I heard an interesting story from one of my Sanskṛt teachers, let’s call him the Professor. This teacher is a resident of Mysore, a seat of traditional Sanskṛt learning, and also in recent times a place where at certain times of the year concentrations of foreign yoga students come to study and practice at schools in the city. Some of these students are keen to explore teachings of yoga as they are encoded in Sanskṛt texts. And some have found their way to Mysore-resident Sanskritists who can help them gain closer access to the teachings enshrined in the glorious poetry of the Bhagavad Gītā, or the ultra pared down Yoga Sūtra for example.

One such student who had found his way to my teacher was particularly interested in prāṇa, and in prāṇāyāma. This term prāṇāyāma, like āsana, is intrinsic both to the classical, holistic path of Patañjalian yoga: what we might call the yoga of the whole human being; and to haṭha yoga: which we might consider the Tantric technology which seeks to harness and harmonise the potential and energy (prāṇa) of the human bodily vehicle so it can most effectively and efficiently help us move towards yoga, integration and the ultimate aim of life.

This student was already teaching prāṇāyāma. He had studied it with various Indian teachers, and knew that prāṇāyāma was not merely breath control, or breathing exercises, but the refinement and extension of the very life force itself. He knew that prāṇa is not mere breath, though breath is one of the mechanisms through which prāṇa, the vital force, the sap of life, moves and circulates in us. He also knew from his experience that some of the breathing excercises that are included under the banner of ‘prāṇāyāma practice’ had certainly helped him refine his understanding of his own life energy. This had also caused him to feel that he was in a sense extending his life. Even if these practices were not going to postpone his death, they were already helping him live each day more richly and fully, with greater appreciation for the amazing opportunity of being alive as a human being, with greater relish for the myriad, subtle flavours of life experience. 

However, this student also had an inkling that these prāṇāyāma practices could actually extend his physical lifespan, perhaps even dramatically. He had heard stories of ṛṣi-s, yogic seers, who had mastered prāṇa and were as if immortal. So when he heard of this great Sanskritist dwelling in Mysore, who had a real problem saying no when someone asked to study with him, he thought he should approach him. If this Sanskrit teacher was as great as people whispered, if his knowledge of the Sanskrit tradition was as mind-bogglingly vast as rumoured, then surely he would know of passages that spoke of the secrets of prāṇa, perhaps he would even be able to decode them for him.

This student was no newcomer to India either. He had been coming and studying with Indian teachers for over a decade. He knew they operated differently from teachers in some other places. He knew for example, that rather than avertising their knowledge or expertise, the real pukka pundits often shrouded the depth of their learning. He knew this was especially the case around esoteric matters and all the more so if the subject in question could at all be seen to be personal, as prāṇa, the question of our life force and how we relate to it, undeniably is.
So, the student chose to approach the matter ‘from the side’ as it were, a tactic he had found could bear rich fruit when interacting with some of his previous Indian teachers. He arranged to meet the Professor, and asked him if he might help him read Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra in the original Sanskrit.

So far, the rumours proved true. The Indian Sanskrit expert could not say no. Even though he clearly had all manner of demands on his time and expertise: people asking him to translate books into Sanskrit from the local language Kannada, from Sanskrit into English, to write editorials and educational stories for Sanskrit magazines and newspapers, to write textbooks for university courses, he agreed to read Patañjali with this foreign seeker.
They began to meet three times a week. The foreign student was thrilled. The text began to take on new significance as the Professor unpacked it, and on days when he was feeling ‘higher energy’, when his prāṇa was circulating with greater efficiency, he would illustrate the teachings with all manner of compelling and often colourful story. The student also found that he could influence the pace with which they moved through the text by how much curiosity he showed in certain words and concepts presented in the Sūtra-s. Of course, what he was most interested in was asking the Professor about prāṇa, and prāṇāyāma, which Patañjali mentions some eighty sūtra-s into his work.

As they approached this section, the student felt his excitement mount. He felt that he had now won, as far as was possible in the circumstances, the confidence of the Professor, and that he would be able to draw from him any secret knowledge of prāṇa.

When they reached the relevant section of the text, the student was quite direct. He asked his teacher what he knew of the mysteries of prāṇa. The student had heard of yogic masters of prāṇāyāma who lived for centuries, millennia even, who breathed just a single breath of Himālayan air a day, who could burn up and digest mountains of rice and dal, and just as easily live hale and hearty for years without any physical food at all. Did the professor know of any such yogis?

‘Well, I don’t know, but I can tell you a story’. For the student, the professor’s stories were almost always his favourite part of their classes together, and he leaned slightly forward as if to be able to more deeply absorb whatever riches the Professor was about to share.

