Something to Say

Chasing Godot

Tue, 6 May 2008 10:00:50 -0400

The Dalai Lama is quoted in the book Tibet, Tibet by Patrick French, and his words are worth some serious contemplation. The Dalai Lama said, "In the West, I do not think it advisable to follow Buddhism. Changing religions is not like changing professions. Excitement lessens over the years, and soon you are not excited, and then where are you? Homeless inside yourself."

This insight is not just about Buddhism. With the current interest in spirituality that accompanies the wave of interest in yoga — coupled perhaps with disillusionment with the established religions that have been the mainstay of our culture — many many of us have shifted over to eastern forms of spirituality (sometimes a pretty eclectic blend of them). There is a definite upside to this; there is also a downside that the Dalai Lama is pointing out. I know of one teacher who, after years of teaching yoga, has realized that the New Age version of yoga philosophy, while initially more sweet and palatable than the Christianity which she questioned as she grew up, has also failed to really nourish her over the years. Without giving up her teaching of the practice of yoga, she has returned to exploring her Christian roots and incorporates that inspiration into her teaching. (I’m not talking about ‘Jesus Yoga’ that just inserts Christian words in place of the Sanskrit ones). That, to me, is really something.

We run a risk when we assume too much about a philosophy that we embrace without fully exploring and understanding it. Lorin Roche (http://www.lorinroche.com/page8/page8.html), in his web site which is well worth exploring and contemplating, points out a number of important things. Not the least of these is the insight that we fail to take seriously enough the cultural context of many of the teachings of yoga — particularly with regard to such things as ‘renunciation,’ the ‘ego,’ and the teacher/student guru/disciple relationship. These arose in the context of a feudal society, in which the individual’s place in society is assigned to him or her by birth and is fixed. The ‘monk’ often arrived at his role because there was nowhere else to go: if he was born into a large family and was not the oldest, then he inherited no property, and the monastery was the alternative to poverty. The same was true for widows, whether young or old, or those women whose parents died or could not afford to marry them off. The ethics of renunciation, obedience and asceticism were not just exalted as spiritual virtues, but were also quite necessary to cope with that situation. This was of course equally true of the situation for Christian monks in the Middle Ages.

While we have evolved in many ways in our thinking as a society, many of our assumptions about spirituality have not been so deeply examined. This especially becomes the case when we take on a spiritual path that is, really speaking, quite new to us. These paths definitely have very much to offer to us in terms of their practices and understanding and shouldn’t be shunned just because they are ‘foreign’ and not part of our upbringing. But they need to be examined deeply, questioned, contemplated and understood in proper context (this is also true in their native society, both east and west, where harm continues to be done by promotion of unexamined and very old assumptions about spirituality). If we do not, we run the very real risk of crossing a bridge between our previous spirituality or religion — allowing it to burn behind us — while looking ahead to find that the path ahead of us is beginning to crumble for us as well, because we really did not understand it.

We do not live in a monastic society, nor in a tightly structured society that demands submission, obedience and conformity above all else. And yet the values upon which that kind of society depend are in the background of much of what we accept as the guiding values of what we loosely consider to be ‘yoga philosophy.’ These values are promoted in various ways in the yoga world. ‘Renunciation’ and the ‘ego’ are tricky topics that we dance around in various ways, but the underlying assumptions and original context for these values are rarely brought to light or seriously discussed. The same goes for the required unquestioning deference to a teacher or ‘guru’ and faithful adherence to a style of yoga as dictated by its teacher or tradition. We often invest more than we realize in these, and if and when we find ourselves disappointed or unfulfilled despite our devotion to that path, we may well find ourselves feeling homeless.

The answer is not rejection of spirituality, spiritual paths or religion. This is a rich and turbulent time in which we need to examine the core values and understanding of our spiritual path which will sustain, nourish and even enlighten us in the midst of the challenges of the now, rather than simply accept the teachings and values promoted by those who most stand to benefit from them, on the basis of deference to the ‘teacher’ or tradition. The times also demand a certain impatience with contemporary shallow interpretations of yoga philosophy designed to flatter our tastes and desires, but which ignore the depth and richness of the teachings upon which they are based just as much as they ignore the pitfalls of unexamined assumptions hidden within their traditions. In other words, now more than ever we need to think for ourselves spiritually, and not be afraid to do so; the corollary is not a rejection of old traditions, but a deeper and more perceptive understanding of them.

Such are the challenges of the yoga of the 21st century.

Healthy Self, Healthy Planet

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:14:37 -0400

A key principle that was rather unique to the actual founders of hatha yoga — the ‘Natha Yogis’ — centuries ago was the conviction that the health of the individual and the health of the planet are intimately intertwined, in ways that we have yet to fully appreciate. But we are beginning to. The urgency of the problem of global warning, and the nature of the solutions being proposed brings this home, perhaps like no other ‘health’ issue that we have faced before.

The problem is so massive that it’s hard to believe that any individual choices we make will have much effect (worthwhile reading in this regard is Michael Pollan’s article on Sunday April 20 entitled ‘Why Bother?’ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Why+Bother%3F&st=nyt&oref=slogin While starting with the acknowledgement that the very scale of the issue is a total bummer, leading us to ask, ‘Why bother?,’ the upshot is quite positive in terms of the benefits of the answers he offers).

