I awoke with a start. Someone was banging on my back door. I rolled over and squinted at the clock: three AM.
In a haze, I dragged myself out of bed and looked out the window. It was Maggie. She was in housecoat and slippers, carrying a flashlight and looking wild.
I called out the window: “Maggie, what’s wrong? Are you OK?”
“Stephen. Get up. You must get up.”
“What’s happened?”
“Just come with me.”
I slipped on some jeans and a fleece jacket. Maggie took me by the arm and we walked across the lawn to her already open door.
I had seen Maggie the previous evening, and I scanned my memory for clues. Maggie had taken my two-hour vigorous yoga class at Kripalu. We had finished with a long yoga-nidrā (relaxation). I noticed in the class that Maggie had been particularly concentrated in her postures. Afterward, we sipped jasmine tea in Maggie’s garden and played with the animals until the moon came up. I had drifted home around ten PM. All in all it had been a peaceful evening. What ever had happened?
Maggie dragged me into her living room and sat me down. There was a small wooden box open on the coffee table. What appeared to be old letters—yellowed with age, some still in envelopes—were scattered everywhere.
I picked up one of the letters and began to read. The writing was unsteady. It was signed by Georgiana Winslow.
Maggie snatched the letter away from me.
“Not yet.” Then she got up and began to walk back toward the kitchen. “I need to make us some tea, first.” Maggie looked more than slightly undone.
“Oh for God’s sake, Maggie,” I said under my breath. She could not do anything important without making tea. A ritual.
While Maggie was in the kitchen, I looked at the portrait of Georgiana on the wall over the fireplace. She was dressed in white satin. The portrait had probably been done for her “coming out” in New York when she was eighteen. She had the most beautiful silky black hair. There was a barely contained wildness in her dark eyes.
Finally, Maggie and I settled into the sofa with cups of jasmine tea, and she began to tell the story.
“After you left last night, I went straight to bed,” she said. “It was only ten, but I was exhausted. I fell into a deep sleep right away. Well, I awoke at one AM, drenched in sweat.”
Now Maggie hesitated. “At first I thought I’d been having a dream. But, it wasn’t exactly a dream. It was more real than that. I’d been drifting in and out of this strange dreamlike state for what seemed like hours.”
Maggie stared straight ahead for a moment, as if she had lost the thread.
“So?” I prodded.
“It was a memory of Georgie’s death,” said Maggie, still staring, as if she were staring right into the memory.
I already knew some of the details of Georgiana Winslow’s dramatic death: Georgie had been thrown by a horse at seventy, when Maggie had been just fifteen years old. Lenox society had been scandalized. Georgiana was reckless and selfish, some said. This was just another confirmation of her unseemly wildness.
Georgiana had died the night after the accident—not of her injuries, apparently, but of a heart attack, brought on by the stress of the fall. All of this had taken place at the old Winslow mansion—near Acorn Cottage where Rudi now lived. Georgie died in her bed, in the room next to Maggie’s.
Maggie and I had talked about Georgiana’s death several times before, and it was clear that Maggie had only the vaguest memory of the death scene—even though she had been there for the whole drama. It seemed to me that even the memories Maggie did have were constructed from what others had told her about it. Her descriptions never had the ring of emotional truth. They were disconnected, vague, and mechanical. Now, for the first time, Maggie began to remember the scene vividly—moment by moment. As she recounted it to me, I could feel it.
Maggie spoke slowly, telling the story in present tense and still staring into the distance. “Georgie is in her silk bedclothes—trying to put on a good face for me. But she is obviously in pain. The doctors are scurrying around. Charlotte [Georgie’s companion] is beside herself. The room is dark.”
“I remember, now. Georgie is reaching out to me. ‘Oh, darling. What a stupid accident. Please forgive your foolish Gammy.’ ”
Maggie went on slowly. “Now Charlotte is hurrying me out. I’m crying, and all alone in my bedroom. Lying on my bed.”
That was the last Maggie had seen of Georgie. She died, quite unexpectedly, about two hours later. Maggie had never been allowed to see the body. The casket had been closed. Clearly, Maggie had been traumatized by the event—and she had forgotten it altogether.
Now Maggie crumpled onto the sofa, pulling a big comforter around her—perhaps in just the position she’d been in on her own bed the night Georgie died. Maggie didn’t cry. (Though later she told me she had cried hard, off and on, during the two hours before she knocked on my door.) I couldn’t tell, really, what Maggie was feeling as we sat together, except that she did seem to be in a mild altered state. I offered to hold her. She said no.
