Year: 2025

Do you experience unwanted thoughts that cause anxiety or distress?

Do you feel guilt or fear about your intrusive thoughts?

Do you find it hard to control repetitive thoughts?

Those questions are listed among others on tests to determine the extent to which you may suffer from OCD.

Our daughter is convinced that I have OCD – and she may be right, but none of those things bother students of classical yoga. And they needn’t bother anyone else!

I wrote a blog post in 2016 entitled “Radio Head” – pointing out that the part of our mind that we “hear” is akin to a broken radio: you can’t turn it off, but you can change the channel and adjust the volume.

Bothered by your inner monologue? Replace it with something else, something relatively benign but interesting enough that you’ll pay attention to it. Hacks like reciting the alphabet backwards always work: while you’re focusing on which letter comes next, everything else (anxieties, fears, desires, intrusive thoughts) subsides as if you’ve changed the channel on a radio.

How is it that mankind has sent people to the moon, flown at speeds exceeding the sound barrier, perfected Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist communication – and yet we don’t commonly understand how our own mind works?!

The art of focusing our mind at will should be taught to everyone from an early age. This isn’t about burying your head in the sand, or covering your ears and shouting “LA LA LA LA”; it’s about learning to focus on what’s important rather than getting caught up in irksome or troubling distractions.

Wishing you a quieter, calmer, more peaceful outlook – always.

Need help getting there? You know how to find me.

Bumped into an old friend yesterday. He was working, and asked if I still was. When I mentioned that I was looking for work as a bookkeeper, he said, “How old are you?! You’re in the ninth inning [of your life]!” The implication being that I shouldn’t be concerned about working at my age (67)!

Ten years ago a friend told me to stop fretting about work as “my tracks were running out”, as if I were about to pull into the final station on the journey of life.

Yes, unless we’re living off the grid, we all need money – but a job provides more than that: a sense of responsibility, purpose, contribution, value.

Which brings me to the yoga bit: in classical yoga, there’s a concept that the last thing we need to lose attachment to before realizing our true nature is our ego (not the “I am smart, fat, old, etc.” level of ego, but the much more subtle sense of our own individuality: simply the “I am”) – because beneath that aspect of our multilayered energetic tangible self lies consciousness.

Classical yoga is about identifying with the latter: our intangible awareness rather than our tangible body/mind. As the expression goes, “we are spiritual beings having a human experience” – not the other way around.

How does that tie back to longevity and employment? When we see ourselves as “real” [yogis see our immutable, eternal awareness as “real” because unlike our temporal, perpetually-changing physical world, our awareness literally never changes – ever], we’re able to let go of attachments to the “unreal” world around us that our senses, desires and fears naturally get caught up in.

It’s no wonder that some people shake their heads and turn away from this kind of talk. Someone would have to be crazy to believe thoughts, emotions and sensations aren’t “real” (my first yoga teacher told me that over 20 years ago – and it’s taken me practically since then to understand what she meant) but if you see it, even for a moment, it can relieve you of a lifetime of stress, anxiety, worry – about things like work and death – and that kind of freedom is priceless.

Would I like to work? Sure. Am I concerned about my own mortality and that of the people I love? Of course. But without the perspective outlined above, I’d be losing a lot more sleep about those and a million other things!

May you find true peace in this lifetime. If you’re looking for it, seek out a guy revered and honored by classical yogis: Patanjali.

God bless.

Want to learn more about classical yoga? You know where to find me.

I taught my first chair yoga class last week. Afterwards, one of the students asked, “What kind of yoga was that?!” 😉

I hesitated to answer because it wasn’t yoga at all.

Yoga is a meditative practice intended to quiet our mind and help us distinguish between mind and consciousness. The practice was memorialized in a 200-line poem, “The Yoga Sutras”, by the legendary Patanjali some 3,000 years ago.

What we did in chair “yoga” class was primarily a mix of Chinese Qi Gong and Japanese Karate warm-up exercises intended to maintain/improve the range of motion of our major joints.

The good news is the class was well received, and the students (average age 77) experienced a version of what they were expecting: a seated, low-impact exercise class.

The aspect of Patanjali’s yoga that caught on in the US in the 1960’s was the third of eight “limbs” of the original practice.

Patanjali’s eight-fold prescription for peace of mind can be summarized as follows:

The first and second elements address our behavior, which has the greatest impact on our state of mind (e.g., if we avoid behaving in a manner we’ll regret, we’ll have a clearer, calmer, quieter state of mind going forward).

The third element of Patanjali’s classical yoga practice (now widely referred to generically as “yoga”) simply addresses sitting still and comfortably to facilitate concentration.

Specifically, Patanjali said:

• “The posture for yoga meditation should be steady, stable, motionless, and comfortable.
• The posture should be relaxed and allow attention to merge with endlessness or the infinite.
• From the posture there arises an unassailable, unimpeded freedom from suffering.”

Somehow those three lines of Patanjali’s 200-line yoga sutras have morphed into the ubiquitous exercise classes renowned for downward dog and warrior poses.

Don’t get me wrong; “yoga” is my favorite form of exercise, I just wish it had been called what it is, “asana” [the Sanskrit word referencing the three lines of Patanjali’s poem above] – so that it hadn’t become conflated with Patanjali’s deeply-fulfilling, life-altering holistic practice.

The fourth thru eighth elements of Patanjali’s yoga sutras address breathing (to further quiet the mind) and four progressively subtle levels of meditation.

I love all forms of yoga (well, maybe not hot or goat yoga), and every opportunity to share my passion for something that dramatically changed my life, even if Patanjali wouldn’t understand today’s singular focus and interpretation of his instructions to simply sit still and contemplate infinity.

Allan “Skip” Dowds