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.
