Our mind takes pictures of our experiences and stores them as memories. It takes snapshots to capture moments of love, turbulence, passion or fear. How well these pictures develop depends on the experience, the emotions felt and the behaviour that sprung from it. And did it capture the moment exactly or slightly out of focus? How our brain remembers events changes over time. Depending on how often the memory is activated affects how strong or faint that memory is.

The impact of these snapshots of joy, sadness, pleasure or pain depends on the feelings and emotions experienced in that moment and our reaction and physiological response to what we faced. The more intense the experience, the more potent the mind picture and the more viscerally we feel when faced with a similar experience. The impact of what has gone before has left its mark and facilitates habitual responses and actions embedded deep in our subconscious. 

In Buddhism, conditioned thought and behavioural patterns are called samskaras, which translates as ‘well planned’ (sam) and ‘the action undertaken’ (kara). As our memories go hand in hand with our emotions, we often walk down the same path, repeating the same actions, deepening the grooves of our samskaras and forming habits. The deeper the grooves, the more indelibly the impressions form in our minds and bodies. When we attempt to shift and redirect our energies from negative actions to positive ones, we can face strong resistance. 

Our samskaras and our perception of what happened influence the meaning we apply to our experiences. Our body responds to each scenario by releasing hormones such as adrenaline, whose main action is to activate the fight or flight response, or perhaps oxytocin, most positively linked to social connection and bonding but also raises our attention to negative salient cues. If our response is one of fear, adrenaline and noradrenaline are first responders to focus our attention and mobilise us to take action. We might experience a racing heart and thoughts, a dry mouth, feeling hot and sweaty, and the ground might feel unstable underneath our shaky legs. If the mind senses this new snapshot is reminiscent of old experiences, it sets off this cascade of physiological responses and jumbled thinking. The emotional part of our brain is loud and overbearing, leaving our rational, discerning part of the brain floundering to be heard. The more intense the emotional response, the more fiercely the samskaras embed and the more defined we become by them. 

Our past experiences will happily shape us into our present-day and future selves, which is often easier than redefining what is deeply embedded. The relationship between how we respond to and perceive ourselves, others and our external world, and our state of mind (anger, fear, joy, desire, compassion) is reciprocal; they feed each other for better or worse. 

Our experiences inform how much space we find between stimulus and response. When we receive intense stimuli that evoke strong emotions, such as passion or fear, the space disappears, and our response can be instant, misconstrued and non-intuitive.

‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’ ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Our five senses absorb external stimuli with our mind firmly at the helm and the keeper of our senses. The meaning our senses apply to the stimuli faced based on previous events dictates our actions and feelings, and we can become entangled in our ego state of ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘mine’ which directs us towards self-absorption. We may find we over-identify with the labels we give ourselves, becoming more disconnected from our true nature and more attached to material things and our identities; this can lead to more duhkha (suffering, stuckness, pain) and further disconnection. 

It is clear that our minds and bodies are tightly bound, but conversely, we may experience a deep disconnection from our bodies by spending so much time in our heads. Even though we may sometimes feel disconnected, through yoga therapy we can learn to exercise our self-awareness muscle and begin the cathartic process of tying the strands together where they might otherwise feel split. This process grows our ability to identify samskaras that are linked to duhkha and break free from the repetitive cycles we find ourselves in.

Yoga therapy works with the body and the mind across all lifestyle aspects, such as movement, sleep, emotional regulation and breathing which in turn improves our interpersonal relationships and, perhaps most importantly, our relationship with ourselves. We have the power to transform our samskaras, and rework unhelpful patterns of behaviour and thought into wise, intuitive and more positive ones, enabling us to take conscious action vs reacting to events compelled by conditioning.

Could Yoga Therapy support you? 

Please contact me: lindseyliveyoga@gmail.com