Off the Mat -- Tapas

(Another in a series of dharma talks with my yoga students)

Tapas:

Heat.

Intensity.

Drive.

Fire.

Austerity.

There is an interesting practice that I recommend you try sometime: svaha. It starts with a fire, so kindle a decent-sized fire in your fireplace or a campfire or, for that matter, your charcoal grill. For the purposes of this discussion and the mind-image, a good-sized campfire will do. You’ve kindled the flame. You respect its intensity, its potential for good or ill. You can now take two different approaches to the fire. By itself, it will die out over the next hour or two. That’s the nature of fire. Alternatively, you can feed it and keep it going.

Let’s suppose that you choose to maintain it. You now have two interesting choices about how to implement that decision. You can see the fire as demanding your attention and maintenance, or you can see the fire as an opportunity to transform what you no longer need into brightness and warmth – or to transform things that you want less than you want the brightness and warmth that will come from giving them up to the fire.

The ritual is to identify what you can put into the fire, and then to do so. While I’m as literal-minded as the next guy, some things just don’t burn too well, so I tend to think of this ritual as more of a way of re-assembling my interests and priorities in life than as a way to reduce no-longer-wanted/needed possessions to ashes. I have, on more than one occasion, written out a word or two on a slip of paper that I’ve tossed into the fire, giving up my attachment to the idea penned there. Perhaps, it’s been a treasured resentment. Maybe an insistence on my own viewpoint. You get the idea.

I like the brightness of fire.

But I’ve practiced a version of this many more times than I’ve built campfires. For many weeks in a row, one of my more wonderful yoga teachers began each class she taught with the simplified ritual of starting us in seated meditation, asking us to think of something we could give up, imagining it cupped in our hands, then raising the hands to the sky, giving it up to the divine fire. That practice worked for me by putting me into a mindset of seeing the obstacles to my yoga practice (both off-the-mat kinds of practice as well as on) as things I could give up.

Now maybe you aren’t as interested in or moved by rituals as I am. If not, there are other ways to practice tapas. The Book of Malachi in the Bible refers to God as the “refiner’s fire.” (Malachi 3:2) In simple terms, a smith would take gold ore, put it into the most intense fires that could be generated at the time, and would burn away everything that was not the gold. I like that verse and image, as it makes clear to us that our core essence is already gold. What is needed is a fire to remove the obstacles. I think that Malachi may have been getting poetically at the same kind of experience as that which Patanjali articulates in the Yoga Sutra, when he writes

For those who seek liberation wholeheartedly, realization is near.

How near depends on whether the practice is mild, moderate, or intense.
I.21-22

Doesn’t that sound rather like a football coach talking to his players in training camp before the season starts? Football coaches weren’t the first to figure out that intense personal commitment can turn talented players into something altogether different. Tapas is the niyama that speaks easily to our culture. While we may not really feel connected to saucha and we may think that santosha is a bit suspect, we can totally relate to tapas.

In a way, the “how near” question presented in I.22 is asking, essentially, “How badly do you want it?” But it isn’t a tax demanded by a greedy universe that we can pay grudgingly – it’s a transformation of ourselves – indeed, a transformation of our very notions of “self.”

Lama Surya Dass wrote:

Last night across the globe, millions of new parents were awakened by the sound of a crying baby. Around the world, these parents responded by groaning as they stood up and made their way to the baby's crib in order to do what had to be done. All of these parents were renouncing, giving up, or letting go of their much needed sleep because they cared more about the well-being of a little child. The child's needs were more important than their own. Their parental love was stronger than their attachment to their own sleep.

Renunciation, an important and recurring spiritual theme, is not that complicated to understand. Renunciation means sacrificing or giving up something that seems important at that moment in favor of something that we know ultimately has more meaning. Each time we do this, we are making a spiritual choice – a decision to go with the bigger picture. ...

