Mind

When we lose our mind—our thinking brain—even temporarily, we make space for our soul, our emotions, to flourish. We experience the world directly, without interrupting thoughts.

with the body active, the mind is no longer affected by its lassitude, no longer draws from its inertia the vague vertigo of an endless spiral.

musicologists describe music as ergogenic, or work-enhancing. Throughout history and across cultures, music has been used to make labor less difficult and more rewarding.

When you let yourself be moved by music, you lay down tracks in your nervous system, pathways for joy to traverse when you hear that song again. I know that when I choose to dance today, I am building muscle memories of joy, giving my future self more songs to be moved by.

However, the default state also has a downside. For many of us, the mind’s default has a negative bias. Its most familiar habits are to ruminate on past hurts, criticize ourselves or others, and rehearse reasons to worry. The default state can also become a mental trap.

The loss of the sense of a self separate from the world around it is sometimes accompanied by a feeling of union with the environment, whether it is the mountain, a team, or, in the case of this member of a Japanese motorcycle gang, the “run” of hundreds of cycles roaring down the streets of Kyoto: “I understand something, when all of our feelings

Chanting, flute or drum playing, and dancing in demilitarized patterns are ideally natural forms of yoga-meditation, because they silence the hypnotic chattering of thought and give one a direct feeling of shabda—the basic energy or vibration of the universe. This is why Gregorian chant, for example, gives the sense of eternity so absent from