We are now living an era of incredibly small attention spans.  The internet (among other things) has catapulted us into an entirely new level of distraction, where hours can easily get gobbled up by link after link of deliciously addictive content. We hear about epidemics of “elective ADHD” in our information-dense world.

When it comes to practicing mind-centering disciplines such as yoga and meditation, many believe that practicing in a truly serene environment is required in order to achieve the proper level of centeredness. While practicing in a perfectly silent studio/temple/batcave is fantastic, there is also much to be said about the incredible opportunity and value of practicing while surrounded with audible and visual distractions.

To wit, we have a favorite saying that goes something along the lines of “anyone can meditate in a cave, but it takes a yogi to practice in ________”…where the blank can be filled by whichever distraction is present at the time.

Since we’ve been teaching in offices in and around Seattle for a number of years now, we’ve seen it all – setting up a practice room while construction is happening on another floor of a building, settling into savasana while cell phones ring, coworkers fielding phone calls as punk rock plays on the radio in the nearby kitchen. Or beginning a series of oms just as a car alarm begins to go off down the street, or as a seaplane buzzes in for a lake landing (this is Seattle, after all).

While any of these distractions might seem like enough to fully throw off even the most focused yogis, we find that working with distraction offers an opportunity to bind our attention to our practice.

Think about it this way: each time you come to your mat you come with your own busy “room” of distractions: your brain. But, as you settle into each pose, you work intentionally on quieting your mind and allowing your body to take over. One might call this a practice of attention self-control, or, more plainly put, dharana (concentration). One of the more awesome things about yoga is that concentration is built into the structure of the practice – there is simply no choice but to exercise concentration in order to bring the physical body into balance in each pose. I’ll never forget one of my teachers saying that, in theory, you should attain a degree of ease (sukha) in each and every asana, such that you would able to be hold it for extended meditation.

In fact, in his New York Magazine article “In Defense of Distraction,” Sam Anderson says that one of the most promising solutions to our attention problems (of which there are many, he notes) is meditation.  Now how’s about that?

In the same way you must quiet your brain to certain degree in order to center yourself for practice, you can also work towards controlling the distractions around you in order to achieve a high(er) quality meditative yogic state, or dhyana. The beautiful Bhagavad Gita analogy of reining in the ‘wild horses’ of our senses comes to mind.

Here’s how we we’ve coined the term “HD Yoga” and how we can deal with distractions around us while practicing:

Instead of trying to quiet each individual distraction, we can focus on allowing each noise to come into our sphere, and then transform that cacophony of sound and stimuli into a blend of sensory inputs that become one. Melding these into one amorphous blob of sensory stimulus allows us to deal with them as one aspect of our practice instead of 20. Once the high-distractions turn themselves into one single distraction, it is much easier to take that aspect and quiet it at once, and to allow our environment to not be wrought with distraction, but humming with energy that we can harness to achieve a higher level of serenity.

It’s actually much easier than it sounds – think about how your brain works when you walk down a busy street or when you’re riding a bus. If you focused on each individual noise around you you’d likely not be able to pay attention to anything but the distractions around you. Not knowing what to listen to at what time might spin you into an audibly-induced frenzy. Instead, our brains are naturally inclined to pool it all into one general category of “noise.” We place noises and distractions into the background instead of the foreground. That allows us to walk down the street, stay focused on where we’re going, and heck- even take notice of the world around us while we go.

In our yoga practice, we can attain even deeper method of this same scenario – we can place our practice at the forefront of what we are doing. We can choose to focus our attention on the movements and the mindset we desire in practice. And thus we can explore, possibly even achieve yet another aspect of that elusive term ‘balance’.

And hey, if you got through reading this entire post, you very well might be an “HD Yoga” prodigy!