“If you are willing to change your thinking, you can change your feelings. If you change your feelings, you can change your actions. And changing your actions—based on good thinking—can change your life.”
Dear Yogini,
I find myself excited for you to travel this path of yoga so that your intuitive wisdom may dawn as clarity and confidence in the direction of your dreams. You strike me as a curious person by nature and that is, in my most humble opinion, the most lucrative place to start. Curiosity replaces any propensity for judgment and criticism, defensiveness and condemnation, stonewalling and denial—a waste of perfectly good energy that can be better spent moving you in the direction of your own self-mastery.
Patañjali’s eight-faceted ashtanga yoga begins with exploring the reflection of the True Self (10) through yama. Like all facets or angles of this yogic path, each yama serves to ‘restrain’ some aspect of our conditioned behaviors and implicit biases. Each yama inhabits the same consciousness as the others, so do not consider separating one yama from another, dear yogini. Each one acts as a mechanism for change and is but one fragment of the whole that you seek. Can you discipline your psyche to change from hostility to humility through force of will? Have you tried to love unconditionally someone you resent? Or attempted to forgive outright someone who has done you harm? Transform envy into admiration? Then you can conceive that each facet of your practice requires consistent and continual ‘shining’ so that the brilliance of humility and love and forgiveness and admiration may reflect themselves in your sphere of consciousness without the weight of refracted truth undermining what they mean to you.
Ahimsa is the opposite of violence. Generally-speaking, ahimsa asks us to practice kindness and respect towards all beings everywhere. Ahimsa is movement away from our habitual attempts to impress our will or beliefs or power onto others. Criticism, judgment, condemnation, negativity are all subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) ways in which we harm ourselves and those around us. This quality of self-talk (directed towards self and others) undermines the esteem we have for ourselves and robs us of the light that consciousness brings to our shadows. It takes bravery to face the internal strife that reflects this war inside ourselves against our very own nature. The practice of ahimsa asks that you take this seat of the witness and, in practice, learn to access, then rest into your tension, your pain, your hurt, your satisfactoriness, your suffering, or dukkha.
There was a time where I labeled my former spouse a narcissist, a cheater, and a bully to frame my experiences of emotional gaslighting and betrayal, and conversely to make sense of my own feeling of low self-worth in this relationship. While there is usually some nugget of truth in how we each frame our respective realities, labels provide a convenient, yet simplistic and limiting viewpoint to make sense of how we feel. Labels validate our emotional and/or mental states, and may help to create understanding around our experiences. Rarely do they diminish our attachment to the deleterious and sometimes destructive feelings these experiences engender within us.
Your yoga gives you permission to feel the hurt caused by the labels imposed upon you, and conversely the labels you have imposed upon yourself and others. Your consistent practice has the capacity to reflect back to you the ways in which you frame your experiences and perceived truths, and the ways too in which you habitually react. This line from the Ashtanga opening incantation, Samsara halahala mohashantyai, asks our practice to help us first see, then remove the poison of conditioned existence (that causes harm to ourselves and others)—these repetitive behaviors that neither inspire us nor elevate us to a greater purpose—then replace them with coherent consciousness.
We do not need to condone patterns of speech and behaviors that are hurtful, intentionally or not. We can, however, with this practice of ahimsa, learn to forgive so we do not marinate in resentment or anger or any of the shadow aspects of violence. If there is anything my own temporary wrath showed me, it is that this heated and contracted way of framing my reality also made me view the world outside of me-myself-and-I from a more hostile perspective. It served only to imprison me behind walls of my own making and made me more furious and less free. My level of stress skyrocketed, dysplasia imminent (in my mind), and catabolic surges of cortisol and adrenaline flooded my bloodstream triggering a state of anxiety that consumed me. This, I came to recognize, is not self-love.
Ahimsa asks us to re-evaluate these paradigms we have around any viewpoint that does not serve our best interests in a positive way. In our culture, we have societal paradigms around physical appearance and health that run deep through the fiber of our being human. So notice your process in asana, the physical approach to your practice. Notice how you accept your physical skill or reject your lack thereof in your postures; how you rally your good efforts and denigrate your perceived failures. The application of ahimsa to your physical practice calls your awareness to the heartfelt intention with which you choose to be in your body in asana at any given instant.
Patañjali describes the effects of observing ahimsa in speech, thought and action (in sutra II.35) as relinquishing your aggressive tendencies and inviting those in your presence to do the same. Let us all persevere in our practice of ahimsa to cultivate the positive qualities of the mind and attitudes of friendliness, compassion, delight, and disregard that allow the mind to remain unperturbed (sutra I.33).
