My regular readers will recall that we spoke about “bhavas” in last week’s post; the positive and negative attitudes that impact our wellbeing and dictate our feelings and our actions. As someone who has been running a yoga class in Mumbai for quite a while now, I have been trying to delve deeper into the other, nonphysical aspects of yoga. I believe that it is important to imbibe yoga as a holistic discipline that presents a complete blueprint for life as it should be lived rather than just a physical activity that you engage in for a few hours each week in class. We examined dharma bhava and gyaan bhava; attitudes that help us define our duties and our quest for inner and outer knowledge. Today we try and explore two other bhavas – Aishwarya and Vairagya Bhava.
What is Vairagya Bhava?
We commonly understand vairagi as dispassion or detachment. While we commonly understand the term to mean giving up on the worldly and the material aspects, in a wider sense, vairagya is about subduing the ego and learning humility. It is also about learning to look at things objectively and dispassionately; not permitting personal biases and views to colour one’s perceptions. In practical terms this attitude teaches us to view failures as temporary, unimportant setbacks and to work past them. It is the attitude that helps us accept the things that we cannot change and move past them by looking upon them as a learning experience.
What is Aishwarya Bhava?
As we know, yoga is all about balance. So while we consider it important to develop a healthy self critical faculty and recognize our own faults and limitations, we also give due weightage to recognizing the good within ourselves. Aishwarya bhava is the attitude that has to do with developing a positive self image, working towards one’s ambitions and building self confidence. The idea is to develop a certain clarity of vision about the self and then learning to be self reliant and positive about all that we do.
Applying the bhavas to life and to the practice of yoga
Certain yoga positions or aasans are seen to promote certain bhavas. For instance, some of the forward bending positions that require the head to be bowed low will help to promote the vairagya bhava, which aims at subduing the ego and learning humility. Aasans that involve the backward bend of the spine help to inculcate Aishwarya bhava or self confidence. So when you perform aasans such as the chakrasan, bhujangasan, dhanurasan, these help to give a sense of achievement and make one feel uplifted in a sense.
Being aware of these bhavas and the impact that certain aasans have on our mental attitudes can help to enhance the yoga class experience as a whole. Make your yoga journey more meaningful by applying its principles to other aspects of your life. We may think of yoga as a physical pursuit, but it is so much more: yoga provides guidance for our attitudes, emotions and can even help direct us to make the right choices in life.