Why yoga matters now: emotional regulation and resilience. Big picture, and two tools to use today.

The emotional landscape is harsh.

In our fatigue, depression, anxiety, resentment, burn out and insecurity, yoga is more important than ever.

In the upcoming three day workshop, I both want to provide solace and support, and I want to kick some butts (hearts) into gear. We know enough, we’ve got tools, or at least we have suspicions and questions and a longing.

It’s important that we get clear on what we’re doing, what yoga is (and isn’t), so that we can navigate our way through this positively. It’s important that we navigate our way through: our doing so is how we most effectively support others, change the world, make a difference.

And we can make a difference.

One of the key understandings here is that yoga is a toolbox of emotional regulation and personal resilience.

Let’s define those terms. It’s important to know what it is we’re doing.

Emotional regulation, at first blush and in common parlance, is something like ‘calm down’ or ‘feel better’. But that’s not what it really is. Emotional regulation is about connection.

Resilience does not mean unflappability. It is not a holy aloofness or a pasted on smile. It isn’t a Nietzchean what doesn’t kill you or a grin and go on. It is a vivid capacity to do hard things.

Emotional regulation

We have all been socialized to ‘regulate’ in terms of hiding our emotions, staying calm for others, or behaving in accepted or rewarded ways. Some emotions are valued and other’s aren’t. In psychobabble, the emotional toolbox we’ve been given often involves masking, repressing, ableism, and code shifting. In extremis, this might come down to internalized oppression and abuse.

True regulation, though, means:

• feeling your body, including a capacity to navigate unpleasant sensation or discomfort, find resources for pain management, and accurately assess threat and dysmorphia. This gives us compassion and understanding of things like dissociation, numbing, projection, compulsivity. Both acceptance and new choices abound. We can stop hating or trying to control ourselves all the time.

• feeling safe in your body - in at least some aspect of your body. This is something that often has to be learned, and compassionately learned, especially as regards trauma, pain, gender dysmorphia, ablism and ageism, etc.

• emotional literacy: being able to name what’s happening inside

• emotional discovery: human body brains are hardwired to experience an incredible array of emotions. Discovering our emotional capacity opens our world, reveals depths and possibilities we weren’t aware of, and has a real tone of befriending yourself.

• reaching for support instead of shutting down. or running away

• an evolutionary and expansive flexibility to our responses, in an upward and outward spiraling way

• this both implies a reclamation of things that have been neglected, denied, or stuffed so far down they’ve become hell monsters of the truly mythic deeps and darks, AND it means we are able to express the appropriate things at the appropriate times. We know the antisocial edge of expressing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way. But we also have beaucoup ness: physical, artistic, meditative, spiritual and social ways of expressing what needs to be expressed without inflicting harm or building up consequences.

The Yoga tradition is rich with tools for mitigating challenge and resourcing the good, beginning with our sense of agency and capacity.

For the sake of brevity and utility here, it’s most important to say

-emotional regulation is learned. Our plastic brains have a capacity to relearn, and our tissues adapt to input.

-Yoga has a unique understanding of suffering, and an ultimately positivistic and humanistic orientation in the face of suffering. We’re not aiming at neutral, nor a return to before we were broken, but at something good out of intrinsic challenge. There is a yes and an affirmation of will at its source. This doesn’t deny or suppress difficult things. We can feel seen and acknowledged. Painful, ugly, and sad things are validated and realized. But they are not only validated: they are seen as potentially and positively transformative. Healing means moving beyond coping to integration; resolution means uplifting; regulation means hope.

Resilience

I think I was given an image of resilience as grit. As taking another hit. As being like one of those inflatable punching bags, generally posing as a clown and weighted at the bottom such that it kept bouncing back no matter what. Problem with this was, such an idea is secretly resentful and dependent on the damage. It’s a negative definition, and a pretty rough way to relate to either yourself or the world. I thought of resilience as toughness. I’ve always been tough. I’ve been praised for it. But sometimes that toughness was causing harm. I identified with my brokenness.

Yoga insists that people aren’t broken.

Through practice and a lot of training, I’ve come to understand that resilance is

adaptive:

which isn’t the same thing as taking another punch. Resilent folks adjust to difficulty and stressors, finding ways to grow and discover. Their well-being is enhanced. I think ‘wellness’ is a shit word, we should start replacing it with ‘welfare’. I’m going to start a whole holy campaign, a marketing blitz, in which we take on the wellness industry with welfare. It isn’t individual. Health markers are more determined by public health than personal choice; at the same time it is true that exercising choice where we’ve got it makes the difference. We all do better when we all do better (Paul Wellstone).

Resilience is recuperative

which is more than ‘bouncing back’. It is a reorienting and mastery of setbacks and challenges. Resilience demonstrates mental strength and employed emotional regulation. It is vitalizing.

Resilience is resourced

Resilient folks develop and utilize so many tools to manage stress and adversity that they reach a point of instinctive, intuitive, magic seeming knowing how to make anything work. These tools include seeking support, problem solving, maintaining positive attitudes and cognitive savvy.

Resilience is mentally well

there are so many contextual things to be said about mental health; forgive my brevity. Point here is that resilience can help protect us, and it aids in living with mental-health challenges.

Resilience promotes psychological capital/wealth

I have a teacher who frequently says ‘the only real wealth is spiritual wealth’. This involves a heck of a lot of unpacking and teaching and practice, but is ultimately true. Resilience is correlative to the positive psychological resources of hope, optimism, creativity, trust, and self-efficacy, which help in hard times. Us. And others.

Resilience is dynamic and a process. It is fluid.

Resilience is a learned capacity. It develops over time. Through experiences. It is not a flat line understanding of homeostasis, but an evocative aliveness.

Resilience is connective and social

Resilient people have strong and varied social networks and resources, a fractal like web of bonding, interrelating, learning, reflecting, responsibilities, impact and opportunity.

Two tips or tools for today: #1 resource your feels #2 take a break that isn’t social media

#1 Get down get down

There are enormous healing potentials, rivers of it, veins and jewels of it, waiting beneath the surface. I mean the surface we mostly glide over in looking away. I mean the thing we stand, sit, walk, run, dance, sleep, and eat upon. This stunning green and bluey ball hurtling at a thousand miles an hour around it’s own axis, spinning at 230 kilometers a second through a mind-boggling expanse of void, without seeming to move at all. Earth is the primordial maternal presence. She hushes and cuddles. She lullabies and washes. She feeds and she loves. Her thick web of consciousnesses has possibilities for healing that are - by definition -limitless.

The earth is a recycler. She asks that you pour out your feels to her. Next time you’re watching a sunset, passing a garden, standing by water, seeing the earth’s body from a window in a plane, or glimspe the moon, notice that pull she has. Listen to the ask she’s making of you: She hungers not so much for your guardianship, but for your emotional response. She is begging for your sorrow and rage, confusion and anxiety, darkness or hot piss. She wholly takes it off our hands. Wholly. She wants what we’ve got to offer, and will turn it to nourishment. She leaves us cleared out, like a good belly laugh, hard work out, or ugly cry does. And while those things work too, they might not be easy. It is relatively easy to get down on the ground.

Roll around.

You’ve got eyes ears nose skin and tongue. Spend a minute tapping your sensory perceptions.

Pour your feelings out.

Feel gravity, and its reciprocal support. Feel the - again, literally infinite - possibilities of letting go.

Taste stillness.

Then you can remember who you really are.

Personally, ‘grounding’ requires regular practice. It doesn’t require particular understanding or the right mood. It just takes a surrender of time. It’s less about ‘focus’ than what feels in some ways the opposite: a hugeness of letting go.

Fact: I don’t always know what’s right for myself. I certainly don’t always know what’s right for the world, or the planet. But I’m sure the earth herself does know. If I want to tap into what she knows and get out of my limited knowing, I’ve got to routinely spend time with her.

Fact: the vast healing potential she’s got is always there. It is never not there. It’s just below the surface. It’s deeper than you think. It’s waiting for you.

Advanced practice: you yourself are earth. “Under the surface” is also your innerness.

Super advanced practice: all cultures have some ‘Mother Earth’ teaching, and we can personally and emotionally access it pretty quickly. It’s harder to find that same force in relationships. Relationships feel scary and opposite of unconditional love and truth. But the force is there, too. It is love.

#2 take a break that isn’t social media

The human nervous system toggles. We cycle through attention and distraction, sleep and wake, circadian rhythms and breathing more through the right or left nostril all day long. The most important skill - first skill - that yoga teaches is the pause. This refines forever so it becomes more skillful time management, knowing what sucks our time and being able to redirect ourselves, knowing how to state shift or reframe a thought, making our time meaningful and knowing what a lifetime is, specifically our own. But it starts with the capacity and training of pause and know you are pausing. Work and accomplishment require regular breaks. We eventually learn how to best manage ourselves, down to food and light and boundaries. Social strife and interpersonal healing.

But it starts with the pause.

