The Witness Mind

We’re finishing up our last weekend of Yoga National Guard today, and yesterday was spent mostly in practice.

One woman chose to do her practical final exam as a class that included a restorative pose. For those of you who might not know (and forgive me, but I’m assuming that’s damned near all of you), restorative yoga is a practice that gets participants into prop-supported poses and leaves them there for upwards of 10-20 minutes at a time. The idea is to turn off the sympathetic nervous system – the “fight or flight” responses – and try to activate the parasympathetic system – the “rest and renew” mode. Restorative yoga is thought to relieve stress and trigger healing and growth responses in the body, and these in turn are thought to help combat disease and balance emotional and mental health, as well.

The thing is, most people have a terrible time in restorative classes. I can see it in my own classes, even, and I leave people in the final relaxation for usually less than 5 minutes: people do not know how to be still and quiet. They fidget. They can’t release their bodies. They don’t know how to relax, and they certainly can’t still their minds.

That’s not to say that they can’t LEARN these things, but it is to say that they won’t learn if they refuse to practice. Cicely was telling us that restorative classes are nearly impossible to keep on the schedule because people don’t come to them. The thinking is that, if they’re coming to a yoga class, they want to work out. This makes me more than a little sad, though; too few people understand that a good and balanced yoga practice is so much more than putting one’s body in odd positions.

Anyway, Jess got us into an easy inversion – our calves were on the seat of a chair, she bolstered our heads with rolled blankets and put light sandbags over our eyes. She left us there for about ten minutes, and it was amazing. There’s an idea in yoga (and, I suspect, in a lot of other traditions, as well) that, with practice, one can distance oneself from one’s thoughts and learn to observe them without being participatory in them. That’s called the “witness mind,” and it’s something that yogis in particular strive to attain. One watches the thoughts that come in and out of the mind but doesn’t engage or participate with them, nor does one judge or try to influence them. I understood witness mind as a concept but, until yesterday, was never sure that I’d ever experienced it myself.

It was amazing. I can’t remember what I thought (I was told later that this is typical of the witness mind), but I remember being conscious of feeling like I was at a movie. I wasn’t in control of the images and ideas that were passing in front of me, but neither was I particularly affected by them. I just watched, in a halfhearted way, like one would keep half an eye on a t.v. show while cooking dinner. My primary focus was in surrendering my physical body; I was safe, I was comfortable, I was well-supported. The more I released into the pose – and the idea of being able to stay still and quiet for an extended period of time; I think the fact that I knew I wasn’t going to be called out of this space for a while is vital to this process – the more I was able to relinquish control over what came in and out of my thoughts.

While I can’t recall exactly what I thought, I do remember being aware of a sense of wonder about how varied those thoughts could be. I felt a lot like I was moving through time and across vast distances – the thoughts felt entirely random and incredibly varied. Even though I was aware of not being in control of them, I also knew I wasn’t threatened by them, either. It felt a lot like lucid dreaming. I bet that’s what I was actually doing.

What I got out of this was that restorative yoga – or, at the very least, an integration of some of it into my own practice – is important to me. I’ve felt, for a while, that I’m on the brink of something, and I suspect that taking more time to be still and quiet will help me step over that edge. I’m also considering offering a one-of class at the health club, if for nothing more than to teach people how important it is to stop for a few minutes and just be. People who can’t shut down, even for two minutes, really are missing something important, and I’d like to be able to teach them, even just a little, how to tap into that healing power that we all carry with us.

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