance. It works at the level of all bodies and koshas through specific practices.
First and foremost is our potential to heal and revitalize. When we live in such a way that the physical and external world dominates our thinking and experience, we are greatly severed from our very source of healing and energy. Our private internal thoughts and emotions are still a part of the external world being the minds response to life.
We need a means to reclaim the innate healing potentials embedded within our physical body as a gift of prana itself. It communicates with us through the language of sensation. Usually, we listen to the cry of the body through significant pain and discomfort. However there have been many more subtle sensation signals or communications we have missed prior to the cry of pain.
Yoga chikitsa teaches us first to listen and respond gently and with breath. The response is not forceful but instead we gain a quality of presence and awareness that is so much more powerful than egoic force. Through subtle perception the body guides us to know what is needed. We learn a new language, the body language of felt sensing, quality of energy and symbol.
Sensations may be kinesthetic (felt within the body space through sensorial nerve communication), auditory (the body may communicate through internal sounds such as cracking, popping, or subtler forms of sound), visual (we may receive symbolic imagery in waking, dreaming or meditative states), or sensing abilities beyond the physical senses. This type of listening and practicing awakens our intuitive intelligence, the higher mind faculty
The postural practices within a chikitsa class or private session will be intentionally slower to increase prana (subtle flow of life force) or intentionally repetitive to move prana from areas of stagnation within the bodies, or a form of stillness with breath that facilitates the movement of transformative energies to act within us.
The postural forms are more traditional or half forms to enable greater ease, to reduce force and to enable the flow of subtle prana which heals and opens us inwardly. This form of practice cultivates prana. We learn to perceive the movement, quality and presence of prana.
Many minds are set in default mode. This mode may be always busy, or always running fast, or unresponsive to body awareness and signals, or on the other end of the scale the mind may be a little dull, inert, repressed and unable to raise enough interest or energy to participate with presence. This describes rajasic or tamasic mind states. When there is too much stress in our lives and we have no means to release it or reconcile it we become either hypervigilant and controlling or overwhelmed and unresponsive - the mind will become either tamasic (inert) or rajasic ( over active).
Yoga Chikitsa practice intentionally invites the mind to participate through the agency of conscious breathing and observation, using at times altered breath rhythms to move prana and to become present. This quality of clear unthinking presence acts upon the mind; the mind becomes refreshed and unburdened. The mind also needs prana of a subtler kind to perform its functions. A rajasic mind has disturbed rpana and a tamasic mind has inert prana. The sattvic mind is fully present, spacious and becomes a magnificent instrument.
Yoga Chikitsa will also include breath and pranayama practices to more powerfully work at the level of subtle energy that actually is what we call the mind. These practices change the vibrational nature of the mind and as a consequence it awakens and becomes a more resilient and perceptive tool for living.
Mudras, particularly hasta mudras (hand gestures) are also a powerful means to redirect and focus energy flow, they have the power to effectively integrate and enliven the koshas. Through mudras we become more subtle in what we perceive and know, the layered nature of our being becomes more apparent and accessible to us.
Mudras are the givers of a direct experience of our subtle nature
Yoga Nidra is an essential practice. Yoga Nidra is yogic sleep, a form of conscious sleep that heals at the level of impressions. All the experience embedded within us as memory and impressions takes up space and alters our behaviours and responses to life situations. Yoga Nidra frees us of non- beneficial congestion at the level of life experience, the unfinished business of the psyche can be cleansed, we can become clear and free.
This beautiful deeply restful practice restores in ways often difficult to describe. Thirty minutes of yoga Nidra can be more beneficial than eight hours of sleep, particularly restless sleep. People often feel they fall asleep during yoga nidra. It takes time and practice to access a quality of pristine consciousness when in the deep sleep state, which could be described as turning on a beautiful lucid light within the darkness. But even when one at first falls asleep during this guided practice our essence responds and receives the invitation to become known to us in all states. Yoga Nidra is a process the letting go and release of blocked prana beneath the threshold of surface consciousness states predominant in waking and dreaming .
Yoga Nidra is an integral practice and aspect of Yoga Nidra
Meditation is also an intrinsic component of Yoga Chikitsa is used to awaken and induce a state of absorbed stillness. We will learn to sit within the silence, stillness and essential peace of our natural being. A quality of joyousness pervades us through this practice and with time that cannot be disturbed by any of life’s flux.
Yoga Chikitsa is essentially a sadhana, a complete yogic path. It takes time for us to let go of the tendencies and habits that generate disturbance, illness, imbalance, agitated mind, and aching heart. Regular well guided practice is our salve and our means to return to ourselves and to reclaim our innate wholeness and integral wellbeing. It is so worth the effort.