A couple of things to take into account:

First:
Fully one fifth (20%) of greenhouse gases are produced by the process of raising beef for human consumption alone. It is not too far a stretch to say that the amount of meat on your plate is even more significant than the kind of car you drive, when it comes to our ‘carbon footprint.’ And while you may not feel that it is good for your health to eliminate meat from your diet entirely, it’s certainly the case that most of us would most likely greatly improve our health by reducing the amount of meat and dairy products that we eat. (Full disclosure here: I’ve been a vegetarian for 30 years — still including some dairy and cheese in my diet — and it has been to my benefit, though I fully recognize that vegetarianism is not right for everyone’s health). A healthy diet and a low-carbon diet are really very closely intertwined, and it would behoove us all simply to emphasize that simple and very convenient truth.

Second:
Ethanol -- when produced from corn, switchgrass and such things (though not necessarily sugarcane) is a disaster of global proportions and a mistake that needs to be corrected quickly. The overall production of ethanol from corn produces more greenhouse gasses than the drilling, production and use of oil. Moreover, it does the added harm of taking food out of the mouths of the hungry, which oil production does not. For a fuller accounting of how this is so, see Michael Grunwald’s article (which as always is not without its critics) at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html

The point is not that all biofuels are bad -- we just need to get smarter in our choices. The amount of corn needed to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol would feed one person for an entire year, and the poor are already suffering from the global rise in food prices, arguably due at least in part to the shift in food production to meet the new demand for corn to make biofuel. Sugarcane does not pose the same problems.

In this case as citizens we need to push back with our legislators, especially because there is great money to be made by (some, not all) farmers, and legislators want to look green (and satisfy lobbyists) by supporting the unwise and harmful choices now being made. Here too, economic self interest and wise leadership are diverging, and the self-interest of the few is trumping leadership in making policy.

Yoga is of great influence in contemporary society primarily because its enormously positive and necessary contribution to our health. The more we make clear the connection between individual health and the health of the world that supports us rather than arguing based on moral principles such as nonviolence (which are quite valid, but unpersuasive as far as changing the behavior of most people, even when combined with viewings of PETA and animal rights videos and print ads designed to shock the conscience), the more we can make a positive contribution.

When expressed rightly, thoughtfully and simply, it’s quite clear that taking better care of ourselves in the simplest of ways -- even starting just with our diet -- is the best first step toward taking better care of the world upon which we rely, as well as of our fellow human beings. That is at the heart of the spiritual message of hatha yoga, and offers a great and persuasive message for contemporary society.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:49:07 -0400

