There's sort of, like, two kinds of people on this planet: There's the way most people are, and then there are people that think about their day in terms of opportunities to cultivate and apply their mindfulness skills. It's just a whole different way to approach life.

If you, like myself, practice both meditation and asana yoga (the physical practice of holding specific bodily postures—āsanas), you can likely get more juice out of your yoga sessions and accelerate your progress in meditation with some simple tweaks. Of course, if you’re really into yoga, you might know that the original purpose of yoga was to aid meditative practice, but this synergy is either de-emphasized in modern settings or is only alluded to in obscure (and often off-putting) ways. So I’d like to offer a few specific ways of seeing yoga practice that might not be so obvious, but which I’ve found very helpful. Some of these are inspired by the neural annealing framework and pragmatic dharma more broadly.

For context, I’ve been practicing yoga for about 15 years and meditating for about 10, both with periods of more and less intense practice (and sometimes no practice at all). The first time I ever did yoga, I did it because my then-girlfriend’s mom was teaching yoga on the side. I reasoned that the returns of investing 1–2 hours of my time in terms of son-in-law points was pretty good, so heck, why not. But the joke was on me: against my expectations, I really liked it, and I kept coming back every week.

However, only in the past two years or so have I been thinking of my yoga practice primarily as a meditation practice, and I wish I had done this sooner. I’m most familiar with vinyasa (“flow”) yoga, which is one of the most popular styles taught today. My recommendations assume vinyasa by default, but many of them apply just as well to other styles. I’ll be using “yoga” to refer to “asana yoga” for simplicity.

The success of the yoga memeplex

While yoga as we know it in the west is just over 100 years old, related practices have been around for centuries. What can we attribute the success of this memeplex to? I think it has to do with the way it “re-tunes” our nervous system through neural annealing (an idea that both Andrés and Michael pointed out in the past). Specifically, the practice raises the “energy parameter” of our consciousness (i.e., the degree of intensity of our conscious experience) in various ways, usually followed by a steady cooling process that results in a more harmonious configuration of the nervous system. If you want to get a better sense of what it feels like to modulate the energy parameter, you can try out this guided meditation.¹

If done well, this whole re-tuning will feel good (both during the practice and possibly for hours or days afterwards), and we’ll keep coming back. I think this fact is most often not explicitly represented in people’s minds, but I believe it does most of the work. If we then add the fact that one can make quick progress as a beginner, and the welcoming, non-judgmental atmosphere, we have a recipe for success. Indeed, according to this source, “the global yoga industry reached a market value exceeding $84 billion in 2022”.

Using neural annealing as a starting point, we have two levers to play with: the energizing aspect and the cooling down aspect. But before diving in, let’s get one initial recommendation out of the way: set a clear intention at the beginning of the class.² Some teachers encourage this, but often their suggestions are more semantic than phenomenological (e.g., “dedicate this practice to one person in your life” instead of “notice how each and every breath affects the energy body”). Nothing wrong with the former; I just find the latter more useful.

Increasing the energy parameter

Yoga practice can increase the energy parameter in multiple ways, and you can play around with whichever ones work best for you. The most obvious one is through mere physical exertion, but I don’t have much to say about this other than “really exert yourself and don’t slack (if you can)”. Notice if you can go harder—(safely) bend deeper, stretch further, hold for longer. Get energized!

Next, we have the breath. In vinyasa, you’re encouraged to use ujjayi breath (slightly constricting the throat to create a soft, ocean-like sound while breathing through the nose; demo). The goal of making the breath audible is that it’ll be easier to stay with it, coming back to it if your mind wanders. This concentration practice energizes the mind, so really prioritize it: the longer you can stay focused on the breath, the more energized your mind will be. Focusing on the breath is also a common technique to enter the first jhana.

