Yoga As Transformation
We are at a critical point in our journey of self-discovery and connection. Through the work of harmonizing with our external world, diving into our internal world, exploring the fields of consciousness and balancing the chakras, developing ritual practices, and finding symbols that activate the psyche, we are a long way from where we began. In the last chapter, I revealed powerful ritual tools for fundamentally changing your mind and your reality. Now comes the hard part: deciding that this is what you want to do.
From here on out, everything about you and your outlook on life will shift and change as you shift and change from the inside. You are now a blank slate, the proverbial tabula rasa, upon which you write any story you want. To do this you must undo the story you have told yourself for a lifetime and choose to create your own personal myth. This myth will carry you through the rest of your life’s journey and provide the sustenance to fuel your practice. This is the most important thing you may ever do in your life.
It requires a reciprocal conversation between the known and unknown parts of you, between the conscious and the unconscious. You must regularly engage in this conversation and learn the language and symbols buried deep within you to recognize the feelings and sensations that they generate within the body. You must learn to listen to yourself and let your personal myth guide you. Most of us are unaware that we are living a myth and that it is in possession of our psyche. We manifest our myth outwardly as our life, whether we are conscious of it or not. When we engage in our personal yoga practice, we connect with our myth internally and give it the fullest expression possible. We consciously let our myth live us in a seamless demonstration of dynamic personal harmony.
The Wellspring of Personal Myth
Living our personal myth means giving credence to all that is buried within the unconscious and simultaneously to that which is our conscious manifestation of personality and drive. When we are too focused on working solely with the conscious persona and personal will—as yoga has been for millennia—we miss honoring the richness of our internal nature, our imagination, our dreams, and our intuition. We forever imprison the dreams and myths that live within us when rational thought maintains its grip on attempting to control our life.
Our personal myth comes from within us and is self-directed through the dynamic harmony generated by a practice that brings together both the conscious and unconscious layers in a full integration of our psyches. It is a wonder what we miss when we don’t explore the depths of our soul. Buried within us is the collective unconscious—a reservoir of human wisdom to which we all have access. This collective landscape features a topography containing the archetypes of humanity. An archetype is a feature that is only known through its manifest form but that exists within us as a greater human truth and a wellspring of potential.
For example, the mother archetype is within us all—within the collective unconscious—and it expresses itself in a multitude of ways: as the nurturing mother, as the dark mother, and even as mother Kali of the Hindu tradition who is known for her relentless blood-drinking and decapitation. This archetype is universally found throughout time and place, but the specific way that it arises is based on cultural, familial, or tribal beliefs. We all have a multitude of archetypes—topographical features of the unconscious—and in order for these archetypes to be known, we need to express them. In expressing them through myth, art, and stories, we come to know ourselves and our internal landscape more fully.
Unfortunately, our cultural myth, our cultural archetypes, and our cultural meaning are all dying. They are no longer sustaining us, providing meaning to our lives, or giving us much needed inspiration. For multiple reasons, including the industrial revolution and the shift away from myth toward science, the cultural myth has calcified, and as we pick it apart and examine it, it disintegrates in our hands, unable to sustain us any longer. To remedy this, our work is to vivify the myth within, to bring to life our personal archetypes, to dress up our own inner topography with the myth that sustains us, and to provide us with the inspiration and meaning we seek. When we do this, we have a juicy, vital myth to live by; one that carries us through the good times and the bad and that helps us navigate personal transformation so that we continue to adapt and evolve in changing times.
Our Mythic Reality
Giving rise to our living myth provides us with both meaning and context in our lives. When we see how our internal landscape expresses itself, we know what myth we are living. This personal myth shows us how to move within our world, how to adapt to necessary changes, and how to overcome internal roadblocks when they arise. When we see the myth, we see ourselves.
