Yoga and Inner Bonding

“Yoga is a way of moving into stillness in order to experience the truth of who you are. The practice of yoga is the practice of meditation – or inner listening – in the poses and meditations, as well as all day long. It’s a matter of listening inwardly for guidance all the time, and then daring enough and trusting enough to do as you are prompted to do…

...The process of yoga is one of undoing the obstructions and limitations  in your body and mind that inhibit the free flow of creative life force. Each yoga posture is a specific template for this energy flow. These templates have evolved over thousands of years and are extremely good at  opening tight and blocked areas.”  Erich Schiffman

I feel so grateful that yoga and Inner Bonding have found their way into my life. I love both processes deeply since they seem to work so harmoniously together, healing and opening to my core self from two different perspectives.

Inner Bonding starts at the most inner level, making us concious about our true intention. The honest intention to learn about becoming a more loving human being is the key to any “success” towards peace and joy. Creating an inner safety space for our inner child, developing compassion towards our wounded self (ego), connecting to our personal source of spiritual guidance, learning to set loving boundaries, the ability to share love in our relationship with others are some of the precious rewards of this profound path. Here we start from within to heal step by step the false beliefs in our minds that create fear and anxiety, dissolving the layers of protection around our core self, our true essence that lies buried like a precious and unique mandala.

One of the most amazing things about this path is that you do not need to be completely healed to feel that peace and joy. Once you learn to keep your heart open to learning with your spiritual guidance, and your inner child feels that you are taking full responsibility for him/her, those feelings of peace and joy will just be present. Loosing those feelings will then feel so bad that you will do anything to keep on track again. For the last 10 years I have been practising Inner Bonding on a daily basis, and there is still a lot of wounded self to heal, but my life has changed completely. It requires dedication and patience.

This has not been easy for me to learn, since I like quick results so that I can move to the next, and I tried other healing tecniques just to see if there could not be an “easier” way to healing so that I could forget about healing and start “living”, finally... until I started realising that healing and evolving is part of living, it makes life meaningful.

Yoga starts usually at the physical level and gets then more internal, more intimate when you start fine-tuning the breath and the movement, when your mind is fully immersed in what you are doing, fully present in the moment. First we learn some poses and the proper breath and we notice the tightness in our bodies. For me it was a way to get more flexibility at the beginning. Then I started to realize that it is much more than this. It is a very similar process to Inner Bonding but with the body as the primary tool. It depends of course very much on your intention. If your intention is to control and you just want to perform better  to get approval, or to bliss out into “nirvana” away from the daily challenges of life, or to be seen as guru or someone “special” then you will not be able to get anywhere. The law of intention governs over all practices and is the main door to personal growth no matter how old those other tecniques are.

Why is it a similar process? Because we start looking for our tight areas, where the energy (prana) does not flow. This is similar to looking for false beliefs. False beliefs limit our full potential, creating fear, tightness for our inner child. Once we find a tight spot in our bodies, we should not fight against it and force it to disappear by just stretching more and more. This would be similar to blaming ourselves for having a wounded self and wanting to get rid of it. We should rather embrace this tight spot (for example tight hamstrings in a forward bend) with compassion and stay there with it, listening to it, breathing into it, relaxing into it. There must be a good reason for this thightness. Then it might open to us, letting us in deeper into our bodies (similar to our Inner Child starting to trust us).

Trying to create balance in the yoga pose is like a conversation with our body. Balance between being too soft (permisive) or too harsh (authoritarian). The Inner Child is linked directly to our body, it communicates to us through the bodily sensations (tightness in the stomach for example). Our wounded self is directly linked to our mind (belief system, everything we have learned since we were born about ourselves, life and god...). Throught the breath we are bringing cosmic life energy (prana, God, spirit that surrounds us like the air) to our bodies. But in order for this all to work in a healthy way as a healing process we need to have an honest intention to take loving care (loving adult qualities) for our body (Inner Child). This would be the spiritual path of love and courage. Here we do not  want to get an external result as the primary goal.

The wounded self (mind qualities in yoga) wants to get an external result, like a perfect looking yoga pose, and then we start forcing our body to that particular shape, creating more pain and anxiety to our body. Maybe creating injury one day. This would be the earthly path of control.

A healthy child’s mind is living in the  present moment, it does not worry about the future nor does it look back to the past, it naturally wants to play and express itself. In yoga we can practice this by staying focused on the breath and our bodily sensations during the poses. They help us to immerse ourselves fully in the now and become playful. A healthy child’s body is soft, sensitive and flexible, the life energy runs freely through the channels allowing full expression of movement and emotions. As we grow up we start tightnening (creating layers of protection) and our bodies harden and become unflexible and rigid (wounded self qualities). Yoga practiced with  an Inner Bonding atittude can help us undo those bodily blockages and we can get closer to our true and original nature.

Francisco Benitez , February 2009
yoga and pilates teacher