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What is Practice - Mysore morning freewrite 4th March 2018

4/4/2018

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What is practice?

Life is practice. Life, as it is said, is the field of bondage, and the field of liberation.
Yoga techniques are preparation for the practice that is life.

We get what we need. If we have to grunt and sweat through extended, convoluted āsana regimes, if we have to work our way through myriad meditation techniques, let us not delude ourselves about the grandeur of our practice. We are novices, so unadvanced, so cowed, so estranged from our true power and capacities that we need these structured resources to help us regain a sense of our internal compass.

The best ‘yogis’ I have met, without exception, do not knowingly ‘practice yoga’. What they do is live their lives, as themselves.

We get what we need.

We get the techniques we need.

Sometimes our pain, our anger, frustration, disappointment, sorrow, self-sabotage, the degree of our fragmentation, is too much for us to look at.

Techniques help us gradually reclaim our sense of self.

But perhaps the advanced practitioner is boldly facing life, meeting it whole-system on, and so harnessing and harvesting the gifts that nature is constantly offering us to realise who and what we really are.

The glory of nature is its being itself. The apple tree does not try to grow peaches or acorns. The oak does not try to weep like a willow.

When we try to be what others want us to be, we ‘sin’ against nature, we miss ourselves.

Generally, we get techniques from others. Making them our own by working with them discerningly in our own way is an important step towards greater independence, greater freedom, greater kaivalya - all-one-ness: that stage of nascent liberation where we are satisfied in and of ourselves.

It is said that all of us are practising, whether we realise it or not. Life is the practice. Yet it is certainly possible to get lost in technique, to ‘escape’ the real work, the real practice, by making our practice so ‘busy’, that we lose ourselves in it. And we may lose ourselves just as thoroughly as the salaryman caught up in the rat race, so busy working for his pay, providing for his family, and doing all the ‘accoutrement activities’ that his status, family and colleagues expect of him that he has no time to actually notice, never mind fathom and truly know himself.

Sometimes the ‘practitioner’ looks on such rat-racers with scorn.

Yet the masters remind us, again and again, that the other is another you, another me, we only see what is in us. So perhaps this scorn or disdain is really an unacknowledged self-loathing, and perhaps it’s really about our not showing up as fully as we say we do or would like to.

As long as our actions, speech and ideas are divided, we will suffer. As the subhāṣita (Sanskṛt wisdom proverb) renders it:

Manasyekam vacasyekam karmaṇyekam mahātmanā
Manasyanyat vavcasyanayat karmaṇyanyat durātmanā


The one whose thought, speech and action are one is a great soul. The one whose thoughts are one thing, speech another and action different again is a soul in torment and pain.
…
Certainly, technique is tremendously valuable, but perhaps only when we remember what it is for: to foster this type of whole system cohesion. So we might check, is our ‘practice’ actually helping us practice yoga? Is it helping us develop this greater understanding and integration of ourselves. Or are we hiding behind the sheen of its lustrous exterior? A pure gold chain can bind us just as well as a rusty iron one.

The first teaching in yoga is to look, to be present, to observe, to attune to the witness we really are. The first imperative verb (of instruction and injunction) in the Bhagavad Gītā is paśya ‘look’. The first imperative verb in the Āditya Hṛdayam, in Rāmayāṇa, the hymn of instruction that sage Agastya imparts to Rāma at the moment of his greatest challenge: when Rāma feels ‘out’ of yoga, wracked by doubt, burdened by his past, and all the suffering he has witnessed, anxious about the future, and the possible outcome; the first imperative verb here is sṛṇu ‘listen’.

Yoga techniques are designed and intended to train us in the ways of steady, sustainable vigilance: to deepen our capacity to see and hear, so we might see and hear beyond the confines of our habitual ways of perceiving.

Yogāsana, the seat of yogic awareness is described classically by Patañjali in the Yoga Sūtra as being, at once, both sthira and sukha: both steady and easy. In other words, the seat of yogic awareness is characterised by a presence that is easy and relaxed enough to be truly sustainable.

One of the cornerstones of yoga practice is svādhyāya - self-study. It is our responsibility to check that our practice is serving us, not becoming another entrapment, or entanglement in our life. As my friend Boris Giorgiev says: ‘don’t make your yoga practice another problem in your life. Let it support your life.’ Let it serve you!

As it has been said: ‘The Sabbath is for the man. The man is not for the Sabbath.’

So as I consider all this, I notice that I have noticed myself noticing or perceiving others as ‘escaping’ in practice: exhausting themselves with ‘intense’ practices, filling their days piling technique on technique.

Which points to the recognition that perhaps I’ve been doing something very similar myself!