To know our personal myth is to sustain ourselves in a vital, living, meaningful context. We craft and vivify our personal myth by establishing solid lines of communication between the unconscious and conscious—between the inner and outer self. We listen to our inner reality when it speaks, paying attention to the feelings and sensations of the body as we work with the chakras and taking seriously our emotions and deeper needs when they speak to us in the form of resistance. When our karma reveals itself and we recognize a projection, we access our personal myth by going in and locating the source of it. When we get to the source of the projection, when we see the karmic loop, break it, and spiral it up, we give rise to a new adaptation, a change in our personality—and our personal myth is free to expand and evolve.
Furthermore, when we start to recognize the symbols that speak to us, we see what is alive within us, and our unconscious gets the message that it is being taken seriously. Symbols are powerful outward expressions of our inner world, and as we watch for the symbols that activate us, we gain another abundant form of communication with the deeper reaches of our psyche. Our participation in symbolism through our yoga practice and alchemical rituals calls us to play with our various levels of consciousness and bring forth that which is within us, in real time, on our mat, our cushion, or in our ritual practice. We see and experience our internal reality on the outside and it is this playful participation that invites a flash of unexplained awe … what many call a moment of enlightenment.
Within the play—the engagement of both inner and outer realities—we rest in the liminal space between the two where we are granted access to our bliss. It is in this space, the dynamic harmony of conscious and unconscious, that our personal myth is fully alive and we know exactly who we are. This is the place where we are free to express ourselves from the deepest well of infinite possibility and manifest our truest form. We become the myth in this instance, as the myth is an outward expression of an inner truth. To live a myth is to be blissful.
You have felt your bliss when time and space have been lost, the future and the past have fallen away, there is only now, and there is only you and your participation with life in that moment. Perhaps it was on a beautiful beach. Maybe it was staring at a piece of art. It could have been the moment you looked into someone’s eyes and knew you were in love. We have all had these moments of inner harmony where, in a flash, we are perfectly in sync with ourselves and the world. This is a human experience that is common, but typically doesn’t last longer than a moment or two. Your yoga practice allows you access to this experience in a sustained way. By clearing your future and past, by releasing the karmic loops that bind us to our projections, by engaging in ritual and working through the chakra system, and by learning how to communicate with the deeper parts of yourself, you experience your bliss and live your personal myth.
PRACTICE
Dream Journal: Bringing the Inside Out
A dream journal is a simple tool for establishing a consistent dialogue with the unconscious and allowing its archetypal images to be expressed. A dream journal is a way to commune with yourself and keep active the line of communication between unconscious and conscious so that you are more comfortable existing in between both. Dreams are the myths that lie within us waiting for expression and as we retrieve and honor them through journaling, we know more clearly the myth that is living us. The purpose of a dream journal is not to figure anything out or to try to interpret our dreams. We are well past labels, judgments, and assumptions. Instead, we develop the strength to simply acknowledge and witness what arises from within us, without trying to control it or push it away.
A dream journal is a process of listening, and the dream itself tells you what you need to know right now. It is a way to stay present to what is alive within you so that you remain awakened and let your life unfold from within. Dreams bring meaning to your life, so there is no need to try and attribute meaning to the dream. Allow it to be as it is, and allow it to interact with you as a psychospiritual experience that further readies you for the state of awakening.
Keep a journal by your bed, along with a pen or pencil, and a small light or candle. As soon as you wake up, before you get out of bed or even brush the sleep from your eyes, light your candle or light. Keep your space as dim as possible so as not to completely disturb your intermediary state. With just enough light to see the page, begin to write in a stream-of-consciousness fashion anything and everything that you remember about your dreams. It may be just images, stories, or random thoughts. Your writing does not need to coagulate into anything coherent, just bring the mythic images out from within you and give them life on the page. Write until the memory is exhausted, and then extinguish the light to close the ritual.
Do this daily. The more you do it, the more you’ll find that your unconscious participates in the practice by more readily feeding you memorable images that stick in your conscious mind and provide meaning and significance to your life. Refer back to these dream images periodically to witness what archetypes and symbols are percolating and evolving for you. Resist any urge to analyze or interpret the dreams. Allow them to speak for themselves, and they speak volumes to you.
