Happiness Lessons of The Ancients: Yoga of the Mind

my god, you should come to yoga. You're gonna love it. And I was like, I am not doing that. Jessamin had tried yoga once before in high school and she absolutely hated it. But her friend wasn't going to take no for an answer and knew just how to make the case. She appealed to Jessaman's appetite for a bargain, and she got me caught up on a group on though she was like, what's the worst they can happen? You go one time you paid thirty dollars with this past, Like,

what's the worst that can happen? Jessamin reluctantly agreed at first that yoga class wasn't the amazing, life changing experience Jessamin was hoping for. So it's really hot here, it smells, it kind of sucks. Actually, like everything about this is really hard. Jessamin couldn't do the poses as well as the other students around her. As a queer plus sized black woman in a mostly skinny, white lady yoga class. She felt uncomfortable in her body and painfully self conscious.

I remember we were practicing a posture called awkward pose that is literally it's so aptly named because it is extremely awkward. So I'm looking at myself in this mirror and which is traumatizing on its own, because I literally would go out of my way at that stage in my life to avoid mirrors and looking at myself. And I'm just thinking, like, why did you even think you could come to this class? Like you obviously don't know what you're doing, and everybody here knows it, and you

can't even do this basic thing. This is like maybe the third or fourth posture in the class. I'm like, there's no like, if you can't do this, then why even show up? And I was just talking cash shit to myself, and I had this moment where I was like, you know, you could just try. Maybe you just try, Like, yes, maybe you're gonna fall down. Maybe everyone in the room is going to know that you don't know what you're doing. Maybe the teacher's gonna know that you don't know what

you're doing. And maybe that's just gotta be okay, Because did you spend this money to come to this class to just stand here and talk shit about yourself because you could have done that at home. Jessamin decided to make good on her thirty dollar investment. She committed to halting her usual self criticism, if only for the length of that one class. She started leaning into all the new postures and movements, and then something incredible happened. She

actually started to enjoy yoga. It was the first time Esseman was able to get out of her head and as long as she could remember. So it was this insane moment of like actually having to reckon with something that I had just decided about myself, and that moment that breaking point to this day. Ultimately, that is why I continue to practice yoga, because it really is it's

a cracking open of the spirit. It's like you're looking in a foggy bathroom mirror, a mirror that you fogged up, and like just swiping across it and seeing your actual reflection back at you. And it was so profound for me in a way that I certainly didn't walk into the class thinking I was going to experience. Decades later, Jessaman has gone from an awkward novice to becoming a famous yoga professional. She's now one of the most sought

after yoga and wellness instructors in the world. Jessaman's done ad campaigns for places like Gatorade, Adidas, and Amazon. She's the co founder of The Underbelly, an international yoga community that celebrates bringing yoga and movement to people of all body types and identities. But initially that experience, I really only understood it on a physical level, an example being like I'm just going to work on this pose, like I'm going to work on camel pose or downward facing

dog like. I got really into headstanding and understanding the mechanics of that, and through that practice of focusing on different postures, I did start to understand that there are a lot of themes that come up when you are practicing yoga so like grounding stability, strength, flexibility, and understanding those concepts beyond what they were offering me physically, So like, if I am in a posture that is offering flexibility in my physical whole body, what other parts of my

life can I be more flexible in. Jessamin was training extensively in the physical side of her practice, but she hadn't yet looked at the historic or spiritual roots of yoga. Was her practice really supposed to be just about the poses, she wondered, or did the founders of yoga intend for it to be deeper. Jessamin was fascinated by all these questions, but she also worried that the answers might not be for people like her. I am black, I am American, I am not South Asian. I do not have a

cultural relationship with yoga. And I was like, I'm pretty sure this is all appropriation and it's probably not cool for me to be doing this at all. But at a minimum, I'm just going to stick with the physical stuff, and then I won't. I'm not even going to dig into anything else. But as Jessamin thought more about the varied benefits that she and her students got from yoga. She began to realize that the physical side of this