‘So it is said that there are these Himālayan yogi-s who live for ages, who know the secrets of prāṇa. One time, such a yogi visited Mysore. He was to give a talk, on the wisdom of yoga. Now being an ancient Himālayan yogi he knew no modern Indian language, and spoke only the language of mountain ṛṣi-s. However, he had a young assistant with him, who knew the ṛṣis’ tongue and translated his speech into Sanskrit, which I then translated into our local Kannada. After his speech, he asked if there were any questions. One man in the audience piped up immediately:
“Er, well, sir, that is all very interesting and I’m sure we are all very grateful for the master sharing his insights, but what I want to know is… is he really one thousand two hundred and seventy three years old?”
I translated the question, putting it to the young assistant in Sanskrit. And do you know what he said?
The assistant didn’t even put the question to his master, he just said:
“I don’t know, I’ve only been with him for the last three hundred and forty-two years so I couldn’t say.”
Which brought the student to laughter, as it did to some in the audience that day.
And hopefully it made you laugh too, and perhaps also raise a question: why do some yogi-s want to live so long? What is the point of extending the life force like this?
 
In the Indian system, there are said to be four ‘aims of life’ (puruṣārthāḥ): artha, kāma, dharma, mokṣa.
Artha means ‘the means’, it refers to the material needs of life, food, shelter, how we make a living. Kāma in this context refers to pleasures and how we enjoy ourselves. It is said in the Indian tradition that it is our duty to enjoy this gift of a human birth, for when we truly enjoy, in a deep sense, we can learn more quickly. Dharma is the action which sustains and supports the wellbeing of the whole, it is sometimes rendered as duty, the law, righteousness. Mokṣa is the ultimate aim of life, liberation.

Another of my Sanskrit teacher’s gurus has said on this topic: ‘Do not focus on mokṣa; instead, focus on making your artha and your kāma dharma, then mokṣa will come by itself.’
But who is able to do this? It seems perhaps easier to meet masters of prāṇāyāma who have lived for centuries than people who have become truly free from conditionings and limiting ideas, or who know how to live always in dharma.
And this is one reason why some yogi-s place such emphasis on prāṇāyāma. This gift of a human life is so precious that we need to cherish it. They say in the Indian tradition that a body without a soul is a corpse, but a soul without a body is stuck. When the soul comes into embodiment, it can journey towards its deep longing: the return to wholeness, to freedom from limitation and conditioning, to remembering its essence. The body may be the vehicle for the soul, and the soul may be the underlying animating force of the body, but this bodily vehicle needs prāṇa to run. And so, Yoga, the practical school of Indian Philosophy encourages us to respect and cherish prāṇa, to develop and deepen our relationship with our life force and our understanding of how we can work with it skillfully. A long, healthy lifespan gives us more time to research the mystery of life, fathom the depths of who we really are and come perhaps to self-realisation. Āyurveda then, the Indian Art and Science of a long, healthy lifespan is a foundation and companion for Yoga.

From a certain perspective, any practice, observance or technique that helps us extend the life force, invite the breath into easier and more efficient patterns, that improves our digestive and assimilative capacities, that bolsters and sustains our energy can be considered a type of prāṇāyāma. Any technique that helps prāṇa circulate more efficiently, that encourages true balance and holistic health can be considered prāṇāyama and a type of yoga practice.

      Pain and Yoga - Note to Self
by James Boag www.jamesboagyoga.com
 
Pain is inevitable. Pain is an intrinsic and very necessary part of the human experience. Pain helps protect us. It can be our friend. Yes, pain and suffering can beat us down, if we let them, but by working with them skilfully, we can be less pained by the trials of life, and transform difficulty into opportunity.
 
Life is suffering. So have said the masters of many traditions.
Patañjali is very clear about this: all is pain to the wise. Life is change, and we humans know it, but still we get attached to things being a certain way. Deep down, even as we are savouring things we find pleasurable, we know that they will not last. So even that which brings pleasure carries the germ of pain…(Yoga Sūtra II.15)
In the Bhagavad Gītā, Kṛṣṇa also makes it very clear: the experience of pleasure and pain is inevitable. (II.14)
At first glance, this can seem rather bleak and even depressing. However, yoga is the practical school of Indian Philosophy. Patañjali goes on, right away, to make clear that we can avoid the pain that has yet to come. Kṛṣṇa goes on to remind us that we know that these pairs of opposites: pleasure, pain, heat, cold and all the rest; come and go. Our challenge as a human being is to be steady amidst it all. If you can find this steadiness, Kṛṣṇa tells us, you can reveal the deathless essence that underlies all the comings and goings, you can penetrate through your fears and savour this life, here and now, fully.
 
Well, that sounds alright, so how to go about it?
 
