IN THE MEDIEVAL TEXT on yoga known as the Yoga Vāsiṣṭa, Rama is asked by his father why he has a heavy heart and why he is having such a hard time in his mind and with his body. With low eyes and a sunken chest, Rama responds by saying,
My heart has begun to question: what do people call happiness and can it be had in the ever-changing objects of this world? All beings in this world take birth only to die and die to be born. I do not perceive any meaning at all in these transient phenomena . . . . Unrelated beings come together; the mind conjures up a relationship between them. Everything in this world is dependent on the mind and one’s attitude. On examination, the mind is unreal, it cannot be found. But we are bewitched by it. This is suffering.1
The king, who is also present for the conversation between Rama and his father, responds first by saying that Rama’s perception of his condition is the root of the problem.
Rama’s condition is not the result of delusion, the king continues, but is full of wisdom and points to enlightenment.2
When the sages, ministers, and community of the court hear this exchange, they stop their doings and become completely still. They hear in Rama’s flaming words their own doubts, fears, and misunderstandings. The royal family, citizens, pets, caged birds, horses in the royal stables, and even the heavenly musicians are silenced by the way Rama gives expression to their deepest fears, hopes, and desires. How does one work with the inherent suffering of being human?
Yoga not only begins in the present moment (atha) but begins also with the recognition of suffering, stress, discontent, and dissatisfaction that characterizes much of our moment-to-moment experience. The characteristics of suffering appear in the heart as poisons. Here is how Pattabhi Jois describes it:
In the yoga śāstra it is said that god dwells in our heart in the form of light, but this light is covered by six poisons: kāma, krodha, moha, lobha, mātsarya, and mada. These are desire, anger, delusion, greed, envy and sloth.”3
Not only does Rama articulate a universal truth about human suffering, but the king responds in a surprising way. Rather than asking Rama to further explain his anguish and discontent, he describes Rama’s problem as an error of perception. It is not that Rama is caught in delusion, but rather that Rama is deluded about his own delusion. His suffering is not the problem, it’s that he doesn’t see that his suffering is the source of wisdom and the actual path to enlightenment. Rather than treating his anguish as something to be expelled, the king infers, anguish is a recognition that the path has opened. The king does not define enlightenment in this first chapter, nor does he offer a series of techniques to follow to find freedom from torment. Instead he offers Rama a complete reversal, a counterperception that defines the path of yoga as embracing one’s suffering and, in so doing, uses complete acceptance as a starting point for practice.
In the same way that Pattabhi Jois describes the enemies of the heart as the factors that create suffering, he also points to the heart with his own breath as a means of saying that the path begins in the heart, the body, the mind, even with their enemies. In the language of devotional Bhakti yoga, it is said that the cure of the symptom begins with love. This is not personal love in the sense of a new-age sensitivity or empathic technique but rather the impersonal force of love that heals by extending itself to the most interrupted, broken, and ruined parts of ourselves.
Like Rama, or many other well-known characters that populate Indian literature (I think also of Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gītā), I came to yoga practice because I was suffering. Most practitioners come to yoga to deal with the myriad forms of upset, stress, and lack. For many, that stress may be recognizable in the daily grind of work, difficulties in relationships, or dissatisfaction in the form of tight hamstrings. But some level of dissatisfaction brings us to yoga, however that is defined and described, if at all, consciously or unconsciously, and its expression and manifestation are unique for everyone. One of the key teachings of yoga, as described in the Sāṇkhya Karika of Ishvarakṛṣṇa, is that life is characterized by duḥkha, suffering. This is one of the central tenets of Kṛṣṇa’s teaching to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gītā, the king’s comments to Rama in the Yoga Vāsiṣṭa, Patañjali’s starting point in the Yoga-Sutra, and the Buddha’s first noble truth: life is characterized by dissatisfaction and pervasive lack.
“There is just enough suffering to get you in the door,” I often tell yoga students, in order to remind them of why they are in class, “so that is our starting point.” Difficulty begets faith. Faith in yoga implies a sense of yearning. What are we yearning for, what do we seek to be free of? For many of us, the longing to practice yoga has to do with aspiring to a life free of habitual patterns of conditioning. If we seek any kind of transcendence, we are always looking for something we do not yet know. So faith is a movement beyond what we currently feel is constricting, and in that sense it is a yearning. At some level, we all yearn to overcome places in which there is constriction, lack, and discontent. Faith in practice requires not a theological commitment but rather an interest in one’s discontent and how to bring it to an end.
Longing is not to be dismissed as a form of attachment but an inevitable part of what keeps us going. Of course, it can get mixed up with the projects of the ego, but there is an inherent longing to see through the limitations of the ego. We long to know the nature of things and to connect and be grounded in relationship with something larger than our ideas of ourselves. We know so much about so many things, but what do we really know when pressed with anguish or pain? What do we learn about our character when up against the truth of change, the truth of death, the truth of suffering?
When I began practicing yoga, the first classes I attended, in the basement of a library, consisted of little more than sitting still and watching the cycles of the breath. I had a hard time sitting still for more than one breath cycle, and by the time I reached the top of an inhalation, my mind was on to something else. The teacher instructed us to notice the breath and whatever physical and mental states were coming and going. Eventually, I began to notice the ways the mind and body were deeply conditioned with patterns of reactivity. Before she had us move our bodies, the teacher required that we could sit still and notice the feeling of simple breathing and the mind’s tendency to escape those simple sensations.