A spiritual journey almost inevitably begins with a decision to renounce a certain way of life. But that decision is less about changing your environment or letting go of people and things than it is about transforming your inner being – learning the inner meaning of letting go and letting be in order to find wise naturalness and authentic simplicity.
(Awakening to the Sacred: Creating a Personal Spiritual Life, Lama Surya Das, Broadway Books: NY, 1999, pp. 31-32)

Along the same lines, Ram Dass wrote in Be Here Now:

You might think of renunciation in terms of some external act like a New Year's resolution, or leaving family and friends to go off to a cave. But renunciation is much more subtle than that – and much harder – and much much more continuing. On the spiritual journey, renunciation means non-attachment.

To become free of attachment means to break the link identifying you with your desires. The desires continue; they are part of the dance of nature. But a renunciate no longer thinks that he is his desires.

(Be Here Now, Ram Dass, Lama Foundation: New Mexico, 1971, p. 9)

So what’s the benefit of tapas – of practicing yoga with deep intensity and commitment? Patanjali promises in language that seems to borrow from Malachi’s refiner’s fire idea that “as intense discipline burns up impurities, the body and its senses become supremely refined.” (II.43)

This is something as yogis we can sink their teeth into – something we can test. As you have committed to your practice, performed even just the on-the-mat work with commitment, managing your life to get you to practice, have you discovered that you have been able to perceive things through your senses and body more clearly?

On a very tangible and physical level, I have. As I’ve mentioned in class before, before I discovered yoga, I had gotten desperate enough to meet with back surgeons to see if they could help me fix the constant pain I was in. Though I started my practice of yoga for entirely different reasons, the more I practiced, and the more attention I paid to exactly what I was experiencing in my body, the more I began to perceive the actions, the postures, the motions I was making and holding that complicated and amplified my back problems. Seeing that, I began to change the ways that I sat, the ways that I moved, the ways that I stood. Doing that lessened the pain. The more I practiced, the more I began to distinguish between muscle groups affecting the positions of my lumbar vertebrae and disks. That led me to discovering that as I strengthened – really strengthened a lot – not only my back muscles, but also my psoas, my abdominals, my obliques – I found that I didn’t have any back pain left at all. Now, I don’t want to mislead – yoga didn’t magically heal my back. It did, however, refine my perceptions. It helped me to discover all those things about my back, and having discovered them, to change them. If I revert to the same behaviors I was pursuing when I was talking to back surgeons, I can make my back hurt again, just as it did before. But it’s been years since I wanted to do that.

Off the mat, commitment to the practice of Yoga has similarly refined my perceptions of my body that affect not only physical conditions, but also matters we more often talk of as related to the heart and mind. There is a radical and elemental connection between minds and hearts, spirits and bodies. The same kinds of refinements of perceptions can allow us to see how our actions cause harm to other beings and to ourselves. They can enable us to perceive the effects the foods we eat have on our bodies and on our minds. They can allow us to understand more clearly how other people see a situation, and how they feel about it.

At its core, Yoga can be understood as a set of practices that applies mindfulness to increasingly refined perceptions of the relationships between ourselves and the beings, the world, and the universe around us.

Everyone’s fire burns at different temperatures at different times. So what can you do to build tapas, if you feel like you’re less motivated, less inspired than you might be at other times?

Here’s what I do, in no particular order:

1. Connect with someone who inspires you. This can be anyone, living or dead, someone you’re close to or someone you’ve never met.

2. Get outside – outside your office, outside your house, outside your normal routine, outside your thoughts, outside your habits.

3. Yoga. For me, at any rate, no matter how grumpy, lethargic, sick, lazy, depressed, or bored I may feel, if I can get myself into a yoga practice, I start to feel better, more interested in practicing. When we practice yoga – especially the vinyasa style that we typically do in class – it gets easy to think of tapas as simply the body heat we generate, but the heating affects much more than just the temperature of our muscles and tendons – tapas affects our minds, as well.