ancient tradition was just the tip of the iceberg. As she explains in her most recent book, Yoga, My Yoga of Self Acceptance, she came to learn that it's less about fitness and more about dealing with your mental and emotional baggage. So much of what was making me unhappy and unsatisfied in my life was that I'd created all of these boundaries for myself, and I made all these decisions about the type of person that I am and about what I'm capable of handling, and I never allowed

myself to step outside of those boundaries. Yoga requires that you step outside of your boundaries, and it's put me in these situations where I actually had to look at the way that I talked to myself and look at the way that I process information and be like, you know what, I know. I decided that I'm not going to be able to do this, but maybe I'm just going to try. And part of that commitment to moving past her boundaries involved taking a careful look at the

cultural origins of yoga. Jessamine began reading about the history of her practice, and in doing so, returned to an important spiritual work that she'd first heard about and her yoga teacher training a book that's often thought of as the earliest textbook of yoga. It's called The Yoga Suits. Such means thread, so it's literally like threads that tie

us together. These sutras have been passed down for thousands of years, and they've been translated an untold number of times, and they really are just words that were captured by the students of a teacher. Parts and jolly, and these words were just guiding thoughts for life. Potentially was the wise Sanskrit stage who first outlined what's known as the

eight limbed Path. The eight limbed path was a way for students not just to achieve a fitter body, as we often think of yoga today, but to gain a fitter mind and spirit. Potentially argued that when followed correctly, the eight limbed path is a way for us all to become free of mental suffering. It's really just like so many other ancient texts, and it's been passed down

because the universality of the aphorisms. They can be applied in every circumstance, no matter who you are or where you are, and that's one of the reasons we'll be turning to the yoga sutras in this episode. Today we'll explore what the eight Lived path says about how to live a happier, healthier life. Welcome back to Happiness Lessons of the Ancients on the Happiness Lap with me, Doctor Laurie Santos. Certainly, yoga has become in the mainstream almost

entirely associated with exercise. What poses are you doing? The difficulty of the practice is engaged by the difficulty of the postures, like how acrobatic is your practice becomes the metric, so that when people go to a yoga class, it's always about like what are the physical benefits going to be? And that even when you talk about like meditation or breathwork, it's not necessarily seen as a necessary component of a yoga practice. And ultimately though, the physical experience of yoga

is really a very minor part of the experience. As Jessamin learned more about the history of yoga and the yoga sutras specifically, she quickly realized that yoga poses, or asina's as they're called in Sanskrit, are just a tiny part only one branch of the eight limb path that Potentially originally outlined. In fact, Asina's didn't even make it into the first limb that Potentially preached about. His classic text started not with Asina's but with what are known

as the yamas or restraints. Yama's especially, I think, because they go first. It's the suture that I think people are most familiar with and the ones that have the most intense translations in our society. The yamas remind us about the responsibility we have to other people. In doing so, the yamas fit well with one of the most well documented effects in the entire field of happiness science that becoming more other oriented is a quick way to improve

our well being. Study after study shows that focusing on other people, either through volunteering or donating money, can make us feel happier, and acting intentionally towards others is what the first limb of the eight limb path is all about.

In fact, Potentially thought our responsibilities to others were so important that he divided the yamas into five tinier principles, as he called them, and the first and most famous of these principles is what's known as ahimsa, which is this idea of non violence, and often Ahimsa is translated as a call to action for vegetarianism or veganism, because the best way to be non violent in terms of not harming other creatures is to literally not consume other creatures.