This has been an illuminating season — or perhaps it’s just a coincidence of my interest in the ‘Rasa’ theory of the Tantras with current studies emerging that examine our views of our own rationality (conducted in the context of a particularly exhausting political season, following 8 years of cynical emotional manipulation by our ‘leaders’). But more than ever, we are being led to reexamine our assumptions about the distinctions we make between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ influences upon our thought. We would of course like to think that in matters most important we arrive at informed and objective, ‘clear-eyed’ judgements, rather than being ‘blinded’ by emotion and prejudice. The truth about the truth, it seems, is more complex, and defies the usual dualities between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective,’ intellect and emotion.
In today’s New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote an editorial called ‘Divided They Fall’ (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/opinion/17kristof.html?th&emc=th) in which he examines studies of “how biases shape our understanding of reality:
“consider the Dartmouth-Princeton football game in 1951. That bitterly fought contest was the subject of a landmark study about how our biases shape our understanding of reality.
Psychologists showed a film clip of the football game to groups of students at each college and asked them to act as unbiased referees and note every instance of cheating. The results were striking. Each group, watching the same clip, was convinced that the other side had cheated worse — and this was not deliberate bias or just for show.
“Their eyes were taking in the same game, but their brains seemed to be processing the events in two distinct ways,” Farhad Manjoo writes in his terrific new book, “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.”
A good part of his interest in this and in other studies he cites is to take seriously the polarizing effect that this can — and is — having upon us, especially in the current political climate, in which the stakes are so high for the future of everyone on the planet.
“Another challenge is the biased way in which we gather information. We seek out information that reinforces our prejudices. One study presented listeners with static-filled recordings of speeches that they believed they were judging on persuasive power. Listeners could push a button to tweak the signal, reducing the static to make it easier to understand. When smokers heard a speech connecting tobacco with cancer, they didn’t try to improve the clarity to hear it more easily. But they pushed the button to get a clearer version of a speech saying that there was no link between smoking and cancer. Nonsmokers were the exact opposite.”
The truly interesting analogy that he uses in suggesting a corrective is based on food and taste: “The only solutions I see are personal ones... Just as we force ourselves to nibble on greens and decline cheesecake, we should seek an information diet that includes a salad bar of information sources — with a special focus on unpalatable rubbish from fools. The worse it tastes, the better it may be for us.”
This is actually a more productive perspective than to go at the matter in terms of ‘bias’ and ‘prejudice.’ It acknowledges that our perception of the truth is profoundly shaped by our own ‘tastes.’ And in matters of health (especially from the Ayurvedic perspective, but certainly also in terms of our understanding of how we receive vitamins and nourishment from a broad and varied diet) we do recognize that our health, so far as it is influenced by our food, is improved by venturing beyond the boundaries of our own tastes in food. So too, our mental and even spiritual health depends upon venturing beyond the bounds of our tastes in thought and belief.
This perspective — which is far more than just an analogy — is very close to the essence of the Rasa theory of the tantrics, in which the ‘Rasas’ (the essences of ‘emotion’) are part and parcel of how we see and hear the world. Our affinity with certain rasas is shaped by our own personal and individual constitution or ‘Prakrti,’ as well as the environment in which we live. And a truly ‘balanced’ diet depends upon our venturing beyond what we ‘like’ in foods. Our enjoyment as well as our nourishment from food is enhanced by variety, even if it means downing the bitter brussels sprout with as much conviction as our favorite dessert. Likewise, a balanced perspective in matters of knowledge and belief depends upon a balanced diet of thought — not just entertaining ideas to decide whether we agree with them or not, but actually enduring the taste of them and thus expanding the horizons of our awareness to a more true and inclusive understanding.
(An interesting and enlightening — and even fun — book to check out is ‘Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions’ by Dan Ariely. It essentially examines how we judge and decide according to relationships and comparisons, not according to isolated ‘facts.’ This is essentially a tantric perspective, in which the ‘truth’ exists only in the matrix of the ‘weave’ of all things: I would venture to say that nothing has its own ‘truth’ in isolation from everything else — thus even the pure Self or Shiva is nothing without Shakti, as the sage Jnaneshwar said; by the same token, Purusha in Classical Yoga is nothing without Prakrti, even though the eightfold path of Classical Yoga is directed entirely toward separating the two as an end to suffering.)
Is this kind of theory of knowledge any kind of basis for public policy? Can we legislate this kind of mental health policy? Not even Nicholas Kristof thinks so. But a free society that tolerates contrasting views rather than shouting them down is of course the basis for the possibility of maintaining our health. Lately we’ve tended more toward the shouting down option, with everyone retiring to their favorite dish of the ‘truth.’
But so far as we seek to understand ourselves better, yoga has much to offer, and the way in which we present and teach it to the world reaches the world one person at a time, fanning out through the ‘matrix’ of consciousness.
The better we understand the perspective(s) that yoga has to offer, both in the ‘Classical’ as well as the Vedantic and Tantric teachings, as well as through the practices that we do with the best understanding of them, the better off we as individuals and the world will be in moving beyond the dualities of knowledge and belief, truth and opinion, fact and feeling.
If anything, Tantra and Vedanta teach that our suffering comes most essentially from our sense of duality and difference, even and especially when it comes to these matters about which we rage endlessly in our politics. This sense of duality is enhanced and supported by the very ‘tastes’ for truth and experience that are built into our individual being. The practices of yoga are precisely meant to help us overcome this sense of duality. We can and indeed should do something about it; the practices — especially including pranayama and meditation — are the means given to us for transcending (without denying or rejecting) our own emotional and mental constitution, and thus the sense of duality that locks us into what we call ‘bias’ and ‘prejudice.’
Truth is not a matter of subjective taste, but at the same time, ‘Truth’ has no meaning and perhaps does not ‘exist’ apart from our taste for it. The rasas describe the qualities of our taste for the truth, and are thus worth exploring through our practice.
To put it another way, while it may be that ‘The Truth will set you free,’ what are we doing to set the Truth free?

Quivering Like Mercury

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 12:59:53 -0400

“The waterwheel accepts water
and turns and gives it away...

That way it stays in the garden.
Stay here, quivering with each moment
like a drop of mercury.”

Rumi

A number of people have written both privately to me in emails and through this blog about experiences they have had in practicing with the bandhas — particularly in pranayama. These have been experiences of great energy, running particularly through the legs.

The Rumi quote, which I revisited this morning, speaks to that in some ways, since the practice of accepting and letting go of the power of the breath, using the bandhas as means of steadily holding that power, is much like his description of the waterwheel. The whole process actually helps us to ‘stay in the garden’ — to stay in one place — which even brings a kind of rumbling of energy just in staying put. So many forces both mental and physical produce the rumbling, wanting to pull us in so many directions.

There is great energy in staying in our center, experiencing the rumbling without being moved by it, and a subtle sensitivity and vibration — still as mercury, yet quivering with awareness of the energy that surrounds and passes through us.

To let go and follow the mind is like the waterwheel becoming unhitched:
“...another roundness (that) rolls
through a dry riverbed looking
for what it thinks it wants.”

Rumi’s poem gives a nice image of the stillness and power of yoga, which resides in the staying with the flow of the breath through the waterwheel of our being.

The Bandhas and the Dura Mater — the ‘Tough Mother’

