Off the Mat -- Satya

(Another "installment" in my continuing series of dharma talks with my yoga students)

Last week I noted that ahimsa is easy to practice on our mats with respect to ourselves, but harder off the mat. This week’s yama, satya or “truth,” may be the other way around. We’re all pretty well-versed in what it means to tell the truth when we interact with others. Most of us are generally aware of when we lie to others.

But from the perspective of the yoga mat, it can be harder to see how truthfulness works.

Years ago – in fact eight years ago, at the same conference where I was first introduced to the practice of yoga – one of the conference coordinators and I were talking separately after one of the conference sessions. The conference session had raised the question of whether in all the various roles each of us fulfilled, we were living “authentically.” I remarked to the coordinator that I hadn’t any idea what she meant by that term. I related to her that I played roles, variously, of husband, lawyer, brother, leader, friend, subordinate, executive, son, and father, but that I didn’t have any sense that any of those roles was the “real” me. When I was a lawyer, I was a lawyer. When I was a son, I was a son. When I was an executive, I was an executive. Two days later, as the conference was concluding, the coordinator re-raised the same question as a topic of exploration for the conferees, in a slightly different format. We penned our thoughts in response to the question of “under what circumstances do you feel most complete and honest?” At the time, I had made a couple of canoe trips down the Green River, which runs through the desolate and desert canyonlands of eastern Utah. The overriding experience of those trips had been solitude and quiet – my companion and I had gone days without seeing other people. And so I wrote in my conference materials, “I am more at one with the river than I am in any other setting in life.”

As sometimes happens, that one statement resonated long after the conference was concluded. As I reflected on it and on the earlier conversation with the coordinator, I realized that the two questions were exploring different facets of the same issue. Even though I didn’t understand the term “authenticity” as applied to myself, and even though I didn’t have any sense of which, if any, of the roles I played was the real “me,” in fact, a part of me knew, because it understood that it had been most present and aligned in the desolation of the wilderness, facing an empty river.

There is something inside each of us that knows truth.

As to communications and interactions with others, that sense inside knows not only when I speak to someone else and convey a false impression – whether I speak actual falsehoods, or whether I simply contrive my statements so that, although truthful, they convey a misleading impression. Awareness to that situation is a practice of satya.

But that which knows truth inside of us knows truth not only in our interactions with others – it knows the truth of ourselves, as well. It perceives when we live falsely, suppressing our understanding of truth in preference for a falsehood, whether it is a falsehood that allows us to harm others, or whether it is a falsehood that allows us to cling to something we crave or avoid something we fear. Some falsehoods arise originally from our own ignorance, and re-aligning ourselves to truth is simply a matter of consciously seeing our mistakes and stepping out of the well worn rut that we developed when we didn’t know any better. Whatever the origin of the falsehood, be it ignorance, ego or the things that ego creates – pride, fear, clinging, aversion, greed – once we build it into our foundations, it takes real effort just to see it clearly, let alone to change from falsehood to truth.

Still, there is real meaning to the term “true self,” and yoga asks us to seek it.

When you move into a pose on the mat this week, notice whether you perceive some value to the question of whether you are doing so truthfully. Is the pose a structure for exploring your experience or is it a way of presenting or maintaining a front, whether to yourself or to those around you?

When you work off the mat this week, notice when and how your communications are truthful. Notice when and how they are not.

And with either of those practices, when you find a situation in which you feel you have not been fully truthful, notice the experience of that non-truth – notice what gave rise to it, notice how it feels, and to the extent you can, notice how it affects the world around you. Does it draw you closer to reality, to those around you, to your true self? Or does it create or maintain a distance from those things?

Off the Mat -- Ahimsa

(Another "installment" in my continuing series of dharma talks with my yoga students)

The first of the yamas (or self-restraints/self-disciplines) to discuss is ahimsa—non-harming. My students have heard me say lots and lots of times, “If I ask you to try something on your mat that hurts or that you know won’t work for your body, then don’t do it.” Following that instruction is applying ahimsa to ourselves. But as useful as it may be when applied to ourselves, ahimsa is mostly a practice that addresses our relationships with other beings. It poses the basic challenge: can we interact with others without causing harm?

Every person – surely including each of us – has lots and lots of stories about the ways that other people have harmed us, hurt us, offended us, caused us in one manner or another to suffer. Most of us could probably come up with a quite a list of those offenses. Some of us have become extraordinarily good at cataloging such events in our lives, cross-indexing each item, running statistical models and probability studies about future events, etc. We are minutely aware of the harms others do to us. That can be a good thing, so long as we don’t freeze the awareness at that stage. Ahimsa challenges us to become aware not only of how we are harmed, but how we harm others. Then, it goes one step further, and asks us to see what the nature of harm is, and how it affects the way we interact with the world.