“All of human unhappiness is due to the inability to sit still in a room alone,” writes philosopher Blaise Pascal in his treatise on the human condition.4 Too often, our first response to sense data is to think about it, and when caught in our thinking, we begin to withdraw into a representational reality constructed in our own mind. The miracle of yoga is what Patañjali calls viveka, the ability to distinguish the difference between self-centered thinking, along with the separation it creates, and the ongoing nondual experience of being in touch with life.
Inextricably linked to the teaching of duḥkha is the way that suffering continues in cycles, like a wheel spinning out of balance. This turning of the wheel of duḥkha is called saṁsāra. Saṁsāra is a metaphor for meaninglessness. It refers to the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. But the concept of the cycle of birth and rebirth is not simply a carryover from Indian cultural attitudes about the possibility of future or past lives, but rather the birth, death, and rebirth of our sense of self from moment to moment. Each moment of experience, whether in stillness or in reactivity, sets up the pattern for the next consecutive moment, and our ability to skillfully meet each and every moment with open and undivided attention is possible to astonishing degrees. This moment conditions the next.
Psychological rebirth is a metaphor for being born into a conditioned existence. Yoga practice is about breaking free of the cyclic force of habitual activity and distorted mental and emotional forces that drive us to act in ways that maintain suffering. While this is not an image of hell, per se, it is thought that saṁsāra and duḥkha are one and the same. Suffering is a product of conditioned existence.
Sometimes turning to the imaginative and mythical tales of India helps us better understand the workings of the mind. Carl Jung reminds us that “mythology is where the psyche ’was’ before psychology made it an object of investigation.”5 In another tale from the Yoga Vāsiṣṭa, Sikhidhavaja asks Kumbha what the nature of the mind is so that he can finally put it to rest. “Tell me the exact nature of the mind,” Sikhidhavaja asks, “then I can know how to abandon its habits so that they do not arise again and again.”
Kumbha responds by saying that all conditioned patterns (saṁsāra) exist in the mind and body as vāsanās (memories, subtle impressions of the past, conditioning). “In fact,” he says, “the subtle impressions from the past and the mind itself are synonymous.” Most mind states are made of habits, and those very habits add up to what we call “a life,” though such an existence is superficial and alienating. Yoga technology is a means of becoming free of our mind’s habitual grasping and contractions.
“How does one let go of the repetition of past experience?” asks Sikhidhavaja, wondering if there is a way beyond self-reference and its resulting discontent. “The end of relating to each experience through the filter of saṁsāra,” Kumbha says, “occurs when you can uproot the tree whose seed is the ’I’-maker, deep in the heart with all its branches, fruits and leaves. Leave the mechanism of the ’I’-maker alone Kumbha says and just rest in the space in the heart.”6
The heart, as a location of mind and body, is the dwelling place of the five kleṣas. The most deeply conditioned of the five kleṣas is asmitā, the story of self we create based on our conditioned likes and dislikes. The aim of practice is to bring duḥkha to an end by facing saṁsāra in order to uproot the egoic tendencies of the mind. Saṁsāra is literally a going around in circles. Saṁsāra is descriptive of a life of frustration where we expend a great deal of energy but live lives that keep taking us back into states of suffering.
Saṁsāra is the sense of being caught in a wheel that spins and spins, yet we can’t find our way out of the cycle. When I began studying yoga postures seriously, I would practice all morning and in the afternoon I would work at a home for senior citizens. Some of the residents were quite articulate and bright, and there was a man named Walter who was especially gentle and quiet. I would sit with him under the leaded glass windows of the greenhouse, with its slate walls and mossy brick pathways, and ask him questions about Toronto and its early architecture. One day, while discussing the sad fate of some of the city’s historical buildings, he made a comment about the way human and physical architecture are both subject to decay. Then he said something especially poignant: “When I think of my life as a young boy, at three or thirty, I had some of the same thoughts as when I was twelve or twenty. Now, in my late nineties, I am not sure if much has changed. I have painted and written poetry, traveled throughout Europe and made a fair amount of money. I have two grown children and I’ve loved my wife consistently. Despite all this I am not sure if my questions about life have been answered at all, nor if I have changed much. My neurotic self is still just as neurotic and my anxieties are exactly the same. It’s as if nothing has changed.”
This kind of reflection is not uncommon, and it strikes to the heart of what is meant by the term saṁsāra. Our psychological and physical patterns, as ingrained and self-perpetuating matrices, keep us bound to the wheel of saṁsāra, and thus the turning wheel of conditioned existence. Carl Jung often described suffering as a neurotic compulsion. He once said that “compulsion is the great mystery of human life—an involuntary motive force in the mind and body that can range all the way from mild disinterest to possession by a diabolical energy.”7 Sigmund Freud called the same activity the “compulsion to repeat,” a seemingly universal tendency in the psyche to be continually caught up by something outside of awareness.8 Twelve-step philosophy states that the “definition of insanity is repeating the same behavior and expecting different results.” Most of the patterns we repeat are being repeated because they are unconscious and, by definition, outside of our awareness. Insofar as we are caught up in cycles and bundles of habit, we are stereotyped creatures, imitators and copiers of our past selves.
The teaching of karma tells us that in every moment, consciously or unconsciously, we are taking actions, however minute, that create our experience of future moments. And our actions have an effect. We put something into each moment as we dialogue with it, participate in it, and in doing so we construct the kind of experiences we have in this and future moments. If we are to grow, change, wake up, or heal in any way and to any degree, such transformation is only possible through embracing with awareness this very moment, even if it is a moment of discomfort, pain, or discontent.
So what is the path that helps us off or out of the circle? What is the path of yoga?