Understanding Yoga as Training for Inner Attention

[Gigsi]

So I just had this insight while on THCa CBD mix, that completely reframed how I understand yoga.

Basically, yoga is like a workout for your inner attention - that part of you that’s awareness, concentration, body sense. It’s like a muscle in some ways, but there’s a key difference. When a physical muscle goes unused, it just stays undeveloped. But this inner part? It stays undeveloped AND it’s chaotic on top of that. Your attention just goes crazy, can’t stay still at all.
What yoga actually does is train this other side of our experience - the non-physical side - little by little. Over time it gets more activated and starts becoming more dominant than the “I am body” identification. You shift more into the “witness” part, which is tuned into what consciousness is actually experiencing right now, not speculation or mental noise.
And looking around my body right now with this perspective, I finally get what the energy body is. You can sense your legs, organs, whatever, through something that isn’t physical. That’s your energy body being perceived by awareness.

My mistake with yoga:
I was jumping straight into complex practices without realizing I needed to start small. It’s genuinely hard to immediately control your awareness, breath, posture, and simultaneously do all these things - moving attention around while chanting, hitting certain patterns for 15-20 minutes. Of course you can’t do it as a beginner. You get frustrated because you don’t see meaning in it or what should happen, because you can’t even perceive that side of yourself yet. Your mind just keeps talking about what it thinks is happening.

Better approach:
Start with small steps. First, just learn to watch your spine with awareness. No chakra centers or chakra theory yet. I think the main chakra centers that people focus on are actually just the ones that naturally have a strong pull - your awareness senses them more strongly for certain reasons. Like right now I can very strongly sense my groin and forehead. So instead of forcing yourself through all the chakras with attention, just teach yourself to even sense them first.

Then maybe later you start imagining your breath going into them. Then maybe in the future you combine the various things your teacher shows you and you actually manage to do it properly, and you get some type of consciousness state change. Which honestly is easy to understand even from normal experience - if you breathe slower, it gives you a less activated state, you relax and slow down, even your mind slows.

Random thought on psychedelics:
I’d imagine this type of evolution happens in humans naturally but at a much slower speed unless you work at it like a workout. Psychedelics probably stress these functions by numbing or over-activating parts of our experience, or even activating things we haven’t reached through our own observation yet. So when the psychedelic interacts with these systems, we still get some type of answer in our experience - whether we’re completely lost or gradually matching what the full potential state would be.

Anyway, just wanted to share this realization. The key thing is recognizing that this is actual training of a real capacity, not just ritual or belief.