Thing is, most of us only ever ‘take a break’ by checking in with an electronic screen of some sort. I know how hard this is. I know how easy. I know that every single one of the screens has some benefits to it too. I’m not a luddite. I make my living online.

But I know the difference between taking a break where I grab the phone, lean back into a slouch, munch mindlessly and punch at buttons with my thumb and a different kind of break where I stand up, move my body a little, refresh in some way, refuel in some way, and genuinely set a boundary between work/tasks/news/phone and my mind body.

For now, I’d just suggest brainstorming half a dozen break things that do not involve your phone. Then do one. This is going to take practice. It’ll be hard. At some point you might have to set some rules for yourself around the phone or tablet. But you can’t even get to that until you have some alternatives that aren’t phone based. Don’t be surprised if you go five seconds and then your busy brain says “okay, done! lemme get back to that screen”. Push back on that. Give yourself an honest five minutes to feel your feels, go for a walk around the block, eat your lunch without a screen, spend at least five minutes with a pet or plant, read or listen to a song. The breath is a classic: you can manage four breath. Do a couple yoga poses without the phone in the room. You have to curate this list yourself. It is also limitless. But you need to start with a few clearly defined ideas.

Advanced: get to 10-12 breath. Do it every day.

Super advanced: context is everything. Theoretically, based on the tradition, we’d get so bloody good at our responsible life (I mean work/resources) we have half our time back, plus honest to god retirement. Without being appropriative or exploitative. Possible? Yes. Difficult and long term, for sure.

Gratis #3 do it every day. Personal, self directed, daily practice is the real yoga. There are - ahem, limitless - possibilities for what that can be. We tend to overthink/expect/do and then procrastinate/not do anything at all. I’m saying this to validate your experience and remind you it’s human, you’re not broken. Daily requires a plan, support, and check ins. It happens in tandem with mentorship and community. I don’t recommend you try to reinvent any wheels or self help your way. You’ll just go more crazy.

In closing

Again, these are the exactly the kinda things I wanna lay out and discuss and plot into your brain over the upcoming workshop. Seriously recommended for yoga teachers. Mental health professionals and educators and caregivers can use it. This is vital for human beings. Good stuff, all round. I’ll say it for you in Sanskrit and point out the relevant sūtras if you want.

If you can’t make the workshop, join us on mighty networks for convo, accountability, good people.

I’m always available for a 1:1, if that’s what you need.

Vīrabhadrāsana

Today/Tonight is Mahasivaratri, the great night of Siva. It’s when your consciousness explodes, and you realize you’ve been in a fog all winter. Or that ‘this too shall pass’ is, actually, true. It might have grief in it. Or joy. Or relief. Feelings being varied, it might have some of all of that.

Sivaratri is when the God Siva comes down from his mountaintop meditation and joins the world. Consciousness comes to being. Or Consciousness marries power and action (siva, pavarti).

Sivaratri is when Siva did his cosmic dance, thrumming the cycle of reality into being with beginning, happening, and destruction.

Sivaratri is celebrated as the return of the light, the victory of light over darkness, and/or inner awakening.

It’s a good time to pray or reflect.

It’s a wonderful time observance.

I wanted to make a video for someone, and that turned into a bit of a tutorial on āsana in general. Enjoy!

Personal Practice: Finding yourself

Unpacking what yoga is, what it means, takes years and years. Maybe lifetimes and lifetimes.

“Now, personal practice tends to start as all or nothing, a big mess, once in a while, binge and purge cycles. Once a person has the desire or willingness for it, they tend to get overwhelmed and confused, thrown around by all the possibilities. ”

But I will assume - since you are here - that you know “yoga” does not mean postures. Postures are one of the tools of yoga. But just like a fork is not food, and you can have food without a fork and eat without a fork and sometimes forks are used not for eating and etiquitte but as weapons, the tools of yoga (here, poses) are not ‘yoga’: you can do yoga without the poses fork, and just because someone is wielding the poses-fork does not mean that they understand anything.

Okay, so we know that yoga does not equal poses, but poses are a tool. Next thing to learn is that yoga is about the self. Maybe not at the beginning. But if you want understanding, learning, and something that actually changes the way your body mind functions rather than a stop gap, yoga is a self thing.

I mean that yoga begins and really starts to take off only once a person begins a home, personal, self guided practice.

Discerning the difference between yoga classes and home practice is hard. Most of us have enough experience with classes (or, increasingly in our internet based world, a video) that we now have certain expectations of what ‘practice’ should look and feel like.

But your home practice tends not to look or feel like a class. In a home practice, you aren’t trying to replicate the experience of class on your own, you’re letting go of that and just meeting yourself. I repeat: home practice isn’t supposed to look, feel, or be the same as what happens in a yoga studio.

A home yoga practice: no video, no teacher guiding you, no fancy studio with pretty smells and a lovely distance from your home responsibilities. Please note that there is nothing wrong with going to a yoga class. But home practice is different, and more important.

A person who practices at home is discovering themselves. They are listening to themselves, meeting themselves, starting to work with the delicate questions of self-discipline and taking responsibility, self guidance, and meditation. This also means facing and undoing perfectionism, procrastination, waiting for the right mood or moment, and unrealistic or irrational thought patterns and goals. Home practice is where you truly learn to support and be with yourself. It also involves sitting in the midst of your actual life - your living room, your stuff, your schedule, your thoughts, your feelings. It is an incredible journey of self-discovery. It’s the beginning of integrity. It’s a process of developing somatic and emotional literacy, which is also somatic and emotional discovery. It’s becoming your own healer, friend, I can be so bold as to say ‘destiny’. After all, that’s what the ancient texts say. I’m not making this shit up.

I suppose that is exactly why most people have a hard time doing it. The old quip about most unhappiness being an inability to sit in a room with oneself.

Home practice is sitting in a room with oneself.

It is only here that you start to actually learn yoga. You learn how much you know and what you would like to learn more about. You learn what you can do and you learn what your excuses are. You learn to be self-motivated, and you really start to discover your emotions, your patterns, your beliefs, and your needs.

If you explore the source texts or listen to good teachers, they will tell you over and over again: yoga is self discovery. Yoga is self-realization. Yoga is self discipline. Yoga is self-liberation.

Which has to mean, if you take it seriously, that yoga is something YOU. DO. YOURSELF.

Teaching people that yoga practice is yoga class (and this is sometimes extended to teacher training, or retreat, or a renunciate life, or an influencer persona, a monk, a perfect handstand), is often doing a disservice to students. They are not being given tools, but following the leader and building deep subliminal patterns of DEPENDENCE, not independence and self exploration. They develop attachments and all sorts of projections around and at the teacher, other students, or the various environmental and time things of a studio. They aren’t learning consistency or discipline so much as expression and exploration (good things, but consistency and discipline are more important if we want healing and liberation). They aren’t learning presence and self determination, but escapism.

Escapism is a very hard pattern to unlearn.

Something happens when you try to practice in your own space. Without a video or music (there are times music can be part of the practice, depending, but if we’re listening to music we tend to be zoning out and listening to the music, not listening to the breath, our own mind, or our body). Something happens when you try to recall what you have learned, what you know, how to do, on your own. Something - all sorts of realizations about your mind, your motivations, your habits - comes crystal clear when we start to choose/think/do “I can do this for myself. I can handle this. I will.”

Now, personal practice tends to start as all or nothing, a big mess, once in a while, binge and purge cycles. Once a person has the desire or willingness for it, they tend to get overwhelmed and confused, thrown around by all the possibilities. I have heard five hundred stories about how a person ‘committed’ to peloton or meditation for two weeks, and then went nine months without. A thousand stories of how someone went to teacher training and then felt more lost and imposter syndromey than before they started. I’ve heard so many people say they wish they could meditate, or had a spiritual practice, etc etc etc.

Hence: working with a mentor or time honored thing is helpful.

A mentor can make suggestions, validate your experiences, help you focus, give you ideas and resources, keep you accountable while also challenging your perfectionism or unrealistic, irrational thoughts and behaviors.

Just a couple things to keep in mind:

• five minutes, one pose, a few breath, two minutes of meditation IS YOGA. Your home practice may not involve a yoga mat, a change of clothes, forty five minutes, savasana, or sweat.

• At first, people start with something like ‘one yoga pose’ or ‘I’m going to meditate’ every day, and it is often the last thing they get to in the day. That’s okay! It’s a great start.

• At the most true and basic level, it doesn’t matter what you do. Something is 100% better than nothing. Doing anything that gets you into the body and the present moment, brings awareness to breath, makes a choice is good enough. Anything that soothes your soul and reminds you you have one works (prayer, meditation, gratitude practices, devotional reading, mantra recitation, sacred objects like an altar, candle, worry stone, murti). Dance for a minute. Take a couple of big stretches. Get into your five senses. Tap, massage, or stroke your own body. Focus the eyes on the horizon if you’ve been staring at the computer screen or indoors all day long; focus the eyes on an object close to hand if you’ve been running around all day. Sigh out loud for five breath, blow through your lips like a horse to relieve facial and jaw holding, stand in mountain pose to feel present and grounded, warrior to feel your strength and courage, or tree to find equanimity. Lie down and progressively relax for a few minutes. It is all, all, good and you do actually know enough. For some people, setting a timer for 5, 10, or 15 minutes and scrolling through this stuff is a great beginning. For others, setting a once a day reminder. For some, connecting it to something like your morning coffee, leaving the office end of day, brushing your teeth, or a ‘trigger’ like noticing tight shoulders or held breath. All golden.

