5

Commitment

Mysore

Knowing what to expect made landing in Mysore easier the second time around. The shala (the traditional word for a yoga practice room) had moved since my first visit, and K. Pattabhi Jois’s popularity had exploded. It was a drastically new situation.

I rented a room for a month in his old house, which now served as a boarding house for Ashtanga students. It was directly across the street from the new shala. Another change was having access to Internet, so it was easy to prepare my visit ahead of time, especially as a friend had secured the room for me before I arrived.

Mysore had become a mecca of yoga a century earlier when the Maharaja of Mysore requested yoga teachings from T. Krishnamacharya,⁷ the grandfather of modern yoga, and his students K. Pattabhi Jois, T. K. V. Desikachar and B. K. S. Iyengar. Due to this royal patronage, a thriving yoga community had developed over the years, along with some highly specialized pandits who set up various schools. As a result, there is usually a large transient population of Western yoga students in this quaint South Indian college town.

I studied with K. Pattabhi Jois’s grandson Sharath, who was also the Ashtanga lineage holder, a few blocks away in the same residential neighborhood as the main shala. I preferred the small classes—Sharath’s twelve students to Guruji’s eighty—and I had a good rapport with Sharath.

Sharath’s class also started at a luxurious 8:00 a.m., rather than K. Pattabhi Jois’s grueling 4:30 a.m. opening session. The weather in August, when I arrived, was balmy and dry and papayas were just coming into season. I met good people. My dark Parisian winter started to thaw.

I requested to study with one of my teachers, Acharya (acharya means teacher, and is used as a title of respect) Shankaranarayana Jois—with whom I felt a deep connection. Something about his presence always stretched my mind a bit, and pulled at my heart. I suppose this is how you recognize your teachers—they demand, and are granted, immediate access to your heart. I had met him on my first visit to India—he and his wife Vijaya had been a big reason for my return to Mysore.

There were only five of us studying yoga philosophy with him this time, with pranayama instruction immediately following. Acharya gave us each an individualized sequence of breathing exercises to do, based on our particular constitutions. Some needed more invigorating sequences to counter lethargy; some of us needed to relax. He stayed with us throughout the midday pranayama practice, sitting quietly in a corner of the room, observing, as we progressed through our breathing sequences.

I practiced the sequence three times a day: early morning before asana practice, midday before lunch, and evening as the sun set. The technique involved breathing in through one nostril and out the other, holding the breath for counts of thirty-two on alternate cycles. The work was painstakingly slow and subtle, and I had come to know parts of my lungs that I never knew existed. The effect on the mind was delicious. Blissfully calm and spacious. Like a holiday from chatterbox mind.

Ashtanga Yoga

Ashtanga in Sanskrit means eight limbs, and asana—the practice of physical yoga postures—is just one of those limbs. Yama and niyama, the first two limbs, deal with ethics and behavior—basically how to be a decent and disciplined person. Asana, from the Yoga Sutra point of view, means the posture of meditation. Popularization of yoga in the West expanded this term to include all the physical poses found in yoga studios these days.

But essentially, yoga is about learning to meditate by preparing the system, and then guiding the mind to stillness. Pranayama, the fourth limb, is about harnessing the power of the breath and putting it to use in the service of meditation. Pratyahara translates as “withdrawing awareness from sensory objects” and allows for undistracted focus. The last three limbs, dharana, dhyana, and samadhi, sometimes called samyama together, are essentially more and more subtle stages of meditation, culminating in a state of ultimate freedom from attachment to the conditioned world—the mukthi, or liberation all yogis seek.

On my first trip to India to study with K. Pattabhi Jois, I learned that these steps are the supposed background of the yoga practice, and yet I noticed that we never discussed them. K. Pattabhi Jois’s famous motto advises that yoga is, “99 percent practice, 1 percent theory.”

One day I found the opportunity to ask Guruji—this is how we referred to K. Pattabhi Jois—about it.

“If Ashtanga is for purifying the body, how do we purify the mind?” I said.

“Ashtanga yoga is for purifying mind,” he said.

I wondered, if Ashtanga is about mind purification, then why did we emphasize the body so much?

Next time we had “conference” on the front steps of his house in Laxmipuram, I asked again, “Why so much emphasis on the body? Why don’t we study the other seven limbs?”

“Asana is door,” he said in his broken English, “then discovering other limbs.”

