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Practical Patañjali - March 2022

3/30/2022

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Usually when I write about the Yoga Sūtra, it is with commentary and fairly extensive illustration. When I speak about the Yoga Sūtra, I often describe the sūtra-s as being like lighthouses that shine their light out in all directions. They can guide us afresh every time we approach them. They can bring us to useful insights wherever we are on the ‘sea’ of life. And because the Sanskṛt sūtra-s face out in all directions, it makes succinct translation almost impossible. The equivalents a translator chooses almost always lack the same reach or range of connotative and suggestive meaning as the Sanskṛt original. Nor do we even have as distilled a linguistic form as the sūtra in modern languages like English or Spanish for example. However, this morning, not for the first time, I gave a talk on the practical Patañjali, a talk which included a ‘whistlestop tour’ of chapter one of the Yoga Sūtra. Afterwards, while waiting for lunch at the nearby café Espiral, I decided to riff off my, at least for me, relatively distilled presentation, and write a pared back rendering of sūtra-s 1-40, which is where we got to in the hour and forty minute session. Here it is:

A distilled, interpretative and in some places synoptic rendering of yoga sūtra-s 1-40:

What is the Yoga Sūtra?
In the words of my teacher Larry, ‘the stitches that weave together the fabric of unity. Or as I have come to think of them: the thread we can use to weave greater harmony into the fabric of our lives.
Yoga is practical, so we have to take up the thread.
Yoga begins, again and again, when we own that we do not know, when we practice looking in ways that reach beyond our habitual ways of looking.
So doing, we make ourselves a patra, a vessel open to receive new insights and assimilate new understandings.
Yoga is integration, when we own, acknowledge, integrate all the cyclical, pulsating movements of our awareness.
Yoga is harmony, the state of at-one-ment, when all the instrumental powers of our being are tuned to the same key and play as a cohesive orchestra.
Yoga: when all the dynamism of life is brought within the compass of our awareness.
In this state we experience our true essence.
Otherwise, our awareness gets congealed and localised in five ways.
Our awareness may congeal and localise to accurate or inaccurate perception of what we are experiencing.
Yoga is pragmatic with regard to accurate perception - pramāṇa - the means of valid knowledge - and accepts three: direct perception, inference and reliable testimony.
Our awareness may also travel on the wings of imagination in the vast realm of vikalpa - association based on language.
Or our awareness may be as if absent, as in sleep.
Or it may linger in or stray to the past, still attached to memories.
The two-fold means to overcome the confinements of awareness and the resulting limited understanding of ourselves and reality is abhyāsa - practice - and the consequent vairāgya.
Abhyāsa is practice: the effort to foster steadiness.
This effort of practice is long-term, uninterrupted, attended to with genuine presence and dedication.
In other words, Yoga practice is all the time, is everything we do; the constant, steady, wholehearted effort to cultivate steadiness and wholeness.
The practice of wholeness brings Vairāgya - the thirstlessness consequent upon practice.
The attachments and allures of the externals that come and go are attenuated by the experience of wholeness that practice invites.
Practice works from gross to subtle, inviting us beyond our conditionings and ideas into total presence which re-forms our understanding of who we really are and what we are really made of.
Some beings are born into this state of total presence and unimpeded awareness.
For the rest of us, the state of clarified awareness in which our discerning intelligence and intuitive wisdom is no longer impeded by our conditionings is preceded and facilitated by the cultivation of four qualities:
Śraddhā - the self-trust, resilience, self-reliance and faith that develops from wholehearted, discerning exploration in the arena of our own lives.
Vīrya - the heroic valour and courage to continue venturing beyond the known, fathoming the shadowlands of our psyches and working to invite deepening integration.
Smṛti - the building of experiential understanding that the heroic, faithful effort is worth it, so we cultivate a memory bank of experience that propels us in the face of doubt; and the re-membering of our innate capacity to experience as a true individual, a person no longer subject to division and fragmentation.
Samādhi - integrated awareness: again and again, inviting all of ourselves into the present moment.
Practice, and practitioners, can be mild, medium, or intense, but when we are truly intent upon it, yoga is right here.
Yoga can also be accessed by making all one’s actions a consecrated offering to that which we consider the highest, or to Īśvara.
Īśvara is a consciousness without limit: not limited by having a body, by karma, by knowledge or capacity. Īśvara is the very source of intelligence and knowing, is not bound by time or space, is the intelligence that allows us to learn and evolve, and which always has. Īśvara is beyond name and form. It is connoted by the praṇava, the mantra Auṃ. In other words, Īśvara is everything, from the beginning to the end and everything in between. There is nowhere god is not. By repeatedly reminding ourselves of this we come to understand that everything is divine, everything is the means, all is one.
This deepening recognition dissolves the obstacles to yoga:
Physical, mental or emotional imbalance or indisposition, doubt and indecision, carelessness, laziness, negligence or indulgence or lack of respect for the sense powers, attachment to previously experienced states of awareness, expectations and instability of awareness.
These obstacles are overcome by practising wholeness, oneness, integration, balance.
How? The basic practice to clarify our awareness is distilled into four ways of being in response to four types of situation.
In sukha - in agreeable, pleasant situations, when in a good space, with good vibrations, practice maitrī - be friendly, present, open, including to the unexpected gifts that life may offer us in forms different from those we may have imagined.
In duḥkha - in difficulties, pain, suffering, when the vibrations are not so good, practice karuṇā - be compassionate.
When encountering beautiful, virtuous, meritorious things, puṇya, practice muditā, joyfulness, let it be a source of inspiration, let it lift you up.
And when facing injustice, tyranny, horror, apuṇya, practice upekṣa - be steady, equanimous, practice equipoise and equivision so as to be able to respond most skilfully. Do not let the bad example rob you of your centre.
If one does not automatically respond in these ways in these situations, then we know that we are not established in yoga, so we can keep practising, and Patañjali goes on to offer us a whole ocean of techniques to support practice.
We may take as our support, as our point of focus and orientation for meditation, the movements, pauses retentions of the life force; or we may cultivate greater steadiness and clarity through the instrumental powers and lenses of our awareness by focusing on subtle sense objects; or we can focus on the effulgence beyond all sorrow or desirelessness by meditating on a sage or saint who has realised such a state; or if it happens that god or the guru visits us in dream to initiate us into a practice technique we may use that. Let us practice in a way that works for us.
We will know practice techniques are working when we experience the lens of our awareness becoming clearer and clearer.