• Next, finding a consistant time in your schedule is the deal breaker. This is entirely dependent upon your all ready happening life: kids, family, work, time management basics. For many, morning practice is easiest. But for some, work and family make this difficult. After work or evening makes more sense and should be embraced.

• Having a plan, an outline, something you have previously memorized or are currently working on is how you break through the ‘what on earth, out of all the possible things I could do, should I do?!’ This doesn’t mean that you’ll do the same thing for the next seven years or forever: it means this is what you are doing now. Repetition and mastery and process, actually addressing your goals and needs, your personal situation, starts to come into focus here. It’s not just ‘yoga’, at that point, but personal revolution. It is growth. It is learning. It is overcoming your personal likes and dislikes or moods and dependency on the situation or time or convenience. But that does require perseverance, commitment, dedication, and lots of repetition.

• Consistency does not mean every single day, but generally over the big picture course of time. We kill ourselves with the ‘I missed a day, I have to start all over at the beginning’ mentality. The more consistent you are over several months, there will be a great scattering of days you didn’t practice but a general trend toward progress. This, too, is very basic human psychology stuff. It’s the difference between ideals/perfection/someday and actual practice.

My main point here: you have all the tools you need. I will probably draw out each of the bulleted points in future, but for now it’s important people hear and have reflected back to them: you have the tools, you have the capacity, you know enough and are enough. Once we start a personal practice, studio or classes become a wonderful supplement. They can be for fun.

If you want to chat as a way to hone in on your own personal practice, I’m around. If you want to bring some traditional yoga and the implicit self practice that happens in mantra recitation, two new classes are beginning in May. (Bhū Sūktam Tuesdays, Nārāyaṇa Sūktam Thursdays).

Whatever you do, please remember that you have enough, you know enough, you can take care of your mind body today. Given the external stressors these days, your own wellbeing is vital. It may feel frivolous or self-indulgent: this isn’t true.

Bhagavad Gita Reflections: Bhisma

I’m hosting a sangha contemplating the Bhagavad Gita the first Monday of each month, one book at a time. Yesterday I provided some of the context and background of the first book, Arjuna’s sorrow.

One of the difficulties of texts like the Gita is the slippery bluntness of mythology. Mythology is absurd. It’s raises more questions than it answers. No matter how you look at some of the stories, you can’t make them resolve to fairness, right, or even a very pretty picture. Why is it okay for some humans to consort (that’s a euphemism: I mean love and have sex with) gods, but other people are karmically punished for it? I don’t know. Why does a mother need to drown her infant children to absolve past karma? I don’t know. How can a person be both an animal, a god, and a person?

I simply don’t know.

Some of the stories upset me. They hurt. Whatever little sense I can pull out of them doesn’t feel edifying. I can’t find virtue in it. It doesn’t feel right. I don’t understand the myths, but I feel them. I feel them as an actual clenching in my body and tightness in my throat. Why are such upsetting things passed on as spiritual wisdom? Why on earth would a person assent to these stories, let alone glorify what they do to your blood pressure?

Myths raise so many questions. Maybe that is their point.

As always happens after teaching, some of the topics stay with me for several days. The thing lingers like the smell of a dead person you loved hangs out in their jacket for awhile, and you know it will disperse, and you are both saddened and gladdened by the fact. Influence is a little bit cognizant, but mostly not. Influence is emotive and atmospheric, more of the instinctive than of the intellectual.

Bhisma! I keep thinking today. Bhisma is the grandfather of the entire war. He loves and advises both sides, though he sticks to his responsibilities and the Kuru kingdom. He sticks with the bad guys even when everybody knows they are the bad guys. He sticks to his responsibilities of state, but he also allows the Pandavas to win by telling them exactly what they need to do to kill him and thus shift the balance of power; he bows out to let the younger generation ascend to the throne. He bows out, but on his deathbed he passes on all the wisdom of statecraft, ethics, spirituality, and dharma to the incoming regime. Bhisma is, the tradition holds, a good man. He is the epitome of a good man. He is the root source of ancestor reverence. But how is this possible? How can a good person be on the wrong side of history?

I remembered a conversation with a friend in which we discussed our remaining, ouchy love for people who hurt us. We all have some people we needed to break with for our own sanity if not survival. In quiet voices, we talked about how difficult it is to sever when you hoped that the break, if nothing else, would cause them to change their ways. But we did the right thing. We took care of ourselves and moved on. We set boundaries. We went on to live a better life.

We talked of how much we still love them, though we wish things were different.

After about sixteen years of a contemplative life, a thing happens. We start to feel compassion, - even, sometimes, a mournful kind of gratitude - for the folks who raised us. We become much more honest and aware of our own imperfections. Done right, this widens into a more cogent self.

I also thought, smelling Bhisma in the spring dirt, of the perennial question of historic wrongs. Our ancestors were assholes. The founding fathers were slaveholding misogynists. Old literature and history baffle us with their antiquated standards. We don’t know how to appreciate the past, love what we love, and similtaneously know the wrongs within it. Our ancestors also suffered. The founding fathers did, actually, wrest out one of the most noble projects of human history. I personally will always have a soft spot for William Faulkner.

“Mythology helps us mold coherent narratives that help us - surrounded as we are by the cacophony of the daily - grasp the dramas and changes we ourselves go though.”

One of the things that kicks me into bafflement and wonder every time history and patrimony comes up is the fact that Toni Morrison read - I mean contemplatively and compulsively reread - the King James Bible. I mull this endlessly. Most of us dismiss such a text. But I dare not say we are smarter than Toni Morrison was.

The religious answer I’ve been given regarding Bhisma holds that somebody had to play that role so that we could learn the lesson and restore things to right. In his heart, Bhisma knew god wanted him to play this role, so he was willing to be the bad guy in his actions. You can’t know other people’s hearts, the teaching says. Search your own.

Religious answers don’t help me much. Not if I take them as religion. I mean rules to follow. It’s like the story of Abraham in the Bible, willing to sacrifice his own son: the only possible moral here is taking the intervening Angel as as aspect of Abraham’s absolute love for his own kid, while the dictate of the previous angel presses Abraham to stay open to the will of god. An allegory, in other words, of the scary asks devotion requires and the building of trust that comes when we’re willing to consider the asks.

I thought of bell hooks, too. Her own childhood was a violent and morally disappointing one. She left this world with a desire that her family know she still loved them.

Bhisma! He is the story of love being messy, and the shortcoming of passing judgement lest we be judged (our age will also appear barbaric), and the ultimate fact that people are more than one thing. This doesn’t absolve, but opens to both forgiveness and accountability.

Stories like the Gita and the Bible aren’t rules to follow. In the conversation (not recorded, but the best part of these Mondays), we talked about the danger of moving through the world with the lens of good versus evil. If we do that, it’s too easy to believe god is on our side. It’s easy to forget that god is on the other guy’s side, too.

The only slightly less dangerous way of moving through this world is to constantly reexamine your own heart.

Rather than being ‘lessons’, mythology (literature, history, the contemplative life) hit us with feelings, regurgitating themes we recognize in ourselves. Sometimes they give us new ways to think about the stories we tell ourselves. Maybe - and I think this is valuable - they make us realize we’re telling stories, pause for a second, and gaze into the screaming silence behind the stories.

There is a clash and constant, ongoing flood of events, individual wills, and circumstances in this life. Mythology helps us mold coherent narratives that help us - surrounded as we are by the cacophony of the daily - grasp the dramas and changes we ourselves go though. I think they do this more by emotion than reason. Funny thing is, the process doesn’t berate reason. It elevates reason.

Avatar: the divine in humanity

Yoga philosophy and spirituality is so tricky precisely because it isn’t exactly ‘god’, or ‘religion’, as we understand those things in English. One of my teachers says “God” is not an Indian concept, and it doesn’t occur anywhere in this practice. But there is something…and the process of discovering what that something is is largely what the practice involves.

In Veda, for example, “the Deva-s” are not exactly “gods” or “goddesses”. They are forces of nature, laws of the universe, given a name so that we can identify and relate to them. Gravity, light, and change are forces of nature. Gravity exists whether you ‘believe’ in it or not, and worshipping gravity is just a little strange. These forces, then, are something that we can begin to recognize. What’s more, these forces exist not just ‘out there’ in the world, but within us. As we start to understand how-reality-works, we’re starting to discover those same powers (and where they have been misused, hijacked, resisted or conflicted) within ourselves.