So how does one do that? And how does the yoga practice as we know it today help facilitate this process of guiding the mind into stillness?

Training the Mind through Ashtanga Yoga

One simple place to start discovering the other limbs of yoga is by connecting the awareness to the breath, pranayama. Prana (also called chi or lung), the subtle and intangible life force in the body, rides on the breath. You can track the movement of prana by observing the flow of breath. You can experience this in yourself, and with practice it’s possible to observe this flow in others as well. This is a great skill to have as a yoga teacher, for then you can help guide students to awaken areas of the body that may be asleep. The ability to observe subtle patterns in the body requires extreme sensitivity—you have to reduce external distractions in order to finely tune your awareness.

When you are able to reduce distractions, it is a sign that Pratyahara is developing. You shift your allegiance from external reference points to internal ones. It’s like you finally are on the map. One practical way this might manifest is that you suddenly notice that you have moments of being completely absorbed in your practice, and not distracted by whatever else is happening in your environment. It’s not just daydreaming—it’s focus, magnified. You’ve probably experienced this before. It’s what happens when you are so engrossed with something that “time flies” and you suddenly realize that you’ve been focused for a long period.

The last three limbs—dharana, dhyana, and samadhi—essentially convey the practitioner through a process of refining the awareness, with longer and longer periods spent in undistracted mindfulness.

So while the yoga practice as you may understand it happens on a sticky mat, with experience it can evolve into a stable seated meditation posture as the mind becomes increasingly settled. This is the most conducive environment for samadhi to arise.

This is why many people criticize the emphasis on the physical practice of yoga asana these days. Pictures of beautiful people doing fancy postures on social media really have nothing to do with yoga. The goal is not to perfect the postures; the goal, if there is one, is to tune in to a highly refined awareness. The practice is just a tool to help you do that.

So how does jumping around on a yoga mat get you there? You begin by bringing mindfulness and awareness to the process. Mindfulness is the faculty of not forgetting what to do and what not to do. It simply means recollecting what you are trying to do in the practice—remembering postures, breathing, and internal mudras.

But unless there is also some element of awareness, it’s entirely possible to bypass this process of moving toward meditation and keep the practice on the purely superficial level. So you also add awareness, a big-picture view of what you are doing.

You observe the process of being mindful. According to Buddhist philosophy, it is this insight—the vipassana aspect of awareness—that cuts suffering at its root. So while mindfulness keeps you continually returning to the practice, awareness maintains an open inquiry into the nature of all that is unfolding.

The whole point is to be present in body and mind without distraction and without attachment. Right now. That is meditation. Rest in that experience for a while—say four hours—and you have samadhi, which some say is our natural state of being before we cover it up with endless distraction. If you continue to practice in a disciplined way, eventually you find your way home to a state of mind that is pure, unadulterated bliss. But even this is not the end goal—bliss is just a perk along the path.

Study

While there is wisdom in not over-intellectualizing practice, study can be helpful. Over the years it has helped me enormously to study the classic texts on yoga and meditation to formulate a map of the terrain.

In Mysore I attended classes with Dr. Shankaranarayana Jois—who reputedly was a distant relative of K. Pattabhi Jois, though I never confirmed this. Acharya was a Vedic astrologer and Sanskrit professor from Mysore University. Interesting note: the surname Jois indicates coming from a family of Vedic astrologers who practice jyotish. So apart from any blood relations, they are joined by family heritage.

Acharya taught the Bhagavad Gita, the Shiva Samhita, and Yoga Sutra to a small group of us on the concrete floor of his cool traditional South Indian house. We sat on straw mats and offered garlands of jasmine to Acharya, as we called him: teacher. His wife, Vijaya, started and ended each session with a beautiful devotional song.

Our classes on the Bhagavad Gita shed new light on the importance of nonattachment. Don’t be concerned about the fruits of your actions, it counseled. The goal of the yoga is to just do something positive—to do your duty.

The human predicament is that our natural state of mind has been infiltrated by our distraction. You can’t just wish your way back to wholeness. It’s like if you find yourself a long way from home—you’ve got to start walking, or stick your thumb out, or—like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz—click your ruby slippers together to get back home. You can’t just sit around and hope you will find your way back, or you never will. You’ve got to act. Yoga practice is like clicking your ruby slippers three times—it’s the vehicle. Done with sincerity and devotion and faith, eventually you will find your way home.