One caution as a parting thought: tapas or intensity does not mean “force,” either on or off the mat. Forcing ourselves into a posture wrecks knees. Forcing ourselves into a thought process performs similar damage to our minds. Yoga tempers tapas with santosha (contentment) and ahimsa (non-harming). Find ways to make tapas compatible with those principles – not an opposition to them.

Off the Mat -- Santosha, Lab Report

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

Though I intended this next piece to be a discussion of my experience with the next niyama, tapas ("fire" or "discipline"), instead, life provided me with an opportunity to practice santosha, and I learned from the experience.

This summer, my family is intact again, my oldest son having returned from college. My wife and I have gotten fully comfortable with kids that go to bed later than we do. But we’re still parents, at heart. So the night before last, we went to bed, as usual, with lights still on in various parts of the house, two kids still up and about, one (the oldest) not home yet.

So I woke up at some point, and realized that the two younger kids had gone to bed, but the lights were still on. I thought, “hm – the oldest must not be home yet,” rolled over, and went back to sleep. Then I woke up again, about an hour later, and this time I looked at the clock.

3 a.m.

I could feel the usual blend of aggravation, worry, and annoyance begin to creep in.

* * *

For many, many years, I strongly resisted using mantras. I'd read about people adopting one mantra or another for various reasons. But repeating the same phrase over and over again always seemed like a kind of mental repression, not openness. Kind of the opposite of what I was seeking. Mind you, I’ve always been just fine with chanting in various languages. Though raised a Mormon, I could sing a Catholic mass in Latin well before I could repeat the Mormon Articles of Faith. So when a yoga teacher changed her routine and began starting each class she taught by chanting the first two verses of the Yoga Sutra in Sanskrit, I promptly took it upon myself to chant along with her. She looked at me curiously, but never objected.

Still, mantra practice, over and over and over again seemed an entirely different sort of thing. But three or four years ago, I began meditating. I tried out various meditation practices, and I found that a minute or two of chanting “OM” over and over and over again, whether aloud or just in my mind, seemed to open me up my mind and heart in ways that just holding still didn’t usually accomplish. At some point in the future, I’ll probably write up something more detailed about OM and mantras generally, but let’s save that for another time. Suffice it to say that it was the first mantra I was comfortable using. It was about mid-way between repetitious prayer and simply invoking the name of God.

Then, a year or two ago, I saw advertised a recording that included one of my favorite Sanskrit teachers, Manorama (“Man-OR-ama,” not “MAN-o-RAMA”). On a whim, I ordered the CD. It was delivered a few days later, and I was surprised to find that it was comprised of six or seven recordings of the same chant, performed by different artists in very different styles. Sometimes I use it to end yoga practices. At any rate, to abbreviate yet another long story, listening to the recording several times was enough to embed in my mind a mantra of a sort. It is really more of a short prayer than a long mantra. By most instruction, mantras are supposed to be as short as one to four syllables. Whatever.

For me, the four-line prayer worked just fine. First, it stuck in my head. With it lodged there, it started to come up at times. I found it helpful in beginning my meditation practice, focused as it is on drawing the heart to the single-point of meditation. I found it comfortingly familiar when I began a yoga practice in a hotel room far from home. Repeating it before stepping onto my mat in various yoga studios, I found it served as a way to dedicate and bring a sharpened mind to the act of beginning my practice.

After I'd done the dog-training exercise of repeating the mantra before and during so many yoga and meditation practices, I started to find that even pausing to repeat it in my mind while driving in rush hour traffic calmed me. And, back to the story from the night before last, I’ve found that it works the same way in the middle of the night, when a worry arises.

* * *

So at 3 a.m., I repeated the mantra in my mind. With late summer in Colorado in our yard, there are crickets that sing through the night. With the windows open to bring in the night coolness, they sing to us all night long. I made it only through the mantra two or three times before I realized that my pacing of its words were blending with the crickets’ song. And the worry about my son retreated, and I went back to sleep. (Yes, I realize that telling a story about a step toward enlightenment by focusing on going to sleep seems a little bit backwards, but bear with me.) I woke a couple of more times during the night and early hours of the morning, saw the house lights were still on, repeated the mantra (or a little bit of it, anyway), connected to the crickets' songs, and went back to sleep.