My teacher, again: when you gesture toward the deva, don’t point outward. Touch your own chest.

This all gets more complicated as we realize the problems of both translation (even Indians will now say gods and goddesses all the time, because we simply lack a vocabulary to point to this other thing), personal and cultural baggage or wounds around religion and spirituality, and the tender work of discerning divine power in the world from the purely material aspects of the world. Non-dualism, incarnation, and transcendence in other words.

One way of experiencing non-dualism is through avatars - or times in the world in which the divine ‘descends’ into materiality in order to help us in our ascent or spiritual growth. The tradition holds that there are literally countless avatars - there is divinity in all humans. This is the root or base teaching of “I see the divine light in you” or the practice of trying to do so, all the self-checking of our assumptions and exclusions and othering. to say nothing of the radical and difficult work of coming-to-know the divine light inside ourselves and the pandora’s box of questions that opens up. But most of us are a deeply complicated mixture of divine and misused divine, the ‘demons’ of greed, fear, self-interest, me-and-mine thinking, avoidance, etc.

There have been, in mythological or spiritual time, 9 full incarnations of the divine come to visit humanity. They come when dharma - or eternal law, the spiritual path that supports self, others, and cosmos - has been threatened by the demonic forces. Avatars might appear to be ‘saviors’, but they aren’t, really. They are teachers, friends, co-conspirators in restoration. They mostly come to remind us to do our job.

Krishna - Viṣṇu’s eighth incarnation - is the most relevant to us. For a myriad of reasons: he is the most widely known and hence we have access to the teachings, practices, images. There is music, literature, community we can tap into. We can read the Gita. More importantly, perhaps, are his characteristics and role. Krishna is loving and sweet, familial and flirty. He’s much more human than others. But he also teaches: he will call you out, give you reminders and ways to understand, things to do.

I recently taught the Viṣṇu sūktam and gave this presentation after we’d learned some of the how to sound. The lecture and ideas might be helpful to others - particularly those who are beginning to work with the Gita as a spiritual practice.

Bhagavad Gita conversation begins next Monday!

The invite:

Just a quick moment to remind you that I will be hosting an exploration of the Bhagavad Gita on the first Monday of the month, beginning next Monday March 3, running for some 19 months. All the details are available here.

Also beginning next week, but every single Monday rather than once a month, I’ll be doing Gayatri Japa. The two offerings are distinct. The Gita involves philosophy and discussion with both me and peers. I hope to create a container in which we can explore our own discipline of hope, svadhyaya, or whatever spirituality or devotional you’ve got in these incredibly stressful times. Chanting japa doesn’t involve conversation or ‘teaching’: I’m just going to get online and do the prayer, no conversation. Thus I’ll be guiding a practice for anybody who is struggling right now to guide themselves.

Come to either, come to both, or whatever.

I don’t really teach anything these days unless I’m directly told to do so by my own mentors. From a western hustle culture perspective, it’s a decidedly odd arrangement. It might seem abject to some, as though I’ve given away my autonomy. From my perspective, it feels as though I’ve reclaimed autonomy.

*

Here’s some collected writing on the Gita, for dorky folks like me:

Amit Majmudar

“The Gita is a scripture without an outgroup—that is, even though it takes place on a literal battlefield, there is no rant against the opposing side; nor are there rants against unbelievers or heathen or infidels or whatnot. So anyone can approach the Gita without feeling their particular religious background or faith affiliation is under attack.

Its message of the underlying unity of all living things—the unity of the self and Brahman—and its exhortation to take part in the struggle of life, however painful, is pertinent to everyone, whether you apply it to environmentalism or social justice or to personal struggles in your everyday life.

And oh yeah—it’s one of the finest poems ever written, complete with a vision of the universal form of the divine.”

Henry David Thoreau

“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

“‘Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who practice the yoga gather in Brahma the certain fruits of their works.’

”Depend upon it that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully.

“’The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter.’

”To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.” ”

— Henry David Thoreau, in a letter to his friend

Thomas Merton

The Significance of the Bhagavad-Gita
THOMAS MERTON (1968)

“If, in the West, God can no longer be experienced as other than “dead,” it is because of an inner split and self-alienation which have characterized the Western mind in its single-minded dedication to only half of life: that which is exterior, objective, and quantitative. The “death of God” and the consequent death of genuine moral sense, respect for life, for humanity, for value, has expressed the death of an inner subjective quality of life: a quality which in the traditional religions was experienced in terms of God-consciousness. ”

— Thomas Merton

The word Gita means “Song.” Just as in the Bible the Song of Solomon has traditionally been known as “The Song of Songs” because it was interpreted to symbolize the ultimate union of Israel with God (in terms of human married love), so The Bhagavad Gita is, for Hinduism, the great and unsurpassed Song that finds the secret of human life in the unquestioning surrender to and awareness of Krishna.

While The Vedas provide Hinduism with its basic ideas of cult and sacrifice and The Upanishads develop its metaphysic of contemplation, The Bhagavad Gita can be seen as the great treatise on the “Active Life.” But it is really something more, for it tends to fuse worship, action and contemplation in a fulfillment of daily duty which transcends all three by virtue of a higher consciousness: a consciousness of acting passively, of being an obedient instrument of a transcendent will. The Vedas, The Upanishads, and The Gita can be seen as the main literary supports for the great religious civilization of India, the oldest surviving culture in the world. The fact that The Gita remains utterly vital today can be judged by the way such great reformers as Mohandas Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave both spontaneously based their lives and actions on it, and indeed commented on it in detail for their disciples.

The present translation and commentary is another manifestation of the permanent living importance of The Gita. Swami Bhaktivedanta brings to the West a salutary reminder that our highly activistic and one-sided culture is faced with a crisis that may end in self-destruction because it lacks the inner depth of an authentic metaphysical consciousness. Without such depth, our moral and political protestations are just so much verbiage. If, in the West, God can no longer be experienced as other than “dead,” it is because of an inner split and self-alienation which have characterized the Western mind in its single-minded dedication to only half of life: that which is exterior, objective, and quantitative. The “death of God” and the consequent death of genuine moral sense, respect for life, for humanity, for value, has expressed the death of an inner subjective quality of life: a quality which in the traditional religions was experienced in terms of God-consciousness. Not concentration on an idea or concept of God, still less on an image of God, but a sense of presence, of an ultimate ground of reality and meaning, from which life and love could spontaneously flower.

Realization of the Supreme “Player” whose “Play” (Lila) is manifested in the million-formed, inexhaustible richness of beings and events, is what gives us the key to the meaning of life. Once we live in awareness of the cosmic dance and move in time with the Dancer, our life attains its true dimension. It is at once more serious and less serious than the life of one who does not sense this inner cosmic dynamism. To live without this illuminated consciousness is to live as a beast of burden, carrying one’s life with tragic seriousness as a huge, incomprehensible weight (see Camus’ interpretation of the Myth of Sisyphus). The weight of the burden is the seriousness with which one takes one’s own individual and separate self. To live with the true consciousness of life centered in Another is to lose one’s self-important seriousness and thus to live life as “play” in union with a Cosmic Player. It is He alone that one takes seriously. But to take Him seriously is to find joy and spontaneity in everything, for everything is gift and grace. In other words, to live selfishly is to bear life as an intolerable burden. To live selflessly is to live in joy, realizing by experience that life itself is love and gift. To be a lover and a giver is to be a channel through which the Supreme Giver manifests His love in the world.

But The Gita presents a problem to some who read it in the present context of violence and war which mark the crisis of the West. The Gita appears to accept and to justify war. Arjuna is exhorted to submit his will to Krishna by going to war against his enemies, who are also his own kin, because war is his duty as a Prince and warrior. Here we are uneasily reminded of the fact that in Hinduism as well as in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, there is a concept of a “Holy War” which is “willed by God” and we are furthermore reminded of the fact that, historically, this concept has been secularized and inflated beyond measure. It has now “escalated” to the point where slaughter, violence, revolution, the annihilation of enemies, the extermination of entire populations and even genocide have become a way of life. There is hardly a nation on earth today that is not to some extent committed to a philosophy or to a mystique of violence. One way or other, whether on the left or on the right, whether in defense of a bloated establishment or of an improvised guerrilla government in the jungle, whether in terms of a police state or in terms of a ghetto revolution, the human race is polarizing itself into camps armed with everything from Molotov cocktails to the most sophisticated technological instruments of death. At such a time, the doctrine that “war is the will of God” can be disastrous if it is not handled with extreme care. For everyone seems in practice to be thinking along some such lines, with the exception of a few sensitive and well-meaning souls (mostly the kind of people who will read this book).

The Gita is not a justification of war, nor does it propound a war-making mystique. War is accepted in the context of a particular kind of ancient culture in which it could be and was subject to all kinds of limitations. (It is instructive to compare the severe religious limitations on war in the Christian Middle Ages with the subsequent development of war by nation states in modern times-backed of course by the religious establishment. ) Arjuna has an instinctive repugnance for war, and that is the chief reason why war is chosen as the example of the most repellent kind of duty. The Gita is saying that even in what appears to be most “unspiritual” one can act with pure intentions and thus be guided by Krishna consciousness. This consciousness itself will impose the most strict limitations on one’s use of violence because that use will not be directed by one’s own selfish interests, still less by cruelty, sadism, and mere blood lust.

