Off the Mat -- Brahmacharya

Hey – doesn’t “brahmacharya” mean celibacy?!?!?!?

Relax. It’s just another path to explore. ;-)

Brahmacharya (as wikipedia will tell you), is a Sanskrit word/phrase that translates to “approaching ultimate reality.”

In some forms of usage, it refers to the stage of life when one foregoes specifically sexual conduct while drawing near to a teacher or to God. In monastic traditions, it has meant celibacy. In other areas of life, it has meant things like being faithful to one’s spouse, or avoiding sexual misconduct.

But whatever the history, what’s the connection to yoga?

Yoga entails the perception, development, and control of energy. Utkatasana (Chair pose) is impossible without using energy, and the deeper you move into that pose, the more energy must be found, drawn in, and controlled. Sexual expression – or even more commonly, the pursuit of and desire for sexual opportunities – just ties us up into knots. It seems that sexuality can capture our grasping egos and attention like nothing other than physical survival itself. So yoga reminds us to notice those that.

Mindless pursuit of desire in any of its forms – attachment, obsession, or infatuation – reinforces our conceptual senses of “me” and “mine,” and diminishes our ability to see, really see, another being. Sexuality can entail all of that. Sometimes, the attachment itself is so strong that the rest of my mind seems to go dormant when its running its course. It’s only after the feeling begins to recede – after I no longer clutch it so tightly – that I can see it for what it is: a deeply ingrained mind-pattern. Mind you, from an evolutionary perspective, it’s a pretty important deeply ingrained mind-pattern. Without it, it’s easy to imagine that the species wouldn’t have arrived here today. But whatever its origin, in our context, it’s just another opportunity to practice mindfulness. (You knew I was headed to that conclusion, didn’t you?)

In my life, the very strongest lessons about mindfulness have not been those encountered quietly during introspective moments on a meditation cushion, but rather those that occur in the brief flash of mindfulness that can happen when my entire body and emotion are fully engaged or otherwise out of control – when I am most angry, or ambitious, or fearful, or resentful. Or filled with sexual desire. Those are the occasions when energy moves most in me.

But whatever channel it moves through, I’m increasingly convinced that energy is, in the end, just energy.

In writing about interpersonal relationships, the Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn observed that there is a kind of “suchness” about others and our relationships to them that we can notice. He compares the nature of those relationships to electricity or natural gas that we bring into our homes for power or heat. Either one can be dangerous when not managed attentively, or when used unskillfully. But with a well grounded recognition of the “suchness” of gas or electricity – and the accompanying measures we use to avoid harm – they can be great blessings in life. (Peace Is Every Step, pp. 68-69)

While he wasn’t talking specifically about sexuality, I think the point is largely the same: there is a suchness about sexuality. It has certain characteristics and effects that can be perceived and understood. It channels and consumes much of the energy of our lives. If we pursue it or use it unskillfully, we can cause trouble to ourselves and to others. Conversely, when brought into the realm of mindfulness, it can be a blessing.

But if my experience is any indicator, sexual desire is amazingly adept at avoiding the bright, full light of mindfulness. Who hasn’t had the experience of listening to a friend talk about the friend’s sexual feelings or actions toward another person, without thinking or saying out loud at some point, “Have you lost your mind!?” Sexuality, with its tunnel-vision focus on self and desire and power and energy, is second only to violence in its ability to track us into unconscious and unmindful patterns. Advice columns in newspapers are filled with stories of people who have lost their minds over sex. Television has made an industry of depicting doing exactly that. Curiously, when we are parked in front of the television watching others who have lost their minds, we can easily lose our own, as well.

Sadly, given its profound power, the widespread lack of recognition of the “suchness” of sexuality often leads to more harm than good. When in its pursuit, we dissipate energy, rather than controlling it. We limit our own perceptions. We harm others, even those whom we care about and with whom we are intimate, as we mistake attachment and desire for love and compassion. And when we allow our energy – our thoughts and our actions – to settle into the deeply ingrained ruts of sexual stimulus/response, we only deepen them, making even basic awareness of the ruts themselves more difficult.

So there are lots of good yogic reasons to be interested in how sexuality affects our minds and bodies and spirits. But if you’re interested in practicing brahmacharya, how do you go about it? Some thoughts about explorations:

Notice the next time you feel sexually attracted to another person. Bring all your mindfulness to the experience. Notice what you actually feel, and where in your body you feel it. Notice when those feelings are strongest, and then watch them. See how long they sustain themselves, and watch them subside. They always do.

Then, also, notice the effect of the attraction on your compassion toward the other person. Are you more or less aware of or attentive to the other person’s best interests? In some regards, sexual attraction can enable a kind of intense awareness and concentration on the other. But also, notice the feeling’s effect on those outside of the field of attraction. Are you able to think and act compassionately toward those persons or do they fade from your perceptions? What energies are entailed? How are they expressed?

Are your thoughts and actions consistent with the deepest wisdom of your heart and mind?

It can be profoundly instructive to watch our own experience of the entire process of sexual attraction from the time it first arises, through its full development and manifestation, and then through its subsidence and transformation. But that kind of mindful observation is much harder (perhaps impossible?) to accomplish if we are simultaneously trying to observe the process and trying to fulfill our desires.

In that light, perhaps, it is easier to understand why some people choose to pursue a path of celibacy. Mind you, though, celibacy can come in lots of different shapes and sizes.

It can exist for a day or a week or a month, as we just experience the attraction itself, neither shunning contact with the person, nor indulging our desires. Celibacy can exist in a different form by committing to intimacy with a single person, as many promise with marriage. For most, sexual attraction does not limit itself to a single person forever, so there can be opportunity to practice and experience celibacy by abstaining from sexual expression outside of the committed relationship. Celibacy can also exist during stages of a lifetime, or even for an entire lifetime, as well, for those who seek what it can provide.

One further point: if you do choose to practice brahmacharya in any of its shapes or sizes, try laying aside the judgmental part of your mind. We live in a society that is a peculiar amalgam of sexual indulgence and condemnation. It’s useful to be conscious of our environment, and its influence on our selves. For some, sexuality is difficult to de-link from the internal judging mind. But that mind, like the “oughts” we discussed last week, can easily get in the way of clear seeing. If you choose to practice this yama, consider doing so without judgment, only with clear eyes and a heart of compassion, even for yourself.

So how does any of that comprise “approaching ultimate reality” that the Sanskrit term brahmacharya translates to?

Just like our work on the yoga mat – whenever we engage in life without judgment, but completely mindful and completely aware, we pop our minds out of their well-worn ruts, and –sometimes quite suddenly –we can see in ways we couldn’t from the inside of the rut.

