They state that these days, we’re living in the attention economy. From all angles, it appears, our attention is being courted and combated over by marketing and marketing groups, organizations, streaming services, the 24-hour news cycle and social media. There is music playing while we consume and talk to buddies in our preferred coffeeshop; smartdevice notifies pinging while we watch an obviously soakingup TELEVISION program. The world hasactually endedupbeing a banquet of sensory stimulation (though frequently not the nourishing kind of feast).
With so much details coming in, it can be tough to different the signal from the sound. Pratyahara, the 5th limb in Patanjali’s eight-limb (or ashtanga) system of yoga, might deal some reprieve. Pratyahara is normally equated as “withdrawal of the senses” and includes the practice of momentarily closing off the senses and pullingback into oneself. It’s a procedure typically compared to a turtle withdrawing into its shell, from where it’s poorly mindful of the outside world, however focused mostly on the universe within its shell.
“Most of us understand this state; when you’re in it, you feel like you’re at the bottom of a well,” composed Judith Hanson Lasater in Yoga Journal. “You register the sounds that happen around you, for example, however these sounds do not produce disruption in your body or mind. It is this state of nonreaction that I am calling pratyahara.”
Pratyahara appears after the yamas (personal principles), niyamas (personal practices), asana (yoga postures) and pranayama (breath control), and priorto dharana (concentration) and dhyana (meditation) — the concept being that we needto veryfirst findout how to withdraw into ourselves if we are going to practicemeditation effectively. In the verysame method that the senses act as a bridge inbetween our inner and external worlds, pratyahara is the connection inbetween the more earthly, daily, outward-focused elements of yoga (the veryfirst 4 limbs) and the more spiritual, inward-focused limbs that come lateron. Pratyahara is the bridge we walk on our journey inwards.
In his analysis of the Yoga Sutras, Sri Swami Satchidananda echoes the Bhagavad Gita’s description of the 5 senses as horses that we should discover to control, lest they race off ahead, dragging us passively behind them. “We should have great rein over these unstable senses,” he composed. In other words, our senses are helpful in assisting us relocation through the world, however we can quickly endedupbeing driven by them and, in the procedure, detached from ourselves.
Like lotsof of the ancient texts, this lesson is mostlikely more pertinent and required today than it was when it was composed 2000 years back. Think of how much harder it would be to practicemeditation in the earlymorning if you read the news, called a goodfriend and scrolled through your social media feed inadvance. It’s a little like biting off more than we can chew, and the outcome is a kind of psychological indigestion. Or, to mix metaphors, the more we subject ourselves to sensory overload, the more churned up endsupbeing the dust of our inner landscape and the more challenging it is to practicemeditation.
This may describe why so lotsof individuals offer up meditation, exasperated by their failure to stop ideas and advises from pulling them in myriad