THE OFT-QUOTED SECOND line of the second chapter of the Hatha Yoga Pradīpika reminds us that when the breath moves through the body with agitation, the mind, too, becomes agitated; as the breath becomes still, so too does the mind. “When the breath is in motion the mind is in motion. The breath being without motion, the mind becomes motionless.”1 The breath, mind, and body work together, as they are inseparable.
In our exploration of the five kleṣas we have looked at the strategies we use, consciously and unconsciously, that cause us to contract around that which is unpleasant or impermanent in order to find some sure footing. This contracting, aversion, or pulling has profound psychological effects (the six poisons), which also replicate through the living body. In the last chapters we looked at how perception can pick up anything in the field of awareness and create a story about “me” out of it. Our misperception and misidentification with our experience is a great burden. Now we will look at how these patterns manifest energetically.
Rarely can our attention remain undivided to stay, for sustained periods, with the subtlety of breathing or the experience of silence. We are so accustomed to the innumerable complexities of living that we are largely unaware of the subtleties of breathing, the simplicity of awareness, the felt sense of the mind and body in stillness. This is one of the reasons we practice yoga postures. We practice postures to learn about waking up the intelligence of the body, and then we also cultivate the opposite: learning how to observe the body and mind while leaving both alone. Yoga practices are constructed quite differently in different schools and across different cultures, depending on what aspects are given more emphasis. Regardless of what limb, stage, or process one is pursuing as their chosen path, most paths share the same dance between stretching mind and body outside historical parameters and self-imposed narratives and then settling mind and body in complete stillness.
The term we use for “posture,” āsana, literally means “to sit.” Most scholars and practitioners translate āsana to refer to sitting in meditation or being in a meditative position such as padmāsana (Lotus pose) or virāsana (Hero’s pose). In the context of Patañjali’s Yoga-Sutra, however, we can contemplate this term in a more figurative sense as meaning “to sit with.” A yoga posture is an opportunity to “sit with” what is arising from moment to moment with acceptance and patience, steadiness and ease. Patañjali states that the practice of āsana leads to the dissolution of duality, where the sense of “me” and “my body” dissolve into each other, leaving only felt experience but no sense of a separate self having the experience. Like the time of day when the coming of night and the conclusion of daylight collapse into each other, or swimming in perfect summer water where the difference between warm and cool are no difference at all, a movement is so fully executed that one is reduced to not even a word.
Contemplating āsana psychologically turns a yoga pose into a tool of awareness, an opportunity for liberation. It also broadens our understanding of āsana to include not just practicing headstand or back bend but also washing dishes, being present in relationship, walking, sleeping, and talking. Āsana can permeate the rest of our day, our entire life for that matter, and give us access to a more spacious sense of being. The form of the pose is secondary to what that pose is orienting the mind-body toward.
Since contemporary āsana practice is the most common door through which people come into contact with yoga, it is usually the first limb of practice. Whether or not this has always been the case is up for debate, especially since Indian historical material on the history of āsana is quite conjectural. In Sanskrit texts that describe āsana in more detail than Patañjali’s Yoga-Sutra, we usually hear of a six-limbed practice that begins with āsana rather than the first two limbs of ethics. Even though there is no mention of ethics, āsana is always considered a practice that brings practitioners to the place of nonseparation.
For many of us, the movements of body and breath bring us into contact with habitual and often unconscious patterns of movement, thought, and feeling. When one first begins yoga practice, it takes only a short period of time to learn about the ways in which the body is conditioned: we can extend our hamstrings only so far, the breath is deeper on one side of the torso compared with the other, the spine is inflexible in certain motions, and the mind is distracted during certain parts of the breath cycle. Soon after recognizing our physical limits, we also notice how these limits give rise to preferences—we like poses that give us pleasure and lean away from postures that cause us difficulty. However, this difficulty is not just a physical limitation but also what the mind does with that limitation, and this is the crucial point: duḥkha is self-generated. Difficult sensation in the body is not necessarily a form of suffering; rather, it is what the mind adds to the experience that creates dissatisfaction and stress. For example, when deeper patterns of uncomfortable sensations build up in the body, say in the hips, the mind becomes impatient. Impatience is a sign that we are having a hard time staying present with sensations in the body. The sensations are acceptable as phenomenal experience, but the mind and emotions have preferences that arise alongside those sensations, creating a gap between what are actually arising as phenomena and what we are trying to do with those experiences. That gap is called duḥkha. The mind follows sensations in the body with preference, interpretation, and conceptualization, described by Patañjali as citta vṛtti (fluctuations of consciousness).
Āsana practice approached psychologically takes us right to the heart of sensations arising and passing as well as what the mind contracts around those sensations. It’s a practice that cuts through the armor of preferences built into our psychophysical makeup. Yoga postures stretch us beyond these preferences. Since the body is always responsive, we move within its envelope in order to cultivate an unrehearsed immediacy of contact and knowing—action without dust.
Because different yoga poses set up various patterns of breathing and physiological action, postures are invitations into the psychological and physiological webs that form the matrix of the mind-body. Posture sequences open up different layers and movements of mind and body and thus work on the sheaths of mind and body in distinct ways. Traditional posture sequences create balance in the mind-body because postures complement one another and alternate between stretching and stilling the breath.