Study of the classical texts can help put the practice into context, so you have a sense of how it all fits together. See “Recommended Reading” on pages 233–234. Traditionally you would study directly with your teacher, going through a text and contemplating its meaning. However, these days many yoga teachers have never even heard of, much less read, the classical texts.

Translations also vary, so it can be helpful to look at several different versions to arrive at your own understanding. My favorite translation of the Yoga Sutra is by I. K. Taimni, and I also recommend one by Edwin Bryant. Georg Feuerstein wrote voluminously about the classical study of yoga and his books are highly recommended. With online study so readily available—and yoga becoming so mainstream—it is worth researching a quality online course to delve into the subtle aspects of these classics.

You may find opportunities to study at two hundred- or five hundred-hour teacher trainings. But my sense is that with the stated goal of “training teachers,” there might be a tendency to rush through the study of texts. Depth of understanding comes from sitting with—and contemplating—these teachings, rather than reading them merely as a prerequisite for earning your teacher’s certification.

The Inner Forms of Yoga

When you practice intense physical postures, as is the case in Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga, you challenge the organism to tolerate, and relax into, increasingly intense states of mind.

On a deep level, the Ashtanga yoga practice shifts the subtle body, balances and aligns it. Working with breath and postures clears blockages in the nadis, which are nonphysical channels of energy in the body, similar to the meridians of traditional Chinese medicine. Steady balanced breathing equals a steady balanced mind. But it takes a while—possibly years or lifetimes—to be able to maintain steady slow breathing while standing up with one leg behind your head.

The shifts that take place in the subtle body as a result of the Ashtanga practice serve as an engine for propelling you along the path of pilgrimage.

How does this work?

Yoga philosophy talks of granthis, or karmic knots, in the nadis that occur as a result of blockages—our unresolved physical, emotional, and mental baggage. This is what causes consciousness to stagnate at certain areas of our life—whether in our body, our relationships, our emotional life, or our thought patterns. They manifest as our blind spots, destructive habitual patterns or weaknesses.

When you move through the series of postures of the Ashtanga system, you stimulate various areas of the body at a deep level, and then intentionally breathe into these areas using the ujayi pranayama breath technique. So the concentrated breath gets directed to the areas of blockage.

Some areas are quick to release, and you might notice a greater physical ease after only one or two practices. But some knots are buried deeper, and tied up more tightly. These may take years to undo. The point is that the practice of directing focused, conscious breathing to the entire body has profound effects on your awareness. As a result, you may notice things coming to the surface—old memories, family issues, dreams—so that you can work with them. Obstacles that have held you back may grow huge as they take center stage long enough for you to be able to acknowledge, and then finally release them.

This is why it sometimes feels like things get messier before they get cleaned up. I get frustrated with modern media’s insistence that yoga and meditation practice will make you relaxed and peaceful—it is not the whole story. The truth of the situation is that if you want peace, you must confront your demons.

Develop a Daily Practice

The sign of a truly dedicated practitioner is a self-guided practice. Tibetan yogis head off to their caves for decades at a time to experience isolation, which breeds self-reliance. Learning how to develop and maintain a meditation practice on your own takes perseverance, dedication, and patience.

How do you develop a daily practice? Like this: one day at a time, include short periods of practice into your daily schedule. It means getting on your yoga mat each day and/or your meditation cushion each morning. It means at a certain point you’ll have to have a conversation with your family to let them know that this is something you are doing with your time, with your life. You’ll probably want a teacher or at least a guide—a live person to relate to about the path. It means that you have made a choice to undertake a training of your awareness, which is unknown territory.

Many people will not understand your choice. This is part of the path: learning to deal with going against the grain of society’s norms. Ironically, to make this shift, it helps to have a daily self-practice.

The beauty of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is that the practice is self-motivated, so you get the direct experience of self-practice from day one. It may be easier to be led through a practice while attending a yoga class—you simply have to follow instructions. But when you are creating the experience yourself, you develop self-discipline and confidence.

It may be messy at times and you may wonder if you are doing it right. In my experience, the only way to gain true confidence in your practice is to muddle through it using your own GPS system. It doesn’t have to be Ashtanga yoga. But I think whatever practice you do—whether yoga asana from a different lineage or sitting meditation—has to be self-directed.