The Yoga-Sutra describes it this way:

As the patterning of consciousness subsides, a transparent way of seeing …
saturates consciousness; like a jewel, it reflects equally whatever lies before
it – whether subject, object, or act of perceiving.

1:41

Labels

I've recently begun to consider that perhaps self-labelling even with ostensibly "good" characteristics may lead me away from clear seeing.

Recently, this issue arose as I reflected on a brief discussion I'd had with one of my yoga students at the end of a class just before Memorial Day. She'd asked if I had plans for the Memorial Day weekend, and I responded that we'd probably put together a barbecue of some kind. She asked what we'd be barbecuing, and I responded "I'm a vegetarian, so green stuff, plus some bratwursts for my kids."

So what was the issue? It's the effect of applying that label, "vegetarian," even though I tend to think of it as either neutral or slightly a good thing. I'm sure that my yoga student just chalked it up to one more way that her yoga teacher is weird, so it isn't the inter-personal effect of the label that I was considering at lunch. It is the effect that applying the label to myself has.

I've begun to think that telling myself that "I'm Christ" produces as strong a tendency toward delusion as telling myself that "I'm Satan" -- not because either characterization is inaccurate when applied to actions, but because those actions (and their respective labels) definitionally apply to something past, rather than something present.

I am not a good person because I did something good yesterday. I am not a bad person because I did something bad yesterday. I am simply a person who has had the experience (and who therefore has been shaped by the experience) of doing something good or bad yesterday.

So back to lunch: is being a "vegetarian" something good? I suppose it can be; but self-notions of "I'm a vegetarian" tend to reinforce the idea that what I have done yesterday and last month and last year should somehow be accounted as good in this instant, when what matters in this instant is whether I choose to eat meat today at lunch -- not what I did yesterday, nor what I may do tomorrow.

(Of course, it's thought-processes like this that explain why I find myself eating lunch alone a fair amount )

Off the Mat -- Oughts

As I’ve been thinking the past several weeks about the Yoga-Sutra’s recitation of the yamas – the ethical principles for interacting with others – I find myself remembering a statement by a psychiatrist I was almost acquainted with: “I don’t do oughts.”

When my family first moved to our neighborhood, we began attending a church there. Shortly before we arrived, a member of the congregation had died, a psychiatrist I wish I’d had a chance to meet. But his influence was far from gone. Mormons – like members of other faiths – tend to get bound up in ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, righteousness and wickedness. That tendency sometimes manifests as lots and lots of “oughts”: We “ought” to love our neighbors. We “ought” to pray. We “ought” to support charities. We “ought” to…

Once you get started with such a list, stopping is nearly impossible.

So one day at church, I found myself in a discussion with another member of the congregation about various responsibilities we had, and he reported that Gary (the recently deceased psychiatrist) had responded to such situations by announcing that “I don’t do ‘oughts.’” Though I can’t for the life of me remember what specific responsibilities we were discussing, I remember very clearly that statement. It was an approach that contrasted sharply with the culture I thought I’d been raised in, and with my own mindset at the time.

While my views on many things have changed over the past fifteen years or so, Gary’s statement, “I don’t do ‘oughts,’” has stayed with me and continued to grow in significance.

As we think about the yamas, it is very easy – for me, at any rate – to fall back into the usual ought way of thinking: “I ought to tell the truth,” “I ought to avoid causing harm to other sentient beings,” “I ought to avoid taking things not offered to me.”

You get the picture.

But all of those thoughts depend pretty heavily on notions of self and judgment and – here’s the interesting part – I think they also depend a little bit on harming. Not flashy and dramatic violence of the Quentin Tarantino sort, but harming, nonetheless – forcing something to fit a pattern that it might not yet fit. Spiritually, that can be as painful as trying to force myself to fit into Lotus Pose before I’m ready to fit into Lotus Pose.

So with that in mind, I’m beginning to think of the yamas more like maps, than like “oughts.” An “ought” is the imposition of judgment with all the elements of disapproval and aspiration and striving and failure implied in that process. A map, on the other hand, just shows the way to a particular place. The Yoga-Sutra’s yamas are just maps to particular experiences. They show paths we can walk to make the journey easier, if we’re interested in traveling. They show us the obstacles between ourselves and those other places. They don't tell us whether we should go down the path, but they show the way if we decide to do so.

For me, at any rate, that’s a profoundly different way of thinking than “I ought to move further down the path of non-harming.” The pure seeing that yoga fosters is nearly the opposite of imposing judgment. The two practices don’t mesh very well at all.

Mary Oliver, an amazing poet, wrote the following, which expresses the idea better than I can:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

© Mary Oliver. Online Source

Finally, this morning, I listened to a podcast of a dharma talk by a favorite Zen teacher. He talked of setting aside ideals of what we should or “ought” to be, and thinking of various ethical or behavioral instructions as practices that remove obstacles that otherwise would inhibit or distort our natural growth.

So long as obstacles to growth are removed, acorns grow into oak trees, all without oughts.

In thinking about the yamas we’ve already discussed, as well as those we’ll discuss in the future, it might be useful to think of them less as “oughts” and more as practices, maps around obstacles to our growth.

Your thoughts?

Off the Mat -- Asteya

Asteya -- non-stealing

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

At its most basic level, recognizing that we should avoid stealing isn’t headline-grabbing news.

Yoga, though, asks us to look a little more deeply into the subject: how does our relationships with things, both those we “own” and those “owned” by others affect our mind-body-spirits?

Just for a minute, remember the last time that someone took something from you that you hadn’t offered to the person, whether it was someone breaking into your apartment and taking your valuable, someone grabbing a Hershey’s Kiss out of the bowl on your desk, a co-worker taking credit for an idea you came up with, or an acquaintance calling you on the phone and launching into a long story without asking if you had time to talk. Remember, specifically, how you felt when that happened. If you’re like me, you actually felt something pretty distinctive – like you’d been disrespected. That’s when things start to get interesting. There are few experiences in my life that engender a more clear a sense of myself as a concrete “ME” than having something I think of as mine taken from me.

If you’ve had that or a similar experience before, then the following may make some sense to you. If you haven’t, or you’re not sure of what you felt the last time something like that happened, feel free to read on, but if you can, please let me know what your experience has been. I’m interested in such things, and I suspect that they aren’t uniform for all people.

