How Yoga can change your life

When you start practicing yoga, you choose what you pay attention to. For example, during practice you focus on your breath, letting go of thoughts and distractions.

Stress and anxiety have become an epidemic in the 21st century, which is born from the interaction and adaptation of the individual with the environment. We live concentrated in the past and/or the future, constantly dissatisfied with the present and always yearning for something more.

We are in constant search of something external when in reality everything changes, moves, and is fickle, which generates that there is always something new to covet.

We cannot control what happens to the outside, but we can control our internal state. This constant search for external satisfaction is an unattainable and implausible search for happiness.

The role of yoga

In yoga, the mental matter is understood as ‘Chitta’ and as ‘Vritti’ as the waves that are generated. Imagine that your mind is a lagoon and when you throw a stone, waves begin to generate. The same thing happens with the mind: if you take the time to pay attention to it, you can identify each of those waves.

The ‘Vrittis’ are modifications of the mind that produce a constant exhausting activity of thoughts. External situations are always going to arise: only you decide the affective charge that you give to them. For example, if you repeat phrases like “I don’t like my job”, “I don’t know if my boss likes me”, “I don’t know if this person loves me”, then you’ve fallen into a negative state of constant dissatisfaction towards yourself and towards others generated by your thoughts. That makes you a slave to the ‘Vrittis’.

What does this have to do with yoga?

If you have stress or anxiety, it is important to observe the symptoms and accept that they are a creation of your own mind: you decide if you feed it or not. In the West, they have a bad habit of being busy and stressed all day, and life goes by very quickly with temporary things that do not generate pleasure.

Try to cultivate a state of satisfaction in all the situations that you live, emotions will always want to reappear. But, it is up to you if you hold on to them or let them pass. When you start to break the mental patterns, your consciousness begins to expand and that is where true satisfaction begins to emerge.

When you start practicing yoga, you choose what you pay attention to. For example, during practice, you focus on your breath, letting go of thoughts and distractions. By observing your thoughts, you will understand that you are not what you think and you will let them pass: let it go.

By observing your thoughts, you will understand that you are not what you think and you will let them pass: let it go.

With yoga, you will begin to see that things do not stop happening around you. But you will cultivate the ability to accept that they exist and let them go, trying to keep yourself calm internally without being influenced by the external.