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Beyond the Bright Lights

3/19/2022

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Photo credit: Nayelly Esquivel @nayesqui  Photo from Varanasi, India, February 2018

In a recent interview on the Joe Rogan experience, Sadhguru pointed out that a main reason for our human problems is because we have got into deep grooves of searching for ‘happiness’/satisfaction/wellbeing in the wrong place. We search for what we want outside ourselves, when human experience is internal. This deluded habit has been running for a good while now and has only gathered more inertia, to the degree that we sometimes self-sabotage in the name of self-help, in the name of promoting or pursuing human happiness.
After listening, I was reminded of an old teaching story I have heard from more than one of my teachers over the decades and also read in one or more of Osho’s books. It is of Mulla Nasrudhin, a character who is often used to highlight our human folly with humour. In this story, Nas has lost his watch. Night has fallen. Another man comes by and notices Nas scrambling around in the dusty ground in the light of the streetlamp in front of his house.
‘Hey Nas, what’s going on?’
‘Wah! I’ve lost my watch.’
‘Oh I’ll help you, did you lose it here?’
‘No, no, I lost it inside the house!’
‘Then why are you looking here outside in the street?’
‘Because the streetlight is here.’
…
In the Indian tradition, light is often used as a symbol of the light of our awareness. There is a light that never goes out. Even when things are dark or terrible, we can only perceive that because of the light of awareness. As one of my Indian teachers has reminded me and others:
‘Remember, your problem is smaller than you are. It exists in your awareness. You have the power to shift it and to come to see it in different ways.’
In the story, Mulla Nasrudhin looks outside, where he will never find the chronometer that is hiding inside. Why does he look out there? The bright lights of the big city, of the mainstream have come to be associated with ideas of ‘where things happen’, where we can get things done, where we can find happiness… The neon glow of dominant so-called culture steers us into a bottomless pit of pursuit, chasing a ‘happiness’ in a neon glare that blinds us to the recognition that we are looking in the wrong place, and that happiness, the type we really long for, of satisfaction, fulfilment, wholeness, is inside. It is not about acquiring things externally, but rather about how we relate to ourselves, others and everything else.
The Sadhguru interview (at least the first part I have so far listened to) highlighted for me the idea that as a population, we have become so used to looking outside that it has become scary to look within. The inner realm has become dark, unknown, forbidding. It is mysterious, and the exernally oriented, materialist overculture often condemns and disprizes mystery. Mystery is verboten, the incovenient enemy, the uncontainable threat, to an ideology stuck on quantification, domination and control. And we have invested in this external pursuit, identified with it, witnessed it being celebrated, validated, prized and championed all around us.
Yet as the ancient, perennial teachings of Yoga remind us, the external things come and go, they are not eternal. Our task is to be steady amidst them, to use them to attune to our centre, to the depth of our inner realms, and so recognise the true address of the peace that passeth understanding, of the happiness beyond happiness of true fulfilment. When we look to externals for validation or satisfaction, we set ourselves up for disappointment. As Kṛṣṇa emphasises so powerfully in the Gītā. You are the sovereign of your actions. Your life is your responsibility. What you do is up to you. While you have no control over what life brings to you, how you meet and respond to it is up to you. Yet we have no control over the outcomes, or fruits, of our actions. So if we do things in expectation of particular outcomes, we are just setting ourselves up for needless suffering. That is not to say that we cannot learn from our actions and experiences. Let us not be the sowers of unnecessary bitter harvests. When we know that certain types of action tend to lead to pain and suffering, let’s not go there. For example, if we notice that when we speak in a certain way to certain neighbours it brings conflict and ill-feeling, well perhaps I can speak to them in a different way. If I notice that when I eat certain foods at certain times it just zaps my vitality, then leave that habit. And also, do not think that inactivity is an option. As long as we are alive, we are pulsating, breathing, moving in a field of constant activity. Action is inevitable. And as Kṛṣṇa makes clear in the Gītā, when something is inevitable, no point lamenting about it, rather meet it as skilfully as you possibly can, from a place of equipoise.
The more balance and ensuing clarity we can muster, the more likely we are to be able to catch ourselves when we might slip into the long-established, societally-reinforced grooves of habits that would perpetuate our suffering.
But what to do when these habits are so established? When the momentum of this looking externally and trying to manipulate and control reality is so tremendous? When the inertia seems to carry the weight of moutains and the pain of generations?
