The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.
ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL
The Sanskrit word drishti means “gaze.” Far more than just the act of beholding with your eyes, a steady drishti is one of the most powerful tools you can create as a yogi. Yoga practice is a meditation in action that is grounded through drishti.
Drishti occurs first in the observable, physical realm. Our physical eyes set on a specific physical point in the environment around us. From the beginning to the completion of each pose, relax your eyes and set them on a fixed point. Your eyes should be soft and tender. Hold your gaze steady throughout the pose, and, as you then move through the pose and then your vinyasa, reset your gaze consciously from point to point. A simple act, yet it yields powerful and profound results.
On a very practical level, a focused drishti is essential for stability in postures. A natural balance arises out of a calm mind, and it begins with the eyes. If your gaze is steady and focused, your mind will be, too, and you can effectively maintain your equanimity. This concentration of focus sends soothing messages to the nervous system and brings the mind from distraction to direction. Wandering eyes equal a wandering mind; focused eyes equal a focused mind. With a focused mind, you can accomplish extraordinary things. The eyes are the lens of the mind, and with drishti, you are focusing your consciousness in a practice of pratyahara (turning the senses inward) and dharana (focus and concentration on a task).
Pratyahara is the fifth limb of yoga, and has to do with bringing our senses into focus. Typically, in our normal life, our senses are all over the place. Rather than the mind commanding the senses—“look here!,” “smell this!,” “hear that!”—pratyahara funnels them toward one singular purpose. Let’s say someone asked me a question, and I became involved in answering, growing more and more absorbed in my interaction with that person. That would create the state of pratyhara. Even though my eyes and ears are open, and my sense of smell and touch are fully functional, they fade into the background because I’m so involved in what I am hearing and saying. In pratyhara, the senses do not function in the usual sense due to the mind’s involvement in something else.
Through drishti, we are training our senses to be used for one aim. For example, imagine you are sitting in meditation and you create a clear drishti by looking through the middle of your forehead with your eyes closed. You hold your attention on your hands and become completely absorbed in the ebb and flow of breath moving through your body, the pulsation of your heart, and alert to the sounds of your environment. In this perfect presence of peace and oneness, you would lose the sense that you are in a seated position.
When you come back to ordinary awareness, you may notice your legs fell asleep. It happens sometimes during meditation, but we may be less aware of that because our consciousness is directed toward the bigger purpose. The mind and the senses are working collectively, merged into the one experience of being present and awake to the moment at hand. In this way, pratyahara happens spontaneously. The practice of drishti, however, allows us to create the experience of pratyahara.
The sixth limb of yoga is dharana. Dharana is the state of mind where the mind (distinct from the senses) orients itself toward one point and nowhere else. It could be anything—a word, a sound, an object—but only one thing. Dharana is a stepping stone toward meditation. Dharana is not something you can do or create; it emerges spontaneously from drishti. When you’ve got your drishti, distractions fall away; internal chatter quiets; time stops (or at least your awareness of it). If you find yourself wobbling, falling, or asking, “When is this pose going to be over already?,” it’s a sign you’ve lost your drishti.
Drishti also generates tapas, which is a cleansing, purifying heat. The internal energy of tapas embodies the physical properties of heat: it rises, expands, softens, melts, and evaporates. The powerful tapas generated by drishti can burn away hesitancy, fear, and resistance, clearing your internal landscape of limiting views and giving you access to full self-expression. If you try to reshape cold glass, it will shatter. Heat it and you can form it, bend it, and shape it in any way you want. The energetic fire of tapas creates a similar result in your body and on your resistance. Fire it up and it becomes pliable.
A focused gaze, grounded in a singular point, frees you from judgments and the flurry of mental assessments. It transports you to the clear space of the receiving pose, where all fundamental transformation happens. Drishti gives us access to the eighth limb of yoga, known as samadhi, which translates to “neutral vision.” Sama means “even” or “neutral,” and dhi means “vision” or “seeing.” Neutral vision means to see without judging. No appreciating nor condemning; simply looking. Samadhi is to see through a clear lens, rather than viewing your experience through the rearview mirror of past perceptions. Cultivating samadhi on your mat will help you bring that quality of mind into your everyday life.