“Just stay with me, will you? Just sit here, right here with me.”
I sat next to her on the sofa. She curled up in a ball, with her feet just touching my legs. I stretched my legs out on the big ottoman. We both fell asleep.
When I awoke, it was nearly eight AM. I was curled up next to Maggie, with part of her comforter over me. The sun was slanting in through the sheer drapes in the living room. Maggie was still asleep. Her position hadn’t changed.
I carefully extracted myself, and shuffled quietly to the kitchen, where I cooked some eggs and made toast for us—laying it all out on the breakfast table with butter and jam, and a pot of Earl Grey tea, Maggie’s favorite.
When Maggie finally awoke, she was still in the penumbra of the altered state. I sat next to her on the sofa, rubbing her back, and she responded with a quiet kind of purr.
“I feel in such a haze. It’s like I have a hangover. Like I’m still in a kind of dream world.” She curled back up in the comforter again, and I rubbed her back and neck. “I don’t want to move,” she said.
When Maggie did finally stir, we talked for a while. The memories of the night before seemed perfectly intact.
“It’s as though I’ve been living in a house with all these rooms I didn’t even know about. It’s so strange. Terrifying and comforting at the same time.”
We finally padded to the dining room to nibble on breakfast, and Maggie recounted all the new memories to me once again, as she had the night before. With each recounting, however, I noticed that there were new details. It was as though the memory, like a Polaroid picture, was slowly coming into focus.
After we ate, Maggie held my arm firmly and walked me into the living room. There was more.
“Something else very strange happened,” she said, now sounding more like herself. “In the ‘dream,’ I saw Georgie’s writing desk. It was scattered with letters as it always was.
“But I noticed something else,” she said. “There was a dark wooden letter box on the desk. Her letter box. Her letter box! And in the dream I thought, Of course! I had forgotten all about it!”
Maggie described what had happened next, in the wee hours of the morning. As she awoke from her dream state, she got out of bed and went right to the attic. There she found Georgiana’s writing desk, which had been stored among the trunks since the old Winslow mansion had been closed up forty-five years ago. In the desk, she found a cache of letters that had sat in that drawer for at least fifty years. She also found a key, clearly marked, to the bottom drawer of Georgie’s writing desk—which, too, had apparently remained unopened.
In the locked bottom drawer, Maggie found a treasure of information about Georgie’s life—a treasure that would begin to unlock the secret of Duncan Gregor.
In the weeks that followed, Maggie and I talked about her revelation at length. During this period, her memories deepened and she often seemed to fill with emotion. Occasionally, as she marveled at these spontaneous events, she wondered aloud to me, “Why now? Why should this revelation have come just now in my life?”
Maggie was convinced that the unlocking of her memories was directly related to the fruit of her deepening yoga practice. She believed that there was some magic in the āsanas. We had, after all, done deep posture practice and yoga-nidrā the evening before her revelation, hadn’t we?
“Didn’t you notice what was happening to me in class that evening?” asked Maggie once, irritably.
I thought for a minute, furrowing my brow, but produced nothing remarkable.
“You didn’t even notice me holding that Triangle Pose?” she queried.
Maggie had held the Triangle for a long time, yes. Much longer than the rest of the class. But this was so common over the past months as to have been a non-event. Maggie often broke away from the class and did her own modifications, and used her own timing in yoga postures.
“Well, tell me,” I said. “What was happening?”
Maggie gave me a long description of what had happened to her in her postures the evening before her “dream”—and indeed what often happened to her those days on the yoga mat. Her description was so interesting that later, I asked her if she could write it down for me. This is what she remembered.
We were about halfway through the standing poses when it happened. I had just held an extremely long Warrior II Pose, and Steve asked us to move directly into a Triangle. My body was soaked in sweat, and I could feel it running down my legs, and drenching my sticky mat. In Warrior II, I felt a powerful eruption of energy from my center, and hit one of those places where I knew I could hold that pose forever. Every energy in the universe seemed to be supporting me, and it was effortless in a strange way.
When I moved down into Triangle Pose, I slowly turned my head upward to gaze along my outstretched, reaching left arm. Energy kicked in again, and I felt my body light up like one of those energy charts on the wall at my acupuncturist. I felt all the lines of energy from my left foot up through my spine, and then through the crown of my head, from my sternum up through my left arm and simultaneously down through my right arm which reached toward the ground.
