An excerpt from The Science of Yoga Asana by Rudramohan
The relation between the physical body and the mind is very close. – P. R Sarkar
Yoga has always looked upon the body as part of the mind, and called it the Anamaya kosa, meaning ‘the layer of the mind made of food’. The role of thoughts in affecting the body and how the body affects our thinking is at the heart of the biopsychology.
There is more and more research that shows the close bond between body and the mind and how yoga can benefit this relationship. In spite of that, most psychologists look upon the mind as that what the brain does. For the past 350 years Cartesian thinking has put reasoning at the heart of human existence, upon which ideally emotion should not intrude.
Today this assumption has come under fire from modern discoveries that logic cannot function without the emotions generated by the physical body. Candace Pert went as far as to say that the entire human body can be characterized as a single sensing and feeling organ through the neuropeptide system, capable of a variety of emotional expressions and memory.
Such a view comes close to the traditional yogic view that our thought emotions arise from a set of physical propensities (vrttis), that then shape the mind. P.R. Sarkar said that “Human existence or any other biological existence is goaded by the propensive propulsion of the psyche.”
With ‘propensive’ P.R. Sarkar referred to what in Yoga philosophy is described is as ‘vrtti’
propensity.
Mental expression is brought about through the vrttis, and the predominance of the vrttis depends on different glands of the body. There are many glands in the body and from each there is a secretion of a particular hormone. If there is any defect in the secretion of hormones or any defect in a gland, certain vrttis become excited.
That means, the experience of the emotion arises from a physical condition. This bio-chemical condition causes the brain to realize we have an emotion, interpret it and work with it. For the last 2000 years the very aim of yoga was defined as the ‘extinction’ of all these mental propensities (Patainjali: citta vrtti niroddha).
Our deepest feelings inevitably dictate who we are as individuals. For human beings, the reality that ultimately matters is the reality of the feelings and how to work with them.
The process of controlling all the propensities was invented by Astavakra over two thousand years ago. He wrote the book Astavakra Samhita. He as a great saint and called the process Rajadhiraja Yoga.
In P.R. Sarkar’s definition, the path of Yoga is not about the ‘extinction’ of emotive propensities, but the redirecting of them towards the highest awareness. We work with the emotion, evolve and refine, redirect and connect these to our greater goal.
P.R. Sarkar writes that yogis:
“…. consolidate their innate propensities (vrttis) and channelize them towards that Singular Entity. Hence the gradual unfoldment of intuition leads to a corresponding decrease in the number of vrttis. Ultimately there remains only one propensity – the propensity of bliss (ananda vrtti).”
Yoga is the practice of learning to accept our emotions in order to redirect them. Psychic disorders, by extension are caused by suppression or overactivity of emotions combined with a lack of that inner connection.
The very process of connecting with something deeper within, allows us to face and accept hidden memories from the past one has been dissociated from. The whole journey of yoga is based on this. P.R. Sarkar writes, “what is the benefit of asanas if the desires of the mind are not exhausted?”
Today the idea that mind is so interlinked with the body is supported by many leading neuroscientists. Antonio Damasio, who’s been at the cutting edge of emotion research for two decades. In his breakthrough book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain he writes that feelings, are intimately connected with the body – and constitute the basis for conscious thought. “Our minds,” he writes, “would not be the way they are if it were not for the interplay of body and brain during evolution …. The human body can therefore be seen as the foundation for our thought and emotions.
This concept, fundamental to yoga practice also appears in the work of modern psychologists, such as Jaak Panksepp, who identified six major emotional systems, or Paul Eckman, who identified eight primal emotions.
P.R. Sarkar stressed that the physical counterpart of the emotional expressions are the glands and ‘sub-glands’(vrttis). He described fifty such sub-glands all related to the major glands we know. P.R. Sarkar saw the description of the yogic concept of propensities, the physical counterpart of emotions as a future framework for psychology.
“Mental expression is brought about through the vrttis (propensities), and the predominance of the vrttis depends on different glands of the body. There are many glands in the body and from each there is a secretion of a particular hormone. If there is any defect in the secretion of hormones or any defect in a gland, certain vrttis become excited …. If a person wants to control the excitement of these propensities, he or she must rectify the defects of the glands. Asanas help the sadhaka to a large extent in this task, so asanas are an important part of sadhana”.
Modern psychology sees the transduction of the mental into the somatic through the fronto-hypothalamus axis. Thoughts arise in the brain in the pre-frontal cortex and are transduced in the hypothalamus and can become endocrine expressions.
The idea that the human body is fully alive and integrated with feeling and emotion as P.R. Sarkar expresses here goes beyond the immediate physical connection or neuron to neuron. There may very well be other transduction pathways, apart from the hypothalamus-controlled activity.
Thought (both self-generated and externally applied) can activate certain parts of the body, possibly through the neuropeptides, a huge class of signaling molecules in the neurological system. This aspect of ideation, cultivation of inner peace and inner focus is central to yoga. P.R. Sarkar writes: “The true meaning of the word yoga is ‘to unify’. But those who do asanas, pranayama, etc., with devotion are cultivating the desert. Without the water of devotion, their effort will not succeed.”
How this deep ideation works more specifically is still to be explored. But there is progress. It was only 50 years ago, that the psychologist Robert Ader at the University of Rochester advanced the idea that cells are lined with many specific receptors to which only specific molecules can attach themselves. These chemical messengers circulate throughout the body and are the vehicles through which the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems communicate. His discovery started off a revolution in how mind and body interact.
Psycho-neuro-immunologists subsequently found that such chemical messengers act reciprocally on the brain and the rest of the body – and that there receptors are most dense in the neural areas affecting feeling. Candace Pert, a molecular biologist formerly at Georgetown University, determined that the limbic portion of the brain contains upward of 85% of the neuropeptide receptors her team studied.
Furthermore, Pert and her colleagues noticed a high concentration of these receptors “in virtually all locations where information from any of the 5 senses … enters the nervous system.” The entire body can thus be characterized, in Pert’s view, as a single sensing and feeling organ: a far flung, unitary, psychosomatic network. Neuropeptides, she said, for a circulatory network, not unlike the endocrine, that binds the brain, glands, and immune system in a network that forms ’the biochemical substrate for emotions’.
Depending on the precise external or internal stimulus taking place at any given moment, a particular information substance will flow through our body and bind to specific receptor sites. When this binding takes place, we encode a given memory, or are prompted to emote a certain way. Pert goes on to conjecture that our bodily organs store emotional memories based on the specific receptors they possess and the nature of the chemical messages they receive. Memory, she posits, resides in virtually every part of our body.