Mon, 7 Apr 2008 07:18:15 -0400

Yoga deals in the realm of paradox as its most familiar territory, insisting on twisting or rotating the familiar to see its other side (‘Parivrtta,’ to rotate or twist, derives from Parvati — the goddess or feminine aspect of Nature) or to turn things on their head, finding a crazy upside-down (uttanita) wisdom in being upside-down. The ‘bandhas,’ which play a key role in the original texts of hatha yoga, provide just such a paradox, as a means to unlocking our own paradoxical nature.
A ‘bandha’ is most often translated as a ‘lock.’ Its most literal meaning is a contraction of specific muscles to create a physical closure or ‘holding.’ But the word derives from older agrarian terminology: a ‘lock’ used in irrigating a field creates a closure to a pathway of water that redirects the water to another part of the field. Likewise, in yoga, a bandha or ‘lock’ imposed within the physical (and subtle) body is for the sake of opening or ‘unlocking’ another pathway of awareness.
We most often hear of the bandhas these days in the context of vinyasa yoga, and this connection provides us with our first contemporary paradox. The bandhas are described as the inner support for a steady flow of asana: mula bandha (contraction of the muscles of the perineum or pelvic floor) is especially credited as the key to the lightness with which Ashtangis float through various arm balancings (and indeed it is!) Yet this emphasis seems to put the bandhas in service of a dynamic asana practice which can become quite extroverted in its emphasis on poses and the flowing transitions between poses.
The original purpose of the bandhas is really quite introverted; they are meant to be calming and stilling, aiming for a deactivation of the sympathetic nervous system, which is otherwise under such bombardment in contemporary society — including hot and sweaty asana classes pulsing to the beat of jazz and rock fusions of funky kirtan. (We should be able to laugh at ourselves at least a little when our primary motivation to do yoga is that we get ‘pumped’ and excited about ‘rocking out’ to yoga, with the music mix and motivational language providing the central appeal — to which the yogis of old might well reply, ‘Huh?’)
The action of Mula Bandha — through contraction of the muscles of the pelvic floor — is in its more traditional uses credited with activating the parasympathetic fibers of the pelvic region of the spinal cord, providing a relaxation response. (Parasympathetic fibers emerge in the cervical or neck area and the sacral or pelvic areas only, while the sympathetic fibers emerge from the thoracic (upper back) and lumbar (lower back) areas of the spine). Studies cited in the book ‘Moola Bandha’ published by the Bihar Institute (p. 3 ft.1) claim to show that performance of the bandhas — Mula Bandha in particular — create parasympathetic responses in the body that include decreases in heart rate, respiration and blood pressure (in those with otherwise normal blood pressure), and a general sense of rest and relaxation. Uddiyana Bandha, involving contraction of the lower abdominals, exerts control over the sympathetic response of excitement in the nervous system, while Mula Bandha and Jalandhara Bandha bring about the parasympathetic response of lowered heart rate, blood pressure and so on.
While Mula Bandha and Uddiyana Bandha involve a very specific kind of ‘locking’ through contraction of very specifically targeted muscles, Jalandhara Bandha — the ‘Chin Lock’ — rather involves a very specific kind of ‘unlocking.’ The full action of Jalandhara Bandha is at work in the Shoulderstand, in which the chin is pressed toward the chest and the chest toward the chin, but the action of Jalandhara Bandha does not have to be so extreme to experience some key benefits.
Some very tiny muscles at the very top of the spine (the ‘suboccipital’ muscles which stabilize the axis and atlas bones as well as creating rocking and tilting motions of the head) attach not just to the base of the head (the occiput), but also to the ‘dura mater.’ This is the connective tissue that surrounds the spinal cord and brain. When the suboccipital muscles tighten and literally pull the head down on the spine — creating the kind of tight neck seen in ‘forward-head’ postures exhibited by drivers in tense and heavy traffic, or intensely focused workers squinting at a computer screen — they pull not only on the bone of the skull but upon the dura mater. There is a good deal of suspicion among researchers that this tightening can adversely affect the connection between the spinal cord and brain, causing headache pain by affecting the rhythm of cerebrospinal fluid fluctuations and the normal functioning of the vertebral artery and suboccipital nerve. (Trail Guide to the Body, p, 144)
The ‘Dura Mater’ provides an apt name for the governess of this connection: ‘dura’ (pronounced dyoo-ra) means ‘tough,’ and ‘mater’ (pronounced ma-ter) means ‘mother.’ (I’m not making this up!) Thus we have a ‘tough mother’ at the base of the brain and surrounding it, who metes out a rather severe comeuppance for the tension we create in ‘locking’ the back of our neck, especially in times of stress. Botox was in fact first created as an injection for the back of the neck meant to deactivate the muscles thought to be responsible for causing chronic migraine headaches in this fashion. Jalandhara Bandha is in essence designed to bring about the same unlocking of tension — without the pharmaceutical use, of course, of toxins for the localized poisoning and paralysis of muscles.
The specific actions involved in Jalandhara Bandha — related to alignment of the neck according to the hyoid bone — are something I have covered in my Yoga+ article ‘Resolving Neck Tension’ (September-October 06: http://www.doyoga.com/a_yp_articles/Y+9_06.pdf). The larger point is that the actions of the bandhas are really ‘locks’ meant to ‘unlock’ the grip exerted by the world upon our excitable ‘sympathetic’ nervous system, calming us down and centering the breath so that we might relax and turn inward to a more nourishing way of being. There is always a ‘tough mother’ waiting at the base of the brain to let us know when we forget to turn inward — and she can be a real headache!

