ĀSANA AND MEDITATION INTERTWINED
HOW DO WE GO beyond likes and dislikes, beyond the dichotomies our minds are always creating? We do so by letting go of clinging, even the subtle clinging to ideas of self. When we lose the sense of a separate self that comes with habits and preferences, we become one with everything. We practice Serpent (bhujaṅga) and we become a serpent. We practice Eagle (garuḍa) and we become an eagle. We practice Heron pose (kraunca) and we become a heron. We practice in full connection with the earth (pṛthvī) and we become earth. When we let go, the nondual, united nature that we call “yoga” comes forth correcting the waywardness of our distractions and misperceptions. In the realization of a holistic and integrated reality, of which we are only a part, sensitivity, devotion, and love burst forth.
“Fetch me from over there a fruit of the Nyagrodha tree.”
“Here is one, sir.”
“Break it.”
“It is broken, sir.”
“What do you see there?”
“The seeds, almost infinitesimal.”
“Break one of them!”
“It is broken, sir.”
“What do you see?”
“Nothing, sir.”
The father said: “My son, that subtle essence which you do not perceive there, of that very essence this great Nyagrodha tree exists. Believe it, my son, that that is the subtle essence—in that all things have their existence. That is the truth. That is the self. And you, Svetaketu, you are that.”1
This exercise in nondual teaching comes from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad. It is only the grooves of perception and our accompanying concepts that keep us from being eagles, herons, trees, or ocean tides. Yoga returns us to spontaneous meditation, which is actually a nonmeditation, moving us even beyond technique. In other words we are not trying to meditate or even trying to practice. We are tuning in to the naturally existing sate of meditation, which is full engagement with what actually is. Yoga postures teach us how to fully embody the ever-changing flow of life that goes on seemingly without beginning or end. If we see things in this way, then we gain insight into vinyasa—the sequences of movements of thought, breath, and mind. In other words, when we practice always and without end, we see that whatever arises in body, heart, and mind—greed, anger, jealousy, laziness, boredom—is recognized as another flowing moment. Patañjali names this dharma megha samādhi.
Practically, this means recognizing what is arising from moment to moment in order to become familiar with patterns, much in the same way that we can break down the succession of stills that create the frames of a motion picture. There are patterns that are benign as well as other patterns (of movement, thought, speech, listening) that are so conditioned they stand in the way of immediate experience. The moment you recognize a pattern, you can accept that it is there with patience. Just allow whatever is there to be there. Then keep staying with it. Imagine mind and body like an empty field and whatever pattern you notice it is just moving through; you don’t have to identify it as “me” or “mine,” but just allow it to live and exist as a pattern. Sometimes this is simply feeling a pattern of a headache or a part of a breath cycle; it might not even be linguistic.
Narratives are only ideas. As persons in bodies, we are like threads made up of multiple strands, each thread being a story about our likes and dislikes. Some strands are continuous over long periods of time, others like the short bits of wool that are spun into yarn; achieve the appearance of continuity only when seen from a sufficient distance. Practice of yoga postures and attention to breath give us the tools to find this distance in order to see the distinction between being in the body and resting in our ideas of the body. The more we let the threads of storytelling dissolve, the closer we come to the experience of life. Then the body becomes something much more reliable. The closer we are to the heartbeat of existence, the less we need the thread of stories. The practice is to move beyond the story line and to stay, with acceptance, patience, and curiosity, with the changing sensations that appear from moment to moment. We move from our idea of “body” to the feeling of an energetic flow of conditions. We become process, and in so doing, come closer to nature. There are some practical ways to do this. This is the practice of smṛti (immediate attention). Smṛti is best translated as “mindfulness,” and mindfulness has several important attributes that deepen as practice matures: present-centered, nonconceptual, nonjudgmental, intentional, engagement through nonattachment, nonverbal, exploratory, liberating, steadiness, and ease.
One practical technique for maintaining focus in each and every movement requires that we keep focused on the body in and of itself, and put aside distraction, attachment, or distress with reference to the world. What this means is recognizing the body as a body, without thinking about it in terms of what it means or what it can do in the world. It could be either good or bad looking. It could be strong or weak. It could be flexible or ill, plagued with cancer or HIV, or robust and energetic. It could be agile or clumsy—all the issues we tend to worry about when we think about the body. Patañjali says, “Put those issues aside; find a sense of the breath, body, mind, and world as indivisible.”2
Just be with the body in and of itself, sitting right here. When you sit down on your cushion or yoga mat and close your eyes—what do you have? There’s the sensation of “bodiness” that you’re sitting with. That’s your frame of reference. Try to stay with it. Keep bringing the mind back to this sense of the body until it gets the message and begins to settle down. In the beginning of the practice, you find the mind going out to grasp this or that, so you note it enough to tell it to let go, return to the body, and hold on there. Then it goes out to grasp something else, so you tell it to let go, come back, and latch on to the body again. Eventually you reach a point where you can actually grasp hold of the breath and you don’t let go. From that point on, whatever else that happens to come into your awareness is like a fish coming up and brushing the back of your hand while you’re swimming in a river. At first you note the felt sense of the fish, but once you get used to the fact that there are fish in the water with you, you don’t have to continue to notice them. You stay with the body as your basic frame of reference. Other things come and go, you’re aware of them, but you don’t drop the breath and go running after them. This is when you have really established the body as a solid frame of reference.
