Yoga Psychology: How does yoga affect consciousness?

Consider this:  in the 1980s Bell Labs and IBM combined their brainiac departments and, with a fairly high degree of accuracy, ascertained a human being's average sensory input measured in bits per second. *

What the research folks at these institutions discovered is that our body is capable of receiving approximately ten million bits per second of information.  That includes everything we are able to sense, our hearing; our sensual perception; our taste buds; olfactory sense (smell) sight; memory; gastric experience; everything!

Our consciousness, what we are able to perceive and experience in any given moment, measured at about sixty bits per second.  That's right, six zero, sixty!  Let's round that up to 100.  That means that while our bodies can receive ten millions bits of information in any given second we are only capable of knowing about one hundred.  That's a pretty big fraction 100/10,000,000.  Or one one hundred thousandth of what we receive, we get. What happens to the rest?

In our series of twenty-six postures at BYCH Hot Yoga, we concentrate on the physical postures, Hatha Yoga. With regular practice we stimulate an expansion of our sensory experience enhancing our somatic awareness and how we are moving. We simply feel more.

Done regularly, the physical demands; the heat; the commanding encouragement and corrections from the instructor;  all combine to increase sensual awareness while reducing cognition. We stimulate the more ethereal processing of our right cerebral hemisphere.  The words become like a song in the background directing our physical patterns and establishing increased awareness of who we are physically. We connect with those around us moving in synchronicity, with less of an ego state, more connected to each other. Our sense of who we are intensifies as the chatter of our ego mind lessens. Paradoxically, we experience more of ourselves with less thinking.

*Information about measures of consciousness used here comes from the best work I have ever read on the elusive subject of human consciousness: "The User Illusion" by Tor Norretranders. 

Traders in the Temple?

A Bloomberg News story describes how a high pressure finance trader uses meditation to manage stress. Spiritualists quoted in the article cry heresy. The meditating stock trader reasons that Japanese Samurai and, later in history, Kamikaze used meditation prior to battle. So our intrepid trader, engaging in finance, is at ease with co-opting the stress reducing benefits of meditation for mere financial gain.




If one examines the claims of spiritual superiority exclusive to their systems combined with claims of scientific validity coming from scores of twentieth century self-styled gurus, and one digs only a little, you will find a pattern.

• Assume a Hindu name or title
• Claim a lineage from ancient times
• Declare your system as the only valid approach
• Treat western medicine as a misguided competitor
• Invoke scientific support
• Claim special secret knowledge or ownership

Gurus seeking Western audiences taught spiritual lessons, yoga postures or a combination of both. When successfully implemented, the pattern created great wealth for leaders of many yoga and meditation movements. This meme, this marketing pattern, included celebrity name dropping as well. If this describes the man you hold as a creator of a system you follow and think I am describing him, look deeper. This description fits nearly all of the late nineteenth and twentieth century Indian gurus who found success in the West.

The Eleventh of September

This day recalls the lives of loved ones, friends and neighbors lost. We grieve still. Spared, I live with gratitude, humility and a soft voice today grateful for the gifted among us who reveal our better, loving nature.

"This triumph of the message of love over a barbaric and a backward act"  
Marc Knophler

Modern Yoga

Mission statement of Hot Yoga Alliance 

For nearly 200 years now, the US and other western countries have adopted myriad expressions of yoga, some in the Indian spiritual traditions, others as a physical expression known as Hatha Yoga. At first shunned in the West, then relegated to counter-culture status, in the last fifty years yoga has grown to become a global phenomena. Hatha yoga, the physical expression of postures are the dominant expression.

In recent times yoga systems have nearly exclusively been a guru led model of organization, adhering in varying degrees to a philosophical or spiritual foundation. That model is not obsolete, we respect and are grateful for its existence. Guru led models of spiritual or philosophical teaching will no doubt remain for those who seek that path.

Hot Yoga Alliance (HYA) sees a future with a less “top down” model in the organization of schools teaching yoga postures for health, fitness and peace of mind. We see a somatic, more modern, business philosophy. In cooperation with Singapore’s new policies of training Singaporeans for Singaporean jobs, HYA trains teachers to lead our classic series of Hot Yoga postures. But beyond good civic partnership, HYA sees an opportunity to set a new philosophical agenda for teaching yoga in a growing region. Precision, discipline and absolute adherence to good teaching and business ethics in schools led by responsible members of the community they are part of, not some far away charismatic figurehead.

Through our work and the work of our sister organization, BYCH Hot Yoga, we exist to sustain and support the field of yoga. We do so by providing the public with a registry of teachers whose training meets our standards and by supporting yoga teachers, schools and studios in their work as yoga professionals.