A Mindful Yoga Approach to Weight Loss

The Spiritual path – is simply the journey of living our lives. Everyone is on a spiritual path; most just don’t know it.


- Marianne Williamson

I sometimes get a little overzealous in reminding people that yoga is a spiritual discipline. When I am asked about subjects such as weight loss, I often tell people that they need to seek elsewhere. If the extent of your interest in yoga is physical, there are other forms of exercise, dietary disciplines or psychological interventions. Yoga is about realizing our true nature as beings of consciousness. It is about the union of the individual soul, jivatman, with the universal soul, Paramatman. However, I’ve been rethinking my position.

You don’t have to have a lofty spiritual goal to practice yoga. You certainly don’t have to subscribe to a belief system. However, you need to be aware that the yoga path may awaken a deeper awareness within you. It will challenge your habitual ways of thinking about yourself. Some yoga teachers have tried to take the spiritual elements out of their yoga classes. Some have dispensed with Om chanting for instance. The popular emphasis seems to be on the physical postures, the asanas of hatha yoga. Traditionally, however, these are preparatory practices for the deeper levels if inner yoga. Asanas are meant to take us beyond the body. Meditation takes us beyond the mind.

A Mindful Yoga approach to weight loss incorporates all aspects of our beings: physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. Just as psychological symptoms, life threatening disease, or other life crises can open us to a deeper perspective on our lives, a weight problem might be an invitation to look more deeply into whom we are and the meaning of our lives.

Then again maybe not . . . It’s up to you whether you are willing to inquire more deeply into yourself. First of all yoga will teach you that you are not your body. The body is the material vehicle through which the conscious soul experiences this life. It is a temporary flawed expression of your innate timeless perfection. As such it is also perfect. Mindfulness begins with a loving acceptance of what is. If you hate your body and you identify with your body then this is where you start: by going deeper and finding the compassionate awareness of your soul.

The next thing that yoga will teach you is that you are not your emotions. You are not the victim of your emotions either. Through the practice of mindful awareness you become aware of emotions as energy which moves through you. You don’t have to react to negative emotions like anger and resentment, guilt and shame. You can simply let them be present in your awareness. This is where we move deeper into the inner witnessing awareness. I wish I could tell you that this is easy. I can tell you that it gets better with practice.

Yoga will also teach you that you are not your thoughts. Just as we are aware of bodily sensations and the world of the five senses, of emotional energy which we might express or suppress, we are also aware of thoughts as they pass through our minds. Although it might be easy to understand that we are not bodies – we tend to say “I have a body.” It is harder to not identify with our emotions – we tend to say “I am angry.” It is harder still not to identify with our habitual thought patterns.

When you say something like, “I am too fat.” Who are you referring to? The “real you” is not too fat, not too skinny but just right. The real you is “loving awareness,” to quote Ram Das. Be as you truly are. Recognize yourself as the pure awareness beyond this seeming space-time matrix. Then if you still feel the need to work on your weight:

1. Become more physically active. Do dynamic hatha yoga practices as prescribed in Asana, Pranayama, Mudra, Bandha. Take walks, run if you are able. Dance! Do “laughter yoga!”

2. Become more aware of your eating habits. Pay attention to your energy levels. What foods make you feel truly nourished, truly healthy and attuned to your inner being? Fast one meal per week and pay attention to your thoughts and emotions. Forget fast food. Limit sweets.

3. Focus yourself mentally on spiritual goals, on meaning and purpose in your life, on God or Enlightenment. Practice meditation on a daily basis.  Specifically the practice of Yoga Nidra with a carefully formulated sankalpa will be helpful.  (Refer to my earlier post Yoga Nidra and the Importance of Relaxation

for more information.)

The Significance of Dreams and Dream Consciousness

The first step in dream practice is quite simple:
One must recognize the great potential the dream holds for
the spiritual journey.
- Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Every night we sleep and dream. Many people report not remembering dreams but sleep research tells us that we all dream whether we remember or not. There are different theories regarding the reason and purpose for dream activity. However, it is generally agreed that we process information through dreams. We take in an immense amount of information through our senses daily, a great deal of which we are unaware of on a conscious level. Dreams seem to be a way for our brain/minds to organize, prioritize and “file” this information. We also process emotions in our dreams. Recurrent dreams or nightmares seem to present us with emotional material that remains unresolved within our psyches. Emotionally charged dreams are easier to remember when we wake up.

Freud famously referred to dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious.” He recognized that dreams represent the working of an autonomous process within the psyche which is generally unknown to the conscious ego. Within Freudian theory this unconscious process revolves around our more primitive drives of sex and aggression, suppressed by our super-egos which are the psychic products of civilized culture. In “Civilization and It’s Discontents,” he writes, “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct.” So, psychoanalysis was developed as a way of helping neurotic individuals come to terms with their primitive drives within the context of civilized society.

Some dreams, however, seem to convey a significance which is not simply primitive and instinctual. As Jung recognized, they also represent an inner process of healing and spiritual development. For Jung dream symbols represented a deeper process of moving towards wholeness, self-realization or individuation. It is not just primitive instincts that we need to integrate consciously to heal but also spiritual potentials. Thus, dreams help us to find meaning and purpose in life. Other psychologists have gone on to develop their unique way of working with dreams as well.

The yogic understanding of dreams is similar in some respects to the psychoanalytic. The Mundakya Upanishad, for example, tells us that dreams are based on “memory and desire.” Memory and desire make up the karmic traces within our minds. According to yogic theory, all of our actions and experiences are based on the activation of these karmic “seeds.” In waking life we experience this fruition of karma as our life experience. In dreams we become aware of karma in a potential form. If we pay attention to dreams we can be more aware of the inner karmic process that informs our lives. We can perhaps mitigate the negative tendencies as well, but this takes a great deal of awareness and discernment. If we pay no attention to our dreams, than we miss out completely.

The yoga means of working with dreams, however, is distinct from psychoanalysis. While the yoga aspirant might analyze the contents of the dream, she is more interested in the exploration of the dream consciousness itself. The events of dream experience can be predictive, they can convey information not available to our normal waking consciousness or they can be utilized as a means of waking up to the deeper reality which is beyond both waking and dreaming. From the yogic perspective both dreams and waking life are the projections of our psychological, karmic tendencies. These are not just based on the biographical material of a single lifetime but contain seed memories from multiple past lives as well.

The Tibetan yoga tradition contains a dream yoga practice which is deeply profound and also difficult to practice. Meditation practice is essential for preparing the mind to enter into the dream state both with lucidity and stability. While Westerners who have discovered the practice of lucid dreaming might use it to experience the power of flight, or maybe to have fantasy sexual encounters, the spiritual way of working with dreams is to develop an awareness of the mind’s projections. Ultimately, this will help us when we die and enter the bardo or intermediate state between death and rebirth.



Recommended Reading:

The Upanishads (Classic of Indian Spirituality)

The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep

The Freud Reader

Man and His Symbols