Caverly wrote this article for Asha Yoga Studio's Fall Newsletter
November 2009
We are almost always surrounded by noise. Music, conversation, street sounds, alarms, radios, and televisions are ubiquitous in our lives, yet we rarely stop to consider how sound affects us. On levels we generally are not attuned to, sounds affect our energetic systems, our bodies, and our minds. When we aren’t paying attention, we don’t realize the process by which we are affected. We don’t see how sound can trigger our conditioned reactions to life.
An excellent place to bring awareness to the subtle ways in which we are influenced by sound is on our yoga mats. In yoga, as we move, as we open, as we breathe, we can notice what’s going on within us. On the mat, we can start to see a pattern of how the sounds can trigger our automatic, conditioned reactions to life. For example, the way a line in a sad love song might throw us into a memory of our past relationship. In such a case, we might suddenly feel a deep sense of longing, with no idea how the feeling came to be.
Why would we want to bring consciousness to this? When we begin a spiritual pathway, we embrace the opportunity to see ourselves (and life in general) clearly. We begin to untangle what we’ve always assumed to be true. We begin to see how this conditioned system that we’ve grown to call ‘me’ operates. We become the detectives of our own lives. We open to the possibility and the actuality of freedom.
When we are unconscious to what is occurring within, the conditioned system is operating on autopilot. Perhaps I am conditioned to approach life from the perspective of, “Bad things always happen to me,” “Life is really difficult,” “I need to work hard to get what I want.” Such beliefs are being triggered on a moment-by-moment basis and without consciousness, acted upon. The seemingly innocuous line in a song or a particular vibration can trigger them. Without awareness, we might simply notice that suddenly we feel depressed, without realizing what led to that reaction to life. Without consciousness, we might not realize how a certain sound can trigger the mind into thoughts of the past or fantasies of the future. We may not be aware that certain music makes our energetic centers vibrate in a particular way and that when our energetic centers react, the mind/body follows.
Next time you are on the yoga mat, see if you can pay particular attention to how you react to the sounds around you. If your yoga teacher chooses something other than silence as a backdrop, or if you are present to other noises outside the studio, notice what happens within you as you practice. Also notice how your energetic system/mind/body responds to silence.
Use your mat as a place to explore who you are. Use it as a place to find out how the system that you’ve come to call ‘you’ is structured. Give yourself the opportunity to see the conditioned, karmic, system for what it is, thus opening the door to what’s beyond.