First let us not delude ourselves, pain is inevitable, part of the game. However, this doesn’t mean we are helpless and hopeless when faced with it. Yoga reminds us, when something is inevitable, don’t get upset about it, that’s a poor choice. Instead, be with it as steadily as you can, so you can respond to it as skilfully as possible.
Early in the Gītā, Kṛṣṇa distils the way of practising yoga in the world:
Sukhaduḥkhe same kṛtvā lābhālābhau jayājayau
Tato yuddhāya yujyasva naivam pāpamavāpyate (II.38)
 
Which I might translate as:
Practising evenness (yoga) in gain and loss, in triumph and defeat, in pleasure and pain: this is the way to act in the challenging world and not be tainted and bound by your actions.
 
In other words, pain and suffering are inevitable. Life is constant change and we cannot, will not, always get what we want. However, we do not have to be so pained by this reality! We can choose to suffer less in the face of life’s inevitable ups and downs.
How? By practising yogāsana. By this I don’t mean just going to yogāsana classes or dropping into a favourite yoga posture when pain starts to manifest. No, I mean by cultivating the attitude of yoga: balanced, skilful, pragmatic, open and responsive. I mean by drawing on all our resources, and so resisting falling into the easy but often counter-productive and self-sabotaging familiar patterns of our habitual reactions.
 
Mitigating pain with Yogāsana
- The posture with which we meet the world
- The attitude we adopt in the face of change
 
One of the Sanskṛt words for pain is duḥkham, literally: difficult space. Its opposite, sukham - agreeable space. 
In the Indian system, the kham, or space, we exist in is recognised as containing sound, movement and vibration. Sukham then can be understood as a space in which there is a good vibration; duḥkham, or pain, one in which the vibrations are somehow dissonant.
Yogāsana is defined classically as the state of awareness that is at once sthira - steady, and sukham - easy. In other words, the seat, platform or foundation state of yoga is when the field of our awareness is a place of sustainable good vibrations: a field of robust, resonant harmony that makes us less susceptible to being thrown up and cast down by the inevitable ups and downs of life.
 
So how to practice this?
 
Kṛṣṇa in the Gītā (II.47) makes this clear:
You are the sovereign of your actions.
Your experience is your responsibiliity.
You have no control over the outcomes of your actions.
However, you do know that certain types of action can be relied upon to bring painful results.
So, pay attention, notice how your attitude and actions affect your experience and do not be the cause of unnecessary pain. Perhaps you have been so unwittingly, blindly. And perhaps as you notice that you have been a major cause and contributor to your own suffering, this recognition itself is tortuous. But it’s also instructive, and it’s empowering. So take the opportunity it affords you, accept the gift it offers, and reform yourself: dig in, for the painful work of overhauling your habits, examining your belief structures and limiting ideas. And remember, it is worth it. And really, there is no alternative. The way out of self-sabotage is not avoidance. The way out is really the way through. As Kṛṣṇa goes on to say, don’t think that not acting, staying in your tent, or retreating from the arena is even an option. No, yoga is the path of the hero.
 
Yoga: the path of the hero - the way of the heroine
 
You are a human being, so you are going to experience hardship and suffering. But as a human, with your miraculous gifts of awareness, you can refresh your perspective, reset your ways of looking and recast your suffering into a means for useful growth. Yes, you do experience being torn and fragmented, yet you can muster your will, your insight and your diverse capacities to weave greater harmony into your life and expand its tapestry to include and reconcile more of who you really are.
But this requires heroism, known in Sanskrit as vīrya - the quality of a vīra. This word vīra is very beautiful, and of great significance in yoga. Vīra denotes both human being and hero/heroine. It means then, the human being who has the courage, persistence and fortitude to wrestle with all (including the painful, difficult parts) that it means to be human, and do so in a way that is merciful, pragmatic and wise.
So, practice vīrāsana - the posture/attitude/way of being that allows you to be fully who you are: to face and integrate all your shades, the whole spectrum of who you are.
And, practice how you want to feel.
Everything is training.
We get good at what we do a lot. So, when you take recourse to yoga technique, make very sure that you are not inviting unnecessary pain and suffering. Make sure that you are actually inviting what you really want to feel. When we take recourse to yoga techniques, we are practising for the rest of the day, for the rest of our life. So make sure you are setting yourself up to move through life in a graceful way, that will make you less susceptible to being ravaged by the vicissitudes of fortune. When you practice yogāsana, do not practice straining and struggling! Rather, practice that beautiful, balanced ‘posture’ that marries alertness and relaxedness. Practice the attitude that allows harmonious connection and communication between all parts of you. Practice reinforcing the ways of whole system integration and spacious awareness. Practice the heroic work of re-attuning your system to meet the reality of today as skilfully as you can.
Pain is inevitable. But you can work, with steady presence, to reduce the self-inflicted blows, and let the ups and downs of life teach you about the space of the centre and the vastness of the awareness you really are.