But that's just one translation of Ahimsa, and that's just

one translation for some people. Non violence, to me has always come up more in the language that we used to talk not just about other people, but about ourselves, because if you are using violent language to talk about yourself, that is coming into the way that you communicate about other people as well, which is kind of ironic, because I think the whole idea of a himself is not to engage in violence, and in some ways, critiquing people,

especially critiquing people's bodies, you know, might be really a violation of the very principle exactly. And another one that jumps up for me is Bramacharia, which is this idea of chastity. And like I remember in my own teacher training it being said like, oh, well, we don't really think about Bramacharia that much, like it's not that big of a deal. You don't need to worry about it because bramacharia being translated as chastity and therefore meaning celibacy,

no sex, no sex. People are like, I'm not not going to have sex what you're saying, And in my own understanding of brahmacharia, I think that it's more about owning your own spirit so that when you are engaged in acts that are literally sharing your spirit with other human beings, that you can at a minimum know what you're getting into. And that's what sex is. It's offering yourself to another human being, and sex it can get you twisted in the game. It will get you confused,

and that is really all that Brahmacharia is. It's really just asking a question. It's like, you know, what does it mean to hold onto your essence? To preserve your spirit. Jessamine has a similar interpretation of the other three Yamas principles. They're there so our minds don't get twisted up and so that we can preserve our spirit. These final free principles include Satya or truthfulness, basically, don't lie to people and commit to living in truth even when doing so

is painful. Then there's estey, which tells us not to be covetous Astea is all about nipping that green eyed monster of jealousy in the bud and to try to avoid social comparison generally. And finally, there's a paragraha, which is freedom from desire. A paragraha fits nicely with a happiness strategy we talk about a lot on this podcast, remembering that more stuff and more accolades are not going to make us happy. A paragraha is all about trying

to notice times when we're feeling a little greedy. It's really not like hard rules, it's opportunities to engage with yourself on a more visceral pud For the next limb of the eight limb path, the Niyamas is even more focused on engaging internally, and that's because the five principles of the Niyamas are focused on the responsibilities we have not towards other people, but towards ourselves. Those principles include sautcha keeping your body clean physically, mentally and emotionally, tap

Us a sense of austerity and self discipline. Svadiaya, a commitment to studying yourself and looking within yourself for answers. Isfara pranidana committing to finding a spiritual path, and my favorite of the niyamas Santosa. Santosa is my favorite, not because the word kind of sounds like it should be the name of some cousin of mine, but because it's the principle that's focused on finding contentment in the present moment and doing so without ruminating about the past or

the future. You could spend your whole life just focusing on the yamas, honestly, because they show up in everything, and they can be interpreted so many different ways, whether that's through the language that you use, through your personal definition of chastity, through the things that you consume, how you cleanse your body, but then it's also the way that you engage with other human beings, not coveting what other people have, not speaking ill of other people, and

really like having an attention to your words and the language that you use. But the eight limp path doesn't just stop with the yamas and the ni Yamas. When we get back from the break, we'll continue our discussion of Patanjali's other six limbs. We'll see where all those tough yoga poses we use in the modern day fit into the ancient stage's vision of the good life. And we'll learn how a true eight limbed path towards flourishing requires regulating not just the body, but also the mind.

The happiness lab will be right back. When you look at people who are extreme athletes, like I think a lot about ultramarathoners and people who run ultramarathons, they're not doing that for their health, Like they're not obsessed with that experience because it's like, oh my god, my body is going to look this way. No, they are working out deep psychological truth, so they are they are having

a spiritual experience. The ancient sage patan Jolly lived way before modern fitness practices like CrossFit and tough Mutters were a thing, but he still recognized that moving our bodies could be an important step towards spiritual enlightenment. And that's the logic behind the third and most famous limb of

patan Jolly's eight limbed path, the asanas. The asinas are what most Westerners typically think of when they think of yoga, the poses, things like downward facing dog, chaturanga, gomu casana, and chair pose. But the key to getting the most out of all these asanas isn't what most modern practitioners think from Patan Jolly's perspective, the goal wasn't to twist

your body into an uncomfortable pretzel. Author and yoga instructor Jessamine Stanley says that the original idea behind the asinas was much simpler, asina really means to sit, so it's not even as complicated as assume this specific posture. It's literally like to be just to exist. Patan Jolli is really saying that any form that your body takes is assuming a shape that then is a part of this world, and it's something that evolves for every person throughout their life,

depending on what's going on in their life. But the reality is that you really only need to practice one posture, and it can be any posture. The posture can be sitting down, it can be lying on your back, it can be standing up. That's sufficient posture because ultimately they're very complex postures, and in truth, being able to just be in stillness is the hardest posture. Jessamin tells her students that this is the point performing all the yoga

poses they practice. The austins are there to help us accept the hard challenges that come not on our yoga mats, but in life. Let's take a posture like post For example, you look at a posture like cheer pose and it's like, what do I need to do? I need to turn my thighs toward one another. I need to engage my core. I need to fall down backwards while also sitting upright. I need to lengthen out of the crowd of my head.

