How Hatha Yoga can help your mind Isha Hatha Yoga

Mystic’s Musings By Sadhguru – Founder, Isha Foundation

In this series, Sadhguru discusses various aspects that can significantly impact the quality of your yogic practice and our life.

Part 14: How Hatha Yoga Can Help Your Mind

Questioner: I have a hard time memorising. Being receptive to oral transmission is very challenging for me. Could you say something on this?

Sadhguru: Everything that you see, hear, smell, taste and touch is recorded. There is no recording problem. Let’s say I abuse you badly right now, you will remember it for all your life. You have great memory. You just remember bad words — that’s all. The problem is only your inability to bring back certain parts of your memory when you need them. You are not able to pick out what you want. This is just a question of clarity, not of memory. If we say a phone has low memory, it means it has a limited capacity to record. On the other hand, if I press “2” and it shows “5,” the issue is not bad memory but a bad keyboard. Your issue is also a question of “bad keyboard.” There is no need to fix the memory — everything you experience is recorded. You are not able to retrieve the right information — that is the entire problem.

We have to work on clarity. What is it that gives us clarity of mind? A simple thing you can do to improve clarity is to handle everything you do with a certain precision. Hatha Yoga is all about precision — how your feet should be positioned, where your hands should be, how you should hold your head, how you move, how you place the things that you brought with you and so on. If you bring precision into your activity, there will be precision in your mind. You need to practice precision in every aspect of your life. How your room should be, how you go to bed — everything. Bring the meticulousness that you apply when doing an asana into your life. You will see, slowly, the mind will become very clear. It will become meticulous with everything.

From this moment, a simple practice that you can do is when you stand up, when you sit down, when you walk, whatever you do, do it with precision and attention. Consciously register everything that is around. For example, there are five columns here, one vessel, one big rock, one pond, another four columns, one door. How tall? Looks like twelve feet. Just practice this with everything. How many steps from here to there? Don’t count “one, two…” — start walking and notice “Okay, I think that’s three,” another three and another three. After a few days, do intervals of four, five or eleven — without thinking, you must slowly know when you have walked twelve steps. This is yoga. This effect will happen over a period of time by itself.

The precision that you try to bring to your body, bring it to your mind too. Let the mind imitate the body. You will see, clarity will naturally come.

Excerpted from a talk by Sadhguru at the Isha Hatha Yoga School.

For dates and details of Hatha Yoga programmes, visit www.ishahathayoga.com.

[Sadhguru, a yogi, is a visionary, humanitarian and a prominent spiritual leader. An author, poet and internationally-renowned speaker, Sadhguru’s wit and piercing logic provoke and widen our perception of life. www.ishafoundation.org]