Q. So James, could you tell us a bit about this Bob Marley and the Bhagavad Gītā weekend? I’m intrigued and was wondering what it’s all about.
A: Sure, when I first started getting into yoga and discovering how practical its teachings were, I was also struck by how much ‘yoga’ there was in so many poems and songs that were already dear to me, and this included many songs by Bob Marley and the Wailers.

Q. Could you give an example?
A. Sure, with Bob’s music the yogic messages keep on coming throughout the course of his albums, and they are there, very strong, right from the beginning. The great, opening song of the Wailers’ first album ‘Burnin’, is ‘Get Up Stand Up’. And ‘Get Up, Stand Up’ is one of the very first instructions in the Bhagavad Gītā. In the Gītā, the student, Arjuna, is torn. He’s on the floor, doesn’t know what to do. The rules he has previously lived by are no longer robust or inclusive enough to guide him through this challenging situation he now finds himself in. And what does his teacher, Kṛṣṇa, tell him? Kṛṣṇa first asks Arjuna how he has let this meagre, faint-heartedness come over him at this, the crucial moment, then tells him that this pathetic attitude does not suit him, is not worthy of him and will do him no good now or hereafter, so he should rise up like the great hero he really is. In other words, Kṛṣṇa urges Arjuna to Get up, stand up! Stand up for your rights, Arjuna, like the great hero you really are!

As Kṛṣṇa’s teaching continues, he urges Arjuna to claim sovereignty for his own experience, in other words, to get up and stand up, and claim responsibility for his own life. In a course I took with one of my Indian teachers, Bharath Raj Naga Kumar, he reminded us: ‘remember, your problem is always smaller than you are! It exists in your awareness, so it’s smaller than you.’ Everything is experienced in the realm of our awareness. As soon as we notice, we are empowered to shift the way we are engaging with reality and perhaps shift the quality of our experience. In yoga, a challenge or difficulty is thus recast as an opportunity in disguise.

Yoga is about coming home to the fullness we really are, coming out of partiality and re-membering our innate wholeness. As Bob says, in ‘Coming in from the Cold’ at the start of the magnificent Uprising album: ‘In this life, in this life, in this life, in this, oh sweet life, we’re coming in from the cold, coming in from the cold.’ And this reminds us of this yogic message that every experience in life is an opportunity to learn more about who we are, to come out of the ‘cold’ of fragmentation, into the warm light of centred, cohesive, integrated awareness.

One beautiful and striking feature of yogic texts of instruction such as the Bhagavad Gītā and Yoga Sūtra is the lack and total absence of negative instruction. In Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra which encodes in distilled sūtra form essential practical teachings of Yoga, there are no negative instructions. Patañjali does not deal in ‘don’ts’. Yoga recognises that if we want to move in constructive, new directions, we need to channel our energy there, rather than dwelling on, dissecting and analyzing what is wrong. Yoga instead encourages us to take great care with the quality of our thoughs, words and actions, so we can actively invite the type of cohesion and experience we really want. And this too is reiterated by Bob Marley, for example in ‘Positive Vibration’ which opens the Rastaman Vibration album:

‘If you get down and you quarrel every day, you’re saying prayers to the devils I say! / Why not help one another on the way, make it much easier… … make way for the positive day, are you pickin’ up now?’

‘Are you pickin’ up now?’ In other words, what waves are you choosing to catch in your day to day? What vibes are you allowing yourself to cultivate with the quality of your thoughts, words and actions? So here again, we get a strong yogic message as Bob’s lyrics remind us that the quality of our experience is our responsibility, and always involves a significant element of choice. And we can choose to cultivate the ‘positive day’, the ‘positive vibration’ that is conducive to learning and evolution.

And talking of evolution, as Bob reminds us in Revolution, at the closing climax of the majestic Natty Dread album: ‘It takes a revolution, to make a solution.’ One of the ways I understand this lyric is that when we are coming to terms with the extent of our own self-sabotage, when we are working with our own fissures and fragmentary patterns, and as we move in the direction of greater cohesion and integration, it takes a whole go-round of the cycle of our experience for the new ways we are inviting to really gain traction, because the old patterns have inertia. As we make the heartful, sincere effort to shift our patterns in new directions of greater cohesion, this will not be an overnight, one weekend, or even one year affair. Practice, as it is defined in the Yoga Sūtra, is the long-term, continued, whole-hearted effort to foster steadiness, attended to with dedication and commitment, then it becomes robust and well-rooted. In other words, when we persist, diligently, through the natural cycles of our experience, we can come to greater self-mastery and integration, but this requires attentive presence through the whole cycle of our experience.