The user’s guide to the human condition that is yoga offers a way. It works. It has been tried and tested over millennia.
Really? If that were true, why is it not more known, why is it not more prevalent? Why is this method not broadcast in the bright lights?
Well, there are perhaps countless, interwoven reasons, but one is because yoga will not be reduced to a slogan, is not a quick-fix pill. Rather it will change your sense of self. Which means from a certain perspective it will ‘kill you’, ‘destroy you’, ‘take away’ your false limiting ideas. And who wants to give up the ideas and sense of identity they have diligently invested in all these years? Who wants to admit they are wrong, that their understanding is partial, that they have been seeing only a particular skewed sliver of the reality that is really all around us?
Who wants that? Who is ready for that? And can yoga  really be a ‘solution’ if it is so forbidding?
Yes, it can. Yoga works because it helps connect us to the most powerful force in the universe. This goes by many names, but steel yourself to not stop reading or reject the message when I describe it in terms that have sometimes been bright-lighted in pop songs, the power of love. Yes, love. Not Hallmark card love, but the mighty love of vast vision, of acceptance, forgiveness, reconciliation, of openness and total presence.
Yoga works by inviting us, steadily, into greater presence. The idea of killing ourselves and losing our identity may repel us. But the idea of being ‘killed softly’ and seeing the patterns of our whole life in ways that allow and empower us to move on in fresh configurations has a quite different feel to it. Yoga is a steady, patient process. The work of transforming long-established habits into ways that give us more reliable access to real satisfaction is a lifelong endeavour. ROMA was not built in a day. A kingdom of AMOR is a constant practice. However, yoga works because it invites us on. When we give ourselves the chance to experience the richness of working ‘together’, joined up, as an integrated unit, the whole system is nourished and may even rejoice. Just a glimpse of that can leave a powerful imprint. But a peak experience alone is hardly ever enough to exact lasting change. We have to keep inviting ourselves into cohesion, again and again. Yoga is not a 90 minute class, a weekend workshop, or a 30 day challenge. We can learn tools of tremendous value and gain encouragement and inspiration in such offerings, but practice is everything we do.
Where do I allow my attention to flow? What do I give my energy and awareness to? Am I conspiring to confine myself to a futile scramble in the societally approved dust? Or do I dare to slow down and listen more deeply? Will I dare to look into the deep, dark, vital soil of the previously hidden, sometimes forbidden places? Will I venture into the perspective-changing riches of the inner realms?
To go into the dark, to acknowledge that we may have blinkered ourselves, shut ourselves off from deeper nourishment, is a lot to swallow. We have to forgive ourselves for our previous patterns that kept us from this. In other words, we have to love ourselves. And many of us have not had the greatest encouragement to do this. I know few people born in ‘the West’ who were not deeply and repeatedly wounded in their formative years: their sense of belonging assailed by ideas that their natural inclinations and intuitive wisdom was wrong, inappropriate, not good enough, that their voice was not welcome, that they were ugly, pretty, delicate, clumsy, that they were too this, too that, or that ‘we don’t do that!’ Or most ridiculously of all, to a child who like all of life is pulsating, that they had no rhythm… Oviously I could go on and on. But the net result is often that we carry an idea, inside, in the dark, that we are not only not good enough, but not enough. This idea was sown and planted when we had so few resources to protect ourselves against it. The same idea was all around us, and was, is, reinforced day after day in so many gross, subtle and perhaps unintentional and barely noticed ways. The idea is buried deep. But if we find the courage to dive deeper, we can access a greater treasure. The treasure of love. Courage, heartfulness, is its great virtue. It dares to go where others fear to tread. And it pulsates in each of us.
Why do we keep chasing the happiness outside, when the evidence that it doesn’t work is irrefutable? The fear of going in, deep, to the unknown, through the woundings, is forbidding. It takes love, and love is a practice. Yoga asks us, wherever we are, as best as we can, to bring ourselves together, to invite all of ourselves into the present moment, all of ourselves, even those parts of ourselves that we may habitually have denied, repressed, ignored, neglected. Steadily, softly, gently, again and again, we invite more of ourselves to the party. As we do so, we start generating a new inertia, one powerful enough to counter the weight of the old, established one, a force able to face down the fear, to melt the ice around the heart, to carry us through the acknowledgement of our wounding and into the realm of the inner treasure. As we forgive ourselves, and give more of ourselves the chance to experience presence, we recover our innate capacity for love. We regain our innate capacity to relinquish control, to abandon concern for the outcome, and to offer ourselves fearlessly to the wonder and wholeness of this moment.



