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Practical Patañjali - March 2022

3/30/2022

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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Practical Patañjali - March 2022

Beyond the Bright Lights

Responsibility and the invitation

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

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