Meditation is yoga. It may be a dynamic (moving) meditation or a static (non-moving) mediation.
You might meditate on a run, while washing dishes, doing laundry, during your yoga practice or sitting at the edge of a cliff, or in a chair staring at your big toe, or seated on a cushion with your eyes closed.
Meditation is a profound concentration of the mind thinking about nothing, uninterrupted and undisturbed by the mind itself, or by forces outside of the self.
Meditation tames the mind and helps us choose what we decide to give our attention to. It’s a choice.
In the ‘Yoga Sutra’s of Patanjali’ it states in the second yoga sutra, “Yogas citta vrtti nirodha.” Citta means mindstuff. Vrtti means modifications. Nirodha means restraint.
Translated “Yogas citta vrtti nirodha” means . . . “The restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff is Yoga.”
Put another way, “The undisturbed mind in its concentration is Yoga.”
Meditation is the ability to focus undisturbed from whatever it occurring inside of your head or outside of your body.
The ability to concentrate the mind, by removing any diluting agents such as noise, thought, emotion or excess is meditation.
When we think of concentrated cleaning products or concentrated food stuff, it by removing water or other diluting agents that leaves the concentrated form. The same thing goes for meditation when you remove the diluting agents.
While on the mat no matter what style of yoga is being practiced, the mind has to engage in a form of focused attention (drishti) in order hold a pose.
Further, yoga is NOT about the pose. It never has been about the pose. It is through the pose that we practice the meditation.
Can you stand on one foot, pat your head and rub your belly at the same time while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance? Focus, focus, focus. Of course you can. That’s yoga. It’s not the pose, it’s the meditation, concentration, focused gaze that you accomplished …. the pose was there is simply challenge you. That’s Life, with a little chaos thrown in . . . and the question remains, can you hold your drishti, your focused gaze while chaos surrounds you? That’s meditation.
Can you hold your shit together when the world is crumbling around you? Can you do that on one foot or standing on your head? Can you hold it together while getting up in middle of the night to tend to the children? That’s yoga in real Life.
I remember talking a surgeon friend once and he was talking about the music in the operating room. I said, “You listen to music while operating?” He said, “I can talk and drive at the same time.” In other words, he has his moving meditation down cold.
All of this increased concentration and awareness reminds me of Dr. Love (Leo Buscaglia) who once told me, “The more you are conscious, the more you will realize when you are unconscious.”
