Yoga Sutra Conversations I.33: "By cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward happiness, compassion toward suffering, delight toward virtue, and equanimity toward vice, thoughts become purified, and the obstacles to self-knowledge are lessened."

“This week’s sutra ought to be emblazoned in all public places.” ~Dharmayoga

“I’ve been given the power to delegate and so I do. I delegate: reading the newspaper to my boyfriend, big bosoms to some of my girlfriends, eating sugar to my kids, enjoying hunting to the hunters and giving the kids a cat to my ex. (at his house).
What I get out of this practice, is SERENITY. If I really believe we are all one – than I truly can enjoy soo many things.
~Jenni

If there was any doubt that yoga is more than what happens on the mat, here’s the antidote. The first time I heard this quoted,  I wrote it down and soon thereafter was digging in the Sutra like it was a life raft.

Sounds so simple: be friendly to happy folk, compassionate toward unhappy, take joy in good action and try not to get to het up about the bad stuff. Yoga is about the path, the everyday, every breath, every moment, what am I getting so excited about, where’d all my energy go, what’s it all about and how do I figure it out path.

Simple is not easy, though. I wrote this on the clipboard I carry everywhere at work and when I felt my heart skip or my dander rise, I’d look at it. So much of behaviour is reactive and what this Sutra asks us to do is choose how we respond. Don’t react, respond, and do that with consideration… for your own peace.

One of the things I admire about the translation above from Mukunda Stiles is that where other translators state these responses will bring us peace or quiet mind, he states they reduce obstacles to self-knowledge. In Sanskrit, the claim is “Citta prasadanam” which has overtones both of purification and calmness  regarding the mind. “Lessening obatacles to self-knowledge” reminds us we are discussing the path that leads to yoga, which happens in the mind that isn’t identified with its disturbances. We can, little by little, step away from all our identifications, the things we act like matter even when we would say they don’t if asked point-blank, but we react to them as if they were everything, and so make them into our world.

Peace comes from self-knowledge. In such a state we are transparent to the truth of our own being. How to reach this state? Start taking the veils off the dancer: the obstacles to self-knowledge must fall. But like any drunken reveller, when the veils start to ripple and fly we want to get caught up in them: Ooooo, look at how they catch the light! look at how they ruffle over the surface! smell how they catch the heady scent! We forget that the veils aren’t what they cover over, or we tire of the effort steady abiding, and we settle for the ruffle and sparkle, running off in the direction of the wind.

In this sutra we are aksed to tend to our own responses to our worlds and in return, the world to which we respond will reveal itself as different than we’ve previously experienced. Not sure changing the world can be so simple? Try it. Practice your equanimity when buffetted with derision or insult. Practice being undefended and friendly when you are around happiness. Practice being undefended at all. Undefended and compassionate in the presence of Sadness? How do you keep your heart open and your boundaries clear? Yoga is a razor’s edge and you walk it with your heart. When you truly open your heart in experience, the world you experience transforms, and so do you.

Where to start? In your next human interaction, your next breath. Heck, have you practiced compassion and undefendedness with your own precious self? Be friendly toward your own happiness, befriend and cultivate it. Have equanimity when you catch yourself in bad behaviour – no self-derision, no guilt. Steadiness, abiding breath and choice, whether in line or Ardha Chandrasana, these are the things that build our practice.

Yoga Sutra Conversations with Jenni & Kate

Picking up in the middle is the fate of all humanity. We always wake up, when we awaken, in the midst of a life, a breath, a sentence and the trick (which is the opposite of a trick) is to continue being awakened for whatever we find. Well, I’ve been blessed to awaken to a conversation among yoga teachers on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a foundational text for yoga practice in which Patanjali gives instruction and advice primarily on preparing your character & your mind for the transformation that yoga brings about. He wrote sometime between 2 centuries before the common era (200 BC or BCE) and 2 centuries after (AD OR CE).

The only thing he has to say about physical postures is that Yoga pose is steady and sweet, which is sometimes translated as comfortable. Like the Buddha, to whom he is sometimes compared, he emphasized the importance of preparing ourselves through reflection on our everyday life & actions & gave really practical suggestions and encouragement on how to sweep away the obstacles to clarity, discipline & enlightenment. He even tells us that we can change the world in contemplating our own heart’s true light… but more on that in a later post

Please meet Jenni & Kate, if you haven’t already. You’ll be glad you made their acquaintances Kate is a yoga teacher in the ViniYoga tradition who teaches and practices in New Brunswick, Canada. We also share our careers & histories in Emergency Services – she dispatches for Emergency Services in her area. Jenni is also a ViniYoga teacher who practices and teaches in Denmark. Every weekend we’ll each post a reflection on the Sutra, working our way through all four books. I’m excited & priviledged to part of this beautiful experiment!

Awareness & Thinking: A User's Guide to Recursive Consciousness

Something Tolle said from the very beginning rubbed the trained Philosopher in me the wrong way: Stop Thinking. That’s like blasphemy for someone who deals in definition, analysis and understanding. Or so I initially reacted.

