I want to sing like the birds sing, not worrying about who hears or what they think.
–  Rumi

Dear friends,

Now I have the time to complete the sharing of the lessons learned during my silence practice this year. What I want to share on the blog here is a bit too much to share in one post, so there will be one follow-up post to this one.

The most important thing that I learned in my practice this year is the importance of remaining mentally free. When I use the term ‘mentally free’, I do not mean something over-your-head. I mean being free from ideas of how life should be and accepting life as it presents itself to you, by remaining free from judgments and expectations. Allow me to illustrate this concept in this article, and explain how I learned about it in the next article.

I have observed that many yoga teachers and students have a very strong idea that yoga, and especially meditation, should be practiced seated on the floor in a cross-legged posture. Some will even go so far as to say that using a chair for meditation is not yoga and that it is wrong! This leads to two kinds of unnecessary suffering:

• Physical suffering. In our current times, we are not used to sitting on the ground and we also do not have a lot of physical exercise. The body is then not prepared to sit on the floor, especially not for a prolonged period of time. When an unprepared body is suddenly made to assume a cross-legged posture, the body will hurt like crazy! Moreover, meditation will simply not happen when the body is suffering without reason.

• Mental suffering: First of all, a student will practice a cross-legged posture under the duress of his or his teacher’s idea of what yoga is. Practicing under duress disturbs meditation in many ways, some of which are hard to notice. Secondly, since the student is not able to practice according to that idea in a comfortable way, he will slowly start to think he is a bad student. I will explain the problems of self-condemnation from my personal experience in the next article.

Being mentally free in the example I just gave means letting go of the idea that meditation should be practiced seated on the floor. Learning to sit on the ground is not essential for meditation. I do not mean to say that meditation on the floor does not have certain benefits, but the choice to learn to sit on the ground should be made

• freely, willfully and joyfully;
• free from self-judgments and expectations;
• when the circumstances allow for it.

My experience is that this kind of mental freedom makes the experience of life wonderful. It does require the courage to let go of all external support, become self-reliant, and claim responsibility for how you feel and this is not always easy.

Editor’s Note:

Ilyaz Nasrullah has been interested in spirituality since childhood. Introduced to the Himalayan Yoga Tradition in his early teens through his parents, students of Swami Veda Bharati, Ilyaz started practicing yoga in the Himalayan Tradition at age 20.

Now at age 25, Ilyaz has studied yoga from different teachers in India and Europe. Always having enjoyed sharing his practical experiences with others, Ilyaz started teaching integrated yoga classes two years ago.