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YOGA and SPORT part two

2/11/2020

Yoga and Sport part two - The sport of yoga

Recreation, sport, competition and competence

Competition, as it is often understood these days, could be seen to go against yoga.
By definition, yoga is all inclusive. It leaves nothing out. Yoga cannot leave anything out, because it is about connecting and integrating all the parts. It is about unity in the middle of our world of so many dualities. And unity can be real and sustainable only if it is genuinely inclusive.

In recent times, as I write, one has not needed to look far to see the ugly face of competition in the sporting arena: a win at all costs attitude, sports ‘cultures’ full of abuse and corruption. Yet still, one can also see examples of the sense of companionship and respect that can come from competition/competitive endeavour, and the way that honest, respectful competitiveness between well-matched rivals can help everyone grow. When competitors play fairly, they can spur each other on and drive each other to growth: the competitive arena can become a place where everyone is edified.

When competitive sport is such, everyone is a winner. Each participant is complicit in the growth and ‘going beyond’ of the others. When we compete, seek and strive together honestly and openly, our competence grows, and our understanding of ourself grows.

And really, this is what competition means. Etymologically:
Verb - Compete, from com – together and petere – to seek together
Noun – competition, strife of rivals towards a common goal

And: Competence – the ability to work towards a goal

Considering the root meaning of the word then, we could say that competition means to work together towards an aspiration, towards something all parties working together yearn for. And competence is our ability to do this.

This sounds a lot like using a technique, or a support (an ālambana in the Sanskṛt yogic terminology), as the means to invite all our constituent powers into the experience of working together so that we can feel a real satisfaction.
Yoga practice is about developing, remembering, and reclaiming this innate competence.
As such, we might say that yoga is a ‘competitive sport’: not in the sense of a game with winners and losers, but as a re-creational game, in which every participant can be a ‘winner’. It is the play, or the game, of inviting all our constituent powers to work together so they may access and reveal their deeper longing.

Nowhere to go, nothing to do
Of course, there are those who say: No, no, no, no! There is nothing to do, there is nowhere to go, you are already it! And they may be right, but most times when I hear this, I feel ‘the lady doth protest too much’, and I am not convinced.

It may well be true that I am already all that I seek. However, if my current habits, patterns and ways of thinking, seeing and holding myself continually remind me that I am not quite satisfied, that I’m not quite playing the game of life as skilfully as I might, that I am not drinking from life’s rich cup as deeply as I might, then by Thunder I’d better do something about it!

If I do nothing, then I know what happens: I drop into depressed apathy, or I notice I have all this angst, this pain, this grief and desire that propels me to do. Or, more basically, I need to defecate, I need to feed myself, because as Kṛṣṇa reminds us so beautifully and powerfully in the Gītā: doing nothing is just not an option for a human being. The ‘choice’ to do nothing is itself an action, a ‘karma’, and it will have consequences. As a human, we are a living, breathing, moving agent: action is our nature, and we cannot avoid it. The mere sustenance of our life demands action. Yoga, the practical school of Indian Philosophy, holds no truck with the armchair intellectualiser theorising about his true nature, but exhorts us to be all we really are and demonstrate it in the way we conduct our lives.

Action is inevitable, the question then is how? How do I do it, this thing called life? How do I make it? How do I play it?

Make it a sport, make it a game, make it a play, make it a recreation.
Take it easily, but seriously.
Get in the game, be here, now! But know, remember, it is a game.
Not inhibited by concern about the result, just allow myself to enjoy the experience.
Freeing ourselves from the weight of past impressions and the anxieties over future outcomes by engaging fully with this moment, the ‘actionless action’, the ‘effortless effort’, the skilful means, the karma yoga, the action that is its own reward becomes our reality.

This yoga is a game worth playing.

Playing like this, I am no longer concerned by winning or losing. Inhabiting the moment like this, so fully, so whole-system nourishingly, is its own victory, its own triumph, its own reward.