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Responsibility and the invitation

3/11/2022

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When we try to dominate another, we are at once denying, attacking and suppressing part of ourselves.
Brother, sister, you too are Mother Earth.
When a human being tries to dominate another, or tries to dominate nature, we are harming ourselves.
The dominator game is dying.
Life knows how to live.
Tyranny always fails, but it can still cause a lot of harm along the way to its inevitable doom.
It can be scary to look at the inconvenient, unpleasant truths, the ones that tell us we have been duped, that we have been negligent, blinkered, blind.
But truth always comes out.
Truth always prevails.
And it is True that neither women, nor the earth, nor any human being, are territory for conquest.
Those who think themselves conquistadores are deluding themselves, lining themselves up for a heavy dose of Truth, sooner or later, or sooner and later.
As a species, we have slumbered and allowed ourselves to be incarcerated in the ways of dominion for too long.
The ways of freedom and sovereignty can be intimidating. They require courage and responsibility.
But the ways of tyranny, of abdicating responsibility to false authority figures is collusion in a falsehood, is self-sabotage, is only putting off the pain of facing the Truth: that your life is your responsibility.
And as Leah Grossman once said to me: responsibility is not a burden, responsibility is the invitation to the embodiment of the wisdom you already carry.

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Yoga is a four letter word - a few more introductory thoughts

3/8/2022

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‘Satyam eva jayate’ - truth alone prevails - so it is stated in the Mahābhārata epic.
Truth and truthfulness are at the heart of the Indian tradition, and are the life pulse of yoga, the practical school of this broader philosophical tradition.

Satyapratiṣṭhāyām kriyāphalāśrayatvam
When there is establishment in satya - truthfulness - there is concomitance of action and its fruit. So it is said in the Yoga Sūtra. The more one is established in truthfulness, the more reliable one becomes. What one says comes to realisation. One’s actions bring the intended fruit.
In other words, the more one practices truthfulness, the more one becomes established in authenticity, and real authority.
Further, the more we practice and attune to truthfulness, the easier it becomes to discern the false note, and to catch ourselves if we stray from authenticity and truth. The more we orient to truth, the deeper our lived, embodied commitment to it, the closer we gravitate to it. The more we practice truthfulness, the more we enter into ‘confidence’ with it. Truth becomes our friend, our companion. We join ourselves more keenly to the indestructible.

So what then of some of our current so called ‘leaders’?
What of the politician whose daily practice is duplicity? Though really that’s not the way to say it, is it? Because there are so many more than two ‘versions’ of the stories so many of these politicos spin to the public.
What of the person who makes a habit of lying?
Such a person becomes estranged from the truth.
A person who abandons truth, is in turn abandoned by truth and abandoned by genuine authority. Hence the proclivity of so many false leaders to cling more and more to tyrannical imposition and ‘authoritarianism’; to use a dark-shirted, uniformed, faceless mass as the instrument of its armour against its own fragility. Because the elaborate lies are always only a house of cards. They will fall down when the storm of truth blows through. Or, to use a metaphor from the Mahābhārata, the ways of deception are a house of lac, and, irresistibly, inevitably, they will be razed and exposed as the falsehood they are when the fire of truth catches and ashes their intricate deceit.
Still, when we look around, and when we are exposed to the messages spun by these false leaders, it can seem that we are abiding in this house of lac, what to do?
‘What can we do?’ Some might say, throwing their hands in the air.
There is a telling proverb in Sanskṛt: that the sovereign shapes the time, not the other way around. The time, the zeitgeist, the contemporary trends will always exert a certain influence. But the genuine sovereign acts from a deeper, more perennial place, orients from a truer compass, draws succour from a truer source.
So what can we do, when we look around and see so-called leaders who are trapped in delusion, whose daily practice is deceit, of whom we might genuinely wonder whether they may even still be able to recognise truth?
What to do? What yoga has enjoined us to do for millennia.
Reclaim our own sovereignty. Build and rebuild our self-trust. Recalibrate, rehabilitate, reclaim our connection to conscience.
This is possible, yoga tells us.
Though the zeitgeist might tell us it’s impossible.
Yoga reminds us, this requires courage, persistence, consistency, constancy. Again and again, we make and renew the simple, honest effort, wherever we are. This can seem hard, but just a little effort in this direction brings affirming results. This practice is its own reward. It is a self-propelling system, provided we keep at it.
Reclaiming our sovereignty. It’s what this yoga is for.

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Saluting the Sun

12/13/2021

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Saluting the Sun

‘I need to clear my mind
Sometimes I have these voices in my head, I don’t know where they come from
What can I do?’

So you live on this beautiful planet
So, I stand on the ground, feel the earth beneath my feet. Close the eyes and feel. Feel how the Earth is always supporting me.
As I exhale I exhale out of the soles of my feet and give energy back to the earth, to thank my Mother for always supporting me. I breathe away the energies that no longer serve me, returning them to the Earth that knows how to recycle.
After a few breath cycles I feel the energy of the exhalation extending down, down through a powerful root network that reaches to the very centre of the Earth. I feel myself connected to this rooted, stable centre. I breathe in the generous support of Mother Earth with gratitude and I feel a buoyant spacious energy moving up through all parts of my body, all the way to the crown of my head.
I visualise the beautiful golden light of the Sun above me. I feel its irresistible rays shining down and inundating every cell of my body.
As I exhale now I feel this golden light infusing me and nourishing the root netweork that reaches down to the crystal core of the Earth. Breathing in I feel that rich support and buoyancy. Breathing out I feel my whole being inundated with the golden light of the rays of the Sun.
I continue like this for a few breath cycles.

Now, breathing in I feel the space of my body and the energy it exudes. Breathing in I feel and appreciate the subtle lateral expansion across my body. Breathing out I feel elongation and space the length of my spine.

I give thanks to my body, to the breath of life.
I give thanks the earth for holding me. I give thanks to the sun for nourishing me.
I remember that I have so much to be thankful for.
May I walk here with kindness and bring to life the gifts of my birth.

I move with reverence, embodying gratitude for my senses and for my body and for my home, this beautiful earth.
This day, let me do all I can to honour life.
This day, let me move to make life more beautiful, let me be generous, let me be ready to share, ready to receive, ready to bless and be blessed.
My movements my prayer, my speech a song of praise, my song my celebration, my work my expression of honour and gratitude.

