Yogi’s Guide to Therapy Compassionate Practice
As those of you who practice yoga know, it is much more than exercise, it is a mind-body-spirit system, as well as a way of being in the world. I encourage anyone who enjoys yoga to delve into the resources below for a more comprehensive review of yogic philosophy. In the most condensed form possible, yoga is an eight-limbed path, and only one of the limbs includes the yoga postures, known as asana in sanskrit. In the spirit of walking the wholistic path of yoga, it is helpful to examine a few elements of the eight limbs that have potential applications to psychotherapy.
First and foremost, a degree of self-reflection is required to take up any of the limbs of yoga. The first of the yamas (which make up the first limb) is ahimsa, meaning non-harm. At the surface this is quite a simple prohibition, but its implications are manifold. In order to align with ahimsa, we must be willing to look at the subtle as well as gross harm we might be doing to ourselves and others. For example, we can notice the scope of how we relate to ahimsa, and the ways that we might ignore self-harm or harm to the environment if we define ahimsa in terms of not physically harming another person. The openness required for self-inquiry is a cornerstone for both therapy and yoga. From this starting place of openness, curiosity and self-inquiry, we can develop a strong foundation for yoga and therapy alike.
One of the crucial supports to self-inquiry in either therapy or yoga is compassion. Meditation is the seventh of the eight yogic limbs, and meditation requires a stable seat in the same way yoga asana requires alignment, and therapy requires boundaries which are sometimes called the therapeutic ‘frame.’ For meditation and therapy alike, the most stable home base position, alignment or frame is compassionate awareness. Awareness is akin to clear observation, and the element of compassion helps to inform or guide the incoming data. Awareness without compassion throws off our alignment, and distorts our therapeutic frame. Some may prefer the phrase kind awareness or caring attention to compassionate awareness, if those feel more comfortable.
Caring attention is vital for opening up or accessing difficult thoughts, emotions, actions or history, and each of these is vital to successful therapy. Kind awareness presents groundedness in the form of observation, along with compassion, which helps to create a safe base, also known the psychology world is called a ‘secure base,’ or a ‘holding environment.’ The phrase holding environment was coined by D. W. Winnicott to describe the safety a child might feel with their caregivers that enables them the freedom to explore their environment. This sense of safety to explore is particularly important at the outset of therapy.
For many of us, a base of compassionate or kind awareness is quite unfamiliar territory. We often feel desperately fearful, hurt or angry in ways that make the voice of compassion or kindness distant or irrelevant. Ironically, difficult emotions might be the call we have been waiting for to open the doors to a more compassionate home base position. Even intention toward awareness, as well as any variant of compassion that speaks to you (kindness, love, openness, harmony or equanimity) can be useful at the outset of therapy. In yoga as in therapy, we don’t have to go far to see where tension is being held. Just stand up to reach for your toes or talk about something difficult that happened recently, and more than likely you will encounter something that feels challenging. If we are honest, self-compassion itself can be extremely challenging, and takes time to develop.
If we develop a base in compassionate awareness, we can become more aware of our stance. Stance can be interpreted as a general manner of approach or a way of relating. We all come with habits in regard to our patterns of relating to ourselves, others and the world. Sometimes these habits come from our genetics, families, neighborhoods, unique circumstances or things that may have helped us cope in our development. In yoga as in therapy, there is value in bringing kind awareness to the way we approach our posture, the poses and our lives. In therapy, stance can be interpreted as emotional tone, thought patterns or even expectations. Stance pertains to both conscious and unconscious thoughts and feelings we bring to treatment about ourselves, the clinician or even the capacity to heal. It is not easy to gain perspective regarding the core beliefs we hold about our strengths, weaknesses and the sources of growth in our past and present. In therapy as in yoga, we aim toward more consciousness in our awareness of such patterns.
If healing is to translate off the mat, cushion or outside the treatment room, we will need the help of compassionate awareness wherever we go. This does not mean that someone will feel or exemplify the deepest compassion in every corner of their life, but they can be attentive to their proximity to compassionate awareness as a guidepost. It can also be very useful to observe transitions, as well as edges, as they often show us thoughts and feelings that are not apparent on the surface. For yogis the edge may refer to the physical limit of a muscle, breath or alignment. In the therapeutic realm, an edge can also take many forms, as there are edges with regard to levels of awareness of thoughts, feelings and actions. It can be extremely easy to move through life on a form of autopilot in which we do not fully engage with the range of our experience or the experience of those around us. Autopilot can stand in the way of authenticity if we rely on it too much.
Some clients find physical experiences much more difficult to process, for others it is thought or feeling content that presents the most challenges. Diagnostic manuals in psychology outline familiar stances or patterns of relating to correlates in behavior and relationships. A multi-dimensional awareness is part of what we work toward in mindfulness practices as well as in therapy. I remember being awed at the outset of my yoga practice, as well as my clinical practice, by how many things I was supposed to track. Physical posture, breath, movement, felt-sense of being (sometimes called kinesthetic awareness), gaze (drishti for yogis), thoughts, feelings as well as what is happening around me which speaks to a level of concentration in real time (Dharana being the the sixth limb of yoga). There is also an awareness of energy that serves yogis as well as therapists, as this can be as useful as live supervision for those who can tap into their experience and feelings in real time. Despite all the fullness of our human being, sometimes our best work is to simply remain in contact with compassionate awareness in our seat.
Determining how to maintain integration of mental and physical experiences can be challenging, particularly for those who experienced trauma. Both yoga and therapy provide forums for building, sustaining and extending a sense of physical and emotional safety. So often we are in overdrive, that can perpetuate a degree of overwhelm that can prevent us from accurately processing our experiences in real time. This might be the result of the many distractions we face, but it can also be the result of embedded or long-term thoughts, feelings or stance that can cloud our awareness. Yoga and therapy provide skillful means for being good partners to ourselves, others and our environment.
Further Reading:
S. Miller, Patanjali. Yoga: Discipline of Freedom. (Bantam, 1998).
Satchitananda. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (Integral Yoga Publications, 2012).
D.W. Winnicott. Through Pediatrics to Psychoanalysis. (NY: Basic Books, 1975).