All of these things are things that I need to do when I'm challenged, when someone is pushing back against me at work, when I feel like someone is being mean to me, when I'm feeling challenged, those are the same things that I need to do. I need to pull into my core. I need to try to fall down backwards but also stay upright. I need to lengthen

up to the sky. I need to pull It's all of these ideas that seemed theoretical and that seemed like philosophical but that are really actually very practical, And I think it makes it easier to deal with the parts of life that are really hard, really really hard and complicated and that are not meant to be anything other than that. Like I think sometimes in life, really hard shit, bad shit happens, and you think this isn't how things are supposed to be things are supposed to be good.

I'm supposed to be happy. This is wrong, And what yoga reminds is that everything in life is not good. Everything in life is not happy. You need for things to be hard so that you can actually strengthen from the inside. So practice the things that you do when things get hard. Pull into your core, become flexible in your hamstrings, draw your butt cheeks together, whatever the things are. Practice that in the moments that feel emotionally hard, and

you will be strengthened as a result. The fourth limb of the eightfold path, it is also about harnessing something that can help us get through tough times. Not mindful movements as in the Ausinas, but mindful breath. It's called prana, the full word as prana yama, Prana being this energy that we we most consciously understand as breath, and so breathwork becomes the focus of pranayama. Scientists have long recognized that our breath can have a huge impact on our

well being. Take for example, one of the easiest ways to shut off activation in our fighter flight system, or what neuroscientists refer to as our sympathetic nervous system. You're probably familiar with the activation of this system if you've ever felt overwhelmed by too many demands at work, or anxious after reading some scary news article, or pissed off by an annoying email. Our sympathetic nervous system kicks in

whenever we feel under threat. It's a system that's only supposed to turn on once in a while in moments of urgent threat or danger, but many of us keep this system running chronically, which leads to a whole host of stress related illnesses and bad feelings. But there's a fast and easy way to get our fighter flight systems to chill out for a while, and we can do that through our breath. There's evidence that we can switch off sympathetic nervousness to activity simply by taking a slow,

deep belly breath, especially one with a long exhale. Pat and Jolly wasn't a neuroscientist, but he realized that we can use the breath to change the way we feel in our bodies and our minds. But Jessamin says that prani Yama isn't just about taking a few deep breaths

when we're feeling stressed. Prama is really like everything. Once you focus on your breath and once you assume a posture, whatever that posture is, then your body starts to go into a state of actually engaging with what is underneath your skin and what is happening beyond your mind. It's starting to unite the way that your body moves and the way that your mind works, and the way that you feel so that you're able to understand yourself as

a full spiritual being. But if you really want to understand yourself as a full spiritual being, you can't stop at Praniyama. You also need to commit to practicing what's discussed and the rest of the limbs of the eightfold Path,

the ones that we haven't talked about yet. We'll hear more from Jessamine about what these final spiritual practices are and how we can harness them to live and feel better when the Happiness Lab gets back from the short break, so that the last limbs of the eight limb path, Pratiahara, Darana, Diana, and the Samodi are all the stages that happen once you have united your breath with what reform your body is taking. So far in our progress through Patanjali's path.

We've talked about the importance of the yamas our responsibilities to other people. The ni yamas are responsibilities to ourselves. The Austina's physical postures we can relax into distay, grounded and prani yama, the importance of controlling our breath. And if you're counting and keeping track of where we are in the eight limbs, you might be tempted to think that we basically hit the halfway point towards spiritual enlightenment.