Why should yoga tangle with ideas like that? Because yoga looks at what happens in our minds when we take what is not offered to us, and what happens in our minds when we have things taken from us that we have not offered to others. What are those mind-events? Feelings of separation, alienation, anger, violence. All of those feelings reinforce our mental images of our Selves. Weirdly, being deprived of something makes our concept of our Self stronger. Similarly, taking something that is not offered to us manifests two different weirdnesses – the first kind is “this isn’t mine, but I’m taking it anyway” – a kind of assertion of one person’s importance over others’. The second kind is the lack-of-boundaries sort of thinking that makes a muddle of things: “I don’t think clearly enough to recognize that cutting flowers from my neighbor’s garden might relate to my own subconscious notions of right/wrong/mine/yours, nor to consider the impact of those actions from another’s perspective. … And isn’t that just beautiful?”

As I was considering what to tell you about non-stealing, a friend came into my office and told me about how unhappy he was to find a neighbor with her dog in his backyard at 6:30 one morning, letting her dog “play” with his. He went out, a little disturbed at the intrusion, but quite angered by his neighbor’s presumption and oblivion to his feelings. He spoke sharply to his dog, which was barking, and took the dog inside, leaving his neighbor behind. He came to the office and told me of the experience and his frustration at not responding well, but also concerned that he didn’t want to alienate his neighbor entirely.

The next morning, he came back into my office to report the perfect solution. Very early that morning, just like the prior one, his neighbor came into his backyard so her dog could play with his. As he was getting enough clothes on to go down and confront his neighbor, his four-year-old daughter opened the back door, and both dogs ran into the house. The four-year-old helped the neighbor catch her dog, and, once the dogs were sorted out and the neighbor was out of the house and on her way, the four-year-old came upstairs and told my friend, “I got her dog for her and I told her that it wasn’t polite to come into our yard early in the morning.”

As I’m a word-person, I did a little investigation: “polite” comes from the same Latin root as “political” – polis – the word relating to culture or people. The neighbor was taking something – access to my colleague’s backyard and dog and privacy – that wasn’t offered. He saw the affront to himself and got mad. His daughter perceived all the same things and saw a lack of knowledge – a kind of ignorance on the part of the neighbor – and educated her about what was and wasn’t polite. A remarkable lesson in how ego gets wrapped around the axel when things get taken without permission.

So how to practice asteya? Like every other yoga practice, just notice it. A couple of easy-to-find opportunities:

1. Notice what happens in your own mind when someone cuts in front of you on the freeway. Notice where in your body you feel the sensations of anger and indignation. Notice how long those feelings last. Notice them subside.

2. Notice when you take something that isn’t offered to you – whether it’s candy out of someone’s dish at the office, a space in traffic, or credit for an idea. (These situations are harder to notice because our minds often start from the assumption that we’re entitled to things, but see what you can come up with, anyway.) If you’re lucky enough to be able to see such a situation occur, notice your feelings about the action before or as it occurs, then notice your feelings and (re)actions after it has occurred.

3. Obviously, not taking what is not offered is a simple way of preserving a basic level of respect among people and keeping a basic level of peace and trust among them. But it’s always interesting to ask why it works that way. For me, I tend to think of the human responses as built upon and into ideas and feelings of ego.

4. I’ll be interested in your thoughts.

Meditation Anywhere

Monica's recent post at Buddhist in Nebraska crystallized this:


Sitting in church today, beside my family, an in-breath snagged my attention.

I followed it in, watched the exhale.

With the lights back on, I could see my hunched-over posture, and straightened. Heard the complex sounds of the speakers’ words.

Saw the next inhale begin.

What a curious thing to be aware in the midst of life!

A cushion in a quiet room? Yes. Of course. One thing at a time.

But outside, everywhere, all the time?

Buddha?

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?

A note to my yoga class

All,

I've received some good feedback regarding our yoga class. I spoke about it last Friday, but I'd like to share it with those of you who weren't able to attend that day, as I think it's an important reminder for all of us.

As many of you have heard me say on one occasion or another, what sets yoga apart from just good exercise is the connection between the mind and the body. One way to keep the mind engaged is to work at the edge of our abilities. Some poses challenge our ability for balance, others challenge our strength, flexibility, or coordination. But whatever the particular "edge" may be for each of us in a particular pose, one thing is almost certain: the "edge" will be in a different place for every person.

For some of us, Downward facing Dog presents a huge challenge to our shoulder strength; for others, it's a real test of hamstring flexibility; and for yet others, the real challenge of the pose is the coordination of keeping the spine long while still moving the heels toward the floor. The more we practice a pose, particularly working at our "edges," the more we will wear away those "edges." Shoulders will get stronger. Hamstrings will lengthen. Greater awareness will increase our coordination.

On one level, those developments seem entirely like a good thing. We all want to be stronger, more flexible, and more coordinated. But on the level of Yoga -- the connection between the body and the mind -- those developments are decidedly mixed blessings.

Why? Because as we increase our strength, flexibility and coordination, the Downward facing Dog pose that previously presented lots of different mental and physical "edges" becomes too easy for us. When that happens, the pose loses some of its value as an "edge," and our minds get free to drift. We lose the mind-body connection of Yoga. Fortunately, there is no such thing as "the final" Downward facing Dog pose. So when one pose starts to lose its "edge" qualities, we can always modify the pose to re-find those working edges.

Sometimes in the past, I've coached classes to try a more difficult version of a familiar pose, or to try a more difficult pose. On reflection and particularly with the benefit of recent feedback, I've concluded that I haven't emphasized enough that such modifications are only useful if you've gotten so comfortable in the pose without modifications that it's hard to find and work those "edges." I want to emphasize here that Yoga isn't really an exercise in stupid human tricks, though on occasion I've referred to various more exotic poses that way. What I'd most like to avoid is any situation that could lead to injury, which can happen when we attempt poses that our bodies or our minds aren't ready to try.

In the future, I expect that I'll continue to suggest modifications to basic poses, both to enable you to develop beyond a pose that has gotten too comfortable for you, as well as to keep you mindful of the amazing down-the-road capacities of each of you. But I can only do that responsibly if I'm certain that you understand that those complex-i-fying modifications are only useful if they help you to re-find your edge in the basic pose that you might have lost because you've gotten too strong, flexible, coordinated, or balanced. Sounds funny to say it that way, but it's really true.

And, as I try to emphasize every week, even if you've lost your edge in a particular pose, if I suggest a modification to a pose that you believe wouldn't be good for your body or yourself on a given day, please, please don't try it out. If it bugs you to not try out a modification even if you don't think it might be good for you, rather than trying the modification, just notice your mind and whatever it is that bugs you about not trying the modification. That is, in itself, a kind of "edge" you can explore. Your continued well being is more important than any particular pose modification.