Beyond the Yamas

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 10:02:05 -0400

At a key point in his ‘Yoga Sutras,’ Patanjali tells us what to do when following the ethical principles of the yamas and niyamas don’t seem to work — that is, when following his restraints and observances don’t seem to overcome negative thoughts.
“When these restraints (yamas) and observances (niyamas) are inhibited by perverse thoughts, the opposites should be thought of.” (II.33) (Quotes of Sutras are from Hariharananda’s version, SUNY Press, 1983)

January Newsletter

Wed, 9 Jan 2008 12:25:25 -0500

How does the body communicate with the self — not just the ‘brain,’ but the ‘me’ that we can’t help but experience as our own selfhood, above and beyond our physical body? This is not just an abstract question: it touches every aspect of our lives, and has everything to do with what we call emotion. What is emotion, and where does it fit into the relationship between body and self? Or soul?
Science recognizes that the nervous system does not provide a direct ‘line’ from the nerve endings in the senses to the brain. Rather, the messages leap across gaps or synapses from ‘senders’ or ‘neurites’ to ‘receivers’ or ‘dendrites’ through the medium of molecules that carry the message.
These ‘information molecules’ are known as neurotransmitters, which not only carry the message, but also shape how the mind ‘hears’ the messages from the body. The names of some of these neurotransmitters are already familiar to many of us; we know them from the heightened emotions that come with our actions and experiences — or are enhanced through various kinds of ‘drugs.’
For instance, we all know how adrenalin affects us when we’re frightened — and lasts even after the danger is gone. Oxytocin drenches us with love and serenity when it is produced through intimacy with our beloved, while noradrenalin mixes a cocktail of either alert cheerfulness, or aggression, fear, and a crash of depression. This can come from a stimulant as commonplace as caffeine, or in the extreme from amphetamines or cocaine.
We know a fair bit about the effects of such neurotransmitters when ingested from the ‘outside.’ We generally call these drugs, and it’s relatively easy to trace and measure their effects. But we only respond to these drugs because we produce and experience the same neurotransmitters on the ‘inside.’ We call the states produced by inner causes ‘emotions’ or ‘emotional states,’ while the experiences caused by external ‘drugs’ are ‘altered states’ of consciousness. Both are examples of ‘Rasas,’ which are not so much alterations of our consciousness — as if they are something added to normal consciousness — but rather of the very nature of our experience. Experience without a trace of Rasa or emotion is an abstraction from real experience, rather than a more ‘pure’ or ‘objective’ form of experience.
The ‘Rasas’ in the yoga and Ayurvedic tradition might be said to serve the same function as the neurotransmitters. They are produced internally as the result of identifiable factors — the energetic qualities of the elements in the form of the ‘doshic qualities’ — that we take imbibe through our food and environment, coupled with how they interact with our own individual constitution or ‘Prakrti.’ Yoga as a path of self-inquiry seeks to understand the relationship between the uniqueness of own Prakrti and the energetic qualities of our environment, all for the sake of making choices — choices by which we shape our experience of self and world in a way that brings the greatest happiness and fulfillment, rather than sadness...

To read more, click here

Truth in 08

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 09:57:05 -0500

This is a post of something well worth reading from today’s New York Times. The article is clear and truthful, and speaks to the best of us, invoking the light in the coming year by which we might dispel the darkness that has increasingly gathered over us.

But this is a light that has to be rekindled again and again, each time with fresh understanding.

Overall I avoid references to politics, since our culture and society is already saturated with it, and the well of political discourse has been so poisoned with unthinking hatred and prejudice that most attempts at discussion leaves everyone feeling sick. Thus most people these days avoid political discourse, except perhaps to offer guesses on who is likely to win caucuses and nominations, while we shake our heads at the irrationality of the process. We would like to believe in the audacity of hope, but have become resigned to the apparent hopelessness of hope.

But this posting is not about party politics or power. The year ahead of us is the year of Truth, and of speaking the truth. Those who are dedicated to wealth and power know that a lie is as good as the truth, if it is repeated enough. In fact, a lie is even better than the truth, because it is a weapon that can be controlled and calibrated, whereas the truth cannot. Those of us who believe in the power of truth have made the mistake of thinking that it is like sunlight: that it is enough to speak the truth — even just once — and it dispels the shadows. If we have learned anything in the last seven years, it is that this is not so. The truth has to be told simply, clearly, and without hatred at least as often as the lies are repeated, until those promoting lies have run out of mud to throw. The ‘without hatred’ part is the hardest, but the most important.

What does this have to do with yoga? As a practical matter, and for those struggling with the very concept of ‘yoga,’ I like to define yoga as ‘The union of the walk with the talk.’ If that is a fair definition (and it really covers a lot of ground once you start to unpack it), then this is the year when America needs to begin the practice of yoga.

What is it to practice yoga? I have plenty of friends and students and fellow teachers who believe that if everyone just did yoga (most often meaning the kind of yoga we do in asana classes), the world would be saved. Yoga has been around for thousands of years, and there has never been a moment when the world was even temporarily ‘saved’ by it. The planet just doesn’t work like that. Part of the fallacy in the understanding lies in focusing on practices everybody should do for transformation, rather than yoga’s real focus on who we are, and the hard work of remaining true to our higher nature. In our enthusiasm for the practice we organize rounds of Surya Namaskar to raise consciousness and money — (and these efforts do raise both, and I applaud that) — but fail to grasp in our enthusiasm how much our culture is able to coopt and capitalize on the look and talk of yoga, without ever touching its substance and truth.

How do we teach America (and ourselves) yoga in the coming year? It’s not just by encouraging each other to do yoga. It is by teaching and embodying integrity: making the connection between who we say we are, who we know we are (at our best, not our worst) and what we do. When there is that integrity, then we are truly doing yoga.

And in the big picture of our society, it is not by pinning hopes on a new leader to turn everything around, but by holding any and every self-proclaimed leader to that standard. No leader should be permitted to think that it is enough to say the ‘right’ or popular thing (eg. “We don’t torture”) and then do whatever suits or profits him. Nor in our own lives should we give ourselves or those dear to us the same pass.

