So it is with our relationship to the teacher, the guru: someone who initially appears to us as the other. Once we have incorporated them into our own system—merged the corner of their ideas with our own, considered that their perspective is at least as authentic as our own, once we have shared some laughter together—then we think we know who they are, and we may even begin to identify with them, and it is at this moment that we must redefine the borders of our own self. It is the guru’s duty at that juncture in the relationship to drop back and to appear as the other, the unknown, thereby reestablishing the boundaries in order that they again may be dissolved. We continuously have to dissolve and reconnect, then restructure and disperse again, our sacred spaces, those things that we tend to identify with.
When two things meet, it is right there at their conjunction that yoga occurs. It is said that when day meets night, when in-breath meets out-breath, this is where yoga appears. This is because it is in that initial communication, in that process of two systems meeting, that each system has to dissolve. Each system must release its identification with itself; it must let go of the baggage it carries, reconsider its techniques, release all of its temporary concepts and all of the limited aspects that it has identified as its own separate essence. Whether it is a person, a religion, or a corporation, any system must drop back into its true nature in order to experience the other. Through connection with the other—through yoga—we find our true selves. This is why the yoga tradition has been passed on from teacher to student and from student to teacher. It is passed on through a healthy relationship with the other, and it flourishes through finding the essence of that teacher-student relationship that reveals the essence of all relationships. It is not absolutely essential that the yoga teacher be perfect, meaning that they conform to a particular set of standards. Better that the yoga teacher is able to create and dissolve sacred spaces, that she has opened her heart and has understood that the real bottom line lies in the union of ideas, in the joining of opposites, and in authentic relationships with the others. A good teacher is able to continuously restart his own practice of yoga and to drop back to the very beginning. Through a good teacher’s presence others are able to relax and to drop back as well. A good teacher simply allows us to be comfortable enough that we are able to observe the process of our own mind, which is this process of making idols, of making mistakes, superimpositions, and transferences. In seeing this process and in observing it in the light of the necessity of true relationship, by allowing ourselves to gradually and continuously let it go, then day by day—perhaps even moment by moment—we can awaken to the present moment.
If you are a teacher, this means that you have to have a teacher, and that teacher in turn has to have a teacher. The chain of teachers is to be imagined as going back endlessly, which allows the teacher of the teachers—or the present moment—to be the true source of the teaching. These lineages of teachers are often imagined as the guru sitting inside of the crown of the head of the student. The image continues so that inside of that teacher’s head, sits another guru, and so it goes back into an endless chain of teachers and endless linking of relationship. If you are a teacher, you must practice surrender. As a teacher, more than anyone, you are willing to give up your preconceptions about what is and to simply be in awe of a process that you do not truly understand but that you intuit as the very heart of your own existence. So to be a teacher, humility is the requirement, and entering into the suṣumnā nāḍī is the process of finding that humility. In this way you automatically respect students, and you are able to give students back to themselves continuously, even if they insist on projecting or transferring aspects of themselves and their beliefs onto you. You give it all back to them automatically. As a teacher, at no point do you actually identify with the role of “teacher” because in that identification there is an enormous risk of ego inflation. So the good news for most, and the bad news for a few, is that being a yoga teacher, a guru, is not a career path. The guru is an archetype, and there is no need for the ego to identify and to become possessed by that archetype.
If you are a student, having a teacher means that you have realized that the process of life and the process of yoga are beyond your ability to completely control. Even though you may intuitively know you are so close to understanding life, deep inside your heart you also know that the true mystery of life and of the present moment is revealed only through surrender, through letting go, through not controlling and not-knowing. To be able to simply rest and to fall back into the very nature of existence, to be able to dissolve into the core of pure being without having to hold on to any belief or any conceptual system or form, to release any hope and attachment to finding reality, this is the essential practice of yoga. To become a student is to become a fool, and to become a fool is to become wise.
In this light, truly nothing we can come up with, no matter how bizarre, lies outside of the realm of yoga practice. Yoga is the release of all things through the cultivation of insight into the heart of all things. It is said that perfection in yoga can come very quickly, perhaps immediately to someone who surrenders to the guru—which is exactly what Kṛṣṇa told Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gītā. A yogi is one who trusts in the truth of pure love, one who drops into all experience as it arises, trusting the essence of the heart, which enables the yogi to offer all experience, particularly the core experience of the mind, into the fire of awareness. It is this fire of awareness that is the true guru. This form of surrender means an ability to see that even our innermost thoughts and feelings are part of a completely natural and shared process. It is said that everything, particularly this (meaning what you are experiencing right now), whether it is the feeling in your knees or in your hand, or the particular thoughts in your head, all of this is enveloped by the principle of the guru—the principle of the guru of gurus. When you realize that whatever you are experiencing—this—is not yours, there is a great sense of relief, and you can let it go. You can observe it without accepting it or rejecting it, just as Śiva was able to take in the hālāhala, the poison of existence, without swallowing it and without spitting it back out. In this letting go as if it was not yours, you find incredible happiness with an astonishing pleasure of pure being; you find the natural radiant joy that is yoga.