But author and yoga instructor Jessamine Stanley's quick to point out that Pat and Jolly didn't intend for the limbs. He described to be boxes that we check off on

some spiritual to do list. So the idea behind the eight limb path is that it provides structure for your life, and it provides a way to go about taking care of yourself, and then the way that you show up in the world, and then the way that you are engaging with the energy of the world, and then ultimately the way that you process that energy and bring it forth into back into the world. And I think that when you say eight limb path, it's always like, okay, cool,

So I've done the first three. Once I get to level eight, I will have figured out how to be a perfect human. And it's like no All of the limbs are happening at once, and there's no ending points. Ultimately, you're just moving through and around them at all times. The sutras are just the truth. They're the truth of the human experience, and they can be applied in different ways depending on what's going on in your life. Patan Jolly's eight Limb Path was also not meant to be

a quick journey. His tips can't be mastered in a forty five minute yoga class. His spiritual path was meant to be a lifelong practice, which is kind of a relief, especially since the last four limbs described in the eight Limb Path may require even more time and care than the earlier ones. Take for example, pat and Jolly's fifth limb, which Jessamin thinks is probably the hardest for modern Western practitioners to work through. It's called profe yahara, the commitment

to detaching from things external. What does Patu and Jelly mean here by external things? Think what we look like, how much money we have, the stuff we own, how successful we are at work? And all the identities we share online on social media. It's so hard because we live in a world where we are constantly tapped into everything. And I think that that idea of withdrawal and what it means to withdraw and how you withdraw. Is it

all your senses? Is it only in certain circumstances? Is it for an hour in the morning and then you're good for the rest of the day, Like what does that mean? And the reality is that there are no hard and fast lines or limits. It's really just about understanding it for yourself on a personal level. For me, withdrawal of senses only happens when I accept the fact

that my senses are alive and are awake. And that doesn't mean trying to shut them down or pretend that certain things are and happening, or trying to avoid things. It's just let it all be there, Let every sound be there, like every connection be there. I'm just gonna let it all hang out. That's when you can pull

into yourself. That's when you can withdraw. And the importance of pulling into yourself leads us to both the sixth and seventh limbs of the eightfold Path, which are known as dharana concentration, and the practice that leads to daharana, which is diana or meditation. If you've listened to other episodes of The Happiness Lab, you've probably heard about the many physical and psychological benefits of meditation and concentrating on

your internal experience of the present moment. There's evidence that practicing meditation regularly can lead to reduced anxiety, less stress, better sleep, and fewer negative emotions. But Jessemin worries that the hype about meditation may sometimes cause modern practitioners to miss out on the way the practice was intended back in Patanjali's day. Meditation has become so trendy. I think that it makes it seem more complicated than actually is.

But when you assume a posture, let's say that the pasture, you're sitting cross legged, and you are working on your breath work, and it doesn't need to be any kind of complicated breathwork. It doesn't need to be alternate nostril or lions roar or anything. It can literally just be breathing through your nose out through your mouth. You can close your eyes, you cannot close your eyes. It's not that big of a deal, but you find the posture

that works for you. When you tune in, that's when the concentration starts, Like, that's when that one pointedness, the concentration derama, that's when that begins. I think sometimes when you sit for meditation and you're withdrawing your senses, that you think, oh, there's supposed to be this magic moment

where my mind is clear and I'm totally calm. But what actually happens is that all your thoughts collide and it just becomes complete chaos inside your mind, and that contemplation you find that as the focus and you just sit in a space of contemplation, so that I always think that meditation is like the best time to obsess over something like as a virgo rising, I'm here, I'm anxious and think too much, just like anybody else, and meditation is my time to like, Okay, now I can

make all those lists that I was thinking about. Now I can obsess over everything. Because the reality is that if you apply focus and if you stay in a space of concentration, you can't obsess over anything forever. And the more that you just let your mind not be clear, the clearer it will become. When you're in that state of concentration and when you are really present and are withdrawing your senses and these This is Patiajara, this is Drana,