The discoveries of Freud and others in modern times have, of course, alerted us to the fact that there are certain imperatives of culture and of conscience which appear pure on the surface and are in fact bestial in their roots. The greatest inhumanities have been perpetrated in the name of “humanity,” “civilization,” “progress,” “freedom,” “my country,” and of course “God.” This reminds us that in the cultivation of an inner spiritual consciousness there is a perpetual danger of self-deception, narcissism, self-righteous evasion of truth. In other words the standard temptation of religious and spiritually minded people is to cultivate an inner sense of rightness or of peace, and make this subjective feeling the final test of everything. As long as this feeling of rightness remains with them, they will do anything under the sun. But this inner feeling (as Auschwitz and the Eichmann case have shown) can coexist with the ultimate in human corruption.

The hazard of the spiritual quest is of course that its genuineness cannot be left to our own isolated subjective judgment alone. The fact that I am turned on doesn’t prove anything whatever. (Nor does the fact that I am turned off.) We do not simply create our own lives on our own terms. Any attempt to do so is ultimately an affirmation of our individual self as ultimate and supreme. This is a self-idolatry which is diametrically opposed to “Krishna consciousness” or to any other authentic form of religious or metaphysical consciousness.

The Gita sees that the basic problem of man is his endemic refusal to live by a will other than his own. For in striving to live entirely by his own individual will, instead of becoming free, man is enslaved by forces even more exterior and more delusory than his own transient fancies. He projects himself out of the present into the future. He tries to make for himself a future that accords with his own fantasy, and thereby escape from a present reality which he does not fully accept. And yet, when he moves into the future he wanted to create for himself, it becomes a present that is once again repugnant to him. And yet this is precisely what he has “made” for himself-it is his own karma. In accepting the present in all its reality as something to be dealt with precisely as it is, man comes to grips at once with his karma and with a providential will which, ultimately, is more his own than what he currently experiences, on a superficial level, as “his own will.” It is in surrendering a false and illusory liberty on the superficial level that man unites himself with the inner ground of reality and freedom in himself which is the will of God, of Krishna, of Providence, of Tao. These concepts do not all exactly coincide, but they have much in common. It is by remaining open to an infinite number of unexpected possibilities which transcend his own imagination and capacity to plan that man really fulfills his own need for freedom. The Gita, like the Gospels, teaches us to live in awareness of an inner truth that exceeds the grasp of our thought and cannot be subject to our own control. In following mere appetite for power, we are slaves of our own appetite. In obedience to that inner truth we are at last free.

Faith?

The word śraddhā is all over the yogic literature. It is the first step on the yogic path according to Patañjali. In the Bhagavad Gita, śraddhā is foundational to one’s search for truth and meaning: one’s śraddhā is the basis of their actions and the consequent unfolding direction in life. In the Veda, śraddhā is what lights the inner fires of metabolism, wisdom, and being.

It’s unfortunate - or at the very least misleading - that this concept is translated to “faith” or “belief” in English. Because of our spiritual wounds, the thing comes across as confusing, offensive, dogmatic, religious, bypassing, ignorant, avoidant, oppressive, judgmental, archaic, submissive, unscientific, stupid, brutal, and provocative. We bristle, even though the lived experience of empowerment and curiosity are the most true things we can say of our personal yoga experience.

Let’s throw out ‘faith’. It would be better to understand śraddhā as conviction or dedication. The word in and of itself breaks down to a unity of truth (śhrat) and hold (dhā to hold, to support, specifically support the mind and functions of mind, an attentional stability). Thus śraddhā means “holder of truth” or '“adherence to truth” or “in the pursuit of truth”. Which is lovely.

““Śraddhā is essential for progress,
whether in Yoga or any other endeavour.
It is a feeling that cannot be expressed or intellectually discussed.
It, however, is a feeling that is not always uncovered in every person.
When absent or weak,
it is evident through the lack of stability and focus in a person.
Where present and strong,
it is evident through the commitment, perseverance
and enthusiasm the person exhibits.
For such a person, life is meaningful.”

”

— TKV Desikachar

In the oldest texts, words are constructed in verb forms. In later commentaries, the same words are constructed from nouns, prefixes and suffixes. Thus in the oldest and original sense, śraddhā is an action: it is a grasping of or holding to, a moving toward truth. In that understanding, śraddhā is no different than science, logic, good relationship, the effort to do the right thing.

Wellbeing depends upon a sense that what we do matters. Sanity demands it. It’s vital that we believe in ourselves, crucial to feel we can make a difference. śraddhā affirms this wellness, sanity, and life force. Depending on the moment, the importance of our actions and thoughts either feels like being called out or like an invitation. In all moments, it is validating. Even being called out is, at root, validation.

In the fourth chapter of the Gita, Krishna says shraddhavan labhate jnanam: the one who adheres to truth arrives at knowing.

Desikachar said that śraddhā is the resolution or resolve, despite obstacles and uncertainty, to move in the right direction. I’ve heard other teachers say “urgent curiosity”, “unwavering discipline”, “vigilance”, “attentiveness”, “hope”, “source of motivation”, “longing”, “open mind”, “prudence”, “conviction”, “trust”, “heart’s desire”, “optimism”, and “hopefulness”.

“Faith” doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with truth, which is why it’s a crappy translation for śraddhā.

"The truth will set you free,” we’re told. The quip is a borrowing of a central tenet to intellectual freedom and the power of learning: Cognoscetis Veritatem et Veritas Liberabit Vos. There are versions of this statement in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and ancient philosophies. In social terms, “the truth will set you free” examines history and social conditions with clean honesty, as the related quip “truth to power” illustrates. In personal and intimate relationship, it addresses the harm of secrecy, denial, and dishonesty with the power of vulnerability, care, trust and respect.

The most lovely aspect of śraddhā is its opening. It’s spaciousness. While ‘freedom’ has meant different things in different cultural contexts, ‘truth’ always speaks to the possibility of growth, healing, understanding and change. śraddhā includes limitations and doubt as a part of the movement. We might be wrong or make mistakes along the way, but with śraddhā failure becomes less a personal failing and more a clarification. We may not have answers or enough information. We may not feel competent.

We don’t know, but we can want to know. śraddhā is the feeling tone of ‘you have everything you need’ and ‘more will be revealed’. It is the premise of enlightenment, wisdom, and liberation.

The health and hopefulness of such a starting point is clarifying and uplifting. In wisdom traditions, śraddhā takes on the flavor of trust and confidence. These often direct or connect us to trying, seeking out guidance and expertise, counter ill-will and short term fixes in our mind heart. śraddhā is the basis of right understanding, right relationship, and perfect resolve. It fosters both respect and self-understanding. It takes a hammer to selfishness, all the fleeting and fickleness of mood and circumstance and excuses. śraddhā, to my experience, dignifies everything.

“Write one true sentence,” said Hemingway. “Write the truest sentence that you know. Once you write one true sentence, you can write another, then the next, and so on.” This tends to both cut through my writer’s block and my life generally confusions. It’s how I practice āsana, too. It’s also, if I’m keen and balanced enough, the way I navigate tricky things like relationships, disappointment, and moral quandary. śraddhā is the heart of good teaching: “start where you are,” a great teacher says, knowing full well that such a start leads to places the student can’t yet fathom and wouldn’t believe.

Truth matters. It also shows up all over the place. The weather, the news, my family, my body. I know that when I stay close to it, when I keep coming back and touching it like a rosary or a prayer mat, śraddhā takes on the quality of a pulse. It keeps me from the thinness and ungraspability of things. It’s thick and warm and hearty, as in of heart. It flows and circulates, undercurrents and swells. It is essential aliveness. When I’m anchored in śraddhā, my fears get small or at the very least unimportant. Urgency deflates. Whims - which I tend to have like a rash - pass without my having to worry about them. I don’t hate myself when I rest in śraddhā. I don’t have to fight with everybody all the time. I’m not so scared. I’m not so lonely. Life is hard, still, but I both know this and it’s okay. In inversion - which is basically what the yoga path is - the hardness of life actually becomes good.

śraddhā is gumption. Audacity. It’s even anger and fear. It’s what happens when a student shows up, or wrinkles their forehead, or asks a question. It’s the smile a good teacher gets, every single time.

**

I’ll be teaching the śraddhā sūktam Tuesday mornings in March and April. It’s (appropriately) a beginner level mantra. Come. Sing.

Prana. The moving.

Prana yama 1. The breath lies at the very boundary between our conscious and our unconscious selves.  It lies between our thoughts and the whole of our physical, emotional, cellular and metabolic makeup. Because it lies there, between, it is a bridge.  It is an autonomic system, like our digestion and the ticking heart.  But unlike those things, we can feel and pay attention to it directly, without a need for medical tools or machines. And unlike those things, we can choose to influence it.