There are too many different brands of yoga these days to mention them all, but if you find an authentic teacher you like and trust, you’ll be able to find a practice that works for you. I suggest sticking to a form of yoga that comes from a lineage rather than one that someone has recently invented, trademarked or franchised. Any form of yoga that comes from the lineage of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya—whose students included B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, T. K. V. Desikachar, Indra Devi, and A. G. Mohan—is a good place to start. There are also other schools such as Kripalu, Sivananda, Satyananda, Kundalini, and many more. Many of the names commonly seen on studios in the West—Core Power, Vinyasa, Yin, Bikram, Power, Flow—are recent additions to the world of yoga and may not offer a complete approach to practice. That can be fine if you are seeking an entry point for your journey, but just know that there may be more on offer when you are ready to go deeper.

Only you know your body and mind as intimately as you do, so you are the only one who can read the signs. It’s like training your ear to learn a new language—it’s all gibberish at first, until you break it down, one syllable at a time. It’s not something you can accomplish in a day or a week. It takes dedicated, disciplined practice, and time. It is absolutely sure that if you apply yourself, results will occur.

Each day when you get on your mat, you drop into your breath, making it regular and even. You drop into awareness of the bandhas, accessing a sense of grounding in the body, which then connects to the breath. As you move through the postures with these two features of breath and bandha engaged, you clear away the previous day’s mental and emotional garbage. Over time, the effects are cumulative. What happens is a radical restructuring of the entire body-mind system. But it happens with just a few minutes each day on your yoga mat—like clearing out the cobwebs on a regular basis.

Dedication

Learning to maintain a meditation practice takes dedication. I remember the moment when the process clicked. I was rushing out the door to go teach an early-morning yoga class, feeling frazzled and late. It was midwinter in Paris and I had overslept. I was about to walk out the door without doing any practice whatsoever—I did my yoga practice in the afternoons—and I stopped myself.

“What are you doing?” I said to myself. “You are a teacher of contemplative practice, so go sit down and follow your breath before you teach a class. Do it now.”

And I did. I sat for one minute and watched my breath settle down just a bit. I walked out the door in a new state of mind, confident that I had access to the state of mind I was about to go teach. That was nearly twenty years ago and I have almost never missed a day since. Even if I am rushing to an early-morning flight, I at least follow my breath in the taxi on the way to the airport. The thought of missing my morning meditation is like forgetting to brush my teeth—I would feel gross and vaguely antisocial for the rest of the day.

But it hasn’t always been easy to become a daily meditator. At times, we all need a bit of support. It is enormously helpful to have a community of fellow practitioners, called sangha.

The beauty of meditating with a community is that the group energy serves as motivation to get on your cushion. This can be a weekly—or daily—group practice at a local community center. It could be a retreat where you go totally off-grid for a week or twelve. Or it could be a program with a meditation teacher, weaving in sessions of meditation with teachings about the view of practice.

Group practice is incredibly powerful to help you establish—or reestablish—your balance. It’s a great way to develop and maintain a meditation practice at the beginning. I think it’s important to schedule sitting with a group on a regular basis, just to make sure you are keeping it real.

That said, when you are meditating by yourself, you get direct access without any distractions. It can be incredibly empowering to develop the personal discipline to keep your mind focused without anyone telling you how to do it.

This is what will strengthen your dedication and help you maintain a daily meditation practice. For this you have to allow for the possibility that—at times—you might get it “wrong.” You might spend a full hour fantasizing about lunch. You may misunderstand the instructions you received and treat thoughts like they are the enemy. It’s okay. This is why it’s called practice. We practice being present with ourselves, fully and authentically. You are the only one who will ever really know your own mind. There is something empowering about learning how to develop and maintain a meditation practice on your own.

Whether you want the support of group practice, or feel ready to establish your own self-directed home practice, it helps to have some guidance. If you are just starting to meditate, see the Resources section for an introduction to the practice.

Perseverance

You know the drill: you have a goal, set an intention to get there, and a truckload of obstacles blocks your path. Like Naropa’s relentless tests under Tilopa’s guidance, perseverance can seem superhuman in the face of never-ending holdups.

Getting stuck is a part of the path—it’s a part of life. Losing your perseverance happens when you lose sight of this fact—you assume staying stuck is a permanent situation. Feeling stuck shows up in a variety of ways: as an obstacle, a limited mindset. Or circumstances: the wrong place. The wrong time. Wrong people. Or you simply lose your mojo.

These self-made obstacles manifest differently for everyone. But what they have in common is fear. Fear is the obstacle. Because even if we can “blame” our circumstances or a seemingly irreversible twist of fate, if we hit a roadblock, it’s fear calling us out.