It was the reaching that did it, I think. Reaching up out of the center. Up toward heaven, down toward earth. With my heart and sternum open. And feeling my legs and abdomen so strong. I dropped my left shoulder slightly back, and this opened my sternum and heart even more.
In a flash, I felt energy stream through my arms and legs, pumping blood and heat. The hard shell of my body melted into liquid light, and there was no more posture. Only energy and light and heat and pulsing and oxygen. No me. No effort. No form. Just life. There was no more reaching now—or at least I was not the one doing it. Only a kind of effortless streaming.
I have no idea how long the experience lasted. It was a moment in time out of time. When I awoke from the trance, the rest of the class had moved on to the next posture. For a while I couldn’t make out Steve’s words. They echoed in my ears like pure sound.
I finished the rest of the class in a state of bliss, and moved in and out of trance. We all lay down for deep relaxation. Steve knelt down next to me and put his right hand lightly on my belly, just above my navel, and his left hand on the crown of my head. I felt an infusion of love such as I had rarely known. A pulsing sensation moved from my heart to my crown. My body was washed with love and healing. I felt waves of relaxation, going deeper and deeper, all the way into my core.
Time disappeared. As I drifted in yoga-nidrā, I was surprised by a vision of Shiva—and for the first time I got a sense of who that little guy in the statue really was. He was dancing in the ring of fire in the charnel ground—his arms waving, his hair wild like strands of cobras. One of his hands seemed to say to me, “do not be afraid.”
After hearing Maggie’s account of her posture, I realized that she was probably right. Her dream-revelation may certainly have been connected to her deepening yoga practice—and also, probably, to her continuing practice of meditation and mantra.
Āsana awakens the observing part of the self—the witnessing function—and as this becomes stronger and steadier, previously split-off or disavowed aspects of experience become available to awareness. The mind begins to know itself—to know its exiled parts. This observing function is like a powerful searchlight that automatically scans the entire field of experience. As it gets stronger it reaches into the dark corners, exposing memories of experiences that could not be digested at the time they occurred.
Most contemporary practitioners of yoga assume that postures are meant primarily to cultivate some kind of supernormal state of physical training. This is not quite so. In classical yoga, āsana was not meant primarily for physical training at all. Says Rajneesh, “Postures are concerned not really with any kind of physiological training, but an inner training of being—learning just to be.”1 In the classical tradition, āsana is a continuation of the attentional training found in early meditation practice. The single posture with which Patanjali concerned himself was the posture for meditation.
The Sanskrit word āsana literally means “seat.” In posture practice, we find the seat from which we can witness the play of experience. Joseph Campbell, the great American scholar of myth and comparative religion, called this seat the “immovable spot,” or the “still point.”2 Āsana cultivates the still point at the center of the dance of experience—the still point at the center of the play of sensation. The immovable spot from which we can witness the chaining of sensations, thoughts, feelings, and actions.
What are the essential ingredients of this “seat”? Patanjali lays it out succinctly.
The postures of meditation should embody steadiness and ease.
This occurs as all effort relaxes and coalescence arises, revealing that the body and the infinite universe are indivisible.
Then one is no longer disturbed by the play of opposites. (2.46–48)
In Part Five we will explore the stunning meditative achievement called “coalescence,” which Patanjali mentions here but does not explore fully until later in the Yoga-Sūtra. Patanjali’s first and third sūtras on āsana, however, lay the groundwork for this fascinating later attainment, and we can now examine them more closely.
In Patanjali’s time, as I have said, āsana meant “seat for meditation.” It did not mean the immensely varied menu of postures with which we’re familiar today. This “seat” would have been primarily the Lotus Pose (padmāsana), the first, the primeval posture, and the mother of all postures. Padmāsana is the seated pose we often see in pictures of meditation adepts—with a yogi seated upright on the sits-bones, spine straight, legs intertwined, fingers interlaced, and hands—palms up—resting comfortably in his lap, eyes closed. The Lotus Pose connects the body directly to the still point—to the immovable spot.
