The Divided Self and the Integrating Path of Yoga

Shame in Yoga Practice and the Myth of Secular Freedom

Over the years I have seen, in myself and in many students, a tendency to practise from a sense of not being good enough. Practice becomes self-correction. A way of trying to repair something assumed to be flawed.

We may assume that living in a secular society has freed us from religious shame. It has not. Secularism does not erase centuries of conditioning. Even if we no longer consciously believe we are born sinful, the structure remains.

If I am good, I will be rewarded.

If I am bad, I will be punished.

If we are blessed with good fortune, we may subconsciously believe it is some kind of reward. When things go wrong, we may assume punishment. Is this what karma means? Perhaps not. The logic of reward and punishment persists even when theology is no longer explicitly present.

This structure lies underneath our conscious awareness and is embedded in the systems and institutions that shape our culture. It appears in education, in work, in family life, and in social hierarchy. It determines how we interpret success and failure, health and illness, gain and loss, leaving us susceptible to manipulation and control.

These patterns are inherited. They are transmitted across generations through behaviour, expectation, and fear. They shape the psyche before we have language for them.

The False Self and the Divided Psyche

And we are left divided. Certain feelings are acceptable. Others are suppressed. Certain impulses are permitted. Others are denied.

We learn to split ourselves in order to create and maintain the image of ourselves as good, in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. The false self is created.

Yoga is a return to the true self.

As such, it does not teach perfection but integration. It does not teach self-improvement but self-acceptance. The paradox is that improvement happens through acceptance.

Future-Oriented Practice and the Inability to Be Present

This conditioning does not only shape how we interpret our lives. It shapes how we practise.

If we are not fundamentally okay in the present moment, then breathing and posture become means to an end. We practise to become calmer. To become stronger. To become healed. To become more spiritual. Practice becomes future-oriented.

The present moment is no longer sufficient. It is something to improve.

Breathing becomes a technique for achieving a better state. Posture becomes a way of correcting ourselves. Even awareness becomes a project.

When practice is driven by not-enoughness, it is never complete. There is always a next level, a deeper breath, a stronger pose, a more regulated system. The future becomes more important than the experience itself.

But if yoga is integration rather than self-improvement, then the orientation changes.

Breath is not something we use to get somewhere else.Posture is not something we endure in order to become better.

Practice is the experience itself.

When we remain with the present moment without trying to turn it into a stepping stone, the logic of reward and punishment loosens. There is no future reward to earn. There is no present failure to correct.

This shift from transaction to participation is subtle but decisive. It marks the movement from division to wholeness.

Breath Awareness and the Imprint of Experience

To be present is not to perform calmness. It is to remain with experience as it is, including our response to it. Pleasant and unpleasant. Comfortable and uncomfortable. When we stay with experience without judgement, it does not need to be carried forward unconsciously.

The tools of yoga, posture, breath, and attention bring us into contact with sensations rooted in our history. If we look closely, we see that our breathing pattern has been shaped by our experience. What many call stress or dysregulation is often simply a history that has not yet been integrated.

If the breath is restricted, held, or paradoxical (when the abdomen moves out on the exhale and in on the inhale), this reflects patterns that once served survival but no longer serve wholeness. To observe the breath and the body is to observe the imprint of experience on our physiology. Every sensation and every inhale and exhale is unique to us.

Yoga does not ask us to override these patterns. It asks us to see them, to feel them, and to stop pushing them away.

Integration, Not Perfection

So the invitation is this: when you practise breathing or posture, do so in a way that invites the full range of sensation into awareness. Recognise if you are practising to become good, to punish yourself, or to escape discomfort. Recognise it without judgement of yourself or judgement of your judgement.

When we feel what is present and allow it to move through us, nothing needs to be stored beneath the surface. The self moves towards wholeness.

We are not excavating ourselves in search of wounds. We are establishing stability so that what has been split off can return safely. Insight cannot be forced. When the system is ready, what needs to be seen will reveal itself. Integration is not manufactured; it is allowed.

This is earned wisdom.This is healing.This is Yoga.

This is the foundation of how I approach weekly breath and posture practice. Not as a programme of improvement, but as a disciplined space in which integration can unfold.