And this careful, attentive, wholehearted presence is what yoga practice is all about. These days, we hear much more frequently than only a few years ago about consciousness, but we don’t hear quite so much about conscience, and this is perhaps why the spread of yoga has yet to have the revolutionary, positive evolutionary impact that is its innate capacity. But Bob Marley and the Wailers knew that spiritual practice is really all about how we live. As is said in Rebel Music (3 O’ Clock Road Block) on the Natty Dread album: ‘check my life, if I am in doubt. But coming back to the Wailers’ Burnin’ album and Pass It On:

‘What your hands do, it is your own eyes that have seen, so won’t you judge your actions to make sure the results are clean?/ It’s your own conscience that is going to remind you that it’s your heart and nobody else’s that is going to judge…’

What a beautiful summary of the key teaching in yoga that it is up to us to claim sovereignty for our actions and experiences and work honestly with the miraculous gifts of our incarnations as human beings blessed with self-reflexive awareness and the gifts of conscience!

So, in summary:
Get Up, Stand Up!
Your life, your experience, your action, is your responsibility, yours and nobody else’s, so rise up, you have great power, great capacity and this life is a great opportunity, so as Bob says: Wake up and Live NOW, wake up and live!

Yoga is about working with the gifts of conscience, working skilfully with the reality of the human condition. I love the inclusivity of the yoga tradition, how the teachings are offered in so many different, yet wonderfully complementary forms: the ultra-distilled Yoga Sūtra, with the sūtra-s basically like mnemonics: concise keys to vast bodies of practical teachings, practical teachings that are further illustrated by the dramatic dialogue of the Bhagavad Gītā, the flavourful, symbolic literature of the Purāṇa-s and epics. And I would add to this the spiritual teachings that have come through mystics, visionaries and artists who have been conduits for spirit on every continent. And Bob Marley, in my opinion, is one of these. Let us not impoverish ourselves by turning away from the wisdom that is all around. Yoga is an all-inclusive practice and it recognises that the way to One Love, One Heart, to true at-one-ment embraces the whole of life and allows all we experience to be a Redemption Song, all we express to be a song of freedom!

See James speaking about Bob Marley and the Bhagavad Gītā here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIQfz5iW1yU

At school, I was taught many things that I have since come to consider as being highly inaccurate, misleading, or mistaken. One of these was the idea that Hinduism is a polytheistic religion, because it believes in many gods.

There are a number of problems with this statement. One is the word Hinduism itself, because it is hard to pinpoint what it means. Of course, this is true for many words, people can use the same term understanding it in very different ways, however this word is a rather extreme case. To illustrate, I have been at conferences on the Indian Intellectual Tradition at which learned and venerated Sanskṛt pundits admit readily that no one really agrees what this means. The term itself only came into being when the colonising British wanted a way to refer to the vast body of religious practice which they encountered in the lands south of the River Indus. This vast body of religious practice was to the colonising agents most confounding. As colonisers intent on plundering the riches of the subjugated lands, they were, as colonisers usually are, operating in the divide and rule game. And to divide and rule, limiting names that split people and deter them from their common humanity and retreat into cliquish, schismatic identifications are helpful. Further, as colonisers, names that differentiate the subjugated people, that accentuate somehow their otherness, can make it all the easier to treat them as less than human, and so ‘Hinduism’ was born.

Further, to my mind the very word is a problem, because, just like Bob Marley, I am ‘sick and tired of the ism-schism game’; like Satish Kumar, I think we need to make all ‘isms’ ‘wasms’ – things of the past, and move towards more inclusive and reconciliatory ways.

To my mind, this unification, this inclusive reconciliation is the whole aim of yoga.

Indeed, in my explorations of the yoga tradition, I have come to see that Bob and Satish, though they have coined beautiful and resonant phrases, are not expressing anything new, but the same feeling that has motivated many of the great sages, seers and visionaries of spiritual traditions from all around the world.

The reason I find the idea of Hinduism so misleading though, is that in Indian Philosophy, on which the religious practices that developed in the lands south of the River Indus are based, God is One. The Paths are Many but the Truth is One.

But wait a minute, someone brought up in an Abrahamic monotheist land might say, don’t ‘the Hindus’ have hundreds of gods?

Yes, they do, and that is actually the point.

Because God is One, God is beyond name and form. As soon as we name something we limit it. When we define, we confine and diminish. The idea is that God is in and beyond everything. The Supreme, the Ultimate, defies description, exceeds all boundaries and barriers. And this is why to my mind, any ‘religious’ thinking that limits God is flawed, any so-called religious idea that imposes barriers and boundaries, that works to divide and rule is not connecting us to God, to the Supreme, or to our innate highest potential, but to our fear, and is based on politics, not spirituality.

