"Mindfulness Yoga" at Yogaville

Several months ago I received an email from the programs coordinator at Yogaville that they were looking for volunteers to staff many of their upcoming workshops. I thought this would be a great opportunity to spend a weekend at my yoga "alma mater" and also attend the workshop. So, I sent in my preference for a couple of them and ended up staffing the "Mindfulness Yoga" workshop during the Oct 23-25 weekend. The workshop was taught by Rev. Frank Jude Boccio who is a certified yoga teacher as well as a fully ordained interfaith minister; he is also ordained as a Dharmacharya, a dharma teacher in the Buddhist tradition.

The main focus of the workshop was to discuss the Four Brahmaviharas (divine abodes or abodes of Brahma) of the Buddhist tradition and how to apply them in life in general and to the yoga-asana practice in particular. The Brahmaviharas, also known as the four immeasurables, are: friendliness (maitri), compassion (karuna), joy (mudita) and equanimity (upeksha). Students of the yoga philosophy of Patanjali will immediately recognize these as the four attitudes, mentioned in Sutra 1.33 of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, which can be applied in different situations to achieve tranquility of the mind (chitta prasadanam).

During the workshop, we studied each of these four attitudes in some detail and applied these to our asana and meditation practice. During the meditation practice we became mindful of the meaning and significance of each of these four values. With that mindfulness, we repeated in our mind statements like, "may I be peaceful", "may I be happy", "may I be free from suffering" etc and applied them to the following categories of people:

• ourselves – e.g., "may I be happy" etc
• to a benefactor; someone who has been very good/kind to us
• a beloved friend – including family members as well
• a neutral person – someone we have no strong feelings for one way or the other
• a difficult person – someone with whom we have experienced conflict and have feelings of anger, hatred etc
• groups of beings like animals, those in prison or hospitals etc
• all beings everywhere

We also went through several sessions of asana practice. During this practice, we became mindful of the chnages taking place at the body, breath and mind levles. At the physical level, one becomes aware of the part(s) of the body impacted with the stretch. In fact, the deeper the sense of such awareness, one minimizes the chance of injury from the yoga practice. At the level of the breath one becomes fully aware of the changes in the quality of breathing during asanas- whether it is shallow, deep, hurried or disturbed. At the level of the mind one becomes aware of the thoughts, feelings or emotions that come up during the practice.

In one of the asana sessions, we practiced "Yin Yoga" wherein we held each pose for more than three minutes. When you hold the pose for that long with total mindfulness, the connective tissues begin to loosen up and your natural levels of flexibility and ease in each pose are improved over time.

I would like to point the differences in the interpretation of these four values between the one presented above (based on Buddha’s teachings) and the one by Patanajali in his Yoga Sutras. The sutra (Chapter 1, Sutra 33 ) reads, "By cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and disregard toward the wicked, the mind-stuff retains its undisturbed calmness" (translation by Swami Satchidananda). As you can see here, Patanjali has divided people that one interacts with into four different categories depending upon their primay nature – happy, unhappy, virtuous and wicked. For each of these groups of people, Patanjali has prescribed one of the four attitudes mentioned in the sutra. In the Buddhist tradition, these four Brahma Viharas are mentioned as universal values that should be applied toward all beings to achieve supreme happiness.

On a Google search, I found this very nice article titled, “Four Sublime States”, which discusses the four Brahma Viharas in some detail.

Overall, I really enjoyed the workshop and just being at Yogaville was a source of joy. If you have never been to Yogaville, I strongly recommend making a weekend trip there to enjoy the weekend programs they offer, excellent vegetarian food and just the superb natural setting of the ashram.