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Killing me softly

12/11/2021

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Photo credit @julialehmanfineart

Killing me softly
 I heard he sang a good song, I heard he had a style
And so I came to see him, and listen for a while
And there he was this young one, stranger to my eyes
Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
Killing me softly with his song

In a certain sense, yoga asks that we ‘kill ourselves’, that we ‘chop off our own heads’. When we recognise that we are not living in as integrated way as we might, and we’d like to do something about it, we can represent this as ‘dying’ to limitation so as to be ‘born again’ in a fuller realisation of our truer selves. 
Yoga begins when we own that we do not know, that we don’t quite have it all figured out, when we recognise that we are not living in as integrated way as we might, and that we could do something about it. Stated another way, we might say that yoga asks us to make ‘killing ourselves’ a practice. Not in a violent way, but softly, gently even, shedding the skins that no longer fit, that no longer allow the appropriate expression of our soul’s essence, so as to make space for a wholler self to emerge. 
This process is represented and encoded symbolically in many spiritual traditions. It is one of the symbolic teachings of Jesus dying on the cross. At Golgotha — place of the skull — where the blood from the crown of thorns runs down to the roots of the earth, Jesus is crucified and Christed. His limiting sense of himself is dissolved in the recognition of his indwelling divinity and he rises again in Christ-consciousness. Amidst the symbolism of the cross is also that of the place of yoga, where are resolved all polarities and where all pairs of opposites meet and draw forth each other’s complementary potential. One example from the yoga tradition is Vināyaka having his head chopped off to become Gaṇeśa. 
These archetypal representations are dramatic and memorable. They are often distilled into condensed, symbolic renderings, but they encode an ongoing and cyclical process. Yoga is a practice, we have to keep doing it. And anything we are going to keep doing for the long haul, we have to learn to be able to do it softly, gently almost, in a sustainable, nourishing way. Steadily, we invite more and more recognition of our deathless essence. Eventually, we reside in the recognition beyond limited identity. 
Yoga, always practical, recognises that we learn from the pairs of opposites. Imbalances teach us about balance. The experience of discord can help us tune to our true centre. Yes, we can learn from pain and from the hard times but we can also learn from pleasure and good times.
Life is short, but yoga plays the long game. This is time-tested wisdom, not the one-step-forward-two-steps-backwards of the Babylon system. One leap forward, several steps backward is inefficient. Of course, those superficially unprecedented steps forward and those eye-catching, attention-grabbing, miasma-inducing leaps forward can be very distracting-beguiling-deluding, but if we want genuine change, lasting transformation, then it’s slow and steady wins the race. Which is why we have to ‘kill ourselves’ softly. Why we have to invite the transformation of the accustomed, previously established mind-ego complex identity to dissolve, relatively speaking, ‘pleasantly’.
 I heard he sang a good song, I heard he had a style
And so I came to see him and listen for a while

We need to listen, not just for a moment, but for a sustained, long while. Constancy and steadiness are foundational in yoga. One thing this means is that the discipline of practice needs to come from love, from alignment, from congruence. If it is forced, it will likely break and falter under duress, will likely be forgotten or neglected when things are going really well. Practice has to be what we feel genuine devotion for.
Practice works because it is its own reward. When we invite ourselves into a place of deeper joy and greater being, it brings forth an affirmative quality. When we experience greater congruence, the tendency or previous habit of incongruence is shown and proven to be less than optimal, less than healthy, less than satisfying, in the direct view of our integrated system. With this direct experience, we come to know now that a different way of feeling and experiencing is possible. What we need next is to continue inviting this type of experience. The clinging to previous habits is likely linked to survival instincts and the protecting of old wounds. To overcome that we need to build confidence, trust and faith. Regularity, constancy, steadiness is the recipe for this. 
It is not that we are conning ourselves, rather, exposing ourselves, regularly, to new possibilities, to new vistas of being. We may begin dipping our toes in the water — mmm, it’s alright — we start going in deeper, up to our knees, up to our waist, up to our necks. After a while, putting our heads in feels more tempting than intimidating. With continued regularity and steadiness, we come to a point where we dive in freely and continue to invite our whole being to be infused with the flavour of savoured, lived, integration: the type of experience which slowly, steadily, softly ‘kills’ off more and more of our limiting, divisive, false beliefs, which acclimatises us to the mystery of the deep, that helps us learn to breathe easy in the not knowing that is intrinsic to our human condition, while opening us up more and more to the oceanic perspective that is our innate potential.
I have also previously spoken on this theme in the YOGA Top 40 on the jamesboagyoga youtube channel 

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On puerarchy and bully boys

12/10/2021

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'I strive for an education that teaches us to think, and against an education that trains us to obey...

I saw this on the wall of a school building in Puerto Escondido, Mexico earlier this year.

I have thought to share it for a while. One idea it prompts in me is about the puerarchy we need to dissolve... what do I mean? In recent years, many people talk about 'the patriarchy', but often in ways I don’t find entirely convincing. I would suggest that we do not really live in a ‘patriarchy’. For me, that would imply responsible fatherhood, patrimony, the respectful passing on of culture, building on inheritance in positive, evolutionary ways. Instead, I would suggest, we are dominated not by a paradigm of the mature masculine, but of immature, boorish bully boys, a puerarchy. The mentality of throwing weight around, 'dominating' others to ostensibly 'show off their strength', but really to mask their fear and weakness.
One of the playground bully's classic tactics is to get others to do things that don't make sense, that make the bullied victim look (and feel) stupid while validating and pumping up the bully's sense of power and domination. As the bullies humiliate and terrorise the other, they syphon some of the others’ power and this adds padding to the bullies’ armour.
'Why am I doing what I am doing?'
This is one of the most important questions in yoga practice.
It is also the question prompted by one of the most important lessons of my schooling:
'Because s/he told me to',
'because everyone else is/was doing it’, are NOT good reasons to do anything.
'Does it accord with my conscience?' 'Is it the right thing to do?' These are the questions we need to check in with.
How to deal with these bullies?
Do not comply with their impositions.
Do not dance to their tune.
Do your own dance, fearless, looking them in the eye and letting them know that your will is not subject to being dominated by a fear-driven bully, so craven that he has to throw his weight around to feel safe. Demonstrate that you will not let your power be siphoned off to prop up their false, deluded construct of dominion. See through the bullies’ veneer, their sickening schtick, see the scared little boys. See them with firmness, with pity, with compassion, and with unshaking resolve to stay true to the pilot of your conscience.

