Toward A Yoga Presence

Why yoga knows what it knows, and how the body learns what insight alone cannot teach.

Reading time: 4 minutes

It is difficult to be at ease and fully present in a yoga class. Long before we step onto the mat, we bring with us a cultural inheritance that says knowledge is earned through effort, achievement, and improvement. We assume that if something matters, it must be conquered, completed, or mastered. I thought this way too when I started, but there was another, and better way, I had yet to learn.

My discovery came by accident. I was putting in great effort during my classes and life study for several days in a row. And then one day I had little energy for the practice but started a simple stretch and breath routine in my own home. After twenty minutes, I stopped and realized that my mind truly was present with me in that moment. It is something I experienced a lot in yoga classes but not usually when walking around in my home or in my ordinary life. That’s when I realized my learning didn’t require a classroom space but only asked me to attend my breath and be at ease in my own presence.

It’s not in Herculean outward effort, but the opposite, an inner release toward surrender. Yoga effort may put us into moments of discomfort, and that is part of its therapeutic, but the balance of opposites or the force of hatha requires surrender and ease too. There is a reason that the “stilling of the fluctuations of the mind” arrives early in The Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali. It’s about balance, but additionally, I love how this phrase rolls off the tongue, yogacittavrittinirodah. Say it out loud a few times.

It became obvious to me that martial artists know this truth. They talk about using an opponent’s energy to their advantage and will find ways to catch the opponent off balance to then use this aggression against them. I realized that it’s what I did a lot to myself, I struggled to do something that I thought I should do in class when it was actually working against me.

Taking One’s Seat

Mark Stevens reminds us that the literal meaning of asana is “to take one’s seat.” This is often interpreted as presence in the present moment, but the phrase reaches deeper than attentional instruction. To take one’s seat is to accept location, limitation, and timing. It is to practice knowing from here rather than from an imagined elsewhere. It’s what I learned by myself that day. I was not in some imaginary elsewhere, but home with myself. It was a place where I could take my seat.

Over the course of a lifetime, a yogi takes this seat thousands of times and the knowledge that emerges is conceptual at first. But the body learns from the repetitive act of attention. Resistance appears, and never goes away, but the negotiation between breath and pressure teaches how to release that resistance. Nothing about this is accidental. It is yoga’s training of a new way of knowing, we can call it a knowledge of presence.

Presence as Method, Not Mood

What is often called “presence” in yoga is not a fleeting mental state. It is a disciplined relational stance. Presence can be practiced whether we are in a room with others or alone in our homes. The relational state of presence cannot be taught, it cannot be rushed, it cannot be summoned by instruction; but arrives when the nervous system trusts that it will not be abandoned, when we stay in the pose long enough for the body to speak back, when the vulnerability we feel shifts to trust.

This staying is learning, and when we stay, knowledge is generated by connections between breath and resistance, intention and consequence, effort and surrender. The body remembers these lessons because they are stored somatically.

A therapist speaking on grief during a seminar I once attended said, “Stress is perceived in the mind, but felt in the body. Therefore, to treat stress in your mind, learn to relax your body.” I’d not heard that before, and its wisdom stunned me.

The mind perceives the stress, and after an hour or two, the mind may forget about that stressful moment and be on to the next task, but the body sits with the result of that stress. Yoga teaches the body to be at ease, and the body then calms the mind. It’s the reversal of the normal treatment for stress or anxiety.

Yoga became the laboratory to practice this epistemology of the body. Not from a place of comfort, but one of attention. By paying attention, we return to the practice, stay with the pose and learn from what resists.

This is yoga’s quiet claim that knowledge grows as we return to our presence in surrender. This is the truth that brings more life to us. It is a presence earned through repetition that becomes a way of knowing that we carry into our daily lives. And isn’t that the point?