When dawn came, my wife and I got up, saw the lights still on, the car our son had been driving still not home, and we got decidedly more worried. We called our son’s cell phone, but it rang into voicemail. It was out of batteries or he’d turned it off. It was then, sitting at the kitchen table, that I realized that I had an opportunity to practice santosha. Practicing contentment and equanimity when everything is comfortable and easy is not a very challenging kind of practice. Practicing those things when your child is unexpectedly missing for longer than he's ever before been missing is, for me at least, an entirely different sort of thing.

I paused in the conversation with my wife about where he likely was and what his condition probably was, and I thought to myself, “I am aware of the feelings of worry and concern. I can be mindful of those feelings without diving into them more deeply. And I can practice contentment and equanimity, even now, even if my deepest worries (car accident, injured, dying, etc.) are all true.”

And just that slowing down and decision allowed those feelings to soften – not to go away entirely. They didn’t. But they softened enough that when my son got home an hour later, I was glad to see him and interested in the experience (he reported nothing more interesting than an unannounced sleep-over at a friend’s house -- was that something he should have mentioned?), rather than beside myself and angry, as I’d have been otherwise. And that non-threatening, non-dominating, non-command-and-control response, in turn, allowed him to accept the request that he let us know of such things in the future.

End of story.

Santosha – for me, the practice was two-fold. First, it was being mindful enough even in the middle of the night to recognize that I had a tool that could help me manage my otherwise-automatic-and-very-loud worry reflexes, and it was having developed and entrained my mind to mantra practice enough to have that tool available. Second, with the arising of consciousness and awakening with the dawn, it was recognizing that even my most dire worries did not have to prevent me from practicing santosha.

And the fruits of the santosha practice -- a happy reunion and a non-combative resolution of such situations in the future, seem pretty good to me.

Have you tried out santosha? What has your experience been?

Off the Mat -- Santosha

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

Santosha means “contentment.” When I first ran across this niyama, it bugged me.

Contentment? Didn’t Patanjali get the memo? Contentment is contemptible, we should always be striving, always climbing, always getting more, always unsatisfied with the status quo.

So I believed, and so I lived for many years. That kind of life hasn’t proven to be all it claimed to be. So I’ve begun to explore a different way of being. Taking a step back from the “everything, all the time” mentality has allowed me to discover moments when I have experience contentment. When it has arisen, it has felt like the opposite of suffering, rather like a kind of spaciousness; and it has seemed entirely possible despite poverty or pain, possible in hunger or wealth. On those occasions when it’s arisen, it hasn’t felt dulling or passivity-inspiring, at all – more like a kind of balance, a kind of okay-ness, even when I’m in the midst of a hard-fought court trial or a complicated family problem.

I’ve come to recognize santosha as a function of how I am internally, rather than what the situation is externally.

One teacher described it as a series of contrasts:

…serenity, but not complacency. It is comfort, but not submission; reconciliation, not apathy; acknowledgment, not aloofness. …

Too often we think too small. Some people believe they must close their eyes to the suffering of others in order to maintain their own contentment. They confuse indifference with detachment, passivity with peacefulness, and isolation with equanimity. But hiding one's head in the sand will not guarantee contentment. There is an old saying from India: “You can wake up a sleeping person but you cannot awaken someone who is pretending to sleep.”

That is something I can relate to – a sort of emotional adulthood. You don’t find yourself plunged into despair when something goes wrong, nor wildly elated when something goes right. Cyndi Lee calls it “unconditional happiness.”