2.  Furthermore, there are few sensory experiences that have such an immediate effect on our nervous system – that is, our brains, our spinal cord, our nerves and neural pathways.  The nervous system is responsible for mood, instinct, fight or flight, rest and digest.  It plays a major role in our thinking and behavioral patterns.  It is also intimately related to the way we age, the way we process internal and external stressors, and our ability to remember, imagine, create.  We could change our nervous system over time with intensive therapy, drastic physical shifts, ongoing dietary change, drugs or brain surgery.  With breath, though, we can affect our brain, nerves, and spine within seconds.

Books could be written, and have, about the thousands of ways in which the breath is central to a yoga practice, but these two form a rock solid beginning.

By learning to pay attention to our breath (and, at times, to influence it), we take a step back from the thinking, ego part of who we are and directly experience our larger selves.  We literally start to play with the world of the subconscious, the dream, memory, cell structure, brain tissue, nerves standing up or calming down, the life processes of birth and decay.  There is metaphor and poetry to talking about the breath: the breath of god, the breath of life, stopping to catch a breath, you take my breath away.  It’s important to realize this is no metaphor, but truth: changing your breath changes your physical reality, immediately, in ways your conscious self can only catch glimpses of or appreciate at a surface level.

Because the breath occupies this boundary land of conscious and unconscious, it is a unique trap door we can use.  It provides a way for the conscious self to step into and begin to influence and explore all that is unconscious and murky and so terribly influential in our lives.  It is very hard to imagine controlling the secretion of digestive proteins, say, or to willfully slow down our heart rate or participate in the life cycle of a cell.  It is nearly impossible to think our way into feeling better or believing other than the way we do, no matter how many affirmations you repeat to yourself.  Those are all processes dominated by the unconscious; they are stubbornly resistant to will power or conscious intervention.

But the breath – the breath is something we CAN notice and even change.  It requires no fancy tools or expensive equipment, no laboratory tests or radical change in diet.  It doesn’t require years and years of study.  It is available to everyone, at any moment, and literally brings us to the gate of all those ‘subconscious’ processes happening within us.  It is proof that we are participant in those larger, shadowy processes, even though our participation is usually unconscious.

The word ‘prana’ is usually translated to breath or life force.  ‘Yama’ is restraint, observance, practice, control, or mastery.  Hence, pranayama,  fourth branch on the eight limbed path of yoga practices , is observance and practice of the breath or life force within us.

Prana

Life, physicists tell us, is energy.  I am not a physicist, and I couldn’t very well explain this to a toddler, let alone another grown adult.  All that E=Mc squared, stuff.  Yet I know and accept, on an intuitive and intellectual level, that life and cosmos are a mysterious tapestry in which our universe burst into being out of nothingness eons ago, that millions and zillions of stars circling are and exploding with materials so heavy a teaspoon’s worth weighs many billions of pounds and the shifting of seasons is actually, on a level I cannot see, a shifting of atoms.

There is something that causes us to be alive and, after our last breath leaves us, to no longer be the same any more.  I am not a theologian, either, and I will not bother to explore concepts of afterlife.  But I will say there is something that is us that doesn’t seem to be just our bodies, since our cells change every second, but isn’t just our brains, either.

That self, the yogic tradition tells us, is one manifestation of prana.  Prana is energy.  Life is energy.

That, says the yogi guru, pointing to energy and mystery and wonder, is what you are.

**

The yogic sages were brilliant.  They were able to discover and intelligently talk about this stuff without the benefit of a microscope.

Our western medicine has identified 6000 nerves in the human body: conduits along which impulses of energy move back and forth, shifting our hormones and cell structure and chemical composition along the way.

A yogic sage would nod at the concept of nerves.  He would call it a nadi.  The nadis are energetic and informational pathways that course our bodies in a manner as detailed and variegated as the nerves, the lymphatic system, and the circulatory network combined.

The yogic sages say there are not 6000, only.  That is only what our microscopes see.  Some yogic maps show 72,000 nadis or energy/nerve pathways in the body.  The yogic map of these pathways is uncannily like our map of the nervous system.  Other yogic sources, though, say there are more than 350,000 energy pathways, coursing and roadmapping out the entire field of who we are.  They’d say our science is just not sophisticated, not subtle enough to see it.

**

Life is energy.  Life is prana.  And yoga is a practice or path of learning what and where energy actually is.  What has power and what doesn’t.  This sounds simple, and it is: we learn we function better when our bodies are open and cared for, when we eat well and rest enough.  But the study or practice of energy is also profound, and goes deeper and deeper the more open you become to exploring it.  It will start asking difficult questions, along the lines of why do I feel or act this way?  Why does this feel so good or bad? When I say ‘I’m feeling sad’, what do I actually mean?  Is there a physical sensation to sadness or is it a set of thoughts?  Where are those physical sensations, and can I tolerate or change them? What happens when I sit down and look fear right in the face for a moment? Why do I always feel this way after talking to so and so? How much longer will my body take this?  What IS that pain in my neck? They are difficult questions, and push us toward self-knowledge and self-mastery.   They also open into remarkable possibilities.

There is, at any flickering moment in time, a tremendous amount of power and intelligence in your body.  The human body can power up televisions, they say.  Human bodies could light up whole cities.  Every heart beat is triggered by an electrical surge.  Anger has a voltage.  So does laughter.

What yoga begins to show is that we have this huge potential, this oceanic tide of kinetic energy, even if we feel sluggish and stuck and powerless.  The power in us is often misplaced, repressed, or resisted – which causes energetic turmoil and dis- ease.  But it is there.

Prana and the energy body

Prana is life force , or breath.  It is the energy of the million, billion stars exploding and gyrating in the sky.  Human beings receive this life force directly into the body through the process of breathing.  We take it in in other ways as well: through live foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables, minerals, through fresh water, through living, breathing trees and vegetation.

I tend to think that we also take it in through the love of other people and other creatures.  We probably also take it in in more subtle ways still, through music, the sound of inspiring words, beautiful sights.  Through empathy and art (neuroscience is backing this up).  Human beings are hardwired for connection: the tug and pull of affection, inspiration, rejection, or acceptance leave tracks or stains or floods of energy inside us.  It is the emotive force, complete with its ocean of endorphins and stress hormones and sex hormones and joy, that binds us to life and makes us want to live, more.

Yoga discovered that in addition to the physical architecture of our body we have an interpenetrating and underlying sphere or tapestry of reality.  They called it the pranamayakosha (the body of vital energy or airs.  (There are five bodies.  Food for a different essay)).  The nature of this subtle structure is movement, flow, change and tidal shift.  Over the centuries, they developed not just the theory of the pranamayakosha, but the anatomy of it.  They discovered the roadmap to our emotional selves, our characters (again, see picture at the end of the essay).

The structure is shot through with these invisible channels, those nadis, through which prana flows, energizing and literally sustaining all parts of the physical and energetic and intellectual structure.  Again, a visual representation of these tracks looks very much like our representations of the nervous or circulatory systems, but many times more dense.

Many western students are loosely familiar with the term ‘chakra’ or energy wheel.  According to yogic science, these energy wheels are like grand central terminal for the railway of the nadis.  They are energetic hubs, major thoroughfares of power and information.  Interestingly enough, these chakra points correlate directly with major nerve plexuses, organs, circulatory and lympathic centers of our body.  Their observations were physiologically accurate.

The energy body is deeply intelligent, although it doesn’t exactly speak English.  Much of yoga practice is learning to develop awareness of and trust in the wisdom of this energy body.

As yogis learned to experience the energy body directly, to map the flow of its major currents, they made another fascinating discovery:

Breath has an immediate impact on the entire flowing, waving, shimmering thing.  More than anything else, it is breathing that builds and regulates the flow of prana in the body.  On the most basic of physical levels, breathing sustains and supports the metabolic processes of every anatomical system in the body.  The very life of the body’s tissues is created by and dependent on the process of the breath. A body can go more than a week without food, almost that long without water.  Without breath, we would die in moments.  Breath supports the strength, responsiveness, and ability to detoxify the bones, the muscles, and the organs.  Unhealthy breathing habits (which most of us have) cause cellular structure to weaken, become dysplastic, irregularly shaped.

The breath balances, regulates, opens, closes, controls, and channels the flow of energy across the entire field of who we are, from our core beliefs and emotions to the skin of our toes.

Yama

The word yama is translated restraint or ascetic practice.  This is a harsh word, to our modern day ears.  It rankles of renunciation, fasting, rules and regulations.  Yet the point wasn’t an embrace of suffering for the sake of suffering.  The point was to suffer less; to be oneself, more.  Yogis sought reality.  Knowledge as ‘taught’ by priests, hierarchies, rituals was not their goal; experienced truth was.  There is an element of hard truth to ‘yama’; but there is also an element of authenticity and integrity.  The practices and restraints may be thought of as cultivated habits, a dedication to right things over easy answers, or an approach to self mastery.  At its most general, practice is the effort to replace blind auto pilot with conscious choice and mindfulness.