In vinyasa, you want to synchronize the in- and outbreath with the poses and transitions. Good teachers will guide you (“inhale: upward-facing dog; exhale: downward-facing dog”). Do your best not to breathe faster (or slower). It’ll be difficult at times, especially if the poses are challenging and you lose your breath and start panting. But it gets easier. You might have to hold your breath at times to catch up. The best is when the teacher chooses background music or beats that fit the breathing tempo, but this happens rarely (sadly).

You can take the breathing to the next level by adding counting. Again, some teachers will do this sometimes (“stay here for three breaths”), but you can do it anytime, and also within breaths: while inhaling (or exhaling), you can count to 2, 3, 4, or whatever feels comfortable. This gives you yet another anchor to stay focused on. It’s also a common technique to enter the first jhana (see Rob Burbea’s “Counting Within the Breath”). Of course, if you’re new to yoga, you’ll be too busy trying to follow along and getting the basics right. That’s fine. Set goals that feel doable.

Next, since pleasure and pain can act as energy sources, make sure to pay close attention to them when they arise (since attention causes the object to be energized). (Obviously, doing so means paying less attention to other things, such as the counting; that’s fine, at least temporarily). Try to notice them simply as patterns of waves in your body without attaching labels. It’s a good exercise in phenomenology: How fast do the waves travel? In which direction? Are they confined? Are they spiky, soft? At what frequency do they vibrate?

Finally, notice moments of surprise. Some examples: you’re surprised you managed to hold a pose you thought you couldn’t (or the other way around), or you don’t know a certain pose, or you feel a muscle you didn’t even know you had, or you realize one side is stronger than the other.

As a meta recommendation, simply play around with whatever techniques cause your mind to energize and drop whatever doesn’t work. Maybe it helps to visualize an image, or to repeat a mantra, or to pretend you’re dancing as Shiva in the cosmic dance. Be creative and smart.

And to avoid letting the precious energy you’ve built up leak, really try not to get lost in thought, since the semantic content of thoughts can act as energy sinks.

Cooling down

Conveniently, most yoga sessions end with a cool down, usually involving some gentler poses or stretches, and culminating in corpse pose (savasana). If you were diligent about the energization techniques during the session, your mind and body will feel bright, light, expansive, even blissful (I can still remember a few specific super blissful savasanas).

Probably the best use of this time is to simply meditate using your go-to meditation technique (noting, metta, body scan, jhana, etc.). Minimize chatter.

Sadly, the cool-down typically lasts only a few minutes, but if you can, consider meditating right after the yoga session, while your mind is still energized, focused, and calm. The sit will be much deeper than usual.

Mike Johnson has suggested what not to do after being in a high-energy state of mind:

Off the top of my head, I’d suggest that one of the worst things you could do after entering a high-energy brain state would be to fill your environment with distractions (e.g., watching TV, inane smalltalk, or other ‘low-quality patterns’). Likewise, it seems crucial to avoid socially toxic or otherwise highly stressful conditions. Most likely, going to sleep as soon as possible without breaking flow would be a good strategy to get the most out of a high-energy state- the more slowly you can ‘cool off’ the better, and there’s some evidence annealing can continue during sleep. Avoiding strong negative emotions during such states seems important, as does managing your associations (psychedelics are another way to reach these high-energy states, and people have noticed there’s an ‘imprinting’ process where the things you think about and feel while high can leave durable imprints on how you feel after the trip). It seems plausible that taking certain nootropics could help strengthen (or weaken) the magnitude of this annealing process.

You’re welcome for the sophisticated excuse if you ever fall asleep during savasana.

Other ways of seeing yoga

Yoga as equanimity practice

Equanimity is one of the three elements of mindfulness as defined by Shinzen Young (the others being concentration and sensory clarity). He defines it as “radical non interference with the natural flow of sensory experience”, i.e. accepting and welcoming whatever comes up, without either fixating on it or suppressing it.