Archetypes: Reflections of Inner Truth
Our myths come to life when we live in sync with our intrinsic belief system, tethered by the symbols and archetypes that are most alive within us. But, how do we find those symbols and archetypes that most resonate with us? Like all things in our yoga practice, we find them within ourselves. Symbols are outer reflections of an inner truth that activates our psyche. We’ve already done work to recognize them and bring them into our rituals.
Powerful symbols are those that are evocative. Some are universal (such as a cross or a crescent moon), and some are personal (the seashell you collected on your beach vacation). Archetypes, in contrast, are inner truths that often come alive first within us and then speak outwardly … sometimes through dreams, often through symbols, or what Swiss psychologist Carl Jung would call “synchronicity.” When an archetype within our unconscious begs for our attention, it appears to us in as many forms as possible. Our dreams speak about it, we see images of it in the world around us, the symbols we latch on to harken back to it and we increasingly find ourselves in situations that address the needs of the archetype.
Archetypes are internal realities that then become our external reality. They are brought to life by our unconscious in a seamless coagulation of thought and form. As such, it is critical that we learn to look for these archetypal motifs and recognize them when they appear. For example, if the mother archetype is active inside of us, then we will see mothers everywhere. Our attention will be drawn to mothers with children in a crowd. Everything will remind us of “mother” no matter where we are—the baby food aisle of a supermarket or passing a school crosswalk. We will have dreams about motherhood. We’ll see “signs” that show us over and over this mother image that is so constellated within our psyche. When an archetype is alive within us, synchronicities repeatedly arise that blatantly show us this archetypal form.
There are essentially two ways to discover the archetypal images that are alive within us. We either look outwardly to what it is we are continuously focused on or obsessed with or we travel inward through the layers of the body to retrieve mythic image that is begging for attention. Either we ignore it until it expresses itself as imbalances in our chakras and outward obsessions or we dig in to find the archetype that is looking to be honored within us right now.
Archetypal images are always alive within us, but most of us have lost the effortless connection to them in the abandonment of our religions and myths. In reviving and creating our own personal myth, the retrieval of a mythic image allows us to work with, honor, and give these archetypes the attention they deserve. If we neglect them, they will demand our attention via the usual psychospiritual causeways, creating imbalances in the chakras or generating complexes and hardened karmic loops.
Archetypes sometimes behave as children who cry for attention in louder and more obtrusive ways if they are ignored. But when tended to, they inspire joy, creativity, and love. The archetypes are alive and deserve to be heard, recognized, honored, and ritualized. Though we talk about the archetypes in a way that gives them autonomy, we must remember that these are still hidden parts of us, and to address them is to address secret parts of ourselves waiting to be divulged. When we do the work necessary to look at them and see the mythic images within us, we may be surprised at what we find.
Yoga Nidra: Recovering the Mythic Image
Yoga nidra, or yogic sleep, is a way for us to consciously access the unconscious mind as we travel through progressively deeper layers of the body. The body is said to have five layers, or kosha, that cover one another like the layers of an onion. The innermost layer, the anandamaya kosha or blissful layer, is the layer that conceals our atman. The anandamaya kosha is the part that is most intimately connected to our soul. This layer becomes dysfunctional when we are disconnected, and it is nourished by bliss and connection.
The next layer is the vijnanamaya kosha, which is our intellectual layer, and it is unsettled by boredom and settled by conscious engagement in our life. The middle layer is the manomaya kosha, or the emotional layer, and its afflictions are those of mental distress, depression, and anxiety. It is calmed through service to others.
Beyond that is the pranamaya kosha, which as its name suggests is made of prana or our vital life force. When this layer is agitated, it results in physiological challenges of all sorts including endocrine issues, circulation trouble, or respiratory difficulty. The physical practices of pranayama and asana are excellent remedies for this layer. The outermost layer of our body is the annamaya kosha, or the “food” layer, which is made healthy through nutritious dietary choices. This is the physical body whose difficulties are of the most physical nature, such as broken bones, muscle tears, or joint issues.