In that spirit of beginning the new year with an acknowledgement of both who we are and where we are — and the distance between the two that needs to be closed — I’m including here an editorial that appeared today in the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/opinion/31mon1.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin) It is worth reading, contemplating and sharing.

___________________________________________

December 31, 2007
Editorial: New York Times Opinion Section
Looking at America

There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of the most trusted posts in the nation plotted to cover up the torture of prisoners by Central Intelligence Agency interrogators by destroying videotapes of their sickening behavior. It was impossible to see the founding principles of the greatest democracy in the contempt these men and their bosses showed for the Constitution, the rule of law and human decency.

It was not the first time in recent years we’ve felt this horror, this sorrowful sense of estrangement, not nearly. This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.

In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.

The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

Emotion and Spirituality

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 10:34:11 -0500

One of the topics I’ll be exploring in the coming year is the relationship between emotion or ‘rasa’ — the ‘flavor’ of experience which comes with the feeling that we bring to our experience — and yoga, both in the context of therapy and of spirituality. Yoga — using the tools of analysis that came first from Samkhya (and thus Ayurveda) has many refined insights into this which are often overlooked, especially in contemporary yoga. Hence we need to take a closer look.

These tools help us to approach health on three levels, with tools of analysis that are appropriate to each.

In matters of physical health, we have the doshas of Ayurveda to understand the individual’s unique constitution or ‘Prakrti,’ and the ways in which these doshas can become imbalanced, causing various kinds of physical suffering, one of which is disease or sickness. Kinds of emotions or ‘rasas’ are associated with the energetic qualities of specific doshas, and thus the content of our emotional lives varies from person to person according to their doshic constitution or Prakrti.
In matters of mental and emotional well-being, we have the gunas to understand the energetic qualities of balance (sattva) activity (rajas) and inertia (tamas) that give a specific ‘color’ or timbre to our experience of emotions in the moment. For instance, we can easily distinguish between the sattvic joy of the Dalai Llama as he hands a flower to a child and the rajasic joy of Tom Cruise leaping up and down on Oprah’s couch.
Finally, in matters of spiritual well-being, we might understand our most fundamental spiritual issues in terms of what Patanjali calls the ‘Kleshas.’

This is something that hasn’t been explored nearly enough by the many teachers of different styles of hatha yoga who profess to speak from or appeal to the ‘heart.’ The ‘heart talk’ that is emphasized in yogic circles as the ‘spirituality’ of yoga is really not unique to any style of yoga, since so many teachers promoting their own styles have jumped on the bandwagon: the differences lie only in the phrasing, not in the basic idea. But this kind of ‘spirituality’ is really a language appealing to the rasas or emotions, connecting emotional qualities to the practices of yoga, particularly asana. There is indeed a relationship between action and feeling. The question is whether emphasis on this connection approaches the true heart of spirituality.

When it comes to how this emotive language is taught or presented, what is overlooked is how much the rasas are connected to one’s own individual constitution or Prakrti. The pure rasas are: Love, Joy, Wonder, Calmness, Anger, Courage, Sadness, Fear and Disgust. Each has associated ‘Bhavas’ or more specific sentiments: thus Joy can take the form of humor, or laughter, or exuberance, or even sarcasm (to the extent that someone takes ‘joy’ in skewering someone else). Everyone experiences — or is capable of experiencing — all of these rasas, since we all are made up of all three doshas. The question when it comes to our doshic constitution is of predominance of particular doshas in our energetic makeup. This determines our dominant or favored emotions or rasas.

Each doshic type has his or her own most familiar or ‘default’ emotions, both positive and negative, which affect him or her most strongly. A ‘Pitta’ or fiery type loves to experience ‘joy,’ while his or her Achilles heel is anger; a ‘Vata’ type relishes calmness and suffers from fear; a ‘Kapha’ type is motivated by courage and is brought down by depression or sadness. The complexity of our constitution is what brings a unique richness to our emotional life, and deeply influences what kind of experiences — including what kind or style of yoga — that we are each drawn to. Thus any one ‘theme’ or emotional appeal within a style of yoga is likely to work for some and not for others; some will feel at home while others feel vaguely alienated and out of place.

Yet there is even more to it than even that. Our experience is heavily influenced by the predominant ‘guna’ — whether we know it or not — and this largely colors how ‘good’ we feel about the experience. While our constitution or Prakrti is something that we bring to the experience, and is fairly well set (‘a leopard can’t change his spots’), the predominant guna is a function of what energy is at work in the environment in the moment, both internally and externally. For instance, when sattva predominates, then whatever emotion you experience will have a purity and innocence to it — it will feel nourishing and fulfilling, and the emotion has a deep ‘heartfelt’ and genuine quality to it. When rajas or tamas predominates, you experience the emotion differently — a different ‘bhava’ — though it is essentially the same emotion.

Sattva is described as ‘pure:’ its nature is the experience of balance and completeness or wholeness to it — a clarity of perception and a feeling of contentment. Wisdom is of the essence of sattva; it feels inherently good, and brings a selfless and unqualified happiness, enjoyed for its own sake.