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On the longing for village and conversation

9/8/2021

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I am finding the lack of village more and more painful to bear, the isolation, the lack of engaged, supportive community of shared ethos. I want to live amidst people willing to witness, support, inquire at the level I feel is honest and necessary. This is one of the things I have found so painful this last year: the absence, or at least the misleading presentation of the absence, of honest discourse in mainstream public view, the preponderance of negligent narratives, the wilfull and determined ‘ignoring’ of inconvenient, holistic perspectives, the deluge of propaganda, the avalanche of fallacious reasoning given a free pass and repeated airing on so-called ‘respected news channels’, senseless censorship and an unwillingness to have an honest discussion, to own or acknowledge that we do not know; and with this unwillingness, an absence of truthfulness, of accountability and responsibility. Now some might say that a ‘steered’, directed discourse, a ‘convenient’ and ‘political’ narrative to ‘shepherd’ the populace where ‘we want them to go for their own good’ is the best policy. This does not wash with me. It does not pass my gut check.
Satyam eva jayate - truth alone prevails. In truth, we will find appropriate steps forward, not when we lie and dissemble and smother voices that illumine reality in ways that jar us. Maybe we need to be jarred. Maybe we need to make some changes in the way we relate to ourselves, each other and our ecos, our home Mother Earth. Fixated on an agenda hubristically dictated by some centralised yet tiny, parochial group of powerholders, will we not barricade ourselves against emerging insights? Is being hellbent on adherence to a ‘prescribed’ way not just another way to demonstrably prove that the road to hell is paved with good intentions?
I find it somewhat maddening-saddening: is the drive to dominate, suppress, steer and shepherd not what has brought us here, into this mess?
In this situation, where Mother Nature is howling for our renovated attention.
Is it not the hubristic mania for domination and control that has continued to exacerbate our problems?
Where does this hubris come from, this insane wilfulness to dominate nature?  
A few ideas.
Is it perhaps at least in part related to fear of death? As Yudhiṣṭhira, in the Mahābhārata, famously responds when quizzed what is the strangest thing in the world? - ‘That death is the only certainty for every human, yet we each act as if it will not come for us’. We cannot control life, we cannot control death. Did some man cower in the face of the mystery of life and death and then act out against life from this wounding, motivated by vengeance, seeking to dominate what we never can?
Did some man find his vitality choked, his strength and ‘prowess’ blown asunder by the mesmerising, powerful presence of a woman inhabiting annd radiating her vital essence? And then, shamed by what his surrounding ‘culture’ has taught him to be his weakness, take it out on the rest of the world, on Mother Nature herself?
Life cannot be controlled. It is an erotic - in the true sense of the word - dance, an erotic dance of mutually alluring and actually complementary forces. The different parts work together and flourish in a dynamic dance of partnership.
Domination, control, suppression, this never works. You cannot kill the spirit. The ingenuity of life and its innate intelligence to express itself in ever fresh evolutionary ways will not be stopped. Try to confine life, the pulsating, throbbing force of creativity? It will come out sideways. It will come out as one of my Indian teachers describes it, as ‘perversion’: ‘each person having their own version’ that is not in keeping with reality, with the greater balance, health, harmony of the whole, that is not in accord with cosmic rhythm.
Remedial possibilities:
Can we please start having honest conversations?
Can we make a diligent, committed practice of looking with rigour, discipline and calmness into the places we have preferred, or been trained, to ignore? Can we make the heroic effort: diligent, sustained, daily, again and again, to penetrate through the veils of our conditionings? To decolonise the landscape of our thoughtforms?
We are human beings, amazing creatures. Our body-borne consciousness, our animated selves remain a great mystery. The honest scientists acknowledge this, and that there is so much more that we do not know than we do. Those who assert that “Science’ knows’/that ‘we have it all worked out now’, I would suggest are deluded, trapped in the ultimately self-sabotaging and so often massively destructive and violent pantomine of ‘dominance culture’ and megalomania.
We cannot control nature and life. Yet how blessed we are to participate in life and nature, to be part of it. Verily, we are nature. Born, we will die. In between those two great changes we will experience change. Let’s face the music and dance, with the beauty of the amazing intelligence and life force that we are part of.
We are human beings, with but two eyes. There is always more that we cannot see than we can. Yet we each can see something of the Truth. Council circle practice acknowledges this. Symbolically, truth is in the centre of the circle, in that space where meet the spokes of the whole wheel of global reality. None of us can see even the greater part of it. Yet we each can see something of it. When we share our genuine experience and insights honestly, we can bring light to each other’s blind spots.
Please, may we remember how to have a conversation?
Can we not do so much better than this adversarial ’two sides’ tragicomedy? Divide and rule will only tear us apart. Let us remember. Let us gather, and listen, first to ourselves. When we speak, may we share from the heart, from our own experience, not parroting what we have heard, not talking in generalisations or y’knows, but offering our unique, honest voice.
When we listen to others, may we listen heartfully, with our whole being, so we may hear beyond the words and their sometimes triggering associations to the deeper, underlying sense. May we be lean of speech, let us talk about what really matters. May we be spontaneous: let us surprise ourselves. Really listening, giving up planning our crafty response, allowing ourselves to be the conduit for the emerging configuration of our accrued wisdom and our genuine, intuitive presence.
I want to live in communities where we share and converse like this. I know we can. Who wants to join me?