In the end, it may be worth keeping in mind that there is no odd Sanksrit word for The Final Yoga Pose. There is only the body and the mind and the connections we create and perceive between them. Any yoga pose, no matter which, is only useful if it enables us to see those two elements and their relationship more clearly. When we engage in poses that do not meet our current needs and abilities, we inflict harm on ourselves, whether mental or physical. And I can attest that that leads away from the body-mind connection we're working for, not towards it.

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?

Remarkable Dharma Talk

Very much worth a click.

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." ;-)

Dying to see what's next...

I’ve started to look forward to meditation in ways that are confusing.

For some time, I’ve been relatively equanimous about life and death. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not self-destructive by any means, and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. But in recent years, when contemplating death, I’ve not been particularly alarmed by it.

But that hasn’t been my situation forever. Most of my life, I feared death and tried not only to avoid it, but to avoid even thinking about it. When my younger sister died a number of years ago, avoidance became impossible, and I began a multi-year relationship with death – both her actual death, as well as my own views of my inevitable end at some point.

While I was in the throes of that process, I remember talking with a yoga teacher one day after practice, and in our discussion she remarked that she was pretty comfortable with the idea of dying at any time. Her remark was one of those crystallizing moments in my life. Not only had I never felt that way, I’d never even imagined that anyone would feel that way without the “it’s-worse-to-continue” situations of those in horrible cancer treatments or suicidal moments. The teacher, though, remarked it without any tone of pride or ego or concern. And it stuck with me.

So, like with most disturbing things in life, I found ways to practice it on the mat. The easiest: Savasana/Corpse Pose. As I breathed in, I allowed myself to experience the breath as the last one I’d take. And as I breathed out, I released it as the last breath I’d ever release. Sometimes, I alternated that practice with experiencing in-breaths as the first breath of a new-born life. With that practice, not only did I find that I paid a lot more attention to the breath than I had before, but I found that distress associated with releasing my last breath dissipated, as well. It is, after all, just a breath of air. A practice in letting go. Over time, that little breath practice changed a lot. I learned to relax my grip on things a little. I found myself more comfortable with the idea, off the mat, that the breath I’m currently drawing or releasing could be my last one.

In short, I suppose I found the balance of equanimity. In this particular dimension (heaven knows not all others) I became poised – not leaning backward toward the past, nor forward toward the future…

…which is why this morning’s realization caught my attention. I seem to be lean forward again. Or, perhaps, I’ve always been leaning forward, but I’d managed to delude myself that I was equanimous. The Yoga-Sutra teaches that “misapprehension is that comprehension which is taken to be correct until more favorable conditions reveal the actual nature of the object.” (1.8) Not sure whether I’ve simply regressed, or whether I’m just seeing a little more clearly what I’ve been doing all along. Either way, it feels a bit like standing before an open door. Just seeing the doorway open seems to create (or maybe just reveal) a kind gravity in my desire.

So this morning, thinking about my meditation, I realized that I’ve become attached to where I think/hope/wonder the process will lead. Partly, that attachment has been fed by my second read-through of Cope’s book, The Wisdom of Yoga, where he describes in both vignettes and analytic narrative the process of deepening meditation outlined by Patanjali in the Yoga-Sutra. As I’ve re-read the book, I’ve focused more on the events of my own practice that he accurately describes, as well as the events and developments that I’ve not experienced.

Yet.

See? It’s that desire for more that so easily morphs into attachment.

Seeing it there uncloaked may be all I can manage. Perhaps it’s one of those things, like vampires and political corruption, that tends to weaken when seen in the light of day.

Not sure.

But worth watching.

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.

Rumi knew everything

From a marvelous podcast interview of Coleman Barks, a gifted translator of poetry by Jelaluddin Rumi (1207-73):

...not until faithfulness turns to betrayal
and betrayal into trust
can any human being
become part of the Truth.

-Rumi

Coleman Barks: "Until betrayal, love offered is conditional; and only when betrayed and love is extended even so, do you leave the Garden of Eden..."

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).

Gratitude

So I've spent the weekend engaged in yoga of various forms, and I'm brimming over with gratitude.

Yesterday, I practiced under the instruction of a favorite teacher. This morning, I sat in meditation after a solitary practice in my basement. This evening, I've surfed iTunes to pick up a couple of songs that I've wanted to use in a new mix for a yoga class CD. Last night I began typing up my reading notes from Stephen Cope's remarkable book The Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker's Guide to Extraordinary Living. I'll probably compose a post or two about the book later. Suffice it for now to remark that it is, itself, extraordinary. In typing up notes, I re-experience much of the text -- all the parts that I underlined during the first read through, the pages I dog-ear, the bits and pieces that I flag for further thought.

Then, a few moments ago, reading some light fiction that entails everything working (highly improbably) together for the protagonist's good, I experienced for just a moment the sensation of great happiness of being on a path, what felt the right path. I tend to think, in my rational moments, that we usually create meaning, rather than stumble across it. So I tend to reject the stories of improbable coincidence as fictions, and I tend to view improbable coincidence in my own life as the probable result of many, many, unfulfilled improbabilities.

But eight years ago, an interesting person invited me to join him early in the morning before the business sessions of a professional conference for a yoga practice. I did, though at the time, I didn't have any idea of what yoga might be. I just knew that he was an interesting person, and I liked getting up early in the morning in the mountain retreat where we were staying.

Through a series of what from my prior world view would have been wildly improbable experiences, but what from my current world view are quite typical experiences, I find myself mixing songs and assembling ideas for conveying teachings of ahimsa, asteya, brahmacharya, aparigraha, and satya to my yoga students during the coming weeks. And I find myself feeling profound gratitude to my first teacher for his generosity and the gift I've received from him.

Road to Shambhala

Thinking about yesterday's post, I'm starting to look forward to spending time with a meditation instructor of whom I can ask some of the questions that seem to pile up in my head about meditation experiences. In DC earlier this week, I stopped by a really big bookstore and found a current copy of Shambhala Sun. The cover story "Yoga Body, Buddha Mind" is an article by Cyndi Lee and David Nichtern, assembling ideas that they've put together and used in a retreat/seminar context. The article caught my eye, as I'm slated to join them at the Shambhala Mountain Center for that very retreat program in July. I've not done such a thing before. Something new to think about.

Add to the list of things I still haven't figured out is the relationship between planning for the future and living in the present.

Meditation Darkness

I'm puzzled these days about how to tell whether a particular mind-state that I experience in meditation is something to explore or merely something to note when it arises, and then to return to the breath.