That is why we refer to the posture as a label that sets up a frame of reference. Otherwise, we confuse postural-alignment technique for the experience of yoga and continually find ourselves caught as witnesses somehow outside of direct experience.
As you learn to stay present and recirculate energy by being less distracted, you develop some new qualities of mind. One is mindfulness (smṛti). The term mindfulness means being able to remember, to keep something in mind. In the Yoga-Sutra, sometimes the term smṛti is used to connote mindfulness practice and sometimes it refers to the act of remembering. In English we use the term mindful in the same way, as a reminder, a way of waking up—“be mindful of your step.” A practical way to translate mindfulness is as present-centered, nonjudgmental awareness with acceptance. In terms of the body, we could also refer to mindfulness as immediate awareness. In the case of establishing the body as a frame of reference, it means being able to remember where you’re supposed to be—with the body—and you don’t let yourself forget, whether you are in formal sitting meditation, prāṇāyāma, or āsana.
Another quality that arises though the practices of prāṇāyāma, meditation, and āsana is concentration, which is another means of being aware of what is actually going on in the present. Are you with the body? Are you with the breath? Is the breath comfortable? Simply notice what’s actually happening in the present moment. We tend to confuse mindfulness with concentration, but actually they are two separate things: mindfulness means being able to remember where you want to keep your awareness; concentration means that you are absorbed in what you are doing, no longer relating to your action from the place of a separate self. The term mindfulness is a term much more familiar to Buddhism than it is to the Yoga-Sutra, but nevertheless descriptive of Patañjali’s sixth limb, dhāraṇā. Concentration follows naturally from mindfulness. This is why Patañjali describes a movement from āsana (posture) to pratyāhāra (natural uncoupling of sense organs from sense objects) to dhāraṇā (meditation on an object) to dhyāna (absorption) to samādhi (deeper levels of concentration and integration). Don’t be put off by terms such as samādhi or concentration if they are new to you—Patañjali gives very simple and straightforward instructions, not only for how to practice these techniques but why their application is important in working with the habits of mind.
If you realize that the mind has wandered off, you bring it right back. Immediately. You don’t let it wander around, sniffing the flowers. Next, when the mind is with its proper frame of reference, we try to be as sensitive as possible to what’s going on—not just drifting in the present moment but really trying to penetrate more and more into the subtle details of what’s actually happening with the breath or the mind. There is a whole universe even within one breath cycle.
When you practice in this way, you begin to see that these stages or limbs are actually natural outcomes of one another, and you can’t help but settle down and get really comfortable with the body in the present moment. That’s when you’re ready for the next stage in the practice, which is described as being aware of the phenomenon of origination and the phenomenon of passing away. This is a stage where you’re trying to understand cause and effect as they happen in the present—in mind and body. Sensations come and go, thoughts come and go; in fact, everything that is perceivable comes and goes. In terms of concentration practice, once you’ve got the mind to settle down, you want to understand the interaction of cause and effect in the process of concentration so that you can get it to settle down more solidly for longer periods of time in all sorts of situations. To do this, you have to learn about how things arise and pass away in the mind and body, not by simply watching them but by actually getting involved in their arising and passing away. Staying with the breath means studying it as it arises and also as it passes away, feeling sensations as they arise and disband.
The link and successive progression from limb to limb is important to understand, especially once the first four limbs have been established. Once attention internalizes and the body is fit for being still, we focus the mind on an object. Most meditation practices begin as concentration practices, because one is honing in on a particular field of focus. So a characteristic of the last three limbs—dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi—is that each begins with concentration exercises using appropriate objects on which one focuses. In this procedure, however, once a certain level of concentration is achieved so that undistracted focusing can be maintained, one goes on to examine, with steady, careful attention and in great detail, all sensory and mental processes. Through this contemplation, we learn how to notice all experience from a place of stillness.
