Yoga No Boundary

Beyond just a study of our own primal behaviors of mating, and territory marking, you can learn a lot of things watching animals. You may even find some useful attitudes and postures to adopt. Ancient yogis certainly seemed to think so; large numbers of yoga postures have been named after our various friends in the animal kingdom.  We have the crow, the eagle, the cat, the cow, the horse, and of course the dog. Each of these postures acts like a physical, internal feng shui – when you physically mimic these postures, you not only gain that animals prowess, you also induce an internal energy pattern of the creature. I’ll leave it to you to debate if there is benefit in being like a cow, but they certainly are peaceful and it’s for these ends that we coined the hip and shoulder opener called the cow-faced pose.

If you love dogs like I do, you can observe that when they awake from napping, they will stretch towards their front legs and then back to the hind legs – for which we have appropriated as the upward facing dog and downward facing dog yoga postures.  Even a passing interest in yoga and you know these postures- I myself couldn’t count the number of times in the past twenty years that I have done, or even said the words “inhale, upward dog, exhale downward dog”.  I doubt canines feel any intellectual property issue here; they’d likely to agree with you that it just feels really good to do. And it’s for that reason; there isn’t a day that goes by without me behaving like a dog.

Recently I also realized that a dog has even more to teach us about concentration- that strength to hold your mind at one point, to the exclusion of all other things. Concentration is a desired skill in yoga practice because if you have no concentration there will be no meditation, and without meditation, the true aim of yoga- absorption- will not be attained. That doesn’t make concentration some special, sacred skill however. If a dog can do it, you can too.

My dog meditation teacher
(Swami Busterami)

The most shining example of good concentration would be a dog I know named Buster. Buster is totally obsessed with food, to the exclusion of all other concerns. Needless to say, the dog is fat. It seems even basic dog-loyalty isn’t there; provided the enemy had something that smells nice in an audibly crinkling bag I’m sure Buster could be persuaded to leave his post.

One morning after I had been teaching these very subjects of concentration and meditation to a group of human students, I turned up at my friend’s house with an extra noisy paper bag of warm, aromatic, deep-fried bananas. I made sure the crunching noises and my sighs of pleasure were audible as I savored my breakfast with extra slow enthusiasm. I began taking pleasure in teasing him. I couldn’t resist, it was just so important to him.

Buster was quickly entranced, hypnotized as he followed every movement of my hand from the bag to my mouth with the most perfect, rapt concentration. The funniest thing was, I had just left a classroom full of intelligent, paying people who are genuinely interested in yoga, but they always seemed to half-get the point I was teaching: that the best foundation for success in yoga- and life is strong concentration.

It might be a stretch to say that Buster or any dog is approaching concentration as a platform for self-development as we do in yoga, but according to the definition in the established bible of yoga, the yoga sutras, this dog has it mastered.  The author of the text, Patanjali, wrote over 3,000 years ago that;

“Concentration is fixing your mind at one point or region, meditation is a continual steady flow of attention towards that same point, and yoga is when the object of meditation engulfs the meditator, and self-awareness is lost”.  I tell you; when I looked in the dog’s eyes, he had become the banana. It was his entire reality.

Concentration is not the penultimate condition of enlightenment, as you must further consider what you are concentrating upon. It is however, totally necessary for success in life. Along with many children in the late 80’s, I had been diagnosed with poor attention span: ADD. Can you blame us? Advertising and video games had done a fine job in training the brains of the youth to be distracted constantly.  Psychologists just labeled it with a three-letter acronym. Maybe it was a ploy to sell more Prozac or Ritalin but given the way things are digressing, the government and the big business probably should conspire to dispense free drugs. Or teach our nation’s youth to do yoga?

As a result, most of you have experienced firsthand how being easily distracted leads to mediocre results. Lose concentration on your lover and they slap you. Lose concentration on business and it fails you. Lose concentration on study and you flunk. The inverse is also true; all domains flower with focus.

The good news is that concentration is like a muscle that gets stronger with practice. Use your breath, a project, a mantra, or really anything else- as long as you understand that with deep concentration, the object of concentration leaves its own impression upon the mind. In other words, you become what you think about most of the time. If you’re like Buster, simply finding something that is attractive may be all that it takes. For the real flowering of human consciousness, discipline and a higher ideal will transform yourself and the world around you.  And that’s the joy of being human, because you have the freedom to act like an animal yet create and think like a God!

Till next time,

Adrian Cox

Director, yoga elements studio