Tolle makes a deeply subtle distinction between thinking and awareness that helps to illuminate the nature of reflective, or recursive, consciousness. Simple on its surface, the fact that human consciousness is multileveled and that the levels are free to act independently or interact together has been the bedrock of philosophical observation since the Ancients. Plato and Aristotle used the metaphor of the tripartite soul. The Medievals related to God as the ordering principle. Descartes made a crucial, revealing and powerful error in taking as his bedrock “Cogito ergo sum” often translated “I think, therefore I am.”

Tolle directs us behind thinking, defined as unbridled naming or language using. Who is it who thinks, and thus knows “is”? (Yes, Billie, it does depend on what the definition of “is” is.) Tolle’s work is no polemic against analysis or language, but a careful understanding of its relevance, which has for so long been taken to be universal. Language depends on distinctions, on duality. The very structure of sentence making depends on the subject object distinction and is remarkably useful. We are often seduced by this usefulness, however, into mistaking description for experience. Tolle’s call is one to experience, to silence punctuating our endless naming which breaks the present apart into past, present, future, memory and expectation, subject and object.

Take breathing breaks to interupt the stream of unconsciousness and bring awareness to thinking mind. Do you know where your mind is and what it’s up to? Check in, surprise yourself.

"Radical Acceptance"

Yesterday’s post has certainly generated some reactions. My central idea is simply that while emotions sometimes call us to honor specific stories, they always connect us to our basic humanity. After we let the story go, we are in a position to be present with the emotion in the moment, each moment.

Last night while listening to Tara Brach on AudioDharma talk about her book Radical Acceptance presented through Zencast, which I highly recommend, I was struck by her clarity in addressing this presence. She focuses the issues quite beautifully. One of the problems that “being present” or “accepting” often brings up for us is a version of the problem of evil. By looking at it, am I condoning it? By acknowleding the existence of something hurtful, dreadful am I decreasing my resistance, my approbation, am I allowing it into my life? What if everything is sacred (my word)? What do I do with the dark side then?

Part of the answer is that we don’t keep hurt and harm from our lives by resisting its manifestation. The notion that we can keep harm at bay by intellectually refusing to acknowledge it, though full of  Captain Kirkian nobility, conflates two notions of resistance. When a harm is potential we can work to mitigate or even negate it. When it is actual, it no longer is helpful to “resist”, if this means acting like it’s not there because we don’t know what we’d do if it was: it is. One is positive action. The other is a veiled state of mind.

Tara Brach uses a Buddhist teaching on acceptance to demonstrate a way of “Being With” what is difficult. The Buddha invites Mara in and treats the demon gently, acknowledging its presence and effects. By acknowledging Mara, some of the sting, of the wrongness and the power is taken from the effects and the participants are free to be present.

Relaying in my words her clarity and gentleness would distract from the point: go listen to her. Her stories are amazing and I’m still processing the deep teaching behind the story about her student with Alzheimers.

Stories are amazing, but they are also Wittgensteinian ladders: meant to be kicked away. Everything important is right now.

You don't need to change…. but you will!

Yoga transforms not by changing but revealing. The asana are technology for revealing meaning, health and connection within your own body.  You are already perfect for this moment of your life precisely the way that you are. You’ll feel this, deep in your being, when you get to know the way that you are. Do you already? Your knowing, your investigating, your moving and feeling subtley shifts your being. Reveal your true self and be astonished!

Security & Consciousness

Whenever I hear radical advice, my natural inclination is to find the way between dichotomies created by bianary thinking. Do this, don’t do that, embrace this, have faith in that, abdure that other thing. “Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?” “So I made up my own little sign. It said thank you Lord for thinkin’ ’bout me, I’m alive and doin’ fine!” If you remember The Band, you’ll remember the song from which those lyrics spring. They talk about signs blocking out the scenery and breaking the mind. Then, the very tool which priorly felt oppressive, divisive, ignoring the most important parts of life is used to express what is most important: underlying unity of opposites, well-being, acknowledgement, Spirit & humanity.

I just received some advice: “Let go of security consciousness.” Security, though is something I’ve fought hard for in my life and I recognize it’s value. What does this “security consciousness” mean anyway?

What if security lies in consciousness. What if true security - knowing that you will handle what comes your way even if there are difficult surprises, that you can’t loose what truly secures value in the world – comes from consciousness itself? What if security simply comes from cultivating awareness, which implies acceptance of what is rather than imposing templates of imagination?

We can aspire to this kind of clear awareness. Is it in our grasp? Can our consciousness function outside of imagination? Can we apprehend without grasping, trusting, not that we’ll get what we asked for, but that we can remain open to what we receive? Can I?

Yoga as Metaphor

You might have noticed my idea of yoga is very expansive. So expansive that it could encompass nearly every area of life. This is intentional, and in line with my understanding of the Yoga Sutras and the Ashta-anga – or eight limbed path – at the center of the second Book.

I had this impulse though before I ever read the Sutras.  When I am very invested in something, it permeates the artificial divisions of life. It was that way with Academic Philosophy at one time, and has been that way with Paramedicine. The endeavors become uber metaphors which then subsume everything else.