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On injury and health, life and death

9/4/2021

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Photo credit: @julialehmanfineart

On injury and health, life and death


I injured my knee at the beginning of August. A month on, I was asked:
‘How is your knee?’
Well, it is not yet functioning to allow full range of motion. Plyometric training not yet on the menu. Neither am I yet playing football or basketball. But ‘how is my knee?’ I have to say, ‘it is magnificent!’ It is showing me the amazing regenerative power of this conscious, bodily vehicle. It is healing well, and the healing continues. I can just about walk again, such that injury is not apparent to an external observer, no longer needing to limp. Extension and flexion are improving. The ligaments are meshing and strengthening back together providing more supportive cohesion and all kinds of alchemy are happening as the meniscus is repairing.
When I first saw the local osteopath whose energy and holistic approach I greatly appreciate, he suggested that I look to nature and the example of a wild animal. ‘Take yourself to some quiet, sheltered place, and as far as you can, do nothing. The body is in healing mode. Allow it.’ Several days I was extraordinarily tired, as it felt as if the body was directing a lot of energy to healing. The injury and ongoing recovery process have brought many invitations: to be still now, to slow, to tune in more deeply; and as rehabilitative practices now come more to the fore, to feel awe and wonder at the body’s regenerative and curative capacities.
Today, this reminds me of a couple of things:
i. You are a self-healing system!
ii. How fragile we are! What takes so much energy, intelligence, time to build/develop/grow can be destroyed or lost in an instant.
In turn, this reminds me of Paramahansa Yogananda saying ‘meditate as if your hair is on fire!’ Or as a friend shared in the words of another master the other day: ‘I try to live remembering that I have a great dagger hanging just above my head, by no more than a thread.’ In other words: give up this living for tomorrow, this ‘oh, I’ll be happy when I get x,y and z,’ this ‘oh, I’ll do what I want once I’m retired…’ Walking in life, death is our constant companion, always a hair’s breadth away, as close to us as the resonance of our beating hearts. Expansion, contraction, inspiration, expiration, life… and death, reality.
There is a famous passage in the Mahābhārata epic where Yudhiṣṭhira is asked a series of riddles, or almost impossible questions. Perhaps the most famous question of them all: ‘What is the strangest thing in the world?’
To which Yudhiṣṭhira answers: ‘that death will come to all of us, yet we act as if we are each the exception.’
How true. And how easy it is to live lackadaisically, absently.
So, this moment, this day, this life, let me live it fully!
In yoga, sometimes the crowning achievement of a human life is said to be to die in peace, fulfilled, free from rancour or regret. How is this achieved? By making life a steady, cumulative practice of sleeping in peace at the end of every day. How? By attuning to and heeding the gifts of conscience, by living wholeheartedly, welcoming to the gifts of the present.
The recovering injury obliges me to pay closer attention to how I carry myself, how I use the gifts of this day. Sometimes people say that injuries can be great teachers. This accords with something I often say - and need to remind myself of! - Nature is the greatest teacher. And She is always guiding us if we will but open ourselves. Right now, is Mother Nature not singing a clarion song, with a seismic bassline, booming phrases and searing refrains? How loudly must she cry to penetrate the miasma of our busy-ness and conditionings? Can we start really listening and heeding the guidance that the broader web of life is instructing us with? Can we empty out the hubristic human ‘know it all’ and negligent ‘what can I do about it?’ tendencies, and apprentise ourselves, humbly, to the beautiful teacher of Life, while we have the chance?

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Fighting Monkey reflection - 2021 Zero and Wholeness Injury and Health

9/2/2021

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Fighting Monkey reflection - 2021
Zero and Wholeness
Injury and Health


