YogaHealthtips
To Become a Yogi
To be a Yogi, you must be attentive all the
time. You must practice concentration every hour of your active life. Now you
scatter your thoughts for many hours, and you wonder that you do not succeed.
The wonder would be if you did. You must pay attention every day to everything
you do.
That is, no doubt, hard to do, and you may
make it easier in the first stages by choosing out of your day's
work a portion only, and doing that portion with perfect,
unflagging attention. Do not let your mind wander from the thing
before you. It does not matter what the thing is. It may be the
adding up of a column of figures, or the reading of a book.
Anything will do. It is the attitude of the
mind that is important and not the object before it. This is the
only way of learning concentration. Fix your mind rigidly on the
work before you for the time being, and when you have done with
it, drop it. Practice steadily in this way for a few months, and
you will be surprised to find how easy it becomes to concentrate
the mind.
Moreover, the body will soon learn to do many
things automatically. If you force it to do a thing regularly,
it will begin to do it, after a time, of its own accord, and
then you find that you can manage to do two or three things at
the same time. In England, for instance, women are very fond of
knitting. When a girl first learns to knit, she is obliged to be
very intent on her fingers.
Her attention must not wander from her fingers
for a moment, or she will make a mistake. She goes on doing that
day after day, and presently her fingers have learnt to pay
attention to the work without her supervision, and they may be
left to do the knitting while she employs the conscious mind on
something else. It is further possible to train your mind as the
girl has trained her fingers.
The mind also, the mental body, can be so
trained as to do a thing automatically. At last, your highest
consciousness can always remain fixed on the Supreme, while the
lower consciousness in the body will do the things of the body,
and do them perfectly, because perfectly trained. These are
practical lessons of Yoga. Practice of this sort builds up the
qualities you want, and you become stronger and better, and fit
to go on to the definite study of Yoga.
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