Meditation practice is best pursued under the guidance of a teacher. The mind has such a strong pull toward identifying with the contents of experience or thinking “I’ve got it” that it’s helpful to have someone to guide you through the nooks and crannies of meditation, even if only to offer encouragement when practice is difficult. The aim is to achieve total and immediate awareness, or mindfulness, of all phenomena. This leads eventually to the full and clear perception of the impermanence of all phenomena and the complete separation of awareness from all that is perceived. This separation is paradoxically undivided and free of subject and object. Patañjali calls it kaivalya. While kaivalya is often translated as referring to the aloofness or isolation of the yogi, it is rather the distinct difference between puruṣa, meaning “pure awareness,” and prakṛti, which refers to all changing phenomena.
Patañjali doesn’t make it clear if the path of dhāraṇā, or meditation on an object, can lead to kaivalya or even freedom from duḥkha. It seems that one has to move on toward deeper states of absorption matched with a thorough grounding in ethical conduct in order to move into sustained modes of pure awareness. While the former leads to temporarily altered states of consciousness, it is the latter that leads to enduring and thoroughgoing changes in the person and paves the way to achieving wholeness.
Psychologically, the practical implications of meditation are quite clear. The meditative experiences, when properly carried out and developed, lead to greater ability to concentrate, greater freedom from distraction, greater tolerance of change and turmoil around and inside oneself, and sharper awareness and greater alertness about one’s own responses, both physical and mental. They also lead, more generally, to greater calmness or tranquillity. Through meditation practice, coupled with strong ethical practices, we learn to develop a wisdom that acts as an antidote to the predispositions, imprints, ongoing habits, and deluded states of mind that so often dominate our day-to-day existence. This kind of letting go allows us to be completely open in all of our relationships and helps us act wisely and without self-interest in any given situation.
Spiritual experience is never a complete, unmediated, spontaneous expression as long as the subtlest kind of conceptual distinction is present. This takes us to one of the simplest aspects of practice: being honest. Once we train the mind to see the body as the body, to be with the breath without distraction, and to stay present even during difficult mental and physical states, a natural outcome is being honest about what we see. Sometimes the way we perceive our own experience is so wrapped up in preference and self-image that we don’t even know what our own body looks and feels like independent of our ideas of ourselves. Definitions of self are mostly sluggish and eternally escape any accurate measurement or likeness. “The world is like an experience that has no witness,” we are told in the Yoga Vāsiṣṭa.3 What constitutes reality in any given moment is inseparable from our perception.
The psychological benefit of getting to know the body, breath, and mind without conceptual proliferation is learning how to see honestly, without attachment or aversion. From here, being truthful in other relationships is relatively easy, and suddenly we are cultivating the yama of satya, or truthfulness and honesty. Otherwise, the nadis remain clogged with self-image, and self-image is based on raga (attachment) and dveṣa (aversion) and a never-ending, solipsistic story self-generated by the ahaṇkāra. One story in the Yoga Vāsiṣṭa describes a man whose stories of self, like insubstantial clouds, are mistaken for truth.
There was once a man made by a magic machine [Mayayantramaya], a stupid idiot. He lived all by himself in an empty place, like a mirage in a desert. Everything else was just a reflection of him, but the fool didn’t realize this. As he got old, he thought, The sky is mine and I will rule over it, and so he made a house out of air in the sky in order to rule over the air and the sky. But after a while the house faded away. He cried out, “Oh, my house made of space, where have you gone?” And he built another, and another, and another, and all of them dispersed into the air, and he went on lamenting for them.4
Commenting on this parable, the Yoga Vāsiṣṭa says that the man represents the egoity of the “I”-maker (ahaṇkāra) and the houses are the various manifestations of the body, or physical existence. The man does not realize that his creations are all mental constructions. The “I”-maker will always pump out fantasies, but the key is allowing them to have free play without identification or reification. Even fantasies of what the soul is, what it is made of, and where it comes from, are all activities of a mind wanting to create security. One of the key mechanisms of the ahaṇkāra, once it realizes the limits of material existence, is to create a metaphysical existence. This metaphysical existence, usually in the form of stories that make sense of one’s place in the world, become problematic when taken to be literal truths. But what is most problematic is the literalization of an essential self whose essence we think we can know. The union inherent in the basic axiomatic definition of the term yoga is not metaphysical speculation about our inherent soul but rather a raw experience of the contingent nature of our present conditions and the freedom that arrives with such insight. The breath, body, and mind belong to no one, nor are they completely independent. Yoga teaches us to live comfortably in contradictions without having to resolve them, because beneath the layers and layers of conceptual designations imputed to things via the mind, all opposites are inherently resolved; everything begins without separation.