The earliest yogis dedicated their lives to spiritual and psychological experimentation.  They investigated diet, breathing, physical exercises, ethical behavior, prayer, meditation, chanting, worship, dedication to every conceivable kind of god and goddess.  Over the course of time, some headway was made in discovering the path to a fully alive human being.  A loose tradition was born.  A set of reliable and verifiable principals and practices emerged.  At some point, these principals and practices came to be known as yoga.

Yogis used their own minds and bodies as laboratories for experiments in living.  They arrived over and over again at a series of stunning insights into the human condition.

In the final analysis, they found that it is not what you know or believe, but how you live that counts.  Yamas are rungs on a ladder, a net to catch our days and our experiences with, a guide away from suffering and into that ‘more’ we suspect is there.

Interestingly enough, yogic wisdom does not make any claim to be undertaking spiritual writing or theology.  There is no interest in founding a new religion or disabusing one from the religion one already has.  There is little of entertainment, and not much drawing on the archetypes of the religious imagination.  Instead, the yogic wisdom texts seem to say that what mature human beings require is not another or different religion.  What we require is not more theology, but a reliable practice; a training program that may help the body and the mind realize the full potential and ramifications of being human.

Pranayama – practicing life’s energies

I taught a woman in a domestic violence shelter for two months, and after she left the shelter she continued coming to some of my classes.  Over time, the change in her was so poignant, and so inarguably TRUE, that I was baffled.  Of course, I say that yoga is change and transformation all the time.  I believe it.  But to see the change so radically, right before my eyes, in a way that was not metaphor but real, was stunning.

In the beginning, she showed up in jeans, a thick sweater, and tennis shoes.  I made a general comment to the room about the sensory receptors on the bottoms of our feet, but didn’t push it.  She practiced in those clothes for months.  When I gave cues to stretch the arms or take big steps, she would either mince her way into it and then draw back to her norm, or lose all control and not be able to move her arms and legs in co-ordination.  She always took the same place in a back corner of the room.

Although her disconnection from her body was obvious, it wasn’t really any different than the disconnect most of us have.  There are variations.  But it is a difference only of degree.

Yogically speaking, we begin a personal, spiritual, and psychological change through the body.  While this may seem a bit of a stretch for western minds, to yoga this is a very valid path.  The body plays a central role in the development of our character.  When we were young, those things mostly happened to us.  When we begin to practice, however, character and psychology are things we begin to make, ourselves.  Most psychology, self help, or spirituality begins with what the yogis would call the ‘mental body’ – thoughts and feelings.  But yogis take a radical step in moving the entry point right into the body.  They understand it to be the doorway to the more subtle interior worlds.

One evening this woman showed up to class in sweats and carrying a yoga mat of her own.  She sat down and took off her shoes.  I caught her eye and she gave a slight, shy smile before she went seriously into her pre-yoga practice cross legged seat.

It was as if she knew she had found something, here.  She was willing to see what else she might find.

A week or two later, she took her yoga mat out of the back corner and found a place in the front row.

All of this was beginning to show in her yoga postures, as well.  She became intensely concentrated in her practice.  It was clear she was enjoying, especially, the standing postures and heart opening practices – the warrior poses, mountain, dancer.  She told me one day after class that she loved the sense of feeling her feet on ground.  For the first time in her life, she said, she felt strong.  I noticed that she had taken a sudden leap with her breathing: it was steady and smooth and full even when she was most tired and other students were distracted.

One day, I noticed she was crying in camel pose.  Everyone went into child’s pose, afterward, where our faces are lowered to the ground.  When I cued the class to move again, into the next pose, this woman stayed down.  I noticed that her tears had turned to a kind of quiet and slow weeping.

This has happened before in my classes.  It has happened to me.  But I was surprised when a few minutes later, the woman stood back up again.  She followed the cues and did a few more poses with all of us.  And then, all on her own, she went back into camel pose and stayed there for a very long time.

It wasn’t until weeks later that she and I processed this together.  We were able to process not just that day but all the slow weeks and months that had come ahead of it.  Yoga works that way.  There are obvious and sudden moments of epiphany.  But there is also consistent, day after day subtlety and the basic willingness to show up.

She told me much of what I myself had seen: that she felt a powerful kind of concentration in yoga, and sometimes just moving from one posture to another felt inexpressibly good to her.  She noticed how her breathing had changed and grown more steady and free, and said this was true especially in class, but was showing up in her life off the mat as well.  She said that her arms and her legs began to have energy in them, and it was like there was a burning, fiery power right behind her belly button as well.

In talking about what happened the day she cried, she shrugged. She said it was ‘weird’.  She had begun to feel very dizzy.  Her heart began to race and her vision blurred, as if there were dust motes in her eyes.  Her whole chest and throat began to feel hot, “full of heat, it really kind of hurt”.  She felt she was going to pass out.  Then she realized she was crying, and felt ‘relief’ that we were going into child’s pose afterwards.

But what happened, later, I asked?  Why did you decide to go back into the pose?

She shrugged again.  “I knew that I could.” she said; “I knew it was okay, and there was something in my chest and throat that just needed to be felt again.  I don’t know, Karin….but a few weeks ago I heard something you said in class, and I realized I felt beautiful.  I’ve never felt beautiful in my whole life.  Somehow, it seemed a beautiful thing to do to go back into that pose.”

I know that this moment was an outward and visible sign of a major shift in her practice.  She was able to touch – to literally reconnect and feel – her feelings.  Feelings are the subterranean life of our energy body.

What I saw happen in that student is a thing I have felt in different ways – and to many different degrees of intensity – in my own life.

It is a stunningly beautiful thing.  You see it happen and you feel privileged, blessed to see a human achievement so rare in our day to day life.

But honesty tells me I have seen this happen, over and over and over again.

It would take hours to discuss the ways in which yoga – and perhaps other practices or people in her life – helped this woman.  We’d launch into psychology and theories and about how healing works, how people become stronger or happy.  But all of those discussions are really diversions from the real truth: it would be impossible to articulate all that happens to us in a yoga practice, but the sum total is good.  There is something to simply watching our breath that opens doorways to the soul we didn’t know were there.  If what we need is a way to feel better, stronger, more alive and more self-assured, than theory or theology don’t matter so much as practice does.

Practice, practice.  Practice.  said Patthabhi Jois.  Practice and all is coming.

The word, yoga.

English is an indo-european language - our word yoke is a direct descendant of the sanskrit word yoga.  It means - yoga - to bind or link, to connect, to unify.  To be bound to. The question is, bound to what?  At its most basic, most pared down, bare as dust definition, yoga is the linking of mind, body, and movement.  Our soul to our skin.

Binding the pieces of ourselves back together again. Perhaps knowing where they severed; maybe not.

This is the important point: the belief that body and mind are separate is part of our cultural, philosophic, and medical heritage.  We believe when we have a mood or an anxiety we should be able to just 'snap out of it'; that diseases are strange things visited on our animal bodies, having nothing to do with our 'self'.  We believe our bodies are just vehicles, handy mechanisms for wheeling the brain around from one part of the world to the other, but mostly disgusting, inconvenient, bestial.  Mostly a thing to be contained, controlled, covered up and cleaned up. Managed. Hidden. Used.

Yoga, when I found it, was a life saving bridge.  I didn't know it then. It wasn't what I was looking for, exactly.  I didn't give much credence to the idea that what I felt and believed and thought everyday could be altered, let alone healed.  I didn't believe life, or myself, could be any different.  I certainly didn't suspect and would not have believed that my body would be the thing to do it.  I scoffed at faith healing, energy talk, wispy and weak kneed ideas about karma and souls and manifestation.  They simply didn't hold up to logic and experience.

I still scoff.  But yoga's heart and very definition have very little to do with wispy and weak logic.  There is nothing about auras or faith healing there.  It is simply and forcefully the stated fact that our mind and our body do interface.  That our body hears and remembers everything our mind happens to say.

And our mind feels, remembers, everything the body has lived through.

**

Yoga has been a bridge.  It has, in ways that no political science, biology, doctor or religion or common sense self help book ever has, given me actual tools and ways and means to sort through things.  Tools that work.

For as much as the mind body separation is taken as fact in our culture, we are confused about it.  We say one thing but mean another.  We say 'self' or 'soul' or 'personality' as if it were distinct from the bag of bones, but we suffer.  And we say that ideas are more important than bodies, but we act as if bodies were something, after all.  Politics is very much about bodies, what they are worth, who gets what, who gets to be where and who is excluded.  We have bought and sold bodies, buy and sell them still.  We pretend to be intellectual, democratic, evolved homo sapiens but when it gets right down to our hours and our relationships and our days it involves hunger, fatigue, sex, boundaries, love, anger, disgust, and longing.