But with yoga, this is more than a personal idiosyncracy, even neurosis.  The part of yoga that is most familiar to us as Westerners is the physical part, particularly the asana. The names of the poses are revealing, sometimes fun, sometimes puzzling. But also a clue: there is meaning more deeply embedded than just “oh, this one stretches your shoulders.”

When we hold our bodies, even challenge them to find specific positions we open up to physical and emotional experiences we are able to avoid in the day to day of our lives.  These experiences hold pieces of meanings that it is our life work to put together. Leaving them dormant won’t keep them silent, because experience has it’s own internal drive for expression. But consciously creating a space to discover what we literally hold within ourselves can enhance everything else we hold dear in our lives.

How are you relating to yoga in your life? Are you enlivened by your answer to that question? Does your answer make you curious? Does it bring up emotion?

The last paper I ever presented as an academic was  a promisory for a theory of structural metaphor as a non-sentential theory of truth. It was an unconscious Dear John letter to my life as an academic, because of course all of that discourse occurs sententially. But the impulse was correct, I think. 

Human beings are meaning making machines. Our freedom is made meaningful by the fact that the building blocks for the meanings we create are our physical, everyday experiences, tying us to an intersubjective world that doesn’t answer to our whims.  Having a yoga mat and an idea of how to use it as a labratory can make the our humanity so much more comprehensible by acting as a place to discover things about how we are all the time because it’s how we are in our core, under all the fat, lace and dirt. 

With yoga as laboratory, life can become a prayer, the way I’ve always known it was meant to be. A big, complicated, joyful, interesting, tear sodden, hilarious, tragic, epic prayer.

Imagination

When transgressions hinder, the weight of the imagination should be thrown on the other side.

Yoga Sutras

So much I find fascinating about this. I believe it’s a translation of II.33 and the translator Rolf Gates lists in his biblio is one Charles Johnston who lived (or at least published) in Albuquerque, NM in 1912. The translation seems to me to have a distinctly modern slant, though perhaps Johnston had been studying Kant’s schematism.

Part of what I like is that any time we engage the imagination on purpose, we’re de facto dropping certain assumptions and judgment algorithms from our field of consideration. Obviously, we want to keep certain minimum ones on the filter going to action, but the process even helps us to properly consider those.

Imagination is also the place (acc to the aforementioned Kant, and greatly oversimplified) where impressions from our embodied senses and the categories we are capable of using to organize them are synthesized. So to throw the weight of the imagination “on the other side” of our challenge really opens up a whole new world.

Kant was on to the same thing Yogic Philosophy addresses by noting that the world is “nothing” without “us” (interpreters, perhaps.) Certainly we like to think that it’s “there” regardless of the existence of animal interpreters such as ourselves. But, there is no “there” there without a “here” and without self-referential subjectivity (yes, that’s us) there’s no “here”, thus no “there” there.

Why does this matter in my journal? Isn’t this a lot of logical round-n-round, just the sort I left Academia to get outside? Well, first of all a certain amount of this is good exercise for imagination. But most of all, the quote turned out to be quite important for what I called my procrastination journey yesterday.

So, bad things happen to people, and something rather horrible happened to me a year and a half ago. I was out of the country and for all sorts of reasons kept it to myself for months. Until I realized (yes, another “dur” moment) that whether I wanted it to or not it was still affecting me and – more importantly to me at the time – my relationship with my then fiancee, now husband.

So, when really awful things happen, it usually happens that it takes calender pages to sort out the aftermath. More if you try to ignore the original fact, which I did.

So, we started our day yesterday tending to some of that. It left me raw but also lighter. So what did I do? Yes, you may have guessed it… I’m not an overachiever. I’m an excellent avoider.

So, I made lists in my mind (always the first sign my thinking’s going awry) and within hours felt lost and without any space or meaning. Yeah, that sucks. So I made my plan: grocery, eat, brush dog, yoga. Grocery & eat: check.  Pet Hank: break down. Ahhhhh! progress. She realizes she’s raw, she releases and recognizes. She is learning! (Thanks, Hank.)

She makes an appointment at the local massage school for a massage (lovely). She does yoga (feels great). She teaches (such wonderful people at class!).

Back to home with strong, wonderful, attentive, tender Hubby.  Some cobwebs cleared. Imagination was indeed the way out. Some Tapas, some Saucha, some Satya, then trust and process (Ishvara Pranidanani). Ahhhhhhhh.

The Eight Limbs (Ashta – anga)

from Rolf Gates’ Meditations from the Mat:

“In fact, we take up all the limbs together. As the line in the Eagles song goes, we do everything all the time…. Our yoga practice makes this possible. Each time we come to the mat, we have an opportunity to work the entire path, moment by moment…. Our bodies, our breath, our minds, and our choices are being refined in the laboratory that is our yoga mat.” (p. 6)

“The real payoff of a yoga practice … is not a perfect handstand or a deeper forward bend – it is the newly born self that each day steps of the yoga mat and back into life.” (xvii)

(thanks Zazazu for listing this book!)

Manifest

“…the multiple layers of manifestation happen simultaneously, whether or not we’re conscious of them.” (Splendor of Recognition, p. 79)