Yoga as a Returning to the Heart

This week, while planning classes, I’ve been sitting with a passage from The Secret Power of Yoga by Nischala Joy Devi. It is also our new book for sangha, because this is a book that asks us to look beneath the surface of yoga and into its deeper meaning.

The word sangha is often translated as community. Traditionally, it refers to a community of people who come together in shared practice, learning and spiritual enquiry. For me, that is at the heart of our sangha gatherings. A space to sit together, reflect together, explore ideas and notice what they stir in us.

The passage I am studying this week centres around one of the best-known lines from the Yoga Sutras.

It is commonly translated as something close to:

“Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.”

Nischala Joy Devi offers another way of understanding it:

“Yoga is the uniting of consciousness in the heart.”

There is something in that interpretation that feels more spacious. The mind is always moving. It travels into yesterday and tomorrow, into planning, remembering, worrying, anticipating and analysing. Thoughts arise, disappear and are replaced by others.

Yoga offers us somewhere to return.

To the body.

To the breath.

To sensation.

To the moment we are actually living.

In the book, Devi speaks about the distinction between chit, universal consciousness, and chitta, individual consciousness. She describes chit as something vast, like an ocean of consciousness, and chitta as the small part of that vastness held within each of us.

However we understand that idea, spiritually, philosophically, or metaphorically, there is something moving about the suggestion that a deeper awareness lies beneath the constant activity of thought. A quieter place within us.

Devi places that consciousness in the heart.

And perhaps we already understand this in an instinctive way. When we speak about ourselves, we often gesture towards the centre of the chest. We talk about knowing something in our heart, having a change of heart, being heartbroken, wholehearted or taking something to heart.

Across cultures and traditions, the heart has long been understood as more than simply an organ. It becomes a symbol of our deepest self, the place where feeling, wisdom, connection and belonging meet. So this week’s yoga practice is shaped around the idea of returning.

Returning from thought into sensation.

Returning from distraction into presence.

Returning from the edges of ourselves towards the centre.

This returning can happen many times during a single practice.

We might be in a pose and suddenly realise that our mind has wandered somewhere else entirely. We notice it, and we come back to the feeling of the feet on the floor. We come back to the breath moving through the ribs. We come back to the sensation of the hands resting over the heart. That moment of remembering is part of the practice.

Perhaps this is one of the quieter gifts

of yoga. Over time, we become more familiar with the path back to ourselves.

The world will continue to pull at our attention. Life will continue to be busy and complicated. Our minds will continue to move. And still, somewhere underneath all of that movement, there is a place we can return to.

A deeper awareness. A steadiness.

You can practice with me this week by booking online.

Vicki x