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On the history of yoga āsana

2/10/2020

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An image of Śiva, Yogīśvara, who traditionally is recognised as the source of yoga āsana and haṭha yoga methodologies. I am not sure whose artwork this is, if anyone knows please tell me so I can credit it. This picture was sent to me by a friend in an email one time

On the History of Āsana

A few years ago was published a book advancing a very narrow and very particular thesis on the ‘origins’ of physical yoga practice and modern āsana. In this book, the author suggests that the postures and practices of what is sometimes referred to as modern yogāsana are just adaptations of British gymnastics and an outgrowth of the desire in late 19th/early 20th century India to reaffirm a culture of physical strength after the centuries of oppression under foreign invaders. Certainly, these factors may of course have had some significant influence on the spread and development of modern, body-based yoga practices. However, I find the idea that they are main sources for physical yoga unconvincing and disrespectful. One of the principal ways the author who advanced this thesis likes to supposedly ‘justify’ or ‘substantiate’ his ideas is by inserting the name of some other published academic in brackets, as if their work is undeniable, thoroughly substantiated ‘Gospel truth’, which it often isn’t. As well as most pages being peppered with other academics’ names in parentheses, another outstanding feature of the book is what it leaves completely absent. The author completely avoids/ignores/discounts the traditional view of the origin of yogāsana and other related physical practices in the Indian tradition.

With the complete dismissal of any Indian physical culture before the 19th century, it’s almost as if the author thinks that nobody had ever moved, or danced, in India before they got sick to the back teeth with the British. And further, as if in ancient India: a civilisation of great learning, of depth, beauty and thorough consideration of the whole human being; there was no culture of physical artfulness, no methods of dance, movement or martial arts to help people inhabit the gift of a body more easily.

Such an idea just does not make sense.

However, not only is it nonsensical, I would say it also smacks of an astounding arrogance that can be seen on the part of some ‘Western’ commentators on the Indian tradition: “Oh the Indians, these brown people, couldn’t possibly have developed such a refined and well thought out system of physical health, could they?” Couldn’t they? Again, this view makes no sense. What it does do though is perpetuate the distorting legacy and blinkered perspective that seems to have infected the Western academy going back to the days of the 19th century. At that time, Europeans had started to ‘discover’ some of the treasures of the Indian tradition. This included Sanskṛt, with its oceans of extant literature in so many fields of human knowledge, with a grammar far more sophisticated and a literature much more extensive than the Greek and the Latin. The Sanskṛt linguistics went way beyond anything any European scholar had even dreamed of at the time. But the 19th century Europeans just couldn’t swallow, accept, or admit - or perhaps they were so blinkered by their conditioning that they just weren’t able to see - that these brown people had developed a culture in some ways so much richer than theirs. That while their European ancestors had been stuck in the Dark Ages, these Indians had been pushing the frontiers of human understanding for millennia and enjoying a civilisation far more advanced than had ever been glimpsed in the Europe of the time. The 19th century ‘scholars’ did notice however, so many cognates in the Sanskṛt, Greek and Latin. So, in order to explain how Greek, Latin and Sanskṛt had so much in common, the European ‘discoverers’ made an invention. Rather than honestly consider the vastly abundant evidence in front of them, in the form of a truly amazing Sanskṛt and proto-Sanskṛt Vedic literature, the Europeans concocted the idea of an ‘Indo-European root language’, a language for which there was no material evidence. But no matter, that suited their arrogant, blinkered, falsely superior perspective much better than allowing for the possibility that Sanskṛt, a language developed by the peoples of this ‘primitive’ land that they had colonised and pillaged for its vast riches, was perhaps actually the source language. To the chagrin of many contemporary Sanskritists in India, this concocted theory of an ‘Indo-European root language’ is still prevalent and widely accepted today, even though there is still no evidence of such a language that is not Sanskṛt or its earlier Vedic forms.
There is however, plentiful textual evidence to suggest that the civilization in India in the 1500 years both before and after Christ was, in many ways, significantly more advanced than in Europe. There is also plentiful evidence that some Western commentators are not aware how veiled by their cultural conditionings their ‘readings’ of Indian culture are.