While all five layers have their specific qualities, they are each made up of the same fundamental component. Everything in the world, including our bodies, is composed of maya. Maya is the Sanskrit term that describes the veil of illusion that both conceals and reveals the truth of this universe, which is that everything is interconnected. When maya is dense, or heavy, we can’t see the connections between everything. Diligent yoga practice allows us to see through maya to witness our interconnectedness.
When our bodies (all five layers) are dense, we have a hard time seeing the light within (atman). When the layers become transparent, we function within our bodies and participate fully in life, with the light of our soul in full view. We progressively harmonize and lighten these layers by moving from the outermost to the innermost layer through yoga nidra. This gives us access to our innermost kosha and grants us the ability to call up our mythic image. It is presented effortlessly by the psyche when we take the time to do this balancing practice. A video where I guide you through this practice is available and the link is in the Resources section at the end of this book.
PRACTICE
To begin, lie in shavasana, a comfortable relaxation position on your back, with feet separated and arms resting at your sides, palms facing up. Make sure that you are completely comfortable. Increase your level of comfort by adding a bolster underneath your knees, a pillow under your head, or a blanket on top of you. Let go completely into a state of relaxation, and soften the breathing. We progressively engage each layer, referencing pairs of extreme opposites that balance each layer specifically. As we do, we come to a new center or balance point, allowing every layer to lighten up and become more transparent.
The outermost layer, the annamaya kosha, is the physical body. Address this layer by clenching body parts incredibly tightly and then releasing and relaxing that body part. Do each section twice. Start with the feet, then move to the ankles, calves, and thighs. Clench and release the seat, then the lower back and lower belly. Move up to the middle back, chest, and upper back, then down to the hands, and up the arms and shoulders. Work your way through the neck and the face in small increments, clenching and releasing as you go. Once you have worked your way up the body, finish by clenching and releasing the whole body twice. Notice your new level of relaxation and balance as a result of directly addressing this kosha.
Move to the next layer, the pranamaya kosha, and address it through the opposites of heat and cold to clarify the pranic body through vasoconstriction and vasodilation. First, imagine yourself on a very hot desert island. It is a beautiful place and you are completely safe, though the heat is tremendous. Feel the heat rise in the body, almost to the point of sweating. Then, imagine yourself on the top of a snowy mountain with a chilly breeze in the air. You feel the crunch of icy snow under your feet and the frozen air burning your nostrils. Remain in this location, where you are completely safe, just before the point of shivering. Transition back and forth three to five times between the hot desert island and the frozen mountaintop until you progressively find a new state of balance and perfect stasis in the pranamaya kosha.
The next layer is the manomaya kosha, the emotional body. Work with this layer by vacillating between the emotional extremes of profound grief and overwhelming joy. It is important to keep in mind that you are in a safe place to experience these emotions fully and freely in order to find a newly balanced emotional state. Imagine a time in your life filled with overwhelming sadness. See yourself at this time, and paint a complete picture of the situation. Fill it with people who were there with you, see the location fully, even smell the air. Immerse yourself in this time, place, and feeling. Let the grief fill your body. Just at the moment you feel tears possibly begin to fall from your eyes, transport yourself to a joyful time. See it fully and populate the image with the sights, sounds, and smells of this joyful moment. When you feel the lightness of joy start to overwhelm you, transition back to the state of grief and shift between these two states three to five times, or until you find a new central emotional resting place.
From here, progress to the following layer, the vijnanamaya kosha. As the intellectual layer, it must be fully engaged to be balanced and strong. To captivate this layer, imagine a giant blank canvas in front of you. As fast as you can, fill the canvas up with an image using all the colors available and all the creativity you can muster. Do not dally or second-guess your artistic endeavor. When the canvas is full, stand back for a moment, look at your creation, and then immediately wipe the slate clean and start again, this time create an entirely new image. Fill all the edges of the canvas. When it is done, stand back, wipe the slate clean, and start over. Continue several more times, stretching your stylistic abilities and let your imagination flourish. Finally, wipe the slate clean and stand back, reveling in the space of infinite possibility and creativity.