Still another level of drishti’s powerful effect is this: where you put your attention is where energy will flow. If you dwell on your challenges in life as though they really are part of you, that’s what you’ll generate in your life. If you focus on where you are going and what you are committed to in your life, that’s what you’ll create right now. Through physical asana, you practice maintaining your steady focus, from physical point to physical point, and building body alignment and awareness that empowers you well beyond the time you spend on your mat. Your work through drishti can deeply and dramatically change your entire experience of life.
Drishti is sometimes referred to as our third eye: the uncolored, unfiltered perception attained through the lens of our consciousness. In Baptiste Yoga, we say that the art and mastery of our practice comes from our ability to authentically look and listen. We learn to steady the gaze in each pose to train the mind and to engage more powerfully in the practice.
In order for you to be able to authentically look within the receiving pose, you will need to first recognize and acknowledge the automatic, past-derived default perceptions that get in the way of genuinely creating your practice, moment by moment. You’ll need to shelve what you know about the pose, what you believe to be true about it, what your past experience tells you about it; you want to clear all that away. You want to get your drishti to the place where there is nothing between you and the pose at hand. You don’t have to throw away all your valuable knowledge and learned experience; you just need to get it out of the way so that there is no content between you and what you are dealing with on the mat, pose to pose. As you become more skillful at steadying your gaze, you’ll gain the capacity to hold on to what you already know and allow it to shine light on this moment without it eclipsing the blank canvas of new creation.
The writer Anaïs Nin said, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.” What settles us into one (limiting) perspective is seeing things only through our positions, opinions, rationalizations, and history—that is, through the filters of what we think we know. That becomes the place from which we “look” in the pose. And because for us what we see from that perspective seems to be “the way it is,” we get stuck in that way of seeing. Having nothing between you and the pose means you are looking through a clear lens—an uncolored drishti—and relating to the bare-bones, as-lived, real-time physical and energetic experience. When there is nothing between you and whatever is coming up for you in the pose, you will have the experience of seeing what arises from a myriad of perspectives.
To be masterful in the practice, you have to be willing to drop what you know as “the truth” and what your past experience tells you, and acknowledge that that is simply one way of looking at things. The mastery comes from expanding your drishti from one default view to a panoramic 360-degree view.
Setting the point of your gaze and being with your actual experience in the pose allows you to free yourself from the grip of your default perspective so that you are able to see what is revealed about the pose, your body, and your experience from varying perspectives. Automatically, a multitude of pathways and possibilities open up when there’s nothing between your “looking” and what you are interacting with on the mat.
Drishti is more than just staring at a spot on the wall. It’s an open-eye meditation of really seeing what you’re seeing and being with that focal point.
You connect to that point out there, and from that point, you’ll notice that your connection to all your inner points expands. One point gives us access to all points. When you really have your drishti, suddenly, you “get” your feet; you get connection and access to your breath; you get access to your core.
Set your eyes to one point in front of you; try that now. You’ll notice that when your gaze is clear and empty of content, you suddenly get access to other things. From that one focused point out there in your physical environment, simultaneously notice another point—say, your feet and their contact to the floor. Then your legs and their contact to your pelvis, up through your torso, out through your arms into your hands, up your neck to the crown of your head. Now, as you gaze to one point, keep that awareness and also notice the ebb and flow of breath into and out of your chest.
From that singular point, expand your awareness to whatever emotion is present for you here in your experience, and where that emotion is located in your body. Is it in your chest, your shoulders, your belly? You can keep adding points of awareness from your singular point. The main thing to learn here is that your one clear gaze, held steady to a point, opens up a whole world of other points. You get access to parts of yourself, your body, and your experience that you can connect to and begin to shape and shift . . . all from the one point we call “drishti.”