Any of my Sanskṛt teachers who were aware of this book were quite horrified and disgusted by it. In particular, by the way it seems to discount the Indian reality of yoga, that Yoga is a central, intrinsic part of the Indian tradition: Vedic, Tantric, Orthodox, Hetorodox, Yoga is there. I would say too that yoga is also part of a global tradition, with many of its core principles evidenced in wisdom traditions from around the world. Still, Yoga is Indian, Yoga is a Sansḳrt word, and a system of classical Indian Philosophy. Yoga as it has come to us in the 21st century has been most thoroughly developed in the traditions of India: a holistic, practical philosophical tradition that deals with the broad spectrum reality of human existence, including our physicality and physical health.

Here is an alternative view on the history of yoga āsana.

The Lord of Yoga is Śiva. Śiva is represented in many ways. As Yogīśvara, he is usually sitting in a radiant example of a steady, easy classic yogāsana such as siddhāsana or padmāsana. His spine is tall, spacious, erect. His aspect serene as he sits on a tiger skin atop a Himālayan peak. The seat on the tiger’s skin demonstrates his mastery over the tremendous powers of incarnation, of his physicality and sensuality, to the degree that he is steadily established in the ‘abode of snow’: the place of clear, pure, pristine, impartial awareness. His clothing is mere ash, reminding us that having fully harnessed the gifts of life consciousness, he is attuned to the essence - to the remainder which abides and which underlies all the material that comes and goes. His adornment is the king cobra, showing us that in the clarity, impartiality and purity of his awareness, the beguiling beauty of nature is his enjoyment, his companion, his friend; it is no danger, poison or snare for him.

In his jaṭa, his locks dreaded by the fusion of the hemispheres of his brain - the joining in yoga of his analytical and intuitive capacities, he holds Gaṅgā, the vivifying river of concious potential, so she can flow smoothly, gently, easily, to nourish the whole field of consciousness, the whole body of life.

In this form, Śiva Yogīśvara can be seen to represent dynamism in stillness. Another way Śiva is represented is as Nāṭarāja, stillness in dynamism. Nāṭarāja is the Lord of the Dance, the five act dance-drama of Creation: the expansion of consciousness, the sowing of life, sṛṣṭi in Sanskṛt; of sthithi, the sustenance of existence, holding the galaxies in their dance; of samāhāra, the drawing back in to its source of the universe; of tirodhana bhāva, of the concealing or veiling of the real deeper nature of existence and consciousness; and of anugraha, grace, or the revelation and remembering of who we really are.

As Nāṭarāja, Śiva is shown as a slender-waisted, androgynously beautiful and graceful dancer. He is four-armed. In one hand he holds the damaru, the twin-headed drum that symbolises the beat, the rhythm, the pulsation of life, the sound of the creation of existence: sṛṣṭi. Another hand is in abhaya mudra, the gesture signifying ‘have no fear’ - sustenance/sthiti. The third hand wields fire, the circle of flames, symbolising the ever-turning, ever-changing wheel of existence, the circle of life, in which he is constantly dancing. The fourth arm makes the shape of an elephant’s trunk. This symbolises the unifying power of yoga as incarnated by Śiva’s elephant-headed son Gaṇeśa. The fourth hand is pointing to the junction point of Nāṭarāja’s lifted, bent knee. This reminds us that it is through yoga, through gathering and harmonising all the members of the group of our being that we can re-member our true selves. Nāṭarāja’s standing foot is on top of a dwarf called Apasmara - forgetfulness. When we reconcile all of who we really are, when we incarnate the integrated Gaṇeśa energy that is our innate potential, we can remember ourselves. We too can come into rhythm, so we can stay steady and balanced, attuned to our constant, conscious essence, amidst the whirling wonder of life.

Śiva Nāṭarāja is also depicted with the locks of his jaṭa flying out horizontally: for the worlds whirl so quickly, he dances so quickly, yet he is serene, graceful, poised and in rhythm.