Patanjali investigates the components of this seat. “Steadiness” (or sthira, in Sanskrit) is one of the key principles of posture practice. Notice that Patanjali talks about steadiness, ease, and relaxation of effort. The archetypal posture, however, as meditators quickly discover, is not relaxing in the usual sense of the word. In Lotus Pose, and in all postures for meditation, we do not experience the global reduction of random muscle activity that we usually associate with relaxation. The posture is, rather, stabilizing. Rather than “relaxation,” what emerges is an increased regularity in the distribution of muscle output. Research on meditation postures has verified that, as Daniel Brown says, “ ‘steadiness’ does not imply a cessation of bodily activity, but a redistribution of muscle activity which counteracts the ordinary random activity…so that gross motor activity undergoes a kind of ‘settling.’ ”3 This settling and steadiness help the body to quiet, while still remaining alert.
When “white noise” from random gross muscular activity is quieted, it is possible for awareness to open to more subtle levels of bodily activity—subtle activity that is experienced as a flow of energy currents. In these moments the factors of distraction are settled. Attention becomes highly refined. Concentration deepens. In this balanced state, the bodymind is not “assaulted by the pairs of opposites,” as Patanjali tells us. In other words, the mind becomes secluded from the pull of the afflictions.
In āsana, we find a seat from which to effectively develop concentration. The noise in the field calms, and we can investigate the subtle bodies. In these settled states, the subtle roots of craving and aversion are burned away. Sukha, or sweetness, naturally arises. A literal translation of Patanjali’s three-word sūtra on posture (2.46—sthira-sukham-asanam) is “steadiness, sweetness, posture!”
Early references to āsana are most likely references to padmāsana, which was found to be ideal both for sitting meditation and the subsequent practice of prānāyāma—literally, “regulation of vital energy,” Patanjali’s fourth “limb.” All subsequent postures were spontaneous variations of this first posture.
Swami Kripalu, when initiated by his guru, was given just two practices: padmāsana and the prānāyāma known as anuloma viloma—the practice of “retention of breath” described by Patanjali. Swami Kripalu practiced these assiduously for years. With time, something astonishing happened: as the swami’s practice deepened, dozens of new postures began to emerge spontaneously. And not just postures, but mudrās, or “gestures” (often gestures of the hands) and more advanced prānāyāmas as well. These were techniques in which Swami Kripalu had never had instruction. In effect, his own body instructed him in āsana, prānāyāma, and mudrā.
Swami Kripalu’s experience probably reenacts the entire history of hatha-yoga. It is most likely that the multiplicity of postures was discovered in this way over and over again by meditating yogis. In order to investigate new aspects of the field of experience, their bodies spontaneously adopted new seats, new āsanas, new steadily held poses which opened up new aspects of the field for exploration. Just like padmāsana, these postures would have been practiced until they were stable and comfortable, revealing some new aspect of the field beyond craving and aversion. Each new posture provided a new base, or seat, from which to explore, to witness. A new still point in the center of the storm of sensation.
Yogis found that the mystical and ecstatic states of concentration that emerged in meditation had profound effects on the human nervous system, and they found that a physical preparation for these altered states made the process much easier to endure without losing the balance of the mind. Yogis experimented with hundreds of (āsanas, mudrās, and prānāyāmas—which promoted purification and optimal levels of health. But this experimentation did not gather steam until well after the time of Patanjali.
Gradually, in certain parts of the sramanic stream, the practice of āsana and prānāyāma became a central focus. What emerged, then, was the science which came to be known as hatha-yoga, or forceful yoga. It wasn’t until the fifteenth century CE that Svatmarama Yogin gathered together and published the first systematic text of the hatha-yogis—the Hatha-Yoga-Pradīpikā. This is still certainly the definitive scripture of hatha-yoga. It is written in sūtra form, much like Patanjali’s Yoga-Sūtra. It is interesting to note, however, that while Svatmarama acknowledges the distinction between hatha-yoga and rāja-yoga, he emphatically speaks for the primacy of rāja-yoga.
“Those who practice only hatha and do not know rāja-yoga,“ says Svatmarama, “I consider such practitioners to be depriving themselves of the fruit of their endeavor.”4
“Without rāja-yoga,” says Svatmarama, “the earth is inauspicious. Without rāja-yoga, the night is inauspicious. Without rāja-yoga, even mudrās are inauspicious.”5
Maggie’s discovery of the immovable spot—and its interesting manifestations—gives us an opportunity to explore a further by-product of seclusion—the by-product which is sometimes called “purification,” or “integration.” Integration is, in effect, the downloading of samskarās into awareness. And it can be dramatic, as it was for Maggie.
