Published July 5, 2026 04:04AM
But the yogis teach that consciousness emanates from the world soul, Brahman, which means “swelling of the spirit” or, according to the 2,800-year-old Chandogya Upanishad, “what-is-real-and-what-is-true.” Consciousness permeates everywhere, everything, everywhen. It is “in the plant,” says Sri Aurobindo, “in the metal, in the atom, in electricity, in everything that belongs to physical nature.”
Consciousness is the “moving spirit” of yoga, the goal of which is simply to abide forever in the immediate consciousness of consciousness. Every cell of our body then, as John Woodroffe notes in The Serpent Power, “has a consciousness all its own.” These cells unite to shape the body’s various constituents—the fluids, skin, and nerves–and to create altogether new consciousnesses. We are, you might say, a community of diverse voices, each contributing to the consonance of the group, while still retaining a unique message needing to be heard.
The yogis “scratch the surface” of consciousness through, to them, its most palpable manifestation, their own body. As B.K.S. Iyengar asks, “If you cannot see your little toe, how can you see the Self?” Self-realization, in other words, begins with a detailed inventory of our physical estate. Traditionally, the “tool” yogis use for this first stage of practice, called the “stage of commencement” (arambha avastha), is asana or posture.
Here our attention in the postures is generally on the more superficial structures, the muscles and bones, and after a while we become experts in the consciousness of the hamstrings, say, or the hip joint or the spine. These structures indeed enunciate essential qualities of our being and becoming, but to take a full census—and make sense—of our entire community of consciousnesses, it’s necessary to penetrate beyond these borderlands into the “heart” of the country.
One promising approach is the “experiential journey” explained by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen as body-mind centering. She compares the exterior body to a “container,” and describes its play and display of consciousnesses—which we incarnate whenever we initiate movement from muscles and bones—with words like “form, power, clarity, grace, intent.”
The “contents” of the container, the interior body, consists primarily of the organs, but also glands and fluids. The organs fill our “inner space” and provide us “with our sense of volume and full-bodiedness, and the inner vitality and support for our skeletal alignment.” They “flesh us out” and set the “tone” of our emotional lives, whether flaccid, steady, or rigid; moreover, since the organs are wired to the muscles through branches of the nervous system, their “state of mind” defines to a great extent how we move and hold ourselves and “interact with the world.”
Bainbridge Cohen suggests that we habitually inhabit only a small section of an enormous range of movement potential available to us. We unconsciously hold ourselves back—or up, or in, or down—and so limit where we go, what we do, and how we’re conscious. To her, we are multilayered creatures who must learn to em-body—or maybe out-body—every aspect of our physical (and spiritual) self.
What happens when you move from the organs in asana? My students report the following experiences: that the posture feels “quieter” and less strenuous; that movement into and out of the posture is more closely aligned with the “core” of their body; and that the various parts of their body and the sequence of movements are coordinated and integrated into an articulated whole.
The physical benefit of initiating a posture from the organs, says Bainbridge Cohen, is that it effortlessly increases its range of motion and strength, and helps prevent injuries. But, she continues, there is also a gain in consciousness. Through the invigorated “mind” of an organ, we can communicate with “universal symbols and myths”—what we might call faces of Brahman—so that we at last fathom and enter into the community of consciousnesses that unites our individual life to all.
Continue to explore how consciousness intersects with the physical practice of yoga in this companion article on Vasisthasana (Side Plank Pose).