Sometimes at temples dedicated to Śiva Nāṭarāja, there are sculptures or depictions of the 108 kāraṇa-s of Śiva as the great dancer, the 108 ‘instrumental positions’ that can be deployed to invite a deepening of yoga in our systems.

These postures are graceful, often curved. They include spinal extension and flexion (backward and forward bends), rotations, side bends and various combinations thereof. They move the limbs and orient the physical structure in space so as to activate the innate haṭha technology of our pulsating bodies. Ha is the sun, the solar channel, heating and contracting; ṭha is the moon, the lunar channel, cooling and relaxing. Life is pulsation, a breath cycle, a heart beat. But these are not the only ways in which our miraculous bodies pulsate. For example, if while standing we lift our right leg upwards in front of us, the front of the leg contracts, ha, while the back lengthens and relaxes, ṭha. Just by the way we move and orient ourselves in space we can influence profoundly the way energy and information pulsates and flows in and through our systems.

Traditionally, within the Yoga Tradition, Śiva himself, Yogīśvara, the Lord or Master of yogi-s, Nāṭarāja, the greatest dancer, is said to have bequeathed yogāsana to human beings. Śiva of course also means the kind, benevolent one. And Śiva means consciousness, the container in which all the śakti - the power of consciousness to become manifest as nature for example - exists.

The yogāsana, like all yoga techniques and teachings, are all based on the observation of nature. It is a fruit of the application of consciousness in focused inquiry. This, as far as I can see, is the real origin of yogāsana.

It was not the British colonisers or the American branders who recognised that the way we move our body can have profound impacts on our overall experience and awareness. This is something people have known since the beginning of time.

The 108 kāraṇa-s of Śiva Nāṭarāja, the plentiful evidence in ancient texts of dance and martial arts that harness the innate haṭha capacities of the body are to my mind adequate evidence that India, just like China, has an ancient system of health that includes movement technologies. Indeed, the 108 kāraṇa-s of Nāṭarāja are very akin to many postures in Chinese martial arts and dance. Humans have been harnessing this in-built haṭha technology for millennia. Call it dance, call it haṭha yoga, call it tai chi, chi gung, subtle or internal martial arts, the aim is the same: to harmonise the bodily vehicle and optimise its capacities so that energy can flow in a cohesive, efficient way, so we can more easily stay in rhythm through the ups, downs and tempo changes of life, and we are more empowered to access the subtler dimensions of our conscious potential.

Āsana and haṭha yoga, ‘somatic yoga practice’ is nothing new. The absence of texts with pictures or descriptions of people performing āsana-s, or the dearth on Youtube of footage of people’s ‘morning practice’ from before the Common Era is not evidence that people had no ‘physical’ or body-based practices. After all, these practices are things one does, they are best learned by doing, they are known by the cells and channels of one’s body, not by their descriptions in a book. Physical practices are part of our human heritage. We have a body, it can move in so many ways. It is a storehouse and circuit of energy. The way we move can affect our physical, mental, sensory capacities. The ancients knew this. I feel pretty sure that people have been harnessing and developing the technologies (tantra-s) of haṭha yoga in posture and movement for millennia.

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YOGA and SPORT

2/8/2020

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Haṭha yoga and sport

It is important to remember that haṭha yoga is not merely a sport.
However, as we shall see, it can perhaps be very helpful to consider yoga as a sport, and sport can help us understand what yoga is and how to work with it effectively.

Etymologically, sport is related to the word ‘disport’, which originally had the sense of ‘to carry’ and to ‘export’ which had the sense it still carries of ‘to carry away’.
Sport then, can be seen as a means of diversion, to ‘export oneself’ from the day-to-day.

Sport, Yoga, escape and remembering

Some people play sports as an escape, a way to ‘lose themselves’ and forget about the stresses and worries of the day. These days, many people experience a similar pleasure when attending a yoga class. Flowing, dynamic, vigourous classes are often particularly appreciated by class-goers for their capacity to invite the participant to forget about work, ‘get out of their head’ and sweat away some of their cares.
Nothing wrong with this, but isn't yoga more than a bit of momentary diversion?
Yes, it is. To illustrate, let us consider how ‘sport’ can become yoga.