So during the past couple of weeks, I’ve tried to be, literally, “non-harming” in my relationships with others, so I could properly tell you something about the practice from my own recent experience. As you probably noticed from my last post, it proved harder than I expected.

I think I’ve figured out why.

Despite my efforts, so far as I can tell, I did not do appreciably less harm to others during the times that I was actively trying to practice non-harming than I did before. I might have withheld a snide reply or two that came to my tongue in response to a son who was acting badly, but that’s about all I can point to in terms of changes to my conduct.

And I had such noble ideas about it! But as things turned out, I got frustrated. I got annoyed. I sat in meditation, noticing only my mind churning, my muscles aching, and I got more annoyed.

But a couple of nights ago, it occurred to me that even though my actions didn’t show much, there was at least one real difference that resulted from actively focusing on and practicing ahimsa: I noticed the times when I caused harm a lot more than I’d noticed them before. I usually didn’t notice them until after the actions were all done and over, but I noticed nonetheless.

Seeing a more clearly the harm I was doing to others made me uncomfortable – especially given how miserable I proved to be at actually changing my actions. Maybe so uncomfortable that my mind tries to find ways not to notice or see those things in ordinary life.

And that thought plopped me right back on my mat. My mat has already taught me what to do when my brain wants to avoid thinking about something – pay really close attention. The most interesting things I can observe about my mind occur when it starts to get weirdly evasive. When I paid attention, I saw two different, but related patterns: they would both start with something happening that didn’t fit what I wanted. Then, I would either react immediately out of unhappiness, and say or do something that – at least in a little way – retaliated against the person I perceived to be causing the situation, or I would let the situation settle in, putting me in a contracted, constricted kind of mood. In the cases where I reacted immediately, I often found that my reaction was both unjustified and ill-designed. Unjustified, because in many of the situations, I was simply taking offense where none was intended – I’d just misunderstood the other’s actions or statements. Those situations made my knee-jerk reactions look pretty bad. Ill-designed, because often the reaction just made the situation worse – it not only didn’t solve the first problem, but it also created a second one that needed to be solved. In the cases where I didn’t react immediately, but let the situation put me in a bad mood, that mind condition then led to me inflicting my bad mood on others who were totally unrelated to the situation.

Grimmer and grimmer. So is there an upside?

Perhaps this: what I found while trying to practice ahimsa was that prior to trying, I was largely oblivious of situations in which I was causing harm. I won’t say totally oblivious because always tugging at the very edges of my heart-consciousness was the suspicion that my actions were causing harm, even when I didn’t allow my mind to acknowledge it directly. And those heart-consciousness perceptions are exactly the sorts of things that yoga makes easier to perceive, as we open and connect our hearts and minds. There is a kind of emotional and intuitive intelligence that is available to us when our hearts and minds are open and connected. I’ve come to think that maintaining a separation between those two – by avoiding letting my mind know what my heart was telling me – made me a bit more emotionally ignorant, a bit less intuitively intelligent.

And this: the first step to change is perceiving the need for change. “…[O]ne must first know one is in prison in order to work intelligently to escape.” Even if all I can do today is notice my own reactions to my own reactions, it’s still a place to start.

Failures are often our best teachers on the mat. I don’t learn much from standing comfortably in tadasana/Mountain pose, but I learn something every time I fall out of the balance pose I’m currently working on. I know many, many ways not to do it successfully. So starting from the fall out of the pose, I bring my attention to what was going on immediately before I fell, to see if I can change something there. And the next time I go into the pose, I try to focus on that stage, and I work my way back until I find something that needs fixing, something that if I change it just a little, lets me balance where before I’d fall.

What I’ve found in working the ahimsa “pose” is this: I fall out of it a lot. The few occasions when I’ve managed to stay in it, I’ve found my heart and my mind more open to one another, and that connection has changed quite markedly the way that I interact with others in life. Those experiences have given me confidence to keep working on the parts of the “pose” that I’m still not particularly good at.

The Yoga-Sutra includes this statement: Yoga ends the patterning of consciousness. In this context, for me, the “patterning of consciousness” includes the automatic knee-jerk responses I make to situations that “get” to me. My yoga, today, is to see those patterns a little more clearly, even if I can only see them, today, after the harm is already done. Tomorrow, I’ll work to see the patterning of consciousness a little bit earlier in the pattern, perhaps seeing it at a point when I can actively choose to follow or to change the pattern.

Mindfulness, one step at a time.

* * *

Questions for discussion or further thought:

1. Are there things that you intentionally avoid knowing? Does avoiding knowing something affect different parts of your life?
2. How does harming someone affect you? How does it affect your relationship to the other person?
3. Do you think it is really possible to live without harming some sentient being?