This morning, meditation began as it usually does -- several minutes of settling in, a few minutes of concentration on breath, and then the process of watching thoughts arise and subside. Then a small mind-shift occurred, and the mind-experience changed to a kind of darkness -- like being suspended in thick, black, velvety air. As an external sound would occur, there would be a mind-shift back to note the sound and the body state, all the while the mind continued to experience the black velvety air, but to perceive it more dimly. Then the mind moved back into that experience, and the external world subsided. Then the mind recalled the Yoga Sutra instruction of pratyahara (withdrawal of senses), and that brought the attention from the darkness back to the memory/mind. Then the mind moved back, a little ways, into the experience, and finally the meditation ended.

It would be interesting to know of others' experiences with such occurrences.

Really Real Dualism: God as Other

I'm not very good at thinking this way. To me, "God" makes good sense, but not as a Being separate and apart and distinct from the fabric of existence, or, for that matter, separate and apart and distinct from the life I see around me, or (god forbid) in me.

I have dear friends who insist that my logic is seriously messed up. That my use of language is imprecise and meaningless. That I'm wrongly seeing monism where there is dualism.

My vision intrudes into my talks with my dualism-perfected friends, and sometimes it leads to misunderstandings. Mistrust. They talk of God. I talk of God. We spell the words the same way. But from their perspective, we aren't talking the same language.

I see the devotion of bhakti yoga as a monistic exercise. My friends insist that I'm not getting something pretty important if I don't understand their prayers to God as really real communications with a Real God who is really different and distinct from them.

I don't know if they're right about what I'm missing. But they're certainly right that I see something different than they do -- at least when I look through "my" eyes, rather than theirs.

That different sight sometimes leads to fundamental, but often imperceptible misunderstandings -- the use of the words sounds right to each set of ears, but mean different things to them.

Here's my point: I wonder to myself sometimes if the messy similarity in verbiage is really an accident, or whether it has something to do with the way the dualistic and monistic ideas tend to interrelate to one another, or whether one group or the other decided to adopt sneakily identical language to describe related-but-distinct ideas, as a kind of fifth columnar code.

Whatever the answer to that question, my friends see their experience of praying to God as profoundly different, not just in manner, but in substance, from my use of yoga to express the devotion of myself (the Self?) to God, God in the form of the Teacher, God in the form of Creation, God in the form of the non-point center of stillness, God in the form of gravity, God in the form of existence. I'm not sure whether it's the idea of a One separate from the pray-er that they see as the key distinction, or whether it's the alien-ness (to them) of a God embodied in everything.

More on Renunciation

A friend and I were talking by phone last week. He had read my last post. He asked me if I was getting ready to renounce and abandon my family, move to Tibet, and live in a cave, all in pursuit of greater Truth. (I capitalized it in my mind when he said it.)

I laughed. I restated the point by Maharajji: if we are attached to anything more than to truth, then we compromise truth in favor of our attachment. He remained unpersuaded.

Renunciation has a remarkably bad reputation in 21st century America.

Two or three further thoughts along these lines, the first: I read this, this past weekend, by Lama Surya Das:

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 theystood 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 withthe 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.

I think it's important that we don't make the mistake of thinking that Buddhism or other genuine spiritual paths encourage us to walk away from responsibilities, friends, or families. Spiritual renunciation goes much deeper than any such external symbolic gesture. Kabir, the fifteenth century Indian poet-saint, said that he didn't wish to simply dye his clothes the saffron color of a holy order; he said he wished to dye his heart with divine love.

From Awakening to the Sacred: Creating a Personal Spiritual Life, Broadway Books, NY: 1999, pp. 31-34, passim

Then, along the same lines, Ram Dass, from Be Here Now:

You may 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 renunciationis much more subtle than that -- and much harder -- and much more continuing. On the spiritual journey, renunciation means nonattachment. 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, The Lama Foundation, 1971

Finally, (also) from Ram Dass, and the point I want to explore more deeply:

When I was in India, Maharajji said to me one day, "Nobody does hatha yoga anymore." I was surprised; I said, "No? But it's very big in America, Mahrajji." He said, "No, nobody does it anymore, because hatha yoga assumes that you've already finishsed with the first two practices of yama and niyama, and nobody does any of that now.'"

So there are eight sequential steps in the practice of ashtanga yoga, and we can see that it's the first step, yama, that has to do with the practice of renunciation. Think about it: We imagine we're so spiritually advanced because we're considering becoming renunciates, and we discovery that it's the very first rung on the ladder. We're just beginners!

Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita, Harmony Books, NYC: 2004, p. 137.

From this statement, Dass remarks on the different kinds of renunciation associated with the path of yoga as it is articulated by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras. I chuckled as I read Maharjji's view of yoga. Perhaps because he was hanging out with the likes of Ram Dass in the 1960s, but Maharajji was mistaken. There are those, even in America, even today, who practice in some degree or another the yama-ic renunciations Maharajji looked for in vain: ahimsa (non-harming), satya (truth), asteya (non-stealing), brahmacharya (chastity), and aparigraha (letting go).

Devout Mormons do. So, too, do devout Baptists, and devout Adventists, devout Muslims and devout Catholics. At least, they do to with respect to some of them, and to some degree. Those traditions (and others, I'm sure) ask a lot of their followers. Mormonism is the tradition I know best, so I focus on it here.

Within Mormonism, this observation is often repeated: "A religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things, never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation." Of course, although the idea of renunciation and self-sacrifice is preached in Mormonism, it is seldom followed to the farthest extremes of its internal logic. Still, the teachings are more than just gilded ideals carved into architecture that never penetrate human minds and flesh.

For participation in the Mormon temple rituals, which the LDS Church teaches are essential for living with God after mortality, searching worthiness interviews by an ecclesiastical leader are required. Among the standard questions:

• Do you abstain from alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea?
• Do you live the law of chastity (for unmarried persons, this is complete chastity, for married people, it's sex only with one's spouse)?
• Are you honest in your dealings with others?
• Do you pay a full tithe?
• Do you fulfill any child support obligations?

The standard questions also include belief elements. Curiously, Mormons are sometimes best known for the strictness of their lifestyles, which, at 45 years of age, I find pretty easy to live by.

It is the belief criteria that disqualify me -- ultimately because of renunciation.

During my life, one of the things that I have held to most tightly, despite the pain that clutching has caused, have been orthodox beliefs.

I held to them when my experience suggested the beliefs were not correct. I held to them when my heart told me they were harming some whom I loved. I held to them when my mind told me that they were improbable. I held to them when every part of my mind and body told me of a world that did not conform to those beliefs. So why do I no longer hold them?

Maybe I'd have arrived at this level of renunciation eventually, anyway, but I got here because as I practiced hatha yoga (including the moral principles, that Mormonism so nicely instilled in me, and even though Maharajji said no one did those things), I began to have the experiences of hatha yoga -- the perception of complete Union with others, the perception of prana (energy), flowing through my body, the discovery of an "inside" to my mind, the discovery of meditation, finding other planes of consciousness.