If we accept that sport has been invented for the sake of fun, for the sake of enjoyment, for the sake of exporting oneself out of a world of cares, worries and burdens, into one of greater freedom and exhilaration, it is perhaps not surprising that when people really get into a sporting activity it can sometimes allow the person to experience yoga. From a certain perspective, yoga too is also about exporting oneself from a state of being pressed down by worry: weighed down by the burden of the past and inhibited by anxiety about the future. Yoga is about accessing the spaciousness of true presence. Yoga practice is about training ourselves in ways that foster our capacity for greater presence: developing patterns of behaving, interacting and relating that allow us to be more fully present in each unfolding moment. Yoga then is not merely an escape, or a diversion, but a means to be able to be more fully here, present and easeful, in the reality of our lives: to become the player rather than the ball getting whacked about, up and down, and all over the place.

If someone is playing a sport and really gets into it, this can invite a cohesive concentration of the whole system. The person's mental, sensing and physical powers all become oriented towards and focused on the same task, whether it's hitting the ball, coinciding/avoiding/moving in the ways necessary for the particular demands of that sport. When the player really gets into ‘the zone’, into a focused, integrated state, it can bring forth a ‘high’, a state in which perception becomes clearer, finer, subtler, broader, in which our normal capacities are superseded and we flow in a type of symphonic harmony with the broader situation.

This flow is a type of samādhi, yogic integration.

This ‘zone’ is a realm of yogic - integrated cohesive expansive – experience.

Sport can thus be a type of tantra.
Any activity that yokes the powers of mind, sense powers, body, emotions and sense of self can be a tantra.

But yoga is more than just sport – Yoga is more than any of the particular tantra-s, means or technologies which can facilitate an experience or deepening of it.

The way of yoga is a broad and inclusive one. A basic practice is to do whatever we are doing with all of ourselves. When we allow this, we often access more of our innate capacities. As we have mentioned, full engagement in a sporting pursuit can lead to a transcendent state, it can ‘change our mind’, elevate our awareness and alert us to subtler realms and capacities.

The flow state, the zone, certain stages of samādhi or yogic integration: these types of ‘high’, ‘expansive’, ‘cleansing’, ‘refreshing’, ‘revelatory’ and ‘soothing’ experiences can certainly be accessed or experienced through sports.
Indeed, we might even consider that the essence of sport, and the reason that these different games were invented, could actually be the deeper longing of the human to export him or herself from the mundane, boxed-in, confined, quotidian realm to a transcendent, expansive plane of experience. Who knows? Perhaps this is the real root of so many of our games. Perhaps sport, like dance and performance arts, really has its roots in sacred ceremony. Perhaps it is really a somewhat devolved and in some cases corrupted and demeaned form of ancient sacred practice. Perhaps it was really developed out of a deep understanding of our need to draw on and celebrate the powers with which spirit expresses itself and moves through us. Whatever its origins, wholehearted engagement in sport can be a practical, yogic means to remind ourselves of our place in the broader scheme of things, to celebrate Life and reaffirm our connection to all of it.

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HAṬHA YOGA TANTRA

2/5/2020

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Haṭha Yoga Tantra

Haṭha yoga is a tantra

Tantra and Yoga are classic examples of Sanskṛt words that encode vast oceans of meaning. Tantra and Yoga are huge, vast topics. I find it somewhat tragic how narrow and attenuated a sense of meaning these words evoke for some people these days. I would suggest that we can all benefit from working with tantric principles to invite yoga more fully into our lives.

Simply stated: yoga is balance, integration, harmony. Who does not want more of these?

Yoga is the experience of oneness, of all-one-ness, of all-togetherness, wholeness, in the middle of the constant change and whirling wonder of nature.

Tantra is the ‘technology’: the ’means’ to work with the reality of ever-changing nature and our multifaceted experience of existence so we can experience yoga.