The quality of rajas is rather different. It is described as ‘mixed’ — there are both good things and bad things about rajas which are hard to separate. When rajas predominates, you may be inspired, enthused, motivated, and feel uplifted and even happy, excited. At the same time, the feeling of happiness is conditional or tied to effort and accomplishment, which carries with it a certain pain or ‘burn’ of effort. There is an aggressive quality at work with rajas that is akin to competition: you feel like you’re striving for your happiness and are wondering if you deserve it, whether you measure up to it, or are good enough to be rewarded with it. An experience is rajasic when you feel pushed, whether from the inside or outside, by a strong dose of ego and aggression. You go away from the experience both elated that you have achieved and earned something or have been uplifted and inspired, and yet you feel vaguely incomplete, icky, pushed or somehow manipulated, as if you had been dancing to someone else’s tune or working at least in part for someone else’s approval — or just feel subtly disappointed in yourself that you weren’t quite good enough, or could have done better by your own standards. The experience is ‘mixed’ because while you’re happy, you’re never quite fully satisfied or complete — thus you keep coming back to give it another shot, to take it to the next level. Rajas is like a drug, a mixture of pleasure and pain.

Tamas is described as ‘dark’ or ‘impure.’ When tamas predominates, there is a dark quality to the experience. While you may feel that you are doing deep inner work with your own ‘stuff’ that lies in the shadows (and there is indeed work to be done here through yoga), there is a heavy quality of pain to the experience. This is more than ‘no pain, no gain’ on a physical level; this is emotional pain, as if you could somehow go into the heart of that pain and somehow kill or destroy it, or pull it up by the roots. A tamasic teacher can be fierce, inflicting pain or ‘busting your ego’ as if that pain were good for its own sake, and somehow purifying. This is different from genuine ‘tapas’ which is austerity or discipline illumined by love; there is no hate, guilt or shame in real tapasya — while tamasic austerity emphasizes these qualities almost exclusively. The tradition of yoga actually has little good to say about this quality or this approach, although those who have tamasic qualities are drawn to it — thinking that this approach will rid them of those very tamasic qualities. Much of what has alienated people from their spiritual tradition over the centuries is actually the tamasic quality with which it has been taught and practiced — and this tamasic approach continues to appear in different forms in yoga even today. And we often do resonate with ‘yoga as punishment,’ just as we have tamasic ways of seeking absolution from our sins.

Whether we realize it or not, our assumptions about spirituality and the forms and practices that we are drawn to come from our resonance with the operative guna. And our distaste for a form of spirituality is actually a distaste for the perceived guna that rules over it. (We can have a distaste for sattva too, based on the guna from which we perceive it — thus to a rajasic person it is boring and namby-pamby, and to a tamasic person it is perceived as unreal and hypocritical) The influence of the gunas — especially in connection with the operations of the ego or ‘Ahamkara’ — is something that we can and must become aware of, and the environment produced by the operative guna is very much subject to transformation, both within ourselves and within a community (the latter is much harder). The individual transformation takes place for each of us within the realm of our own Prakrti or constitution, in the context of the emotions with which we are most typically occupied. If anything, each of us would want to move toward a more sattvic experience — and yet it is so easy to get stuck in the inspirational, highly motivated but fruitless realm of rajas. Thus the most popular forms of yoga are likely to be rajasic — and most yogis, if they are true to their practice and to themselves, are likely to reach a point where they feel they need to move on, from a practice that ‘seemed’ so spiritual, to one that really is so.

What is the real heart of a spiritual practice? Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutras, described our progress in spiritual health according to how well we deal with what he called the five Kleshas: ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, and fear of death. These are the prime ‘issues’ of our spiritual life, and the prime motivators in everything that we do and feel. Yoga as a spiritual practice is far more than working with ‘heart qualities’ or the rasas that we feel and how they might inspire us in our actions. Spiritual practice comes down to how well we deal with the influence of these Kleshas, so far as they dictate our lives. Yet this by itself is not enough either, since yoga (especially later tantric philosophy) also points out that these issues arise from the basic sense of limitation and separation from the source of our being — the Divine, however you wish to describe it. All fear, ignorance and desire is rooted in the experience or feeling of that separation, and spiritual practice seeks to overcome it through the experience of the Truth — which is that there is in reality no such separation. We are awakened to this realization is done through practice and contemplation of the one question at the heart of our own selfhood. Rumi described this question in many ways, one of which was this:

“Who looks out with my eyes? What is
the soul? I cannot stop asking.

If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.

I didn’t come here of my own accord,
and I can’t leave that way.

Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.”

Rumi: The Book of Love, Coleman Barks p. 56

Yoga as spirituality describes our progress along the way home, which is made along the path of any and every spiritual tradition in its purity — Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and so on, beyond the distorting influences of the gunas.

Doug Keller

Shaktipat: the Omnipresence of Grace

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 08:36:08 -0500

The topic of this entry came as something of a revelation to me in the course of my study of the Shiva Sutras via Dr. Douglas Brooks’ course — all the more powerfully because it resonates with my own experience of meeting and speaking to students over the last decade of my teaching odyssey. It’s one of those things you sort of ‘know’ but haven’t had a more solid basis for asserting. Until now. And this is something I get asked my opinion about all the time.

The topic is Shaktipat. ‘Shaktipat’ (or more correctly but harder to say, ‘Shaktinipata’) is the ‘descent of grace’ by which we are awakened to the recognition of our own true spiritual nature as forms of Divine Consciousness. This awakening — the awakening of the Kundalini — is the central turning point in the arc of our spiritual journey. It often (one might even say always) arrives unexpectedly — sometimes dramatically, and other times with a subtlety that we can only appreciate much later in retrospect.

