Relieving Stress with Mindfulness — Stages 1 & 2: The 8 Stages of Yoga with Anantta
The first two of yoga’s eight stages — a mindfulness conversation with performer and Kriya Yoga teacher Anantta. And before you panic: nobody’s asking you to fold into a pretzel in the middle of the all-hands. These first two stages happen almost entirely between your ears.
Relieving Stress with Mindfulness — Stages 1 & 2 on the Laugh Long & Prosper podcast.
Here’s something I didn’t know until Anantta walked me through it: the yoga we see in studios today is a spin-off. The original system was less about the poses and more about the person doing them — a step-by-step path for quieting a mind that, let’s be honest, most of us leave running like 47 browser tabs.
The 8 stages of yoga
Stages 1 and 2 are the focus of this episode — and notice how far down the list the physical postures actually are:
- Yama — control of the senses
- Niyama — contentment & regulation
- Asana — physical postures
- Pranayama — breath control
- Pratyahara — withdrawal of the senses from objects
- Dharana — focus on a chosen object
- Dhyana — meditation, the transcendental quality of life
- Samadhi — union, soul and supreme soul
Stage 1 — Yama: control of the senses (yes, even at your desk)
Here’s the part that surprised me: the very first stage of yoga has nothing to do with a mat. It’s self-awareness — noticing the subtext under your own behaviour. Why do I reach for the snack drawer at 3 p.m.? Why do I refresh my inbox forty times an hour? As Anantta explained it to me: control the tongue, and you can control everything.
The idea is that if you can’t govern your external environment, you’ll never govern your internal one — they’re the same weather system. And good news for those of us not booking a silent retreat this year: you can practise this on the walk to the coffee machine. One deliberate choice — I’m not going to let the next ping hijack my attention — is stage one in miniature. No lululemon required.
Stage 2 — Niyama: contentment and regulation (a.k.a. stop pre-living the future)
Stage two is contentment, which mostly means quitting the exhausting national pastime of worry. As Anantta says, worrying about the future is a waste of energy — the outcome arrives the same whether you fretted or not. And as the old saying goes: worry is like a rocking chair — you go back and forth and never get anywhere.
The other half is regulation — routine. Meditation, Anantta says, is like weightlifting: the more regularly you do it, the stronger you get. An irregular life can’t find a regular time to be still. At work, that’s the quiet case for the un-glamorous stuff — the same short walk after lunch, two actual breaths before the big meeting, a hard stop you keep. You don’t need a yoga mat in the boardroom. You need a few repeatable moments in the day where your mind gets to be exactly where your body is.
Who is Anantta?
The meeting of two rivers. Born in 1958, Anantta had an intense desire for both theatrical expression and spiritual understanding from childhood. At 14, he ran away with a circus and toured across Canada. In his early twenties he was initiated into the Kriya Yoga of the Self-Realization Fellowship, and later became a certified yoga instructor.
From there he began blending philosophy and performance art. After years of experimenting — humour, theatre, music and more — he found a balance between the two, and it carried him into the next wave of his career: touring theatres, festivals and events across Canada, the USA and, soon, Europe, with a wonder-filled “edutainment” of music, comedy, magic and mysticism.
Reach Anantta at Anantta.com or anantta@bell.net.
That’s stages one and two — both, you’ll notice, entirely portable. Stages three and four (posture and breath) start bringing the body into it. Until then: control the tongue, cancel the rocking chair, and — you know the rest — laugh long and prosper.
