The Yoga of Productivity, Part 2: Awareness and Allowing

In the last article in this series, I talked about some yoga asanas, or poses, that can help us restore our focus and motivation as we work — without even getting up from our desks. In this article, I’ll speak more generally about how yoga helps us develop what I call Awareness and Allowing — two capacities that are key to giving us the efficiency and enjoyment we want in what we do.

1. Awareness. Almost immediately, when I started doing yoga, I became much more attuned to the sensations coming up in my body. I noticed all this tension, tingling, heat and so on that I hadn’t been conscious of before.

Another thing I began to notice was that certain sensations would come up right before I’d find myself procrastinating or putting off a project. I’d start getting this antsy, jittery feeling in my arms and legs, as if there were some danger I needed to run from, and then I’d find myself checking e-mail or pursuing some other distraction.

I eventually realized that I was putting off my work because I didn’t want to experience those antsy feelings. Because I found those sensations disturbing and uncomfortable, I’d fallen into the habit of checking e-mail, surfing the Web or doing something else to distract myself from them.

Understanding that those jittery feelings were what I was trying to escape helped put my procrastination in perspective. If discomfort in my body was really all I was running from, why was I running at all? Wasn’t moving forward in my projects more important to me than avoiding those sensations?

Of course, yoga isn’t the only way to develop Awareness — you don’t need to learn to contort your body into a pretzel shape to be aware of the sensations you’re feeling. A simpler approach, in my experience, is to pause whenever you find yourself about to put off a task, and just bring your awareness into your body and notice what’s coming up.

2. Allowing. If you’ve done yoga, I imagine you’ve had the experience of getting into a pose that involved a really deep stretch, and brought up intense sensations. Perhaps you stayed in the pose, despite its intensity. And when you did, you noticed the sensations becoming more comfortable and less threatening.
By Allowing, I mean just that — staying with an uncomfortable sensation that’s coming up, rather than resisting or fleeing from it. This attitude of Allowing, I think, isn’t just for the time we spend on the yoga mat or the meditation cushion — it’s also very helpful in our working lives.
Suppose, for example, you’re working on a project and you start getting bored. Most of us would react to that boredom by doing something to “take the edge off” — maybe playing a few hands of Solitaire on the computer, messing around on social media, and so on.
What if, instead, we chose to stay with that feeling — breathe, relax our bodies, and just allow the sensations to wash over us? What if we decided, instead of pushing our boredom away, to get intimate and familiar with it?
The biggest benefit of learning to Allow the discomfort that comes up as we work is that it gives us control over our own schedules. Most of us are like Pavlov’s Dogs, automatically turning away from our work whenever unpleasantness arises. Developing the ability to drop our resistance to that unpleasantness, and keep moving forward, helps put us in charge of what and how much we get done.