Sometimes after hearing about the different types of yoga practice, after listening to the teachings of the Upaniṣads and contemplating how deep the truth of our own existence must be, we feel at a loss as to how to actually begin the practice of yoga. This is a natural response. But again, taking a step backward, releasing our grip of identity with ourselves and with our own very real experiences, can be a huge relief. One of the most important aspects of viewing yoga as being a matrix of interpenetrating ideas, thoughts, and experiences is that it provides the image of an interwoven safety net that lies beneath us, and each joining of the net reflects our own experience of the process of yoga itself. It provides the support of knowing that everything is connected, which makes the prospect of stepping back and letting go, while also welcoming an opportunity to start over, interesting rather than daunting. The view of yoga as a matrix allows us to return to the very beginning of the practice again and again and again because we need not accumulate embellishments to our ego in the form of yoga practice.
There is really no hierarchy of achievement, ranking, or levels of attainment that we should take too seriously in the practice of yoga. There is not that much that actually needs to be remembered on the spot, but there is something much more essential within our hearts that is inspired through yoga; it is always present and available wherever we are. Within the course of our yoga practice we often find we’ve come to a point where our study has left us dry, as if washed up on a beach. We may get to this stage when we sense how far-reaching and deep the truth is; it may seem as though there is an impossible gap between where we find ourselves and where we imagine it all leading. We may feel as if there is no technique, no mantra, no desire, nothing that coul
d possibly bridge that endless gap between ourselves and the truth. In coming to this point we are offered the important opportunity to start over with the practice, to find out what our original motivation for practicing yoga was, and then to look at what is actually happening. Junctures such as these are an open invitation to go back to the breath, and through the breath to go back to the sensations that are occurring in our body. By steadying the mind in those sensations, we can then observe the pattern of our thoughts, the very pattern that our ego is composed of, and once again we find ourselves entering the web that is the practice of yoga.
A common confusion for yoga students is to wonder what type of practice is best. Should I practice bhakti yoga since I am a person of very strong emotions? Should I practice jñāna yoga since I love to think about things, I love to understand things? Should I practice the postures of haṭha yoga because the posture and breathing practices are very tangible? Should I practice tantra yoga because I am a person of great desire and of insatiable lust—perhaps I can dovetail those energies into finding the truth of my own existence? We have seen through this brief exploration of the yoga tradition that all teachings point out that every type of practice is actually a composite of other types of practice. However you wish to label yourself, whatever school you align with, if you go deeply into any form you will eventually find that you are doing all of the different types of yoga through the form you have chosen. This is probably the most important teaching of the Bhagavad Gītā for those who have become deeply enmeshed in yoga practices. You can call yourself a bhakta or a devotee one day, and the next day call yourself a jñāni, or one who practices the art of wisdom. Likewise, when practicing yoga poses, calling yourself a haṭha yogi you may wonder what pose you should be doing next, but as you continue through the āsanas you may begin to see that as you practice any of the poses and remain sensitive to your circumstances, you naturally begin to adjust the body on a deep internal level. You begin to see that it is not so much specifically which pose you do or how deeply you get into any one of the poses that is of greatest import, rather that your awareness of breath and your ability to truly connect to the inner feelings and sensations that draw you back into the heart of the practice are what matter. When you approach a yoga practice with an open mind and a true passion for being present with and meeting whatever arises, you know that if you go deeply into any of the different disciplines, you are going to bring all of the other disciplines in as well.
Practicing yoga is not always easy. Sometimes the biggest difficulty is arranging a time to do it: starting the session of practice. But if you can trick yourself into just beginning, it often works out. If you have arranged a time to practice but do not really feel like practicing, the trick is to convince yourself to simply stand up in samasthitiḥ, to take three breaths, thinking that you will allow yourself to go off and do something else after that simple ritual. Then after standing in samasthitiḥ, it often turns out that the idea of taking a big inhale, raising your arms and doing half of a sun salutation is alluring. Having done that, one full sun salutation before quitting may seem reasonable. Soon you may find yourself doing two, and then three sun salutations; and then all of a sudden, you are in the groove and the practice continues. One reason the practice can be difficult is that the mind is a very strict taskmaster, and it often creates images of what practice is or it should be. The parameters your own mind sets for the practice may erode the foundation of the practice itself; if you cannot do a “good” practice, why practice at all? You may think to yourself that if you are going to sit in meditation, you must sit for forty-five minutes. If you are going to practice prāṇāyāma, you should practice it for one hour, and that if you are going to practice āsana, two hours is the minimum. When, in fact, if you were to do any of these practices with true concentration even for two seconds, you would open up the core of the body and have remarkable insight and a sense of freedom—particularly a sense of release from the game you have constructed in your mind of what practicing is. Again, we run into the notion of drawing a circle (defining the parameters of our practice) and erasing the circle (having mercy on ourselves if we cannot meet the standards we have set for ourselves). For beginning students, allowing some leeway in some of the parameters we set for ourselves about the structure and consistency of our practice can be the golden ticket to jump-start a routine of practice that, once it is going, automatically draws you back day after day, year after year. Of course, for longtime practitioners, those of us whose minds have comprehended the “draw a circle and erase it” metaphor, the trick may be to encourage ourselves to stick with the parameters we or our teacher have suggested a little longer before erasing the circle, before sabotaging our practice by skipping the parts we do not like. There is a time for perseverance, and there is a time to release the reins of the mind: a time to stick precisely with the parameters, and a time to recognize the effect of the circumstances of our own life on the boundaries that are established. It is all called being mindful of what is actually arising rather than being attached to what we think is or what we want to be arising.