Off the Mat (under construction)

(Another "installment" in my continuing series of dharma talks with my yoga students)

I haven't forgotten the idea of a weekly topic for further exploration -- I'm just stuck right now. I'm supposed to be talking to you about ahimsa -- or "non-harming." But I find myself instead, thinking about a famous story about Gandhi:

In India at the time of the story, Gandhi had become a famous and prominent person, but one who still remained very accessible to others. One day a woman visited him with her young son. She told Gandhi that her son was constantly eating candies, and that the candies were harming his teeth. She said that her son respected Gandhi, and she wanted Gandhi to tell her son to stop eating candies.

Gandhi told the woman to bring her son back in a week. The woman looked perplexed at him, but agreed.

A week later she returned, and Gandhi told her son, "You should stop eating candies."

The woman thanked Gandhi, and then asked why she had to return after a week to have him tell her son something Gandhi could have said the first time.

Gandhi replied, "A week ago, I was still eating candies myself."

Every time I try to write something useful about ahimsa, I realize how deficient my own practice of it is, and I wind up writing things that lack authenticity and strike me as hollow when I read them back to myself.

So I'll borrow Gandhi's instruction: "check back in a week." ;-)

Off the Mat -- Why Restrain Anything?

(This is drawn from the next in a series of emails I provide my yoga students interested in exploring how yoga works in their lives off the mat.)

After an initial period of getting our balance, most of us are pretty comfortable with the idea that a yoga posture practice affects not only our bodies, but also our minds. We start to perceive, if roughly, the relationship between unfocused and scattered minds and physical inability to hold a challenging balance pose, such as Ardha Chandrasana/Half-Moon or Natarajasana/Dancer’s Pose. Those experiences begin to persuade us that bodies and minds are linked together, and as we settle our minds, we find that our physical balance improves.

That perception, as simple and readily available as it is, can be a starting place for exploring and gaining understanding into other aspects of life, as well. If our bodies and minds are connected in ways that prevent our bodies from working well when our minds are disturbed, is the reverse also true – that our minds can’t work as effectively when our bodies are scattered and disturbed?

A second perception: again, after an initial period of getting accustomed to yoga, most of us get pretty comfortable with the idea that our yoga practices on the mat affect not only our abilities to perform the postures on the mat, but the practice also affects our practices (our lives, for instance) off the mat. The physical strength, flexibility, and stamina developed on the mat enables us, off the mat, to work and play with less stiffness and pain, more strength and vitality. The mind-settling aspects of on-the-mat practice also spill over into life off the mat, and we (many of us, anyway) find that we gain a little more patience and compassion for others, a little more awareness of our own minds and feelings off the mat.

The Yoga Sutra teaches that in addition to the physical yoga postures, there are other practices that enable us to refine and strengthen those mind-body conditions. One branch of those practices comprises forms of self-discipline – “yamas” in Sanskrit. And yoga practitioners are hardly the only ones to have discovered these things. The yamas are basic to many communities: don’t cause harm to others, don’t steal others’ belongings, commit yourself to the truth, avoid grasping/coveting, exercise self-control in personal relationships.

But why doesn’t Yoga just mind its own business and stick to postures, mindfulness, and breathing?

The short answer is that for most people who practice yoga in the US, it does stick to those three things. And, at least in my opinion, it’s pretty valuable even when it focuses on nothing more than that. But those three practices don’t occur in the abstract – each person who practices yoga does so in the context of a particular and unique life.

Just as yoga affects that life, so, too, does the life affect the yoga. For those who are interested in pursuing their yoga experience more deeply, yoga suggests ways to change other aspects of life to move the process along because it opens us up, allows us to perceive our own experience a little more closely, and teaches us how to engage mindfully.

But here’s what can happen to mindfulness and perception and openness. Remember the first time you unrolled your yoga mat after you bought it? It stayed curled up. Once we practice on them for a bit, they flattened out. But then, after that practice, we roll up the mat again, put it in the closet, and only take it out in time for next week’s class. But when we take the mat back out, it’s almost as curled up as it was the first time we unrolled it. So, too, are we, if we only allow mindfulness, openness, and perception to affect us while we’re on the mat. The ethical teachings of yoga encourage us not to roll up the experience of mindfulness, perception, and openness when we roll up our mats.

One of the real dilemmas associated with practicing yoga occurs when one discovers that the mindfulness of yoga practice has opened one’s perceptions to aspects of life that were previously outside our awareness. A still mind allows us to see more clearly the harm we cause to others. We understand more particularly the effect of taking what doesn’t belong to us, in all the ways that we do so. We begin to feel the contraction and limitations that occur when we speak untruthfully. We recognize how our conduct affects those we’re close to. The basic heart/mind opening of yoga, then, has the potential to change the way we live. Similarly, though, the way we live, changes our yoga practice.