Remember that every action of body, speech, and mind creates a samskāra, or subliminal activator—a track, or a seed. Remember, too, that in the view of rāja-yoga, the mind and the body are the same—made of the “same stuff.” Mind and body simply lie along different points in the spectrum of subtlety. The body is a gross form of consciousness. The mind is a more subtle form of consciousness. Yogis came to believe that samskāric tracks are laid down in all sheaths of the body—pressed into the physical, energy, and subtle bodies.
So, as we have seen, every act of body, speech, and mind is, in effect, stored in the vast storehouse of consciousness. Our future actions of body, speech, and mind are then influenced by these samskāric tracks. And in order for us to be free from the power of these subliminal activators, each samskāra will have to be experienced again—and fully digested (burned up!)—either now or later, in a future incarnation. Yogis found, too, that there is a hierarchy of samskāras—that some samskāras are more deeply etched than others. (Yogis have said that some samskāras are grooved into consciousness like “a line drawn in water”; some are grooved like “a line drawn in sand”; and some, like “a line drawn in rock.”)
The most difficult samskāras, those etched in rock, are those to which we had the most powerful original reaction. For Maggie, for example, the experience of Georgie’s death aroused powerful thoughts and emotions—fear of loss, and the terror of abandonment. These feelings were so frightening that Maggie could not bear them as a fifteen-year-old. She could not experience them without losing the balance of the mind. And so, she had to deny them. To suppress them. For Maggie, the samskāras of her reactions to Georgie’s death were hidden in the deepest part of her consciousness.
Why did they emerge when they did, and what is the relationship of this emergence to Maggie’s practice?
This is a fascinating question, and one with which yogis preoccupied themselves. Through self-study, yogis discovered something amazing: When we are in a state of non-reactivity, when we are dwelling at the still point, we are not generating any new samskāras. In these moments, the mind and body are still. Nirodha. And this stillness and non-reactivity has powerful consequences. It initiates the process of purification. Says the meditation teacher S. N. Goenka: “Every moment for the whole of our lives we have generated reactions. Now, by remaining aware and balanced, we achieve a few moments in which we do not react, do not generate any samskāra. Those few moments, no matter how brief, are very powerful: they set in motion the reverse process, the process of purification.”6
When the mind is secluded, when consciousness is not preoccupied with digesting a flood of current experience, it begins automatically to register and digest material from the vast storehouse of samskāric impressions. In these moments, impressions of past experiences bubble up to the surface, and are experienced as “real”—that is to say, they are experienced just as any other current sensory input is experienced. (Remember the six sense doors!) Now the contents of the storehouse are re-experienced, one by one. The less deeply grooved samskāras are experienced first, the more deeply etched samskāras later. Here is the kicker: when they are re-experienced without reactivity—with a balance of awareness and equanimity—they are digested, burned up, or as yogis sometimes say, “cooked”—just as digestion burns up a big meal.
As Maggie’s consciousness became balanced and non-reactive, and as her Witness became more resilient (not “blown away” by powerful feelings), it was inevitable that these old impressions would resurface.
Now we can see more clearly why “seclusion” of the mind is so important in the yogic strategy. Yogis saw that even a few seconds of real concentration (real seclusion, real dhāranā) initiates the purification of the deeper levels of the mind. Goenka refers to this as a kind of “fasting of the spirit in order to eliminate past conditioning.”7 The deeper we go into the fasting (seclusion), the deeper the levels of samskāra that are surfaced. This is exactly the process Kate experienced when she found herself “fasting from gossip”—a technique which exposed the subtle intentions and motivations behind her lying.
It isn’t so difficult to understand this kind of fasting—because it is so analogous to fasting at the physical level. Purification of the mind involves much the same process as purification of the body. It simply happens at a more subtle level. Both are characterized by periods of withdrawal, and by moments of intense reactivity—intense craving or aversion—followed by moments of equanimity.
We are now close to the core of yoga’s technology of transformation. Because, if we are to believe yogic sages, it is in these moments of withdrawal and seclusion of the mind that the foundations of the afflictions are destroyed. Craving, aversion, greed, ignorance, hatred—these are all eradicated in states of meditative absorption.
Yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein gives a lucid description of how this occurs: “ ‘Attenuation’ [of klesha] is achieved by refusing these forces [greed, hatred, and ignorance] an outlet…Their power is partly checked by sensory withdrawal and the accompanying stilling of the mind. In other words, the yogin plays the subliminal structures off against each other. By disallowing them to take effect in the conscious mind, he indirectly achieves their mutual annihilation….When even the last subliminal activator [samskāra] is exterminated, the klesha can be said to be fully destroyed as well.”8
As Goenka says, “To trigger this process [of purification]…we must simply refrain from any fresh reaction. Whatever might be the cause of the sensations we experience, we observe them with equanimity. The very act of generating awareness and equanimity will automatically eliminate old reactions, just as lighting a lamp will dispel darkness from the room.”9 This is the process of self-observation without judgment taken to new depths.
What happens as samskāras are being “downloaded,” as they were for Maggie? They are reexperienced, without reactivity this time—they are seen (witnessed) and known without judgment, grasping, or aversion. As a result they are “burned up” in the heat of tapas. Concentration, it turns out, is simply a new and highly refined form of tapas.
And finally, we are back again, as always, to nirodha. Stillness in the mind draws forth those areas that are not still. This is the genius of stillness. It inexorably and naturally purifies the mind. But, of course, this can only happen when concentration, awareness, and non-reactivity have matured.
And what does this purification feel like? As Maggie discovered, the downloading of samskāras is not quite the same as simply remembering a past event or emotion. It is actually a reexperiencing of the undigested samskāric tracks. So, for Maggie, it was a reexperiencing of the scene of Georgie’s death. In some ways, she did not relive it: she lived it for the first time. But this time with awareness and equanimity, and all the fruit of her years of contemplative practice.
Contemporary neuroscience has given us a series of intriguing insights into this process. This begins with a sophisticated new tool for exploring Puppy Mind itself. We now understand that Puppy Mind is reflected in brain-wave activity. Neuroscientists can now map this brain-wave activity. We can see Puppy Mind on the computer screen.
How does this work? Nerve cells in the brain communicate with each other by emitting tiny electrical impulses, and this activity can be registered as oscillations, or brain waves. These brain waves can be measured by amplifying the impulses and displaying them on a computer monitor—a method called electroencephalography, or EEG.
And what do these brain waves tell us? Well, first of all, this electrical activity in the brain is very different depending on our state of mind. When the mind is active, excited, anxious, and wakeful (Puppy Mind!), “beta-waves” predominate in the EEG. These are oscillations in the range of 13–36 waves per second. When the mind is calmer, quietly focused and recollected, these oscillations can slow to a range of 8–13 per second, a range called “alpha.” Alpha waves predominate when we’re conscious, aware, and centered—and they are a kind of portal into the deeper states of consciousness. They are characteristic of the waking, meditative state.
But, as yogis also discovered, there are mind-states that manifest an even slower, quieter, range of brain waves. In adults, states of “half consciousness”—between wakefulness and sleep—are characterized by “theta waves,” oscillations in the range of 4–8 waves per second. Theta waves are formed deep in the brain and seem to reflect activity associated with strong emotions and dreaming states. But the brain is capable of quieting even more profoundly. In states of deep sleep, the oscillations can slow to a range of 1–4 waves per second. These are called “delta waves.” These slowest patterns are associated with the deepest states of consciousness. Some researchers have said that they reflect the most subtle, intuitive aspects of the mind.
New research shows that during yoga and meditation practice most subjects experience a significant decrease in beta waves, but an increase in alpha and theta waves. Studies have shown that increased theta waves, when mixed with alpha waves, “correlate with the appearance of previously unconscious feelings, images and memories. Brain researchers claim that a person in the high alpha/theta state is able to confront and integrate unconscious processes.”10 One researcher draws the obvious conclusion from these studies: “The meditative state, characterized by high alpha/theta activity, can bring about a release, or ‘cleansing’ of unconscious material.”11
As Maggie’s practice deepened, she began to systematically cultivate these slower, quieter rhythms in the mind. This led inexorably to a downloading of memory, and repressed thoughts and feelings. And, finally, because she was able to remain in a state of non-reactive self-observation, the process culminated in the emergence and immolation of some deeply grooved samskāras.
Maggie now entered a period of weeks during which she continued to relive repressed experiences. Out of the memory of Georgiana’s death flowed countless other small memories—as if the memory of the death scene had been a kind of key. Rather like the key to Georgiana’s letter box.
“It’s as if I buried a part of myself with Georgie,” Maggie said. “A part of me went into the ground with her.