this is Diana, all in action. And that gets us to the final limb of the eight limp path, somebody or total absorption. I think that somebody. It's seen as like final level of yoga. Look at what a good yoga I am. And it's like, if you know that you're experiencing somebody, you're not experiencing somebody. First of all, potentially thought that somebody was the ultimate goal, not just of the eight limbed path, but of a well lived life. It's the point at which we finally achieve balance across

our mind, body, and soul. He envisioned it as a sense of union between ourselves and all the other beings in the universe. So, yeah, somebody is pretty intense, not for the beginner, the deepest form of somebody. Ultimately, it is death. It is to move beyond this world. Thinking of the eight limb path, it's not the same as like eight steps to a great life. It's this is just what it means to be alive. Ultimately, it's not really more complicated than that. As long as you practice

the first few limbs, the others will come naturally. You've been thinking about the sutures for a long time. You know, what have you learned from following the eight limbed path? Any big insights that have come along the way, summarize, But my biggest takeaway is that everything is okay. Everything is exactly where it needs to be. The bumps in the road are supposed to happen. The darkness has to be there. If you don't experience a darkness, you cannot

understand the light. You cannot appreciate it. There is no love without the opposite side. There is no love without fear and hate. And when you can just accept it all, there is so much beauty in this world. There's the beauty becomes easier to see because you're not trying to pretend, you're not obscuring it with nonsense. And also a part of that is that the practice is going to ebb and flow with time, and that it's just going to change.

It's always changing. Your needs and understandings are always involving. And if you can say, like the difficulty is why I'm here, I was built to withstand it. And actually it's not even being built to withstand it, because some things you're not built to withstand. Some things you are meant to fall to the floor and to melt into

the pavement. It's supposed to be hard. That was the point, And it's about awareness and losing the need to perform any aspect of yourself, and ultimately like, as long as you're in a state of acceptance of all that is, no matter how you are, you're really living the eight mon Path, doesn't It admits that committing to Pat and Jelly's Eightfold Path isn't easy. She's quick to remind us

that it's called a practice for a reason. I think that I am on a journey for the rest of my life to accept what the universe has brought me, and that the more that I can just accept that it's an ongoing journey and that there will always be new ways that that journey looks, the more that I

can accept that the better, because it's never going to end. Potentially, knew that following the path would take a lot of work and that you probably wouldn't fully reach somebody, But Jessamin will attest that sticking with this lifelong ancient journey, both on and off the yoga mat is worth it.

It's like these truths of being revealed to me in different ways in every moment of every day, and it's beautiful and I'm grateful because to live is such a privilege, and there's so much dope shit that happens every day, and if it means hitting the pavement every day, it's worth it. Talking with Jessamin has reminded me that there's so much more to yoga that a bunch of twisted poses on some colorful mat and that committing to a broader version of the yoga path can pay real dividends.

So why not take a few steps down Patanjali's ancient path. You can start by thinking more intentionally about the responsibilities you have towards other people and to your own body and spirit. You can try to find a space to meditate and breathe, either in a tough yoga posture or just lying down. You can think more critically about your relationship with all things external and commit to getting back to that meditation practice you know is pretty good for you.

And remember it's not about striving for the next level like in most modern practices. It's more about accepting that the path is there to guide you on a journey towards better health and happiness that will last a lifetime. Next week, the Happiness Lab will continue its investigation of

spiritual traditions from South Asia. We'll meet a scholar who will help us explore the tenets of Sikhism, and we'll see that committing to the full humanity of all people may be a quicker path to well being than we expect. So I hope you'll join me back here next week for the next episode of Happiness Lessons of the Ancients With me. It is Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written by Ryan Dilley and is produced by

Ryan Dilley, Courtney Grano, and Britney Brown. The show was mastered by Evan Viola and our original music was composed by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Greta Kone, Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori, Nicole Morano, Morgan Ratner, Jacob Weisberg, my agent, Ben Davis, and the rest of the Pushkin team. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and by me, Doctor Laurie Santos.