If you want to change your mind, change your gaze.
If you stand at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, it looks much different than if you stand at the edge of the upper rim looking in, just like turning upside down and standing on your head makes the world appear vastly different than when you are standing on your two feet. Where you stand—both in physical space and within your body—impacts what you see. It impacts what is known as the observer: the you that sees with neutral vision.
Drishti allows for a physical grounding and allows us to inquire from the observer perspective. It allows us to ask, “Am I seeing this experience from a default lens, filtered through my past experience, or am I trying on new views?” Setting your physical gaze creates the space to shift your vision from default to neutral (and thus opening the possibility for the new) in any moment.
A student once shared with me her breakthrough in drishti. She said she had been struggling with her balance in Dancer’s Pose for many months and was trying to figure out what to do to correct that, but nothing seemed to be working. After trying several adjustments and so on, none of which seemed to make any difference, she felt like there just weren’t any new possibilities available to her to “fix” this pose.
At some point during a class I was teaching (this was before I knew her backstory), I noticed her struggling in Dancer’s Pose. The ankle of her standing leg was wobbling and she fell out of the pose several times, visibly frustrated. I walked over to her mat and suggested that she focus on firmly pressing down through the center of her heel and the mound of her big toe and pull up and tighten through her centerline and core. I repeated several times, “Set your eyes on the horizon, press the floor, and lift up into your core.”
Suddenly, her whole body and being got trued up to center, and the pose manifested into an easeful state of balance. She was totally lit up and, from that beautiful natural expression of Dancer’s Pose, broke out in a huge smile! Clearly this was an aha moment for her. My fresh perspective provided her with a new alternative that had always been available to her; she just wasn’t seeing it. She got a new drishti—a view from true north alignment—that allowed for a new possibility in her practice.
Later, after class, this woman said to me, “It was amazing how my gaze gave me access to the bottom of my foot pressing down into the floor, all the way up to my core. Up until now, I just wasn’t getting what that meant, but now I see what you were saying!” Most of us have had some kind of similar experience with something that we had been struggling with in a pose or in life. At some point, a teacher or another person’s insight comes along, and this new observer offers a different perspective that allows us to break through to a new way of seeing.
I’ve learned that how we do anything or how we handle ourselves in a pose or situation has a great deal to do with the kind of observer we are. We assume that our results have to do with the actions we take, and of course that’s true and obvious, but what’s less obvious is that our actions themselves are deeply tied to how we see things. The way we see things comes before any action we take.
One aspect of drishti is how we frame a situation, in the pose or out. Our default drishti might just see our limitations and what’s not possible, and keep us caught up in the struggle, much like what had been happening with this student in Dancer’s Pose. The way we frame a situation creates or limits what’s possible. Our yes will always come from what’s possible, as seen by the observer we are in that situation.
So all this is to say: when you feel stuck or frustrated, it’s a sign that you are caught in a clouded vision of observer. There is always another perspective, always another possibility. Reframe you as the observer through drishti, and through shifting your vision, you’ll change your mind, your actions, and your results.
We think we need to go inward to get someplace good, or sacred, or connected, but we have it 180 degrees backward. We must gaze outward to get connected inward. I know this may land for you as counterintuitive, but consider there is something extraordinary for you to discover “out here,” rather than “in there” (i.e., inside your head). The path to the goodies available to us “out here” is through your drishti.
I know that in my work, if I want to be out in the world and do the things that I want to do, I actually have to get out of my head. All my thoughts, emotions, and sensations swirl together to make an internal stew, and then the meaningful connections, insights, and inspiration that are “out there” aren’t available to me because I’m stuck in that internal muck. To get a new sense of myself and what is possible, I have to go beyond my internal walls. I’ve got to really see what’s around me . . . smell the flowers . . . really connect and be with others to get a whole other sense of myself. And the path to that enlightened vision is through drishti.