I had been interested in Fighting Monkey for several years. 2020, with all my in-person work cancelled, I was able to join their summer intensive. This year, I returned to Ancient Olympia, looking forward to another week immersed in the Fighting Monkey method.
Now, speaking of the ‘Fighting Monkey method’, I must make clear that I am in no way an official representative of Fighting Monkey (FM). Also, as I understand it from its founders/principal teachers Jozef and Linda - its ‘monsters’ in their words - FM is a method that by design is not fixed, but is intended to help us be more real-world-adaptable. I have heard Jozef emphasise more than once how humans are not machines, and that a good human practice, whatever outer forms it takes, needs to be responsive and adaptable. This accords with my own conviction that practice has to acknowledge and work with the dynamic complexity of natural life. This natural life that includes of course ageing and death. I once heard a beautiful description of the FM method from FM teacher Elke Schroeder, I prapraphrase from memory: ‘I think of it as a method for longevity with virtuosity.’ It’s a method to cultivate growing old gracefully in the sense that it can help us keep celebrating life, however long we are blessed to be here. As Jozef has said, ‘being in love with life, more and more, this is health.’
As with much of the other movement work I have explored I ‘read’ FM through the ‘yogic lens’ that I have come to see the world through. I see it in the context of whole life yoga practice: cultivating harmony, resilience, robust responsiveness, equivision, equipoise in the dynamic field of life; deepening practical, embodied understanding of ourselves and broader life; working with the reality of human nature; honouring the pulsations/cycles of life and cooperating with the nature we are.
One of the constituent elements of FM practice is Zero Forms. There is a lot one could say about this. Again, let me make clear, this is my take on it from my experience of it. Others, especially those who have worked with the FM method in a much more immersive and long-term extended way might have very different things to say. Anyway, amongst what I understand about it: zero forms is a part of practice that allows us to tune in to where we are now. Moving the body in a fairly measured, often (though by no means exclusively) slow, always attentive way, allows a practitioner to check in with the anatomy and physiology. Zero Forms often involves moving the spine and the joints, observing the quality of flow and connectivity through the energy ‘corridors’ of the body. It is a great example of what is sometimes referred to as ‘stacking’: doing many things at once but not multi-tasking. It is a focused practice, yet it aims simultaneously in multiple directions. It brings a broad spectrum of nutrients into the system all at once. It tonifies the organs, it cultivates concentration, multi-sense observation and integrated awareness, it begins to invite fluid, rhythmic coordination between different layers of the body’s intelligence and constituent powers; it stimulates the immune system, and depending on how one works with the movement, it can be used to ground, to quieten, to stimulate, to energise, to strengthen, to cleanse and so on. In other words, while some of the outer forms and some of the subtle aspects of the discipline are different, zero forms has a good deal in common with my morning ‘yogic movement practice’ of the last ten-fifteen years. I draw on lots of different modalities: from the realm of ‘classic modern yogāsana’, from things I learnt playing and training for sports, things I have learnt from various teachers over now more or less forty years of daily movement practice. In the last decade or so, people encountering the way I work with movement are sometimes surprised, puzzled, excited, inspired, and sometimes disappointed! ‘Is this yoga?’ ‘Er, is this tai chi?’ ‘Mmm, is this some kind of dance?’ ‘What style of yoga is this?’ ‘Where can I find this type of yoga if I’m not practising with you?’
When I give myself to yogic movement practices in the morning I am doing my best - which is often so far from what I aspire to - to cultivate steadiness and harmony, to set myself up to navigate the day a little more skilfully and joyfully. So the outer form of what I do can be very different day to day, week to week, and may vary considerably depending what environment or climate I am in, what other types of movement or exertion I am likely to experience that day or during that period, and more basically how I am feeling/doing/experiencing.
When facilitating movement practices, I share what I feel is appropriate then and there, depending for example on the setting, the context, the time available and who is in the group.
However, whether in personal practice or facilitating group exploration, I might say that I am aiming towards the ‘zero state’. What do I mean? To answer this I am going to refer first to something that has landed with me from this year’s FM intensive experience, and then share below a section of the notes from a course I gave earlier this year on Indian Mythology.
This year, my experience of Fighting Monkey was somewhat different from what I had been anticipating. I returned motivated to immerse myself in the embodied, active, participative learning experience. Though challenging, I had found the work, especially in the realm of rhythm and coordination deeply valuable, and with the various restrictions over the last months, I had not accessed any of this type of work in person since the previous intensive. So I booked my place, and traveled to Olympia looking forwards to working in a group and to inhabiting the empty vessel, blank slate, receptive state of studentship as fully embodied as I could.
However, before Linda even demonstrated the first steps of the week’s coordinations on the first morning, I injured my left knee, quite badly. The how, why and what of that is a whole other reflection, but suffice to say, I was not thereafter able to participate in so much of the physical practices. Nonetheless, I attended everything and continued to practice zero forms in the morning within the limits the injury described. One afternoon though, feeling the need to buoy the damaged joint in the water, I left the session early.
Later that evening, another man on the course told me how Jozef had ‘been talking about me’ in what he thought was ‘quite a nice way, when speaking about the thinking behind zero forms. I didn’t see you there, but I thought I should tell you.’ From what was relayed to me, I understand Jozef said something like:
‘Zero is different every day. What is my zero now? Look, if James comes to zero forms expecting his knee to be as it was before Monday, he is destroyed, desolate, but he comes and works where he is, where he can.’
What I understood reflecting on this, is that if I show up as ‘zero’ as I can, I give myself the opportunity to experience as fully as possible.
I did not have the FM experience I had anticipated, but I still had a great time, it was still a positive, nourishing, instructive experience.
Zero and whole, fullness and emptiness.
Are these really such opposites?
Perhaps we can see them as different ways of expressing or allowing the same totality of experience.
But do I allow myself a total experience?
Or do I confine myself in partiality?
Do I cling to ideas or thought forms that block my total presence in the here and now?
Do I hark back to previous ‘golden times’, or fixate on some imagined future state and so basically rob myself of the chance to experience fulfilment in the only moment I can ever experience anything which is now?
But letting myself be zero, letting myself be present, this is not always so easy. Which is why Fighting Monkey is a practice. Which is why yoga is a whole life, lifelong practice.  
 Yoga is a practice that invites us to work with the whole cycle, the full spectrum of experience.
And the full spectrum of experience includes death, the only certainty in life.
Reflecting further on the zero, I wondered, what will happen if I do not practice the zero regularly?
Will I be more likely to clog myself up with unhelpful thought forms and restricting patterns that hinder my living authentically fully?
If I do not practice zero, what happens when things get taken away ‘unexpectedly’?
The crowning achievement of lifelong yoga practice is sometimes said to be the capacity to die in peace, in fulfilment, at ease, in a state of at-one-ment, devoid of rancour or regret.
If I do practice the zero, surely I will be able to meet death and the inevitable losses of life that little bit more easily.


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