The following is an excerpt from Health Hour with Ira Trivedi, Yoga Acharya and bestselling author. Watch the YouTube video for the full practice as well as the question and answer session.

 

Mindfulness has become a very important and very discussed topic, and rightfully so, because during the pandemic, all of us have been glued to our screen with very little real time conversation. I don’t know about you, but even when I’m on Zoom, I’m still looking at my WhatsApp messages when I’m supposed to be somewhere else. My mind is constantly moving to social media, and this is stuff that all of us face on a regular basis.

While we think we will be multitasking, actually, somewhere, we’re disrupting our concentration. We’re disrupting what we call in Western terms, the flow, and in yogic terms, dharana. This flow or this dharana can lead to great changes. It can lead to not just wonderful creative discoveries in our life—problem solving—the greatest artists, the greatest scientists have found solutions to world problems during flow and dharana—but also (being in flow) puts us in a very beautiful restful state, which ends up making us more joyful, more happy in the long run. In today’s day and age with devices really bombarding us with information, yogasana, pranayama and meditation can really help us understand what this dharana or flow is, so that we can take it back with us into our daily life. So when we do a particular kind of activity, we can actually focus our mind. Instead of the mind moving here and there, we can actually begin to get that sense of dharana or flow even in the simple activities that we do in our daily life, which could be playing with our children, could be cooking a meal, typing an email, or even just having a conversation with a colleague.

 

Practice To Understand Mindfulness, Flow, And Dharana

1. Take a comfortable seated posture. Make sure that the back is straight.
2. Keep the hands in Chin Mudra on the knees or place them in the middle of your lap. Close your eyes and begin to breathe, breathing in deeply and breathing out completely. Pay attention to the air moving into the nostrils.
3. Before we begin, just try and disconnect the mind from devices, from situations, from your children, from your spouse, from your colleagues, as if you are pulling the plug on your charging cell phone. Try to disconnect and try to be here right now in the present moment.
4. Try to slow down the breath as we move in deeper and deeper.
5. Place the hands close to the chest and chant “Om” three times.
6. Place your hands on the knees and begin to rotate the spine. This is the practice that we often use in the practice of Kundalini Yoga. Keep moving forward and backward, getting a nice stretch to the spine.

 

Head to our YouTube channel for the full yoga flow.