Yoga offers many opportunities to practice equanimity, especially around unpleasant sensations:

• When pain comes up, don’t push it away (assuming it’s safe)
• When you find a pose pleasurable, enjoy it without clinging
• When you fail to do a pose, be fine with it
• When you notice not staying with the breath, don’t judge yourself

Shinzen Young also has these four formulas that approximate many experiences quite well:

• Pain x Resistance = Suffering
• Pain x Equanimity = Purification
• Pleasure x Resistance = Frustration
• Pleasure x Equanimity = Fulfilment

Resistance here is the reciprocal of equanimity (R = 1/E). So really try to minimize resistance when dealing both with pain and pleasure, and you’ll have a nicer time.

As another exercise in phenomenology, you can also play around with equanimity as a tool to increase the stress dissipation capacity of the nervous system. So whenever you feel pain, you can do what Andrés suggests:

Phenomenologically, if you're having an unpleasant sensation over here, you just let it be. You know, you do “nothing meditation”, or you're focusing just on the bare sensations, letting them propagate however they want. What will happen is that those unpleasant sensations will slowly build up. That will be a little bit unpleasant, but then they will start to get coupled with resonances elsewhere in your nervous system, whether it is in the visual domain, tactile domain, even auditory or conceptual domain. All of those could happen, and then as they get coupled, they become coupled oscillators. The stress will find ways to use whatever it is coupled with in order to dissipate more efficiently.

In other words, notice a painful sensation and see if you can “couple” it with other parts of your experience to lessen its effect.

Yoga as metta practice

There’s a guy in my class whose ujjayi breath is only paralleled by Darth Vader’s. The fact that some people have such a different understanding of “subtle” and “soft” blows my mind, and kind of grinds my gears. But I’m grateful to him for giving me an excellent opportunity to practice mettā (“loving-kindness”).

Similarly, yoga offers many opportunities to practice metta toward yourself, for example, when you catch yourself criticizing your body composition, strength, etc.

Yoga as emptiness practice

Emptiness (śūnyatā) is a core concept in Buddhism, which in broad terms refers to the idea that nothing has intrinsic existence. In other words, anything that exists only exists in relation to other things. Two examples:

1. The concept of the number “3” only makes sense in a universe where other numbers (1, 2, 4,…) also exist. In a way, “3” implies the existence of (all?) other numbers.
2. The country you live in doesn’t really exist. Its physical borders, its laws, its history, etc. are just stories that we keep repeating and that live in our minds.

The degree to which you realize the emptiness of things will be the degree to which you free yourself from suffering, according to Buddhists, in part because you can decide to see things in more beautiful, lovely ways.

The Vajrayana strand of Buddhism has a fun technique to help you realize the truth of emptiness: deity yoga (yidam). The basic idea is to intentionally replace your usual self view with a visualization of an enlightened deity. For example, while meditating, you can pretend to be Yamantaka, a buffalo-headed deity with 9 faces, 34 arms, and 16 legs. You do this until you realize how the usual way of viewing yourself is arbitrary, thus reaching enlightenment. So get ready for this one simple trick.

OK, there are more straightforward ways to get insights into emptiness. One that I enjoy practicing involves noticing how the ordinary perception of your body gets altered in some of the more exotic (though not necessarily harder!) poses. Whenever your body is in a position it’s not used to, ask yourself questions like “Where is my body? What is my body? Where are its boundaries?”

While doing so, you can also try to dial down the amodal perception of your body. In Roger Thisdell’s words, amodal perception is “when you don’t directly experience something, but the mind heavily infers its existence, in such a way that it shapes your behavior.”

While practicing yoga, you can notice that what you thought was a solid, well-defined body is actually just a few disjoint patches of vibration, pressure, temperature, etc. You never really experience your whole body at once. You’re much lighter than you think.

Let’s end this article together with an “Om”. But remember to focus on the somatic sensations associated with the resonance, and introspect on the resulting valence. Now, take a deep breath in…

Footnotes

1. From the video description: “We explore energy sources such as (a) sensory input, (b) pleasure and pain, (c) attention, (d) and surprise.” I’ll be using these four sources as inspiration. ↩

2. You should do this for every meditation session too! ↩