An important foundation of a yoga practice is the effort to cultivate a steadiness of mind. This steadiness is centred on awakening to the truth of impermanence – or universal death. The essential unity of life and death takes us straight to the core of the experience of yoga. Contemplation, or the power to observe the operations of the mind and body with deep awareness, is the psychological ground of yoga.
Mental Modifications
Yoga is the restraint of mental modifications.
(Yoga Sutra 1-2, A Sourcebook in Indian Philosphy)
One of the things we immediately notice about Pantanjali’s definition of yoga above is that it is focused on restraining negative qualities of the mind. The purpose of concentration is the restraint of mental modifications. Thus one important purpose of yoga is to control, limit, restrict and suppress the thoughts and feelings we have that lead to pain and suffering.
Pantanjali describes five types of mental modifications:
- Comprehension: The ways in which we perceive, talk and infer about our experiences;
- Misapprenhension: The ways in which we apprehend beyond our senses (intuition, premonition, etc.);
- Imagination: our interior thought world, mental self-talk;
- Sleep: The ways which we connect to dreams and our subconscious being;
- Memory: The ways in which past habits, conditioning, and knowledge influence our present experience.
If a mental process is truthful, it originates in the awareness of the impermanence of all life. If a mental process is painful it is caused by one of the five afflictions (ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, and fear of death) – or those things that cause us to believe we are separate and unique in life. The idea of restraining mental modifications means that we are engaging with our minds in way that is designed to free us from our addiction to suffering so that we may open ourselves to the truth of universal death.
Mental Modifications: Implications for Building a Yoga Practice
A basic goal for a yoga practice is to restrain mental modifications, in other words, to restrict the thoughts and feelings that are the root cause of suffering. Another way to describe this is that the purpose of a yoga practice is to secure steadiness of mind.
A mental modification for the yoga practitioner is not an abstract concept, but a thought-feeling experienced in the here and now. Therefore, unlike a school setting in which the content is predetermined and imposed on the student, the real content of yoga is the practitioner’s awareness and interaction with their own thoughts and feelings. The content of yoga is our own individual experience – the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that occupy our lives. In a vibrant yoga practice both the teacher and classroom are ultimately within.
…practice is the effort to secure steadiness. (Yoga Sutra, 1-13)