My orthodox Mormon beliefs taught me (blessedly and paradoxically), that after all the mediation of scripture and leaders and authority, the fundamental way to discover truth is to experience it, and to prefer those experiences to any authoritarian statement to the contrary. My experiences in yoga and meditation were inconsistent with those tightly held orthodox beliefs. So, in the end, I let go of those beliefs.

Was that renunciation? Sure. But it was renunciation of the sort Surya Das describes with parents tending to a crying baby, rather than the, "I need to find a way to suffer, so that cave in Tibet is the right path for me." I hold no illusions about the pain that my renunciation has caused my loved ones. If I could find a way to truth that didn't entail that pain, I like to think I'd have taken it.

From the perspective of having let go, I'm beginning to think that intellectually defending a position that my heart disbelieved required me to look less to my heart for guidance, and that, in turn, made me more emotionally ignorant, less intuitively intelligent, than I have found I can be since I abandoned that effort.

Still, I don't want to suggest that I don't feel the pain of loss from what I have given up.

This past weekend, a confluence of events split open the wounds that I thought had begun to heal. I found myself wanting, desiring, wishing to believe. But when I looked, I found that I still didn't. I was frustrated. Unhappy. It wasn't fair.

Then, in meditation on Tuesday morning, I had a brief perception of the energy of the universe, and that it composed me, and flows through me and is me. And I was fundamentally contingent and a precious and ordinary conscious stage of the energy's flow, and -- therefore -- empty, all without denying my ability to choose and exist and be, for a time. And though I can't articulate a rationale reason why, that perception alleviated all the strife. It didn't make the pain go away, but it stopped the suffering.

And I realized that my desire to return to the belief context that I've stepped away from was the desire of a person who's just awakened and climbed out of a warm bed, looking back and wondering whether being awake is really better than slumber.

Renunciation

Monica's post about renunciation over on Buddhist in Nebraska got me thinking about the different ways that notions and the experience of renunciation work in my life. This evening, I ran across the following, about how commitment to truth requires a profound degree of renunciation, from Ram Dass' marvelous book, Paths to God: Living the Bhagavad Gita

Ours is not a culture that has much appreciation for any path of renunication. Ours is a culture built on the idea that more gratification, sooner, is better. Gandhi said, "The essence of civilization consists not in the multiplication of wants but in their deliberate and voluntary renunciation." That's certainly a hard sell here in the West, where everything keeps fanning the flames of our desires. ...

By Gandhi's yardstick, my own country with all its affluence, is not yet very civilized. If we look at what people do with their great wealth in America, we find that they mostly use it to try and create more and more sensual gratification for thmselves. And then when they're totally jaded with it all, and they begin to feel the inevitable falling away of their desires, they don't know where to turn. It's a dead-end street, because it all passes, it's all transient.

Once we see that, we're motivated to turn the process around. But as we start to do that, our minds sometimes get ahead of the rest of us, and we start giving things up in order to be "good," and not because we see that they're a hindrance and we're finished with them. We try to jump the gun on the process.

I've had my own experience of the difference between those two motivations in connection with the practice of fasting, which is a form of renunciation (we renounce satisfying our desire for food). Fasting was an interesting one for me, because I have always had an intense relationship with food. I learned from my mother to equate food with love, so by the time I was ten I was wearing pants in size double Z, with balloon seats. I was definitely deep into the oral trip.

Then it was 1967, and I was at the temple in India. I noticed that everybody there fasted a lot, so one day I said to my teacher, "Hari Dass, can I fast?" (Actually, I didn't say it -- I wrote it on the slate I carried, because were were maun, silent, at that time.) Hari Dass answered, "If you'd like." I asked, "How long should I
fast?" He said, "Four days would be good." So I asked him, "How long do you fast?" He wrote, "Nine days, on every new moon." I thought, "Well, if he can do it, I can do it." So I wrote, "I will fast for nine days." And I looked very holy.

The time came, and I started the fast. And then I proceeded to spend the entire nine days thinking about nothing but food. I thought of the Thanksgiving dinners I'd had as a child; I visualized the roast turkey....

I did complete the fast. I made it through all nine days. But the interesting question was, while I was so busy fasting, what was it I was feeding?

Three months later, when I did my next nine-day fast, I was getting much better. ("Better" -- a new ego trip!) Now I spent the whole time thinking only about foods I could eat as a yogi. So I thought about spinach with lemon on it, and steaming bowls of rice ....

Time passed, and then a few years afterward, I was back in India again. Some friends and I were staying at a little village, and it seemed like a good opportunity to do another long fast. But this time, except for the fact that at noon, lemon and water or ginger tea was brought instead of food, I never even noticed I was fasting. I was just busy doing other things instead of eating. About halfway through, I thought, Oh, this is what fasting is about. Far out!" It's not about renouncing food -- it's about renouncing hunger! I hadn't even known what it was all about before, because I was so busy thinking that the ego-tripping I was doing was tapasya, that it was an austerity of some sort.

I've come to recognize that the real tapasya happens when we are so ripe to do it that we just do it. We do it joyfully, with a feeling of "Yeah -- of course. That's what happens now." We do it with a feeling of "Whew! Now I can be rid of that one." It's a
release, not self-denial. Ramana Maharshi said, "I didn't eat, and they said I was fasting." Right there in that statement is the essence of tapasya. As long as we think we're doing the austerity -- "Look at me! I'm giving this up!" -- it's just another ego trip. Whatever we may think we're renouncing, we're just stuffing our egos with both hands.

pp. 134-136

A few pages later, he describes a personal crisis point he reached as he tried to implement Maharajji's two instructions to him: "Ram Dass, tell the truth," and "Ram Dass, give up anger." In trying to live consistent with those instructions, Dass insults and rejects the people around him, throwing a plate of food into the face of a man who serves it to him. He writes:

Across the way, Maharajji was watching. "Ram Dass!"

I went over and sat down in front of him. He said to me, "Something troubling you?"

I said, "Yeah. I can't stand adharma. I can't stand that in all of us which takes us deeper into the illusion. I can't stand it in them -- they're all so impure! I can't stand it in myself. In fact I hate everybody in the world -- except you." And with that I started to cry -- not just to cry, but to really weep and wail. Maharajji tried to comfort me; he patted me on the head, he sent for milk and fed it to me. He was crying, and I was wailing and wailing. And when I got all finished with my wailing, he said to me, "I thought I told you not to get angry."