“And now, it’s all washing out. I’m coming alive again. Everything seems sacred. Alive. It’s as if I’ve been reunited with Georgie.”
For a short window of time, Maggie found postures, meditation, and mantra to be effortless—like riding a wave. She was drawn to the quiet. She sat as if at the still point of the turning world, and watched as her life replayed itself. There were both painful and pleasurable memories, of course, but to Maggie they were better than the inner compartmentalization in which she had lived. (“A relief to feel them. A relief to feel at all!”) Her sleep and dreams were, as she said, “drenched in memory,” and she often lay in bed, now, savoring these.
She saw, too, that as she got quiet and lived at the still point, the process played itself out spontaneously. As soon as she was tempted to direct it with her will, as soon as she brought grasping into the equation, the process was interrupted. The harder she reached for her sweet memories, the more elusive they became. She learned to trust the process. She learned that it would all unwind in just the right way.
Slowly, Maggie began to understand that her writing had been an attempt to reunite herself with these memories. The current novel, in fact, was, she later said, “like a big archeological dig.” She discovered that in “channeling” Duncan Gregor, she was really reuniting with a split-off part of herself. She identified with him in so many ways: he was a brilliant artist who never came into his own; he was another human being on the planet who had loved Georgiana as passionately as she had; he had lived free of the restraints of the often-stilted society in which Maggie had grown up—a position in life which Maggie also strived for. In discovering Duncan Gregor’s voice, she actually found a part of her own voice. Or, rather, a part of The Voice, which she had split off.
Remarkably, Maggie was not undone by all this “purification.” In fact, there was a new settled quality to her. She was less driven, more vulnerable, more openhearted. I noticed over the months to come that she had more time for our friendship. I nestled closer to her in these months, and she to me.
Paradoxically, Maggie’s grasping, her wanting, her striving and pushing, had been both the road to this reunion with split-off parts, and an obstacle to it. Her real reunion, with herself and with her experience of Georgiana, all only tumbled out when her grasping had been momentarily stilled through practice. It emerged as she stayed present at the center of the storm of thoughts, feelings, and memories.
As the drama of Maggie’s discoveries unfolded, I was profoundly surprised by several things. First of all, as a psychotherapist, I would have expected more drama, more catharsis. But it became clear to me that Maggie was not really experiencing the phenomenon that therapists today call “traumatic reexperiencing.” Indeed, where was the trauma in it? Rather, for Maggie it was a reexperiencing that emerged naturally when her mind had developed enough awareness and equanimity to digest it. There were, of course, plenty of tears, and deeply felt sadness and loss. But Maggie insisted that she was not depressed or undone. And, indeed, she was not. She talked, rather, about “a sweet kind of sadness.”
Was it really just yoga and meditation that provided her with the new source of equanimity? I don’t think so. I came to understand, later, that Maggie’s maturation came also as a result of her new web of relationships—which included me and our band of friends. Maggie had, for the first time since Georgiana’s death, a network of relationships in which she felt safely held and soothed—comforted, supported, upheld. I would come to understand that Maggie had relied not just upon her own developing Witness, but on the witness consciousness of our entire group. Just as Sigmund Freud “loaned” his patients his ego when they needed it, our group loaned its members the group witness consciousness.
Frank Lloyd Wright said, “We create our houses and then they create us.” Likewise, we create our web of relationships, and then they create us. It was only out of this safe and sane web of relationships that the new Maggie was being born. And the new me. And Jake, Susan, Rudi, and Kate.
Practice was important, of course. Postures. Meditation. Mantra. We all continued to practice—and deeply. But with this experience of Maggie’s revelation, I began to wonder just how much of the real juice of transformation came about through the growing bonds and collective intelligence and wisdom of our group—rather than the practices we did on the mat, and on the meditation cushion. Certainly they potentiated each other in some mysterious way. Perhaps this would become clearer as we continued to work together.
One other thing surprised me about Maggie’s experience: she never, throughout the whole course of this adventure, spoke about the death of her parents. She never, at least in my hearing, consciously connected the loss of Georgiana to the loss of her parents when she was just three years old. She never uttered their names.
It was clear to me that this samskāra was even more deeply buried—still safely tucked away until she could bear knowing it. A graduate school mentor of mine once said, “There are some things you never get over.” I wondered if Maggie would ever, in this lifetime, rediscover inside herself the loss of her parents. For surely, it was all in there. Perhaps this would have to wait for a future year, or a future life.