Ep. 154: Pamela Seelig — How to Bathe Your Mind and Body in the Chemistry of Relaxation

My guest this week is Pamela Seelig, author of the recent book Threads of Yoga: Themes, Reflections, & Meditations to Weave into Your Practice (affiliate link). Pam and I talked a lot about the healing and stress relief we can find through yoga, and also about the deeper spiritual elements that are available through the practice. I appreciated thinking with her about the intersections between yoga and religion, especially the Christianity I grew up in. We also discussed why savasana, or the corpse pose we usually do at the end of a yoga session, is the most important pose.

Other topics we touched on included:

• The stress management and anxiety reduction that can come through yoga
• The heightened state of being that can ensue in yoga when we quiet the mind
• The yoga sutra foundational texts
• The relief and feeling of letting go that yoga often brings
• Recognizing that a deeper state of being is already present, though often obscured by the mind
• The harmful effects of thinking that one should be able to make the mind be silent
• Fostering a new, decentered relationship with our thoughts
• The connection between mindful awareness of thoughts and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
• Pamela’s dramatic experience of the toll that stress takes on the body
• Learning that there’s more to us than the body and the mind
• Mystical strands of Catholicism and their relation to other religions like Buddhism
• How a breath meditation practice can be the start of a spiritual practice
• Prana as the creative life force, and its relation to similar concepts in many religious traditions
• The central importance of savasana
• Yoga as coming back and being present and releasing the fruits of our actions
• Relaxing the body to relax the mind
• Connection as our true state
• Discovering a deeper peace that “passeth understanding” and is beyond the mind

Pamela Seelig is a yoga teacher who began her yoga and meditation journey in 1991 when an illness interrupted her Wall Street career.

Along with helping recovery, the impact of her meditation led to a lifelong pursuit of perceiving and sharing yogic wisdom through practice, teaching, and writing.

Pamela completed her teacher training in 2006 at Integral Yoga Institute in New York. She considers Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral, as her primary teacher (root guru), but she has trained with many of the top yoga luminaries in the world today.

Pamela is a fervent student of yoga and continues to deepen and expand her yogic knowledge and understanding. Along with Hatha yoga, Pamela also studies Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and is a certified Raja Yoga instructor.  While grateful for so many brilliant teachers along the way, she regards the practice itself as the greatest teacher.

She lives in New Jersey where she practices yoga, teaches yoga workshops, writes, and empty-nests with her husband, Bob, and dog, Bodhi.

Find Pamela online at her website.