If we only practice poses that reinforce our zones of comfort, we end up with a yoga practice that moves prāṇa only in habitual ways. And if we are used to overexertion or hyperactivity, then the pranic patterns in the body will be reinforced in this way also. So finding the balance between steadiness and ease in yoga postures also requires playing with the limits of our physical sensibilities, because all of our sense organs are conditioned in habitual ways. Some habits are benign, while others are like archaic monuments in the body that we visit as tourists of our own self-image. The basic tendencies or grooves in both mind and body are called “saṁskāras.” They influence the way we think and move, the way we act and breathe, and even the basic conditioning of the respiratory system, nervous system, immune function, and all of the subtle operating systems of the body.
We can also think of saṁskāras as latent impressions, predispositions, webs, imprints, inherent tendencies, molds, or internal grooves. The term comes from sam (to come together) and kr (action). The term saṁskāra is interchangeable with the common Sanskrit term vāsanā, which also refers to predispositions from past impressions or actions. These karmic memory traces are primarily unconscious residue from previous experience. Every new moment contributes to these traces, like dust to velvet. Karma is like an accumulation of dust. In traditional Indian philosophy, these latent impressions that predispose the mind and body in specific ways are somewhat mysterious. In the meeting with Pattabhi Jois at Marpa House in Boulder, it was interesting the way he brushed off questions about alignment technique in yoga postures if he felt that the student was striving in an egoic way. If someone asked him how to achieve the next back-bend sequence, he would just say, “Next lifetime.” This was a joke, but it also served as a way of setting ambition in context. He was much more interested in talking about the internal process of yoga than he was the physical details of postures, even though it was the subject of physicality that most students were asking about.
Physical practice is an internal process when we pay close attention to what the breath and mind are doing in any given moment. Saṁskāras, as conditioned patterns, influence the way we perceive and organize experience. And since anything that is conditioned is from the past, saṁskāras prevent a fresh meeting with the present moment because they inform the way that we meet, organize, filter, and elaborate upon that moment. The saṁskāras are like mental, emotional, and physical biases within the mind-body. The ongoing actions of body, speech, and mind that spring from the interaction of any given data with the habits of the saṁskāras reinforce the saṁskāras from moment to moment. This is the cause-and-effect model of karma as it operates in mind and body, making the saṁskāras psychophysical manifestations of karma.
The karmic effects in mind and body are like seeds that grow into particular modes of perception or particular ways of acting. Seeds that get planted over and over again are like habits that reinforce one another. Thinking of the saṁskāras as bias is helpful because previous seeds prejudice in positive or negative ways the way we interact with succeeding moments. If we think of the poisons that Pattabhi Jois described—desire, anger, delusion, greed, envy, and sloth—as seeds, our unconscious habit of acting on those seeds reinforce those very energies. In relation to the saṁskāras, we can better understand the psychological and physical location of such seeds as conditioned patterns of mind and body. But if we also think of the saṁskāras as fields of consciousness, we can better understand how to work with both the saṁskāras and also the symptoms that manifest from their imbalance, because like any field, seeds germinate under certain conditions and don’t come to fruition under others. Positive saṁskāras germinate based on positive mental states, and negative saṁskāras repeat in negative mental conditions. A shoulder moves within a certain spectrum of movement, and as we open up the shoulder joint, a new pattern of movement is formed. The saṁskāras are constantly evolving. Like a gardener working nonstop, our work is to cultivate the field of the saṁskāras in such a way that we monitor which karmic seeds evolve and in what way.
Context and Release
The saṁskāras are like predispositions or contexts that the mind and body supply in each new moment of experience. When we have an experience, say of a sunset, we try to allow the sunset to reach us, to make an impression on us. But we tend to do that only by supplying a context within which we can receive the experience. We label the phenomenon as “sunset,” compare it to other sunsets, and frame the experience in language. These contexts are fore-structures of understanding, preconceptions, or prejudices. We select contexts by choice: they are not given, and they are not built into the experience itself. A direct experience of a sunset, or the energetic flow of a posture, is inherently empty of conceptualizing, empty of meaning. Joseph Campbell says, “We are not trying to find the meaning in life but rather a deep experience of it.” In fact, when we let go of the constant drive toward finding meaning, things become meaningful.
The process of experience, then, goes something like this: To begin with, a new experience enters us. It is without context. But because we know something about what the experience might be, based on preceding moments or past experience, we have a small collection of contexts that might be appropriate for whatever is going to arise. When the new data meets us, we take it in only partially, as it comes through the filters of the sense media and the mind. The sense organs and the mind quickly decide on the context that fits it best. The experience then seems completed by the context we give to it, but this is actually only a partial experience, because it is already an interpreted moment. Patañjali calls this saṁyoga, or the misapprehension of an experience in context with a fresh experience that has no context. Again, context is not “built in to experience.”
On first consideration, having an experience of a sunset or a yoga posture or even another person without creating a context seems impossible. How are we to vacate prior experiences in order to have a fresh one? This is the psychological conundrum that Patañjali points out in his description of āsana. The problem is that we base our sense of self on these past experiences and filter all new information through that previously determined sense of self. How can something be experienced if the condition for the experience is to have already understood what it is about? This is a paradox, because nothing is more invisible than the next moment. In that case, all we have is this moment, which is without context—the context is an addition.
The way through this paradox is to recognize that we always shape our experience, mostly unconsciously, with the grooves of the mind-body, which in turn reinforce themselves, because the more that the mind and breath flow through conditioned grooves, the deeper those grooves become. When we are in a deep groove, it is hard to see a way out, or sometimes to even know that we are actually in a groove. However, when we begin to learn about our conditioning, we can see these patterns and how they limit our experience. Then we can be open to the alteration of these grooves that the present moment requires of us. Discovery is always a process of redefinition.