We now move to the deepest layer, the anandamaya kosha, or the part of us that is consistently connected to our bliss. At this point, all the layers of the body are balanced, and to enter the blissful layer is to feel the source of intimate connection. Remain here, and simply ask your soul to bring forth a mythic image. Let it come from within you. Do not second-guess or impose any images, and express gratitude and joy for the image that arises. If it is an image you don’t recognize or don’t understand, don’t worry! Our job here is not to figure anything out, but rather to remain present with the image as it is. Without thoughts, words, or labels, gaze at this image for a few moments and see it in its entirety, as your soul wants you to see it.
Now we bring this mythic image out through each of the layers of our body to be worked with in our daily life. Hold this image at the forefront of your mind as you journey through the vijnanamaya kosha, past the blank canvas of infinite possibilities. Hold the image in your mind as you walk between the grief and the joy, in the emotional center of the manomaya kosha. Keep this image in front of you as you feel the perfect bodily stasis of the pranamaya kosha. Finally, see this image in your mind as you bring feeling and sensation back to the physical body (annamaya kosha) with small movements in the fingers and toes. Wiggle the feet and the hands, and stretch the arms up over your head. Roll yourself to the right, and then press into a comfortable seated position.
While in your comfortable seat, spend a moment in meditation, keeping your mythic image in your mind’s eye. Watch and observe it, allow the image to paint itself into your mind. Bring your hands to prayer at your heart, and bow your head slightly to the presence of this image. Offer it reverence. Close this practice by chanting the sound of om three times.
Love the One You Find
Archetypes are numerous and the forms they take are infinite. You may not expect the images that arise from within you. Many Westerners in yoga have sought Eastern mythological forms (like Shiva, Krishna, Ganesh, and Lakshmi) to try and satisfy the mythic demands of the psyche, but to no avail. These foreign forms don’t work if they don’t reflect the forms that the archetypes actually take within us. This is why we need to retrieve our personal mythic images—to see the forms that are active; the forms to which we most respond.
It is likely that the forms that we find are the ones that we would recognize as children—the initial religious or mythic images that were ingrained from the start. We may want our most potent mythic images to be something other than the religious or mythological images of our early lives, but the likelihood is that they are exactly those forms. These archetypal images are imprinted very early on, and for the rest of our lives, these images are strongest when it comes time to work with the energy of those archetypes. Though our penchants for yoga may lead us to collecting statues of Ganesh, and though we may feel a strong pull to Shiva, unless we grew up with these images it is unlikely that they are the ones embedded in our psyche.
When students journey into their inner world to retrieve their mythic images, over and over they reveal that the forms take the images of their birth culture—Artemis, the Blessed Virgin Mary, a sunflower, the three Muses—it is extremely unlikely that a Western yogi finds buried within their psyche the image of Lakshmi or Shiva … because that wasn’t around them when they were youngsters. This doesn’t mean we need to abandon our yogic myths! These mythic images and archetypes may have great resonance now for us as active adults, particularly as we continue to pursue the development of our own yoga practice. Keep chanting the bija mantras, looking at images of the monkey god Hanuman, reading the Bhagavad Gita, and being inspired by the playfulness of Krishna.
When it comes time to do the inner work—and it is now time—be ready to reconcile what you want to find with what you actually do find. This is your opportunity to transform the energy of this archetype; not to leave it behind altogether, but to bring it forth and look at it with new eyes. Bring forth what is within you and it frees you from the inside out. The image(s) that you discover are known in Sanskrit as ishvara. Ishvara is historically a term that denotes our “personal deity,” but what is that for a culture that no longer believes in its myths? In our case, the mythic image we find within us becomes our ishvara.
In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali speaks of no topic more frequently than he speaks of ishvara. Though the Yoga Sutra is incredibly terse and succinct, he references this concept a total of four times. We first see it in Yoga Sutra, verse 1.23, where it says:
Ishvara pranidhanad va
Devote everything you are to your mythic image.
