Responses to fifteenth class...

Insight during the initial meditation led by Hansa:

I am cramming so much reading of yoga into my head that I am losing sight of my actual experience of my yoga practice, and it’s becoming difficult to separate out my experience from the second-hand experience and heavy glosses put on my experience by reference to others.

A couple of thoughts in this regard. First, Richard Epstein, one of my law professors, taught me one of the most important aspects of my legal practice when we were discussing a particular paper I was writing. He told me that I might consider his approach – before he goes to do any research or writing on a particular topic, he writes out his own ideas, thinking things through on his own. Once he has developed his own thoughts clearly, then he goes and reads what others have written on a subject, allowing those counterpoints to help him refine his thinking, and to note where his thinking diverges from them. But he doesn’t do that in the other order, as doing so only muddles his own thinking and prevents him from seeing clearly. In law, this is a marvelous practice, as it helps the lawyer, who can be overly steeped in precedent, minutiae, and jargon, to think clearly, then afterwards applying the statements by judges in deciding cases, and the like, to figure out a particular issue.

As a person, I have done religion in the opposite manner, and it has taken me much, much longer to sort out what I have experienced and what I think based on those experiences from the glosses and interpretations that have been put on those experiences, often even before I’ve had them -- notions of God, notions of spirituality, notions of community. Mind you, I love and value highly my religious tradition. But it has been more important for me in recent years to perceive clearly what I experience and to recognize the glosses and interpretations for what they are – at best, an effort at creating a community based upon common spirituality; at worst, an attempt to control the experience and independence of another. At some point in the not-too-distant-but-surely-after-teacher-training-is-done future, I’ll try to craft a post or series of posts that articulates my own experience with spirituality, and the extent to which I think those experiences fit and don’t fit with the spiritual paradigms I have encountered.

At any rate, given the nature of the insight during today’s meditation, I may lay off for the time being reading of yoga texts. I’ve never been good at reading just one book at a time. Right now, I’m on my second trip through Donna Farhi’s Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living, Harper, San Francisco, 2004; and I’m about 1/5th done with Sharon Gannon and David Life’s Jivamukti Yoga: Practices for Liberating Body and Soul, Ballantine Books, New York: 2002. I picked up the first when I happened to see it, as I had learned to trust Farhi’s insights from the first yoga book I ever found – her Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit (I don’t have the publisher information on it, as I gave away my last copy of it, and still need to replace it.) I picked up the second at Alanna’s recommendation. I’m also re-reading The Bhagavad Gita, which I suppose is a yoga text, as well.

Perhaps I should lay them all aside for a while to see if my own thinking and experience clarify any as a result. But wouldn’t that approach also suggest that I should avoid any external influence at all (such as teachers)? Not sure.

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In response to Hansa's body-reading exercises:

We make our bodies into symbols and message bearers. There is no separation between body and mind, or between mind and spirit. Embodiment carries and is emotion. A posture is an expression and an embodiment of self. At a very simple level, a smile is not only a communication to others, it is a physical embodiment of an emotional experience. The power of asana practice, beyond its tendency to strengthen the body, derives from the nature of the poses. There is a specific and different emotional component to a standing backbend, for instance, and to a seated twist. Because of that, I can readily understand crafting a story that attributes the development of the various poses to Shiva (one of the Hindu tripartite godhead). They are remarkably powerful and complex expressions of feelings/ideas/embodiments. I haven't any real way of referring to a physical "idea," but that is what asana seem to be for me.

The process of "reading" aspects of another through the various asanas, is quite remarkable. When one is a "text," and another a "reader," something very curious and unifying occurs. It would be interesting to consider the teachings and musings of the semioticians and Reader Response theorists in this context.

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Alanna’s sequence of applications of ahimsa from persons you like, to strangers, to those you don’t like, to all sentient beings can be implemented in a small way through the following practice I learned from a Buddhist yoga instructor, and which I have since learned is a variation of the lovingkindness meditation the Buddha taught:

May I be healthy,
May I be happy,
May I feel joy,
May I find peace.

May those I love be healthy,
May they be happy,
May they feel joy,
May they find peace.

May those I do not know be healthy,
May they be happy,
May they feel joy,
May they find peace.

May those I hate be healthy,
May they be happy,
May they feel joy,
May they find peace.

May all creatures be healthy,
May they be happy,
May they feel joy,
May they find peace.

May all life be healthy,
May it be happy,
May it feel joy,
May it find peace.

May Earth be healthy,
May she be happy,
May she feel joy,
May she find peace.

May all the cosoms be healthy,
May it be happy,
May it feel joy,
May it find peace.

I have found that reciting this meditation while extending compassion from myself to each of those persons or groups changes the way I feel about them. Usually, I think of individual people when I reach the second, third, and fourth "stanzas," as it changes the way I feel about those people, and makes the meditation more real for me.

For me, this meditation has become, effectually, a prayer.