Yet all the while, all around, Nature, the guru is inviting us to be fully here now.

So can we let the practice serve us? Can we let it support us? Can we summon our discerning awareness to check if we are working with the practice, or if we are hiding in its busyness?



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The Glorious Yoga Practice of Kirtan

2/13/2013

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Last Sunday a young child came to kirtan. I realised ‘after the event’, that I had missed the opportunity to really invite her into the practice in a way that could resonate with her and help her to participate so she might enjoy the afternoon ‘with the adults’. Her first language wasn’t English, but French, and the following morning I found myself speaking as if to her to initiate and invite her into the practice of kirtan as yoga. As I did this I realised what a gift this was as it prompted me to articulate some of my feelings about kirtan that I have not set down in words before. Then I thought to translate what I said into more general terms. And that is what is written here.

The glorious practice of kirtan
February 2013

First, sit down, relax and allow yourself to become receptive, as receptive as if you were preparing to receive a special gift from your beloved who knows you better than anyone ever has...

Kirtan uses the consciousness-shaking power of sound to help us tune in to the glorious fullness that is our essence – and that’s why it’s called kirtan, from the Sanskrit root kīrt – meaning to glorify.

There are many ways to do kirtan. As Rumi is often translated: ‘there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground in prayer’. I love many styles of kirtan. One form I find particularly expansive, opening and transportative is the simple a capella kirtan that I share pretty much most places I go, and here at the sound chamber of a house where I live when I’m in Mysore.

When we gather for this type of kirtan, we gather with purpose, we gather to practice yoga. So what happens when we gather to practice yoga through kirtan? First, what does yoga mean? To unify. When we work with a yoga practice, we use a support to facilitate the experience of unification. In kirtan we take the support of sound and the voice.

Taking this support, it’s very simple. We listen. It’s the listening that counts.

We open all our sensitivity, all our sense organs. We don’t just listen with the ears. We feel the sound, the frequency, the vibration. We taste, we savour the sound and that allows us to sing not only with the voice, but with all of ourselves, the whole of our body, all our senses, so it becomes a very sensual act, all the senses integrated, and so it becomes an act of creating love, of making love, of becoming really very present, so we can offer ourselves to the sound, and to the energy of this sound. Because the energy of this unifying sound is love. Love: which unites everything; including that which seems impossible to unite.

During the practice, it is possible that we may hear a word we have never heard before, that doesn’t matter; just listen, carefully, attentively, and you may find you’ll be able to repeat that word!  When we really listen, the more we really listen, the more we will access our innate capacity to recreate this sound. Because this sound, whatever it might be, is just one sound, one expression of the myriad possibilities of the infinite creative potential which is present, which lives, which vibrates in the heart of every human being.

During the practice, another thing that’s significant and very useful, is the collective energy. When we gather in this way, it gives each of us the possibility to experience at an individual level a sense of integration, yet thanks in part to the collective engagement. We do the practice together, but each of does it in a unique way.

Still, a key support is the energy of the group. So, if during the kirtan you need to move, to stretch, to get up, no problem. But how can you get up, or move your body in a way which is united with the energy of the song, of the kirtan? If you go to the bathroom for example, the opening and closing of the door has plenty of potential to make a noise, so how can you open the door in a sensual way, to aid the energy of the kirtan? When you wash your hands, your intention will reverberate in and through the room. So when you wash your hands: ’listen’. Make yourself receptive and make it an act of kirtan! Feel the glory of the liquid: the gloriously refreshing quality of the water. And when you feel that, everyone in the room will feel that. If you do it in an absent-minded way, we’ll also feel that, and that might create a slightly dissonant influence.

Also, in this house, I recognised for the first time this last Sunday when a young child came to kirtan; there are no toys here, yet it can still be an adventure playground. For me, I don’t consider this place my house, more a temple, a sacred space, a place for sincere sharing in satsang. In a temple, we don’t usually find toys. However, what do we find? A temple is conceived and constructed in such a way that its design and conception invites us to explore the internal realm so we can then see the external with new eyes. When we play, real play is exploration: to explore our capacities, our knowledge, our awareness, our sense of ourselves. So in kirtan, the playground is in the energetic sphere of our focused voices and where that resonates inside us: this technique and practice is an invitation to explore this inner realm. The most important thing is to listen.

So let’s do an experiment: listen! Yes, stop, and really listen... And when we really listen, what happens? We hear and become aware of those things that are always present, but which can escape our notice when our attention becomes scattered or dispersed. When we really listen, we can hear the rhythm of life: the pulsation of the heart, the pulsation of the breath. Yoga means listening, being attentive, being present. And when we really listen, with all our senses, with all parts of ourselves, we will be guided in our own song.

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