Warning: Yoga is an identity thief.

Without ego, what’s left? Yoga challenges us to leave I-Me-Mine behind and observe the world with bare attention.

By Laurie Niehoff

Consider yourself a yogi? Call the authorities—you’ve been robbed. Your likes and dislikes, your litany of accomplishments, your defense mechanisms, your judgments, your stories, your way of seeing the world—all the things that make you “You” have begun to disappear one by one. And in their place? Emptiness. Space. No self. Yoga has a way of taking I-Me-Mine obsessions and smashing them to smithereens.

The truth is, to be this powerful, yoga needs a co-conspirator: you. You have to be willing to see things as they really are (vidya), without the baggage of opinions, judgments, narrative. And you have to have the courage to let go of fixed ideas of identity—you have give up your “self.”

Letting go is an ongoing journey.
Michael Stone, whose book “The Inner Tradition of Yoga” addresses yoga as a journey of letting go, notes how much harder it is to let go than to focus on growth. “Taking on the new is always easier than letting go of what is old, because what is historical is what is known and comfortable. …The first step in working with our conditioned minds and bodies is seeing what is old in the first place. Then we can let it go. We have a home in the present moment whenever we arrive.”

Stone relates that old yoga joke: that if you want to hide something, hide it in the present moment because no one will ever find it. Yet powerful things happen when we reside in the here and now. When we’re in the present moment, letting go happens naturally as all else falls away effortlessly—the past, the future, expectations, emotional baggage. We connect with our center, our stillness, our divinity—in essence, the present moment is our innermost guru because it connects us to our true, openhearted nature.

We can continue to allow the mind to create distractions that take us away from the present moment, or we can begin to sit with whatever comes up and experience the very moment where our life is unfolding. Yoga gives us the tools to experience this one-pointed awareness through asana practice, meditation and pranayama, each of which play a role in teaching us to watch and listen to ourselves and the world around us, moment to moment, without any attachments or expectations.

What happens when we don’t let go?
A consistent yoga practice keeps both our bodies and minds flexible so that we’re more fluid, and can allow experiences to move through us. When we’re rigid and hold on to ideas and opinions of how things should be rather than let go into the reality of how things are, our inflexible minds lead to strong emotions—referred to in Astanga yoga as the six poisons: desire, anger, delusion, greed, envy and sloth. These “enemies of the heart” result from a mind that operates tightly, stressfully, in the grooves of samskaras or habitual patterns.

Habits don’t have to be our destiny.
The six poisons are only symptoms of the five klesas described in Astanga yoga. The five klesas, which are derived from the Yoga-Sutra attributed to Patanjali, are the deeper psychological issues that are the root causes of suffering (duhkha):
Avidya (not seeing things as they are)
Raga (attachment)
Dvesa (aversion)
Asmita (the story of I me, and mine)
Abhinivesa (the thirst for further existence).

These five factors keep us stuck in I-Me-Mine, the dual state of existence that creates separateness and alienation by perpetuating the concept of a self “in here” that perceives an object “out there.” In the Yoga-Sutra, Patanjali advocates a two-fold method to help us live in the now of non-dualism: practice (abhyasa) to cultivate new patterns in the mind, and detachment (vairagya), letting go of habitual patterns. Says Stone: “Letting go of a self-centered response to reality brings us into a more realistic, clear, and grounded relationship with life, which manifests in intelligent action.”

This letting go may happen gradually, class by class, asana by asana, as we see bits and pieces of old ourselves slipping away, revealing a calmer, more tranquil demeanor. It may happen suddenly, as we breathe through a difficult pose and have a breakthrough, a release so deep it transforms not just our body but also our point of view—a shift in the hips or shoulders can literally shift our posture and change our perception of the world.

Let go to live now.
Want to feel more vividly alive? Let go of the illusions of familiarity and security and dare to be in the present moment. The more we practice bringing the mind to one-pointed focus on the mat, the more the mind is able to do it off the mat. As Dainin Katagiri says in “Each Moment Is the Universe”:

“When you see your life through and through and stare at reality without blinking, that is called realization of the self. To live in peace and harmony, become yourself as you really are in the present moment as it really is. This is very beautiful.”

This is what yoga does: it strips away the confines of “self” and “ego” and leaves us with our moment-to-moment experience. With the bare attention of beginner’s mind, unhindered by habits and untethered by strings of attachments, we can be with our lives as they unfold, one breath moving seamlessly into the next.

Laurie Niehoff teaches Restorative/Pranayama on Fridays at 6:15pm.