The point then, is that God cannot be named, cannot be represented by any particular form. In some traditions, this has led to the injunction that it is wrong to make any image or symbol of God: of that which is beyond symbol. In others, the emphasis is on seeing the Supreme in all living things, and cherishing and worshipping the rivers and the mountains, the sky, the rains, the fields and every living, pulsating thing, from the denser rocks and stones to the subtler water of life, the fire, air and the very space we depend on. Both of these tendencies can be found in various streams of Indian spiritual and religious practice: the first notably in certain streams of Advaita Vedānta in which the Supreme is considered primarily as nameless, formless; the second in certain Tantric streams which share much in common with animistic traditions, and which scorn the manmade temple as redundant. What blind man needs a temple, when the temple of the earth is all about him? However, one of the great beauties of the Indian tradition is the way that it reconciles and includes all these possibilities.

In some Tantric lineages for example, it is just as likely for the Supreme to be discussed in terms of the great Void, or the great wholeness, as through the lens of an archetype, such as Śiva, or a form of Mother Divine such as Tārā, Durgā or Kālī.

And it is this inclusivity of the Indian spiritual and to a significant degree religious tradition that I feel is most misrepresented by an ismatic-schismatic term.

It is very significant that on visiting a temple dedicated to a particular representation of the Divine in India, that one is highly likely to notice representations of other aspects of the Divine alongside the ‘main deity’. For example, one may go to a temple dedicated to Śiva, constructed by people that use Śiva as their preferred representation of the Supreme. At this temple, the ‘image’ or icon of Śiva as the Supreme is the liṅga.
However, also, within the temple, there may be representations not just of Śiva’s ‘family’: Gaṇeśa and Skanda, his ‘sons’, and of Mother Divine, his beloved, but also of images of and associated with Viṣṇu.

The idea is that the particular symbol is not it. ‘It’ goes beyond name and form. And so the idea of hundreds of gods, and of even one god having a thousand or more names or forms, is to remind us, overtly, that the name is not it, no particular form really represents it. The different names and forms are just means to usher us towards a direct experience that will defy description or representation. But yoga is practical, so symbols, forms, names and stories are used and admitted, because these can help us learn. They carry rich educational value and can help draw forth that which is already in us, inviting our awareness more fully in the direction of recognition - of the wholeness, the all-one-ness that we are really all part of.

 Gaṇeśa Śaraṇam – Starting with a song
In the Bhagavad Gītā, one of the most treasured texts of the yoga tradition, yoga is described as ‘samatva’ – ‘evenness’, or the integration of all the powers of our awareness; and as ‘karmasu kauśalam’, efficiency and skilfulness in the things we do. This skilfulness and efficiency is demonstrated by the way many yoga texts encapsulate the whole teaching at the very beginning and only then go on to elaborate it.

Yoga techniques demonstrate this efficiency in the way that they encourage us, right away, to orient ourselves towards integration, and start taking practical steps to foster balance, skilfulness and efficiency.

This is one of the beauties of using song as a practice, or beginning a yoga practice with a song. Sound, being pervasive and penetrative, reaches the parts that other practices can’t always access. Further, when we sing, it can readily invite the various powers of which we are constituted into what we are doing. Singing is a physical and energetic act, but it also recruits subtle mental focus and full sensory engagement, and with the appropriate type of song, can equally summon our emotional body and intent. So starting with a song can really help us ‘do the yogic thing’: in the sense of being skilful and efficient, starting as we mean to go on, not falling into the conditioned idea that we will get ‘there’ around the next corner, or that we have to pursue a certain means for some imagined end. Rather, we invite whole system presence as best we can, here and now, recognising and embodying the reality that the means is the end. We get good at what we practice. So if we truly seek peacefulness, wholeness and integration, then peacefulness, wholeness and integration are the very qualities we need to stay attuned to through the gamut of the various practices which we may use to help rehabilitate different ‘members’ of the wonderful ‘gang’ of our being.

Bringing our gang into harmony
Following a recent program, one of the participants asked if I could send a few words about the meaning of the chant that we sung during the weekend to Gaṇeśa. The chant was:

Gaṇeśa Śaraṇaṁ Śaraṇaṁ Gaṇeśa
Oṁ Gaṁ Gaṇapataye namaḥ

There is a lot one could say about this, but here, trying to keep things relatively brief, I look at some of the key ideas that it represents for me when I sing and share it.

Gaṇeśa Śaraṇam
We take refuge in the inclusive, harmonising, reconciling power of yoga

This is a song to the energy of Gaṇeśa, but we can also say that this is a song to the energy of yoga, symbolised by Gaṇeśa.

Gaṇeśa can be taken to mean and represent many things but essentially, it can be seen as the energy of yoga: the energy that gathers, that brings together, that unifies and reconciles things which may even seem impossible to reconcile but nonetheless does reconcile them and includes them into a cohesive whole in which all the different parts can actually get along and perhaps even enjoy the mutually nourishing and complimentary potential of working as part of a reconciled whole.

Śaraṇaṁ means refuge, shelter, protection.

