Bonus Essay • Witness Sankalpa: Movie Yoga

Witness Practice Sankalpa: Movie Yoga

From Screen to Self:  Strengthening the Witness through Movie Yoga

Discover the power of ‘Movie Yoga’—a fun and transformative practice that helps you master the art of detachment, giving you tools to transcend the big screen of the mind in everyday life.

This is perhaps the most challenging and yet most pleasant sankalpa of them all. On the one hand, you get to watch a movie; on the other hand, you have to detach from it while you watch it. The premise is simple: watch a movie without becoming the movie. The challenge is that a good movie actively seeks to captivate our minds. If we can practice this with the literal movie screen outside of us, we become much more adept at detaching from the screen of the mind within us. The biggest blockbuster of the year, though, is happening all around us, so we might as well use the one we can ‘pause’ to train us for the big screen of our lives.

As Sri Shambhavananda teaches:

“We should step back from that movie in our minds that has nothing to do with growing, and is only trying to kick in and take over our minds. We must learn how to untangle ourselves from such movies. Then we are able to gain the realization of what’s illusion and what’s real.”

It’s no coincidence that Sri Shambhavananda uses movies as a metaphor for Witnessing the mind—his teacher, Swami Rudrananda, used to actually have his students do the Witness practice while watching literal movies, and Sri Shambhavananda does the same with his students. It’s called ‘Movie Yoga,’ and it is a really practical and amazing experiment that you can and should try soon. It’s a method of training our ability to work with our minds while remaining detached from them, bringing the fullest light of our awareness to the big screen of our lives.

Here are some tips on how to try it. After you’ve picked out the movie, you can start your Movie Yoga practice by actually sitting up in a meditation posture on the floor if possible—or with a pillow behind your back on the couch. Your posture can really help you gain traction in the practice. Get your practice going before you press play, and try to use the natural pauses in the movie or show to check back in with your practice. You can use a mala and do mantra, or you can simply try to follow your breath.

As you watch the movie, try to feel your seat, notice the room you’re in, and feel your breath. Occasionally, look away from the screen or soften your gaze to blur the picture a little. When you notice your heart beating fast, just work with it as you would in real life—breathe with more consciousness and pull yourself into the present.

Overall, you just have to keep zooming out on an internal level, feeling your breath and trying not to engage too much with your thoughts as you watch. Just let the images of the screen pass over you, and pass through you, without attaching to them.

You don’t have to think too much to understand most movies; they’ll spell it out for you over and over again. Try giving the movie about one-third of your focus, and let the other two-thirds of your focus feel inside. This is the ratio that Rudi used to describe to his students, saying that we only need a small percentage of our energy to actually understand and navigate our outer reality, while we should have a larger percentage on our internal experience.

Of course, this does not just apply to movies but to anything you watch on a screen. For example, you can do it with sports very easily. Sports games have an incredible way of pulling our attention outside of ourselves. Because they’re happening live, they can have an even greater impact.

One method I use when watching sports is to simply turn the volume down for portions of the game—or turn the volume all the way off—and just watch. Notice how dramatically this shift allows you to reconnect with the states of your breath and body and to detach from the supposed intensity happening on the screen.

You can also try turning the volume down and using closed captions on shows occasionally, just to play around with this idea. It’s not about trying to make your movie or show-watching less fun. It’s more about finding a balance between how you derive entertainment and how you practice.

“Then why watch the movie?” your mind might say, why not just go and meditate and then watch the movie and have more fun. It’s a good question, the reality is this— you are starring in a movie all day long that we can’t turn off, or turn down the volume on— our only choice in our life long movie is to learn how to witness this movie while we move through it, therefore movie yoga presents us with a unique training ground that is especially valuable for bringing our practice into our life. Our only choice is to learn to reframe our awareness to the big screen of our heart or to keep getting sucked into the small screen of our mind. Movie Yoga can actually help you cultivate the tools you need to rise to the next level of the witness practice in your life.

As Sri Shambhavananda concludes for us:

“We have a constant commercial running in our heads about who we are, what we want, and what we need, what is going to happen tomorrow and what happened yesterday. This movie is constantly playing, and we are caught up in it. That is really not who we are. Being able to witness the comings and goings of all our mental activity is a very desirable state to achieve. Everyone has good thoughts, bad thoughts, and indifferent thoughts. We are each like actors playing a role in a movie, and we forget we are actors playing a part. Being in the meditative witness state allows us to see the movie for what it is, and to touch a much deeper sense of who we are and what is possible.”