Approaching my days, now, from yoga, from the starting point that mind and body are both aspects of self, I suddenly have a better way to live.  Hour after hour, how I deal with hunger and sleep and posture and schedules; but also in how I understand what to do in terms of global politics, familial relationships, art and philosophy.

**

It is important to wonder how personal growth, character, phsyical sturcture, and health/dis-ease relate to one another.  It is important to realize the way our body has been acted upon, cared for, regarded both by ourselves and by others are stored into our bodies on a deepset, cellular level.  It is important to realize that our craving for 'something more' and sense that something missing, or ambition and hope, or hints of god and joy or simply the wishing we could know joy, are part of our human body and as real as blood is.  As actual as the kneecap.

It is wonderful to realize the questions, simple stress, out and out boredom or dull abiding inner fears can be touched.  Not by talking about them or popping a pill.  Not by removing something wrong with you or getting over it.  But by listening to your breath, lowering your forehead to the ground, spreading the fingers of the hand.

**

Many of our medical, educational, religious and philosophical institutions base themselves on the assumption that such an interfacing system and, indeed, such direct relationships do not exist.

Yet wellbeing (either purely from a physical point of view, 'success', or an intellectual/emotional standpoint) cannot be infused intravenously or ladled out by prescription.  Nor can they be willed or manifested by positive thinking or die-hard pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.  Health and disease do not just happen to us.  They are part of a matrix, laid out on the lines of the body mind.

**

When I begin to teach, when the student is new, I repeat and repeat myself: yoga means connection, unity, binding.  The mind to the body, the intention to the action, the breath to the movement, the brain to reality.

All our dis-ease, from headache to chronic illness to broken bones, to longing and depression and overwork, are disturbances of that connection.  Yoga is reconnecting.  Yoga is return.

**

Our bodies and our imaginations are walking autobiographies.  We hardly know who we are.  Yoga is reading, and writing, our own stories, our own lives.

By listening to the breath, lowering our foreheads to the ground, and spreading the fingers of the hand.

Give me strength...

There is strength to open pickle jars.  Strength that can hold a twisted, inverted asana where all of one's body weight is supported across the five fingers of one hand.  And then there is the strength that burns down cities in war, of storms that rips trees from the earth, the true strength of death that makes smoldering matchsticks of us all. It was a hot, smoldering summer.  Without thunder or mercy, just the drone of dry heat.  It was easy to fall into lassitude, into believing everything would go on being the way it was.  To think of strength as the muscles, and a personal thing.  I practiced handstands.  There were many black flies.  I flicked at them, absently.

Then one day it thundered.  It roared.  Someone said 'it's fall now, so...' and I thought but no, no it isn't.  By the end of her sentence, though, it was.  September is irrevocable.  And I was snapped out of my dailyness when told I'd have to move, things are changing, I'll have to make decisions and things won't be the same anymore.

The westernest leaves of the sugar maples turned a burned red.

**

When you meet persons who have practiced yoga or meditation for a long time, you are struck by their levelness.  They have a kind of grace.  A quality of being touched, joyful.  It seems, sometimes, that they are a lucky brand of bastard whom suffering and the chaos of life hasn't touched.  Their lives must be different, less stressful than ours.

This isn't true.

When you ask, you learn that they suffer and worry just as we do.  Their lives are no less stressful than our own.  I've known yogis who battle massive depression.  Folks who weep when their parents die.  Ones who have lost money, a limb, a child.

It is not that they don't suffer or that they are immune to life's changes.  It is only that they have learned what true strength means.  It isn't that they don't age, don't hurt, don't have headaches or have to work and find time and defecate like the rest of us neurotic humans.  They suffer and struggle.

But they are not overwhelmed.  They are strong.

**

Before I practiced yoga, my life was a kind of war.  It seemed very hard.  I seemed to have to work, constantly, to hang on with both hands, to keep the whole thing going by my own efforts.  I wavered between a kind of self-pity (why can't I have a life like hers?  Why is that person so lucky?  Things would be different if I had the money, time, if I lived there, if I met the right person, didn't have to deal with this person...) where everything appeared very random and an overweening sense of importance: I would make my own life happen, I would learn the right skills, I would or would not make relationships work, have a happy life, be healthy.

Most of us spend most of our lives with this kind of erratic, frantic movement.  Where we have to juggle and keep dancing.  Where we are constantly busy or too busy, but never really seem to get anything done.

I thought of my depression (devastating, disgusting, brutalizing and wanting me dead) was a thing I had to manage and control.  I thought of my time as I thing I had to control.  I thought happiness and success were things you got if you were good enough at it, and I tried but doubted the outcome.  I thought, most of the time, that I understood The Way Things Are, whereas others seemed only to have opinions and not know The Whole Story. Relationships, just like projects, were things I had to navigate.

I rarely noticed the color of leaves or the passing of seasons.  Unless, of course, it came as a kind of insult and affront to my efforts; the passing of time making a mockery of my best intentions. The whole of 'life' being out of control and myself as powerless.

**

We forget who and what we really are, says yoga.  We are blind.

The practice is to discover strength.  Not of muscles, not of pickle jars, but the strength to be fully alive with the burning leaves and the thundering storm.  To know we are not supposed to and never can 'control' life - we can't even control our own thoughts and feelings, for chrissake -

we are supposed to live it.  To participate in power and strength, rather than fight against it.  To realize there is power and passion and awesome, more baffling strength in being than we'd ever glimpsed.  Strength is there, is real, but we've been looking for it in the wrong places.

**

Yogic strength is in attention, in showing up and watching without turning away.  We watch our thoughts...churning, not so pretty, unstoppable, sometimes just plain stupid, every once in a while deeply provocative and profound.

When we learn to watch them, we are not crippled and driven by them.  We can access the profundity.  And we learn to not be cowed by all that pettiness and drone. Attending can let it be, thoughts being thoughts, mind being mind.

When we learn to attend, we may be slapped with the shock of strength.  Craving, for example.  We slowly start to practice just watching and will notice that 'craving' is an understatement: it is an avalanche of physical sensations, sweaty palms, salivating mouth, a spreading subtle tension across the entire body of muscles, a tightening in the belly, a compression around the eyes, perhaps even a closing of the hearing; it's a ruckus of thoughts, terribly uncomfortable and pressing and insistent, and you cannot stop it.  Attempts to stop it make it worse.

Muscle, for another example.  When we learn, slowly, as we can, to literally pay attention to what stretching feels like, it might hit us like an orgasm or an drug altered state: reality is more intense, more vivid, more than it was before.  We notice not only that the muscle is tensed, but whether it is clenched or trembling or steady, hot or cold, rough in texture or smooth like water, we notice how one muscle touches another muscle, where sensation begins and ends, that sensation in one tiny part of the body spreads like ripples in water.  A clenched hand spills up the arm and into the neck, it alters our breath, it clenches the jaw, it tightens the chest, it shifts our toes, and it literally changes the way we think, shouts a change in our hormonal levels, heats or cools the skin, raises hairs, focuses or unfocuses the eyes.

Every emotion, every movement, has this powerful swell of energy behind it.  Even boredom, apathy, hunger.  Attending shows us how powerful these things are.

When we get stronger, we might be able to tolerate attending to a thing like anger, rage, depression, anxiety.

I am afraid, we will think.  And we'll have the strength to go on, anyway.

We'll realize, more and more and over and over, how much is involved in this being alive.  It's as profound, I tell you, as the ocean is deep or the cosmos is baffling.  We cannot control our minds, we cannot control our lives and our deaths.  But we can know them.

**

Do this, and the strength in you suddenly seems something out of a fairy tale or a comic book, something almost divine.  There is a reason yoga talks in metaphysics.

Oh, my god, you'll think: I LOVE this person, and your love will swell.  I am HUNGRY, you'll realize, and start to eat differently, all the colors and textures and tastes being louder than they were before.  I want to be happy, you'll know, and you'll start moving, moment by moment, into the person for whom happiness is possible.

A person of strength and grace.

It doesn't matter if I can do the pose, or not, you'll think in your yoga class.  And you'll be dumbstruck to realize you're standing on your head.

**

Life, friends, is hard.

We cannot control life.

But it is possible to be alive in it.

Walking, I notice the passing of time.  The cicadas are dying and lay on the sidewalk in alien corpses.  The air is sharper, pungent.  There was a time in my life this would be hard: to be suddenly without a place to live, to be asked all of the sudden what my plans were.  I am different, now.  I can feel the panic, like a little fist in my heart, pulling the whole body into it.  I can feel afraid, but I can also wonder and feel: I wonder at all the options, I wonder what is possible, I realize what a difference I can make, here or there.  I decide to open a yoga studio in a little town I used to know.  I do not know whether this will succeed or not.  But I can try.

The fact is, I try more now.  In relationships, in my heath, with my very body thrown upside down with a seeming disregard for things like safety and bruises.  Truth is I am more afraid, more often, than I have ever been in my life.

But the fear doesn't matter any more.

I am strong.