So when we sing Gaṇeśa Śaraṇaṁ we are basically saying we take shelter, we find refuge, in the inclusive, reconciling, harmonising energy of yoga. Or otherwise stated, we take refuge in our innate capacity as conscious beings to invite ourselves into deeper cohesion through the harmonising power of our acknowledged, channelled conscience.

Assembling a cohesive whole
At the immediate linguistic level, the name Gaṇeśa is constituted of two words: gaṇa + īśa.

Gaṇa means group, or member of a group. It is from the verb root ‘gan’, which means ‘to count’, ‘to enumerate’; so gaṇa is a part of a whole, it’s a member, something that can be gathered, brought together, assembled, counted, enumerated, brought into a whole.

Iśa is often translated as Lord. With this sense, Gaṇeśa is the Lord of the group. In other words, Gaṇeśa is the energy that can unify the group, that can bring all the different parts or members of the group together, that can include all the constituents, recognise all the elements, and reconcile them into a cohesive whole.

Iśa is the Lord in the sense of the one that can skilfully lead all the ‘gang members’ of our being in the direction of cohesion, unity, and the type of yogic integration which will allow us to recognise all of who we really are.

Gaṇeśa then can be seen to represent the innate capacity we have as conscious, sentient beings, endowed with self-reflexive awareness and conscience, to actually bring all of ourselves into alignment and presence.
When we sing Gaṇeśa Śaraṇam, we are invoking, calling on, rousing and encouraging our innate capacity to re-member our true selves and gather all we are into the present moment so we can make it its own completion and fulfilment.

Unifying the whole field of experience
Yoga means to connect, to join, to bring into unity. Being practical, yoga recognises that the only real, sustainable unity is one that includes all the parts. I mentioned above the idea of our being constituted of many different ‘gang members’. In its practicality, yoga also recognises that each of us is something like ‘a gang’. As incarnate human beings we are constituted of many different powers. We have different organs, different powers of body, sense, mind, intellect and emotion; each of which, we might say, is like a ‘gang member’ with its own particular ‘duty’, agenda and capacities, each of which has to take care of different things and in order to do so has to work in slightly different rhythm from other ‘gang members’ in the system, even though they are really all part of one bigger gang. This bringing the diverse and different parts of ourself into rhythm requires patient, sustained presence: this is yoga practice.

Tattva-s: the ‘ganglands’ of our being
One of the very practical models of reality that yoga uses, and in some schools build upon, is the basic Sāṅkhya model of reality.

Sāṅkhya is a system of Classical, Orthodox Indian Philosophy which most other systems of Indian Philosophy reference and/or work with/build upon/differentiate themselves from in some way. Sāṅkhya is also sometimes referred to as a sister school of Philosophy to Yoga because Yoga does use the Sāṅkhya model of reality and the evolutes of consciousness that I’m about to outline quite significantly.

There is a lot one can say about this, but for our purposes here: the Sāṅkhya model gives us a very practical map of the field of our being as conscious creatures (puruṣa/cit) living and experiencing within the realm of Nature (prakṛti/citta).

One way we can interpret or interface with the Sāṅkhya model from a yogic perspective is that as conscious beings, puruṣa-s, our essence is pure consciousness. However, the body-borne vehicle and its different powers through and with which we experience are constituted of prakṛti, the ever-changing stuff of Nature.
The Sāṅkhya model groups the constituents of our being into tattva-s, elements of ever-changing nature. The aim of yoga is to bring cohesion through the all these elements, in other words through the whole field of our being.

So what are these tattva-s?
 
Tat means ‘that’,
tva as a suffix means having the quality of, so a tattva is a ‘thatness’.
The term tattva then refers to aspects of ‘that’: ‘that’ being the reality of nature, and our experience as living beings.
 
In the basic Sāṅkhya model, there are 25 tattva-s: puruṣa, the seeing, conscious principle, and prakṛti, the seen realm of nature. Prakṛti then has 23 evolutes. Working back from gross to subtle, these are:
-the five great elements, the pañca mahābhūtāḥ: earth, water, fire, air and space;
-the five tanmātrāḥ: the realms of the senses and sense experience relating to these elements: fragrance, taste, form, touch and hearing;
-the five karmendriyāḥ: the miraculous divine powers of action that allow us to: speak and express; pick things up and put things down; move and locomote; excrete, digest, assimilate and expel; procreate and recreate;
-the five jñānendriyāḥ: the miraculous divine powers of our senses: smelling, tasting, seeing, feeling, hearing;
-and the three constituents of the antaḥ kāraṇa – the internal apparatus of our awareness: the manas which connects the indriyāh (karmendriyāḥ and jñānendriyāḥ) to the internal apparatus, the cognising and processing part of our awareness;
the ahaṁkāra, the part of awareness which relates our experiences to our idea of individuality and our sense of identity;
and the buddhi, the part of our awareness which discerns, judges, discriminates and makes decisions.
 
