What is Bhavana?
An excerpt from Eddie Stern's book, "One Simple Thing."
Eddie Stern is a yoga teacher, author, and lecturer who teaches Ashtanga yoga at Broome Street Temple in NYC. I haven’t taken Eddie’s class yet (he hasn’t been on the schedule in recent weeks) but one of my teachers recommended I read his book. Below is an excerpt I read around New Years Eve that I’ve been sitting with —
Stepping onto our yoga mat each day can be viewed through the lens of ritual. It is a sacred time for us to commune with our body, our breath, and all of the things that occur in our mind - memory, emotions, thoughts, feelings, goals, and ambitions. It is a time to reach toward our inner sense of self, and try to maintain inner quiet. Ritual sets the atmosphere and scenario for inner communion; the practice is the technique that we ride to harness our awareness inwardly. This can be done with posture, with breath, with a mantra, with a religious ritual, or simply with our own sense of awareness. There is an important ingredient to spiritual practice called bhavana, which means “a mood or feeling that is associated with an action.” The feeling of clarity, exhilaration, or peace that goes along with your practice is something that you can consciously reinforce, so that every time you inhale and raise your arms over your head you associate it with a feeling of peace, inward focus, joy, or whatever it is that you feel. Bhavana is the conscious, repeated reinforcement of an action with a feeling, mood or emotion. The same holds true for repeating mantras or performing other rituals. The bhavana associated with the practice is the juice or nectar that fuels it, that fills you with a presence of awareness within your mind and heart. If there is no bhavana, then the practice can become mechanical, and can become a chore to do, or we can lose interest in practicing. It is the mood or emotion that we consciously bring into our mind and heart and that we link with a physical action that makes yoga a spiritual practice. This is much more important than the ability to do difficult postures or know a lot of anatomical details about how to perform a posture.
I really love the concept of bhavana, and after reading this excerpt I realized that I’ve had a relationship with this concept for a very long time, I just never had a word for it. There were times growing up that I wouldn’t want to go to ballet class, and my mom would say, “Put on your leotard, once you get there you’ll be happy you went.” And she was right every single time. The feeling I associated with wearing my leotard and being in class was positive, it was my uniform and space that I associated with joy, freedom, strength, beauty, community, and self-expression. If I had a bad day, I always felt better after class.
When I put on a leotard, I become more aware of my posture, I feel elegant, I walk with a certain grace. Similarly, when I sit on my yoga mat, I slow down, quiet my mind, it’s like all the outside stimuli competing for my attention lives on a dimmer switch and I can turn it down.
I don’t have any particular source in mind, but recall the advice swirling around that your work space at home should be separate from your bedroom so that your bed is associated with relaxation, and this could improve the quality of your sleep. Similarly, I’ve heard the advice for people job searching that you should have a different outfit or accessory you wear when you’re applying to jobs to put yourself in “work mode” and create separation from the rest of your day, in order to feel a sense of structure. Not sure where I heard that one, maybe on Melanie Ehrenkranz’s Substack, Laid Off.
Even if yoga is not for you, if you just can’t bare to commit to a movement practice of any kind, bhavana is still accessible for you. Especially at this time of year when we tend to set goals for ourselves for the year ahead, or think of good habits we’d like to implement day-to-day, or just want to transform something that we know we have to do into a more enjoyable act, bhavana can be that missing ingredient we need to make that thing stick, whatever it is.
Some ideas of daily activities you can turn into a ritual —
A morning mug of hot water and lemon
Washing the dishes
Going for a daily walk
Talking 3 full, slow breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth when you wake up before looking at any device
Folding laundry
Journaling
Reading a chapter (or a few pages) of a book before bed
Creating a breakfast routine
Baking
It can really be anything - how will you transform something mundane into something special for yourself this year? Let me know in the comments.
Community Classes:
I’m going to be hosting a community yoga class this month in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area and just joined Real Hot Yoga as a sub on their schedule. If you’d like to receive updates on when I’m teaching, subscribe to this newsletter! You can also follow me on Instagram.
Namaste.
EST. 1/11/25