Yoga comes from the root ‘yuj’ which means to connect, to link the various powers of our individual human nature: our emotions, our sensings, our bodies with their motor and sense powers, our minds and intellects; all of these miraculous powers of which we are constituted. The idea in yoga is that we yoke them to the underlying consciousness that enables and animates them all, so we may integrate them into a cohesive whole.

Tantra can be construed in different ways.
One meaning of the verb ‘tan’ is to expand. The noun ‘tanum’ signifies the body, and it connotes the fragility of our human body as a non-stable entity that is always changing and is susceptible the manifold influences of the broader nature of which it is a part.
The verb root ‘trā’ means to protect.
One of the ways tantra can thus be understood is as the means to protect our body-housed individual consciousness from the natural sense of limitation ‘that flesh is heir to’. Given that the body and the body-borne powers that we experience life through are always subject to change, it is altogether normal that we can become identified with change and limitation. Tantra works with the reality of nature and the phenomenological world of pulsating pairs of opposites to foster integration, harmony and help us expand our limited ideas about who we are and what we are made of.

Haṭha yoga is tantra, because it works with spanda, pulsation, a basic tantra concept.
Ha means sun, heating, expanding
ṭha means moon, cooling, contracting
And yoga means balancing, harmonising
So the term haṭha yoga tells us explicitly what yoga is all about: the harmonisation of the apparent pairs of opposites.
Yoga is the balancing of seemingly opposing forces.
First of all, this means that Yoga is about letting the pairs of opposites meet and get acquainted, get to really know and appreciate each other. Yoga is about working with these forces, allowing for the apparent pairs of opposites to become so deeply intimate that they can join in a type of ‘marriage’. With practice and patience, these different forces and capacities can become more thoroughly and beautifully integrated. As integration deepens, the mutually complementary potential of the different and sometimes seemingly opposed forces or polarities within our being emerges more fully. In such a dynamic, integrated state, these different capacities can then readily and seamlessly work to deepen and sustain harmony, even as life, with all its constant change, ups and downs, continues to whirl about us.
This is establishment in yoga.
And this is yoga āsana.
Āsana means ‘seat’. It is defined in the Yoga Sūtra as sthira sukha meaning steady and easy. Yoga āsana is the seat of sustainable, steady, easy awareness: when we sit, stand, experience, established in that integrated state. In a state of yoga āsana, all of our powers are connected and attuned, and illumined by their connection to the light of our conscience.

It is thus ironic that haṭha yoga or āsana practice is sometimes these days being propagated as some limited outlying branch of yoga or a type of ‘partial’ yoga, a merely physical practice, a mat practice, or some kind of fitness option; because haṭha yoga, just like all the other yogas, karma yoga, jñāna yoga, bhakti yoga, rāja yoga for example, is yoga. That is the principle that counts, to connect, to integrate, to ‘yogify’.

So certainly, yes, while many haṭha yoga techniques use the body and the bodily powers more overtly, more grossly and a little more outwardly demonstrably than some other yoga modalities or techniques, if these physical practices are really yoga then these techniques will also invite the powers of our senses, of our minds, intellects and our hearts into the moment, into the movement, into the practice: into the opportunity to train our innate capacity for all-oneness, for togetherness, for wholeness, balance and integration.

There is no such thing as partial yoga.

There is no such thing as ‘just the physical yoga practice’! One can do physical practices that makes use of shapes or forms that are derived from yoga methodologies, or that ‘look like’ yoga. But if the practice we are working with is yoga, then it will always be more than just merely physical, or merely mental, or merely intellectual, or merely emotional, because yoga is about inviting the whole system into the practice.
Yoga is always about inviting the whole system into the present moment. Tantra-s, such as haṭha yoga, are thoroughly tested technologies, or methods, that work with the reality of life, our human condition and constitution, to help train us more deeply in the ways of whole system presence and integration.

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YOGA and SPORT part two

On the history of yoga āsana

YOGA and SPORT

HAṬHA YOGA TANTRA

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