To reiterate, the idea in yoga is to bring cohesion, balance and integration through all these tattva-s, through all these powers, in the myriad ways they function and live within us.

These aspects of ourselves move at different rhythms and in different ways. They have different styles.
Perhaps you have experienced feeling torn: part of you wants to move in one direction, another part would prefer to move the opposite way, another part is demanding we go a different way entirely. It might be that one sense is pulling us one way, another sense another. It might be that our body and senses are screaming for us to move forwards, but our mind is hell-bent on holding us back, for example.

We might consider such a situation as gang warfare on the streets of the city of our being. Our task and challenge is to bring about a lasting peace, where the different gangs and gang members work together as an efficient and relaxed team, confident of each other’s support and capacities, faithful to their common aim and interest of sustainable wellbeing.

How will we do this?

The yogic recipe is to expose all the parts, all the members, to the experience of coherence, of cohesion; to invite each part, all of them, into the lived, experiential understanding that they are better off as part of a collaborative whole than eking out their own survival and trying to find true satisfaction by seeking only their own short term interests. This coherence or balanced integration is also called Samādhi: the state in which the whole being experiences togetherness, wholeness, evenness; it’s also called kaivalya, alone-ness, in the sense of all-one-ness: where no part feels lonely or left out, where all the gang members are seen, acknowledged and warmed by the hearth of centred awareness, brought out of the shadowlands by the light of centred awareness.

This is the Gaṇeśa energy, the energy that includes, unifies and by so doing, steadily trains the different parts, with all their idiosyncrasies and particularities, in the art of being part of one great whole. And as we learn, as we invite all our parts, all the members of the gang of our being to come into deeper, subtler harmony, steadily we and they learn to be part of a glorious, majestic symphony. This is Śrī Gaṇeśa, the glorious energy of yoga, of gathering, of unifying, reconciling and harmonising.

The chant continues with Oṁ Gaṁ Gaṇapataye namaḥ

So we have already sung: Gaṇeśa Śaraṇam –
I take refuge in my capacity as a conscious, sentient human being to actually work with the manifold gifts of consciousness to foster greater harmony within the reality of what I experience. I take shelter in my innate capacity to bring myself into a slightly more cohesive, slightly more coherent, slightly more integrated place. And this is the practice of yoga. Wherever we are we, whatever situation we are in, we invite ourselves to be a little bit more fully present, we invite more of ourselves to be included.  Extending this invitation to all parts of ourselves may require presence and courage. And so, we deepen the affirmative, encouraging power of the initial chant with Oṁ Gaṁ Gaṇapataye namaḥ

Namaḥ means prostration, from the root ‘nam’, meaning to bow/prostrate/offer oneself to.

Gaṇapataye is the dative singular form of Gaṇapati a synonym of Gaṇeśa, so it means to Gaṇapati, to the Lord/Leader of the Group, to the one that can bring all the gang members into powerful, sustaining and harmonious cohesion.

Gaṁ is a seed mantra for this Gaṇeśa/Gaṇapati energy, affirming and accentuating the idea and intent of unification, harmonisation, inclusion and reconciliation.

Auṁ means: everything/all.

So, in other words: we offer all of ourselves, everything we are, to that innate capacity we are endowed with as conscious, sentient beings, that can bring things into greater togetherness.

When sung, because of the euphonic combination of sounds in Sanskṛt, (the way sounds alter to make them easier to pronounce) the Oṁ Gaṁ Gaṇapataye namaḥ sounds quite like ‘ong gang gaṇapataye namaḥ’

Basically, we are asking and  inviting all the members of the gang that make up the field of my being, all the different gang members that inhabit the territory of my awareness: may they all work together, may they all offer themselves willingly to that part of myself that can unify, in other words may they all align with my conscience,  may they all be illumined by the light of my conscience and may I have the courage, the presence, and the awareness, to allow all parts of myself to serve that deeper longing, to serve that guiding light which pulsates in the core of my being.

Or, otherwise stated, may I bring myself into ‘samatva’- evenness and integration, so I may access ‘karmasu kauśalam’, greater skilfulness and efficiency in all I do.
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So, those are a few words about Gaṇeśa  Śaraṇam. If you are interested in hearing more about the archetype of Gaṇeśa, I recommend checking out The Mythology Show on Yoga Anytime. This series includes episodes on Gaṇeśa that say a little more about the rich symbolism of this yogic archetype and what the Gaṇeśa energy represents practically. This includes stories of how Gaṇeśa got his name, and why when we take recourse to archetype and symbol in the Indian tradition, Gaṇeśa is the one that is always invoked and worshipped first. There are also series on Mother Divine and on Hanuman, also exploring the symbolism of these archetypes, what they can mean at a practical level and how we can work with them in our daily lives. If you use my name James Boag, you can get 30 days free access to yogaanytime's now extensive programs.