If we look at each type of practice as a well to be dug, as we dig deeper and deeper we start to find that the other practices are involved in making the hole truly deep. So we may start out with the practice of haṭha yoga, committing ourselves to the opening up of the body, the stretching out of the prāṇa, and the uniting of prāṇa and the apāna in order to open the central channel so that our breath will flow smoothly and freely. As we go deeper into the haṭha yoga practice we become more sensitive, and soon we find that we are actually practicing tantra. Tantric practice brings us into proximity or identification with our beloved deity, and we find ourselves concerned with bhakti and indifferent to kuṇḍalinī and mantra. Bhakti yoga shows us that the various āsanas, the various prāṇāyāmas, have everything to do with our relationships to our teacher, to other people, and how we interact with the world around us. As we go deeper into relating to others we find that actually we are practicing jñāna yoga, because in our relationships we must look deeply into who others truly are. In order to maintain this understanding of the true nature of others, we realize that we must loosen the grip we have on our ideas about them, so that our preconceptions and desires do not interfere with our relationships. Going deeper still into jñāna yoga, we again find ourselves back practicing haṭha yoga. As we think, so we feel; as we think, so we posture the body; and by re-posturing, re-visioning the positioning of the body and the breath, we find that we refresh the mind, and we are able to uncover the emotional and habitual roots of our thinking patterns. So the cycle goes on and on, and not only do we end up practicing all the different types of yoga, but we practice all the different limbs of aṣṭāṅga yoga and various combinations and sequences of practice within those types and those limbs.
When we choose to begin the practice of yoga by fixing our attention on whatever form of yoga we are practicing, as we go deeper into the actual practice we start to discover that everything rests within a nest and is dependent on its context. Initially we learn to focus our mind. Whether we focus on the action of our kneecap in a yoga pose, or on the dominance of breath in one of our nostrils, or whether we focus our mind on a pattern of our emotions or of our thoughts, after the mind is focused a kind of tension arises. This tension is what we know as tapas or heat. Even in everyday life, you can periodically feel heat building internally when you really focus on what you are doing. Through practicing we notice that if we maintain the tapas without a strong sense of repulsion or desire, the context of whatever we have chosen to meditate on is revealed. Essentially, we begin to sense that whatever has become the focus of our awareness is interpenetrating, through a unified background, into everything else we might think, feel, or perceive. This is a fundamental principle of a yoga practice: that when we focus the mind—no matter what the content of that focus—eventually the very content that we have chosen as the focus begins to reveal its background. This i
s easy to understand if we imagine what it is like when we focus on the tip of an iceberg; very soon we intuit that it is simply the tip of something that is much deeper. The iceberg as the object of our attention interpenetrates everything else. In the same way, if we choose a point of intersection in a net, we discover at that very point there exist connections to the entire net. In the mythical Jeweled Net of Indra, at each point of intersection in the net, there is a jewel that reflects all of the other jewels, all of the other points of intersection. This myth offers a beautiful image of the way the world actually works, of the interpenetration of all aspects of life. With practice we begin to see that what appears to be separate—that which is our present experience—is not actually detached and separate at all. When we pay close attention in a meditative manner to whatever our present experience is, all of a sudden we sense its interdependence with everything else. By allowing the mind to settle into the present moment we are able to see that our “separate” experience is really resting in this vast net we call life. In this way, the practice of yoga always reveals context, and when context is revealed there is an incredible sense of release and relaxation. It is as if things are being taken care of. We can see that the responsibility for the maintenance of the body, the mind, in fact the maintenance of the entire world, is no longer resting on the shoulders of the flimsy ego. All is actually taken care of by this vast substratum, and the nature of this bedrock is something that yoga theory has contemplated for centuries.
The Mirror of Yoga Page 24