I said, "Yeah -- but you also told me to tell the truth, and the truth is that I'm angry."

Then he leaned toward me, until he was nose to nose and eye to eye, and he said, "Give up anger, and tell the truth."

I started to say, "But..." -- and then, right at that moment, I saw my predicament. See, what I was going to say to him was "But that isn't who I am." And in that instant, I saw in front of me the image of a coffin, and in the coffin was an image of who I thought myself to be. And what Maharajji was saying to me was "I'm telling you who you're going to be, after you're finished being who you think you are."

Then I looked at all those people, all of whom I detested, and I saw that one layer down, one tiny flick of the lens, I loved them all incredibly. I suddenly saw that the only reason I was angry with them was because I had a model of how I thought it ought to be, which was other than the way it was. How can you get angry at somebody for being what they are? You're trying to outguess God. ... The next time you get angry, look closely at what you're angry about. You'll see that you're angry because God didn't make the world the way you think it should have been made. ...

So the practice of satya requires that in all our doings -- in our dealings with other people, in steering our spiritual course, whatever -- we stay as close to the truth as we possibly can. Maharajji said to me, "Truth is the most difficult tapasya." It's the hardest austerity, the toughest one to do. He said, "People will hate you for telling the truth." And sometimes they do. "People will laugh at you and taunt you, they may even kill you," he said, "but you've got to tell the truth."

The trouble is, we can only tell the truth when we cease to identify with the part of ourselves we think we have to protect. If we're afraid of being laughed at or taunted or killed, we can't tell the truth; we can't tell the truth if we're busy guarding some
position. It's only when we realize that we're not as vulnerable as we fear we are that we can afford to tell the truth. ... I can never be straight with you if I need something from you. So in order to tell the truth to you, I have to give up whatever that need is inside myself. That's why satya is a practice of renunciation; what we're required to renounce are the attachments that keep us from speaking the truth.

pp. 146-47

I have lived my life trying to get people to like me. Oh, I've been reasonably successful at approaching and approximating truth at times, but I've often resisted telling it straight, rather than slant, for fear of harming others.

Or so I told myself.

But in the past few weeks, in particular, I've begun to notice how much of my fear of harming others might be a cloak for my fear of de-friending myself -- a fear of losing what I so strongly want -- connection, love, validation.

Am I ready to give up that desire? Not completely. Not yet. But I am, with the ideas of Monica and Ram Dass, beginning to see that my attachment to such relationships is not entirely benign, and that it may, curiously, be harmful.

Irony

This morning, I sat in meditation.

My morning practice usually begins with a half hour on an elliptical trainer we have in our finished basement. I tend to start the day slowly, so the slow warming into a few minutes of cardio helps me wake up. Sometimes on the machine, I work through a lovingkindness meditation. Other days, I read. This morning, it was reading -- I'm mostly finished with Stephen Batchelor's book, Living with the Devil: A meditation on good and evil (lots of interesting ideas for later posts).

When I finish with the cardio, I turn off the lights and move into yoga. The yoga is on a mat I put facing a glass doorway out to a sunken patio. If I start the whole process early enough, I often start the practice in the darkness, with the morning sky beginning to lighten. The yoga starts in samastithi, hands together at the heart. I recite the anusara invocation, then start the asana practice. Sometimes it's as simple as a few minutes in downdog or child's pose. Sometimes it's 30 minutes of vinyasa, but at an introspective, rather than heart-thumping, pace. Today, it was brief. Enough to transition me from cardio and book thoughts to meditation.

Once I've yoga-ed my way to meditation, I roll up an old blanket as a cushion, place it on the mat, and I sit/wiggle for a minute to get my sitting bones comfortably seated on the rolled blanket. I usually sit in siddhasana, easy pose. Then I wrap my legs in an afghan my wife made several years ago. I do that because it's usually cool enough in my basement to chill me if I sit for very long, but maybe also because I'm following the practice of Manorama, who taught me a lot about meditation and yoga in a workshop last year.

Then I close my eyes, recite inside my head the second verse of the Yoga Sutra, and move from there into vipassana meditation practice.

So what arises then? Awareness of the ways that the space where I practice is really not adequate for yoga and meditation, followed by an elaborate process of thinking about what a really good space to practice meditation and yoga would be, the implication being that if I were in That space, my meditation practice would really be better.

Ha!

Meditation indeed.

Yoga Nidra, Lucid Dreaming, and Paying Attention to Wacky Buddhist Teachings

As a child, when I'd have nightmares, I'd get up in the middle of the night, wake my mother, and tell her about my dream. She and I, together, would imagine a pleasanter ending to the dream, and she'd send me back to bed with the instruction to dream the dream that way.

Sometimes it worked, and I learned to develop a little bit of lucidity in my dreamstate.

As I grew up, I lost that ability, and was interested in recent years to find the practice referred to in yogic and Buddhist texts. In the past week or so, I've rediscovered the exercise.

Its resurfacing started several weeks ago. I was talking with one of my yoga students about why I include savasana (corpse pose) practice at the end of every practice. I made a veiled reference to the interesting mind states that can arise in the practice, and he responded by describing the odd dream/wakeful state that he experienced. After doing some reading of others' experiences with approximately the same experience, I've come to refer to that condition as "yoga nidra." I tend not to discuss it with students or fellow practitioners as learning of it can easily lead to grasping and seeking, two states that tend to work against its occurrence. In my experience, it occurs when we engage in withdrawal of senses, moving inside our minds. It can produce visions, sometimes impenetrable imagaic states, sometimes incredibly meaningful and moving ones. There is, in yoga nidra experiences, sometimes a little volition, sometimes a lot, but engaging the normal controlling state of mind that we usually consider a part of daily consciousness seems to dispel the entire experience. So I've learned to watch and perceive, rather than to try to control or steer the experience.

Anyway, when my student mentioned his experience with yoga nidra (though he called it "weird half-sleep"), it reminded me that I hadn't engaged in it for many months. When I've practiced it in recent weeks since then, I've rediscovered the potential in yoga nidra for simultaneous dream-state and lucidity and consciousness.

That, in turn, seems to have dribbled into my otherwise normal sleep conditions, and several times in the past week, I've found myself drifting off into sleep and dream, while retaining some degree of consciousness. From that condition, it's very easy to release the consciousness and to move completely into the subconscious dream state. The first time this happened, I was napping one Sunday afternoon in a room where other family was still moving around and talking, so I had a stimulus to keep me from going completely out. But a couple 0f days ago, it happened as I was going to sleep one night, and it occurred again, yesterday, while I was in the hospital, following a shoulder surgery.