The sutra features a couple of words we already know, including prana (life force) and, now, ishvara. The last piece, dhanat, indicates “giving” or “devotion.” Essentially, we are told to give our vital energy to ishvara. The reason we do this is to become ishvara, to merge with it in order to know it fully. In merging with ishvara, we embody the myth. We are the myth. In this way, the archetype no longer needs to force its way out of us by constellating in our psyche, becoming a hardened karmic loop or imbalancing our chakras. Instead, we establish a state of complete inner and outer harmony with our myth in a full expression of blissful unity. We do this by placing the image in front of us—quite literally—wherever we go.
When we retrieve our archetypal image, we work with it by bringing it to life all around us so that we are constantly reminded of its power and its meaning. As we work with it, its meaning may shift and evolve, but the more we place our attention on it, the more we shift, evolve, and eventually merge with it.
This concept follows the theory that we become what we pay attention to. In a silly way, it is similar to people who resemble their dogs. They devote themselves so wholeheartedly to their beloved pet that they begin to take on the qualities of their four-legged friend. We see this, too, in couples who have been married for a long time and almost begin to merge with one another as their hearts intertwine. We have already worked with this theory in our discovery of the klesha, but here we work with it in our attempt to merge with ishvara in a state of yoga. The archetype is demanding expression. The myth is asking to be lived. Through our presence of mind, and our consistent attention on ishvara, our personal myth lives us.
PRACTICE
The phrase, ishvara pranidhanad va, shows up four times within Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra—more than anything else in the text. Given that it is the only thing repeated so often, it clearly is an important factor for experiencing the blissful state of yoga. The concept of ishvara pranidhanad va is to give, or surrender, everything you have (everything you are) to ishvara—a personal image worthy of your devotion. Yoga makes no claim as to what your ishvara needs to be, only that you need to have one. Keep in mind that though this image is essential, there is room to evolve or change this image as your mythological experience shifts and changes over time. It is most effective if this object of devotion comes from within you, this way your devotion to it activates this blissful connection within your psyche.
Once you have done the yoga nidra practice and know your mythic image, the work of ishvara pranidhanad va is simply to put it in front of you. This directive is as simple as painting the image and hanging it on a prominent wall like an icon to be viewed with reverence, or placing a replica of the image on the lock screen of your phone. The idea here is that the more the image is present, the more you are reminded of it, and as you are reminded, you then devote your actions—be it cooking, cleaning, or even the laundry—wholeheartedly to it. Get creative with how you populate your consciousness with this image. It is meant to be an inspiration, so participate with it in ways that inspire you. Find ways to represent this image in your daily life and keep it around your field of vision as often as possible. This could be through pictures, inspirational words, jewelry, statues, found objects … think outside the box.
The purpose of this practice follows the same line of thinking as hanging religious iconography or installing a mezuzah on your doorframe. It serves as a constant reminder of your practice of devotion. When we devote ourselves to this mythic image, we eventually merge with it. Through the merging, we immerse ourselves in what the image has to teach us. The image is a concretized form of the internal archetype that points us back to a deeper part of ourselves yearning to be known. To know the image is to know ourselves better. To know ourselves better is to increase our level of consciousness. In knowing ourselves fully, there is bliss.
Living Your Myth
By connecting with our archetypes and recognizing our symbols, we enrich our lives and build our personal mythology. We come to know what our myth is and how it moves us in our daily lives. This is the touchstone for a vivified connection to what most inspires us and what is alive within us. Without this connection—this mythic, enlivening force—we are lost in a wasteland, a desert sapped of richness and internal connection.
When we know the myth we live by and embrace its archetypes, symbols, and structure, we retain a consistent connection to that which most empowers us. Self-empowerment is a salient quality of the psychospiritual state of yoga, along with the confidence that comes with knowing exactly who we are and what moves us from the inside. Living our personal myth engages us with the state of yoga and allows us to experience the blissful connection of that state more often.
In the next chapter, we build on this dialogue as we move past the resolution of our inner self toward the resurrection of a new self. We do less maintenance on what we find within, and we start to pave new trails and patterns of behavior that lock our experience of yoga into place more and more solidly. We leave behind what no longer serves us and embrace the fullest, most authentic, and blissful expression of ourselves. In short, we become who we truly are: satchidananda.