As a point of reference for Christians, the Apostles’ experience of Pentecost after the Crucifixion has been deemed a descent of grace that might be thought of as ‘Shaktipat,’ and Christian mystics from Hildegard von Bingen through Meister Eckhart have described and even based their mysticism on the experience of what Eckhart called ‘Breakthrough,’ which might well be recognized as a description of Shaktipat.

The received lore in yoga has long been that this event happens ONLY through the grace of a shaktipat guru who is uniquely able to bestow and control this awakening. This awakening can and certainly does happen with a guru as catalyst — that was my own experience, and I have experienced in various ways a physical guru’s ability to control and direct the intensity of that experience. But the sticking point for me with this teaching has always been the assertion that the individual guru is the sole means by which this may happen, and moreover that the process is only ‘safe’ in the context of discipleship to that guru.

It is unquestionable that things go better with an experienced teacher than they do without one. But it seems to me that this teaching (where did it come from, really?) has all too often been used to control and manipulate ardent seekers, and the teaching especially that grace comes when you ‘please’ the guru has always seemed especially open to abuse. There are of course disclaimers that the ‘Guru’ we’re talking about here is the universal Principle of the Guru, not the individual — but in practice, human beings, being human, inevitably fixate on pleasing the individual guru, taking that as confirmation that God is likewise and in the same way pleased. It is not hard to imagine the number of false gurus lining up to cash in on this tendency, and hard not to acknowledge the seductive power of this teaching, which makes things so simple, concrete, direct and reassuring. We are always looking for a sign, and a living guru gives a conduit for receiving confirmation of grace, if only obliquely.

The need for confirmation is one thing; but the necessary connection between grace and a particular conduit for grace is quite another. Is the descent of grace entirely dependent upon forming a relationship with a living Guru, even if from afar?

I have met too many people who have had genuine experiences (as classically defined in, for example, the book Devatma Shakti by Swami Vishnu Tirtha) to believe that this is necessarily the case.

By the same token I cannot and need not believe in capriciousness in the dispensation of grace — that grace will be granted at the pleasure of the guru. Has God really set things up in such a way that the bestowal of grace is dependent on the whims of an individual, or upon the rare coincidence of both having a genuine teacher living on this planet and accessible to us, and of our having the divine luck of both hearing of this teacher and having the opportunity to meet and ‘receive’ grace from this teacher? Does anything in yoga philosophy really require that we accept such an idea?

According to Dr. Brooks, the Sri Vidya tradition that is continuous and compatible with Kashmir Shaivism — the principle text of which is the Shiva Sutras, dealing with this experience of awakening and recognition — holds that ‘shaktipat’ or the potential for this awakening is a ‘permanent presence’ rather than a particular and conditional dispensation — one dependent upon shaktipat gurus to hand out. Grace is always descending; we cannot ask or demand for grace any more than we can sensibly ask or demand for air, thinking that it is somehow being withheld from us. If you want air, open your mouth and breathe!

The difference in the case of ‘grace’ is that we have to recognize and value just what grace and the ‘recognition’ it entails is. The purpose of philosophy and philosophical contemplation is to bring us closer to this recognition of what has always been there for us. A worthy teacher can by one means or another ‘awaken’ you to the presence of what is always available; or sometimes you are brought to a place, by crisis or happy and auspicious circumstance, that you just ‘get it’ even though you’re not fully cognizant of just what it is you’re getting — nevertheless you know that something profound has happened. But the problem has never been that grace has been withheld from us by a jealous and persnickety God.

The obstacles to the awakening are on our side; spirituality, yoga, contemplation and all forms of seeking are ways of overcoming these obstacles, rather than ways of ‘earning’ a grace that we don’t otherwise ‘deserve.’ We become ‘worthy’ of love and grace only by ceasing to withhold and place conditions upon love — i.e. upon how and why it is ‘supposed’ to come. Anyone lecturing about ‘studentship’ or ‘discipleship’ beyond that simple point is likely to be manipulating their ‘students.’ Discipleship is an unmediated relationship with our own Self, our highest inner nature. We need teachers, teachings and each other as reality checks as we awaken to that inner relationship. But no one is turning the spigots of grace; we just don’t yet know how to drink. The process of the spiritual path and practices is simply learning how to do so.

Dr. Brooks quotes his teacher as saying, “We do not need to have grace descend upon us; grace has already descended as us.” This resonates for me with the original encapsulation of this teaching by Muktananda, who was my first introduction to the path and teachings of yoga: “God dwells within you, as you, for you.” This understanding also represents the core teachings of the Shiva Sutras, the philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism closely allied with (but not exclusive to) the tradition of Shaktipat: ‘Shiva’ or Absolute Divine Consciousness as the pure light of Consciousness is ever unsullied, always present, hidden in plain sight (i.e. never obscured even if ‘unseen’ or unrecognized) and fully cooperative in the process of our own coming to full self-awareness. The philosophy of Divine Consciousness that is the basis of this yoga makes it clear that it cannot be otherwise.

Whence then comes this teaching that we need to buy a special ticket or form a special relationship in order to ‘receive’ this grace? Whence indeed, except from individual teachers who use this teaching to their own profit and purposes?

If grace is far more available than that, then where and how do we proceed from here? Rumi describes it as a first step in a journey without feet.

Discuss.