I remember reading a Buddhist teacher (I forget which one) encouraging a student to be aware of his mindstate, and when the student responded that he was generally aware, the teacher asked him to describe exactly what his mind was doing when he fell asleep. When I read that, I thought that the teacher was just playing with the student -- asking the impossible to keep the self-assured (and maybe overly self-confident) student working hard. Recalling these experiences, I can remember exactly what my mind was doing when it transitioned from wakefulness to lucid dreaming to dream state.

Now I wonder at what other teachings I've missed because I didn't take them as seriously as I should have.

Not Trying

Today: the counterpose to yesterday's thought

Yoda:

Do or do not. There is no try.

Last Saturday, a teacher called Handstand, saw the class full of non-handstands, and stopped to teach us a mechanical point: to move into handstand, the starting point is to draw the navel toward the spine, and then, from there, to draw the abdominal muscles up toward, and into the space of the rib cage. In yoga-speak, this abdominal maneuver is called "uddiyana bandha." I didn't have the shoulder stamina left at the time to really commit to handstand, but I tried the abdominal lock and made a half-hearted attempt to move into handstand. As with any half-hearted effort, I didn't move into handstand. But I did feel a completely unexpected stability that I had never imagined.

So this morning, I thought I'd better give the new approach to handstand a try (as tomorrow I get more shoulder surgery, and any effort at handstand will be out of bounds for a while). I positioned my hands about 20" from the wall, and I tried to engage uddiyana bandha. And my mind freaked on me. I got nervous. Worried. Unclear. Weird. I couldn't bring myself to repeat the structure of the pose that I perceived on Saturday. So I flipped up into my usual version of Handstand, that relies on the wall to keep me from flipping all the way over.

In meditation following practice, I found my mind moving into ego thoughts -- "what I do makes me a model yogi"; "I'm a good father"; "I'm trying Handstand -- that's a good thing, even if I don't do it right"; the posts I make on line are pretty good." I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I. All projection and aspiration. No doing or not doing. Maybe I'm getting Yoda's point, after all.

Everywhere, all the time

This morning’s meditation: I started with a lovingkindness practice. When that was done, I shifted into regular vipassana meditation. I noticed that the practice was easier and quieter than usual. The standard naming practice wasn’t needed, as I could simply watch the memories and thoughts arise without engaging with them. While I sat in the relaxed quiet, I perceived simultaneously both the deeper mind conditions that I usually can only explore through pratyahara practices as well as the more focused attention mind conditions that occur in vipassana meditation.

That perception was the essential experience.

From there, my mind elaborated on the recognition: I tend to experience the world in discrete and segmented ways. As I enter a meditation, I tend to close the door to non-meditation life behind me. As I move from seated meditation, which requires the involvement of my senses to maintain my vertical posture, to reclining meditation, which allows me to withdraw my awareness from my external senses entirely, I engage in another shift of mind geography. When I lie down at night to sleep, I shift my mind into sleep mode, excluding even the remote awareness of reclining meditation. Exploring each of those mind modes separately has allowed me to encounter aspects of mind that I had not perceived so clearly without the exercise of the specific disciplines that allow me to access them. So I have continued in those practices in varying degrees for the past several years. This morning’s meditation, though, suggested to me that while the distinctions and separations may be a useful didactic tool, just as isolating an exercise for biceps and another one for hamstrings can be useful, there is a fuller state of integration possible, where simultaneous engagement of each segment allows for exploration of things impossible in single-mode exercise.

Perhaps it’s not entirely coincidental that in yoga practice last night, I found myself in a pose sequence that, without the specific and separate muscle group work I’ve been performing for the past couple of years, I’d never have imagined possible. The sequence (that I did badly, but recognizably, despite my incompetence) is a flow of poses (from top to bottom, above) from twisting prayer, to side crow, to scissored side crow, to hurdle, to scorpion. Without the hours and months of devotion to isolated strength work on abdominal muscle groups, spinal muscle groups, and shoulders, and on hip flexibility, the sequence would scarcely have been imaginable, let alone possible (albeit clumsily) last night. But with those isolated exercises, I found last night a tiny glimpse of the integration of dance that is enabled by the work.

So back to this morning’s meditation… At odd moments during the day, I’m reminded that all levels of my perception and mind are available at any moment. That feels a bit like the sense I’ve had since the day I perceived that prana is continually flowing into each of us. It’s a little bit vertiginous, but liberating. It feels a bit like the fulsome connectedness of intense spiritual experiences – a flowing of all levels of mind/body/spirit into present focused awareness.
And the all-levels-at-once experience suggests to me potentials for mindfulness that are analogous to the perception of one pose flowing into another suggests the potential for vinyasa.

More than worth a click

Click this for an hour's worth of Ram Dass at his best -- warm, funny, wise, perceptive, open, and the curious amalgam of Eastern and Western that feels most natural to me. The link is to the first half of remarks he made recently in Santa Barbara. More to come.

Waking Up

This morning I woke up.

Several times, in fact, before I stopped going back to sleep.

So what? This: for reasons I haven't sorted out, I noticed exactly when I woke up, of the change from dream to awakening to awake.

It happened three times. Narrative dream, creating and exploring a story. Awareness of the dream-ness of the dream. Awareness of the awareness of being awake and conscious. And awareness of the empty simplicity of the transition between them, umarked by thought, desire, aversion, self, or Self. Just experience, transformed consciousness, and awareness.

Two, together, not One, alone

Last night I attended a yoga practice with a teacher whom I had worked with only a couple of times before. She calls a challenging series of poses, and does so sprite-like, tending toward bubbly-ness and high animation in her voice. Sometimes, with other teachers, those kinds of things can grate on me, but they don't from her.

Anyway, reflecting on last night, it's clear to me that she designed her pose sequences with a lot of attention and understanding. The apex pose last night was not some exotic or inordinately elaborate bound arm stand, but nataranjasana -- Dancer's Pose. But with the sequence of poses preceding it, I moved more deeply into natarajasana than I've ever moved before. And, so doing, I felt/saw aspects of the pose that I've never seen before, even though I've practiced the pose many, many times in the past eight years.

So after practice, I waited for a few moments to catch a word with the teacher before leaving. When my chance came, I thanked her for the practice and told her of my unexpected experience with the pose. She replied with a pretty standard line from yoga teachers -- and one that I use often enough myself -- "it was inside you; it was your effort." But as she said it, I realized the way that line is false, and I replied, without thinking, really: "No -- it is the teacher and the student together, never just one, alone."

Though I've practiced natarajasana for years, it was only last night, under the instruction and guidance of a skilled teacher, that I experienced Yoga in the pose. Two of us, together, not just one, alone.