Fear is the opposite of love.

Why do we let fear get in the way of our happiness? How do we persevere in the face of it? By showing up.

That’s what perseverance is: showing up. Again and again. Even when you’ve long since let go of hope. Once you give up hope of attainment, that’s when you have a chance to arrive. But here’s the tricky part; you can’t fake giving up hope in hopes of attaining something. It doesn’t work that way. You have to actually let go of hope. And then show up anyway.

Hopelessness is not always a bad thing. This is why practice is so helpful; it mirrors perfectly the letting go of hope. Because what on earth are we hoping to attain through practice? It’s so intangible. Much easier to simply stop altogether. But just when you start to wonder whether getting on your mat or your meditation cushion every day is really worth the effort, this is when things start to get interesting. When you commit to being present, set an intention, and simply show up, things start to change.

Daily Meditation Practice

When focusing on developing a daily meditation habit, start with short sessions. It’s easier to develop confidence when you don’t ask too much of yourself at first. I like to break up very short sessions—say ten minutes—with brief passages from meditation guidebooks. Then I sit with the instruction fresh in my mind while I try to put it into practice. Thrangu Rinpoche’s commentary on Pointing Out the Dharmakaya is one of my favorites.

Here are a few tricks I’ve learned to develop and maintain a meditation or yoga practice:

1.Schedule it. Write an outline of practice for each day and display the schedule somewhere you cannot avoid seeing it. Something written on a schedule takes on a bit more importance and the mind tends to remember to do it. Even if you miss a session, or a day, if it is noted as a regular feature of your daily schedule, chances are you’ll pay more attention to it.

2.Identify support. It’s so helpful to have someone to talk to about meditation practice. It’s even more helpful to have someone to do it with. If possible, find a “practice buddy” and sit together on a regular basis. Or if you live far apart, commit to a certain schedule and check in with each other to hold each other accountable. Talk with a guide who can steer you right when you go off course, or better yet, find a teacher you can study with. Attend a regular group practice session to keep in touch with your community.

3.Keep learning. Read books, attend programs with authentic teachers, participate in retreats. Developing a meditation practice is never-ending. Unless you are Shakyamuni (the historical) Buddha, there is always another layer of subtlety to discover. Maintaining a meditation practice means doing the practice, whether or not you see signs of progress. Practice evolves despite our egoic commentary about that evolution. Just keep going. Study helps you refine your technique and your awareness. Practice and study are equally important.

4.Forgive lapses. Things happen. Sometimes you can’t make it to the cushion, and well, as they say in Bhutan, “What to do?” The only way to move beyond a situation is to accept where you are. If you fight, you’ll only prolong your misery, and the whole point of the meditation practice is to develop a sane and friendly relationship with your mind in order to transcend suffering. Let go and allow the process to unfold. Let go of attachment to how your practice looks, how it feels, or what others say about it. It doesn’t matter. The practice is like a microscope for you to observe your experience. Whatever happens, it’s no big deal.

Learning to develop and maintain a meditation practice is a lifelong journey. From this perspective, there is no end goal. Ego doesn’t like that situation very much. Ego wants progress and signs of success. But if you train the mind to be present at all stages of the journey, your whole life becomes a pilgrimage. The way to start integrating this awareness into your life is to simply get on your cushion each day and watch what arises, without judgment. That’s called the path of meditation.

Writing Practice: Your Daily Practice

Use the following prompts as starting-off points:

What would it look like for you to establish a daily practice?

Write down creative ways you can fit a daily practice into your schedule.

How can you commit to making your daily practice a priority?

Think about how you can get your family and friends to support your commitment to this practice.

How will you respond if they push back at your plan?

Create your own daily practice schedule—make it doable and appealing so that it’s something you’ll want to focus on every day.

Identify the components of your practice—what practice will you do?

When will you practice? Will you sit first thing in the morning and then practice some yoga asana? Will you start with early-morning yoga practice, and end in a long meditation? Will you alternate days? Will you meditate before bed?

Where will you practice? Do you have a designated practice space in your home? Could you?

Will you set up a shrine or altar? Will you sit on a cushion or a chair?

Get detailed about how your daily practice will manifest each day. Your daily practice forms the building blocks of your pilgrimage. Set yourself up for success on a daily basis and your journey will unfold on a strong foundation.