On the mat, we continually confront such limitations. In a class I take on Saturdays from an extraordinarily lithe teacher, I’m continually confronted with how much shorter my hamstrings are than hers. I see how deeply her pelvis drops in lunges and I realize that mine will never match hers. When I see her move through a sun salutation with the grace of a cheetah, I’m aware of my own more giraffe-like qualities.

But even when I make those kinds of comparisons, santosha still can come through.

Whenever we perceive the grace of another’s movement, it is not because the other lacks limitations – being embodied is definitionally a limitation – but rather because the other has found a way to move lithely within her or his own body, even in the context of her or his own limitations. Those perceptions of another’s grace can provide us with a seed to plant and cultivate. Perceiving is the first step in consciously becoming. And the grace that we can see in another person is never – never – the result of the other’s perfect ease. It is, rather, the result of the other fully engaging within those limitations, whether they are short hamstrings, sore achilles’ tendons, a stiff neck, a messy divorce, a going-nowhere job, an undeveloped community, a chronic disease, or just bad teeth.

Christopher Reeve embodied grace within the wheelchair of a quadriplegic. Stephen Hawking embodies grace within a body ravaged by Lou Gerig’s disease. A marvelous yoga teacher I know embodies grace within a body formed by severe allergies and celiac disease. Mother Theresa embodied grace within her own despair and doubts.

Practicing santosha doesn’t require us to abandon hopes for or efforts aimed at obtaining freedom from physical restraints, from external oppression, or from illness or aging (though I suspect other things may limit our ability to escape mortality). Instead, it asks us to release the mental suffering we wrap around our experience of those situations. Doing that allows us see the actual problems more clearly and admit that once the current problems are solved, new dilemmas will arise, new intractable and annoying problems will come up.

But in allowing a sense of contentment to enter in, we’re not denying the problems, not refusing to participate, not conceding defeat. Instead, we’re finding a kind of ease in the very practice of being alive, with all of the obstacles, limits, and dilemmas that being alive entails.

In the end, living with santosha is acknowledging that there is no external condition that, when finally obtained or satisfied, will bring an end to our craving, our attachment, our desires, but grace in movement and thought and action are possible, nonetheless.

Practice ideas:

1. On the mat: find a couple of poses that you don’t like and practice them a lot.

Really. Find a pose that just doesn’t work for you, and commit to it for a month – if you practice outside of class sometimes, make sure you include the pose, twice, in each practice. If you’d like me to include the pose in the sequences I plan for JM classes, let me know what it is, and I’ll build it into our practices.

It’s hard to overemphasize how good a mind-conditioning practice it can be to decide to do a pose you hate with santosha, with an attitude of contentment. For me, the pose I hated most for a long time was utkatasana. The santosha practice didn’t change the pose from hard to easy. What really changed was my mind – I stopped focusing on how much I hated the pose, and I started thinking, “yep, I really don’t like this much, but I think I can take the pose deeper.” In thinking that way, I released my need for the pose to be pleasant. It didn’t produce some fairy tale ending – I didn’t suddenly see the light, get wrapped in a brand-new yoga outfit by my fairy godmother, and forever thereafter find utkatasana to be the easiest and pleasantest pose in the catalogue. To this day, I find it hard, challenging, annoying, difficult. But there has been a change – I no longer get into mind-games about how much suffering I’m experiencing in the pose. The absence of that chatter provides a kind of silent space I can move in and hold in utkatasana. That silence and space, in turn, allows me to see into the pose, and then through it and into life.

2. Off the mat: after a month of working with your least favorite yoga pose, find a situation in life that inspires the same kind of discomfort and frustration for you, but one that you’re reasonably certain would be as good for you as your hated yoga pose, if you were to do it. And then, again for one month, actively move into that situation and practice santosha. Give up expecting the situation to magically change and be all butterflies and flowers. Expect it to be what it is. But see if you can release your insistence that it be other than it is, and in so doing, find contentment even within the constraints of the situation or action.

I’d love to hear your experiences with finding contentment within uncomfortable situations, whether on the mat or off, whether individual or interpersonal, whether good or bad.