As we strip away the actions that we see do harm to others, we find that we are able to explore our own minds more minutely, to perceive our feelings more clearly, to understand the effects of our actions more comprehensively. And that, unexpectedly, affects our experience of on-the-mat yoga, as well. We find greater mind-steadiness, greater sources of mental stamina and energy, finer perceptions of bones and muscles and tendons and nerves, better balance.

In that context, it makes good sense that yoga might have something to say about ethics and self-discipline.

In the next several discussions, we’ll explore aspects of the various behaviors off-the-mat that yoga encourages. I’ll ask your indulgence in this regard: just as you do on the mat, withhold your judgment about whether the particular practice is a good one or a bad one, and consider, instead, whether its something that you could implement more fully than you already do. If it is, then consider trying it out, like you try out Bakasana/Crow Pose. Yes, it seems a bit silly at first, maybe a bit precarious, too. But the penalty for failing is only a short tumble to the floor, and it might be interesting to see what life looks like from the perspective of truthfulness or non-harming, just as it’s interesting to see what the world looks like when you’re balanced on just your hands.

Off the mat -- What's this Yoga Business About?

**Note: I've begun to work with a subset of my yoga students to explore Yoga beyond the posture practice. The following is the first of a series of discussion-starters that I thought might be useful to post here, as well.**

To begin the “off the mat” series of weekly discussions (and I hope that they become discussions, rather than just my ramblings), I’d planned to jump in directly to ahimsa (not harming), but it occurs to me that it might be more helpful to start a little more deliberately. With that in mind, I’ll punt ahimsa til next week, and use this week to provide some context that might provide a framework for thinking about the different practices we’ll discuss. We can get more elaborate later on.

First, what is there to Yoga besides physical poses? Yoga – poses included – is a set of practices that have been done for millennia. Those practices are intended to help draw together (think of the word “yoke” – it’s from the same root as “yoga”) one horse – the body – to another horse –the mind –that otherwise tend to go their separate ways, leaving us pretty disconnected, distracted, and stressed.

In your practice of yoga, you’ve probably already discovered at least briefly some of what happens when those two horses are brought into alignment and coordination – into yoga. It’s the unexpected feeling of profound peace, mind-quieting, and things working right. How on earth does such a physical practice lead to that experience? I don’t know. Yoga’s pretty devoid of theoretical analysis on questions like that. But the practice of Yoga does work. The poses are an important part of it.

But they’re not the only part.

Much of the teachings of yoga come from a work called the Yoga Sutra, and tradition says it was written by a person named Patanjali. Whether it was written by one person or by several, Patanjali or Davy Crockett, in 300 AD or 300 BC isn’t really very important. Here’s why: what the Yoga Sutra teaches is not that you should believe anything in particular. Yoga is not in the slightest a set of beliefs. Instead, it teaches a path composed of eight aspects that, Patanjali tells us, if followed will enable us to see both the world and our relationship to it more clearly. It is a practice that produces the experiences you may have perceived some of already in your own practice.

So what is the path? The path Patanjali outlines is a series of practices: (1) ethical guidelines for interacting with others, (2) guidelines for self-discipline, (3) postures, (4) breath patterns, (5) withdrawal of the senses (an inward meditation practice), (6) concentration (more of a meditation experience than a practice, but once experienced, it can become a practice, as well), (7) meditative absorption (a second kind of meditation experience that can be practiced), and (8) oneness or Yoga – the experience of union of body and mind and environment.

To my ear, some of those things sound pretty much like common sense. Some of them sound well beyond my experience. I can’t tell you everything about the path of Yoga, as I’ve not explored all of it. But I have practiced some of it, and I’m much the better for it.

If nothing else, I can do something I never could do before: I can touch my toes. For a person who started as inflexible as I did, that seems pretty dang remarkable.

In yoga practice today and Friday, think about (and comment back by email, if you'd like) whether and how your yoga practice has affected your life off the mat. Maybe not at all? Maybe a little?

I look forward to discussing and exploring more of Yoga with you all.

greenfrog

**Discussion for next week: the first of the ethical guidelines for interacting with others (both on and off your mat): ahimsa or “not harming.” How can that (not doing something) be meaningful? It’s a part of the instruction to all medical doctors in their initial medical training: “First, do no harm.” It is a guideline that will make our yoga practice safer on the mat. Off the mat, it’s a way to avoid the actions that tend to drive wedges between our bodies (or our feelings) from minds (or our intellect).