Inherent in the understanding of satya (truthfulness) is the assumption that neither you nor I distort or alter in any way a truth to suit our own needs or meet the expectation of another. Not all of us, however, are clear all the time on the distinction between what our truth is and what truth belongs to another. Where there is a status differential there is always the risk of one person subjugating themselves to the truth of the authority, and conversely the authority figure imposing their truth upon their subject. It is all too common an occurrence where students (of yoga and otherwise) project their desires as well as their ineptitudes upon their teacher seeking to get their needs met by that person; conversely, not all teachers (of yoga and otherwise) are sincere in establishing firm professional boundaries as a way of creating safe space for their students. This differential creates internal dissonance.
I have certainly experienced this feeling of internal dissonance, which feels to me much as guilt and confusion do. This fundamental discord arises from the differential between the truth I think I or someone else desires (a contraption of the mind) and my shiny-diamond self-truth (the sincerity of heart), and not always knowing exactly what that is. The embodied practices of yoga are critical to putting us in touch with our deepest understanding of Self.
In conflict, we understand there to be at least two distinct, and frequently discordant, accounts of what has transpired. We are all guilty on the one hand, of internalizing the conflict as repressive tendencies (where the emotional energy behind the conflicting elements gets shut down by the mind and stored in the body as resentment and dis-ease); and on the other, of externalizing our conflict as expressive tendencies (where the emotional energy behind the conflicting elements gets directed outwardly at someone or something as blame, shame, bullying, aggression, etc.).
Yoga asks us to observe these feelings of conflict and disconnect in the moment, as they arise. This is an exacting practice. It requires a sincere dedication to challenging the status quo; a commitment to asking more of yourself and wanting more for yourself. To be with discomfort and pain is hard. Yet, the more you practice paying attention, the more familiarity you gain with the sensations and feelings behind the emotions and the energy of conflict. Every sensation that shows up, every feeling that is felt, every emotion that manifests is first filtered through the background of your own conditioning. Thought patterns and habitual reactive tendencies are entrenched in every single cell and fiber of your own being. Behind this conditioning, and colored by it, lies the truth of who you are, the diamond-brilliance. Satya is a practice of learning to perceive the discolorations and refractions that distort your truth, so that you may live into it.
Any attack on me or my truth and I can feel it at the level of my bones to the surface of my skin. It has an antagonistic quality to it and sets off my defense mechanisms in the form of self-righteous indignation. It turns out this is not a very attractive trait when I observe it in someone else’s field of reactivity! So I notice this tendency first within myself. I pause. I breathe. I invite my sphere of awareness to illuminate these feelings, these energies, without making them anything other than what they are, nothing more than shadows lurking. The shadows still lurk, I still react, but I now have some capacity to see this, step out of my reactivity and regain perspective. This, to me, is what the practice of standing in truth looks like.
I have always been completely captivated and entirely envious of those people you come across in life who exude confidence and sincerity of being. The one thing perhaps that has worked in favor of my moving in that direction is the simple fact that I have always wanted to be that person. Whether you choose to become a yoga teacher or not, your perseverance in practice comes with a responsibility to embody the precepts of yoga and present yourself to your fellow practitioners, to your students, and in all your relationships in a way that is congruent with the truth of who you are. In other words, you have to keep up your own practice.
This practice works. Other than having to meet my own expectations of myself, I know now to differentiate for myself and for others, in truth, what acceptable (behavior) is and what it is not, so as not to mislead or, conversely, take another’s misinterpretation of my actions to heart. I also know that failure is just another interpretation for feedback: No longer am I ‘not enough’ or insufficient; neither do I need to be first, or the best, or the most viable, or at the center of attention. And I certainly do not need to meet another’s criterion (especially my own) of perfection. Excellent, yes; perfect, no. I can set my expectations to the level of reasonable and realistic and stand in a place of owning my own truth—regardless of anyone else’s opinion of what I should do or who I should be. I want to say that again: regardless of anyone else’s opinion of what I ‘should’ do or who I ‘should’ be.
Your biggest and most fragile liability is your ego, which seeks permanence, continuity, and certainty—none of which are real. Classical yoga calls this trait ‘I-am-ness’, or asmita, the ignorance that comes from identification with the ego. The contraption of the ego is self-limiting when we stylize or curate ourselves to meet an ideal perpetuated by our culture or another person that is incongruent with who we are. We limit ourselves when we pretend to be someone we are not; we limit ourselves by not being exactly who we are and were always meant to be—in accordance with yama and niyama, ahimsa and satya.
With the practice of asteya, you measure yourself against another and begin to see how you create a sophisticated dynamic of ‘lesser than’ and ‘greater than’. You might classify your workplace as toxic, divide your family into dysfunctional or supportive, and judge your fellow yogin as adept or inept against whom you decide to measure your own self-worth. How simple it is for envy and jealousy to usurp the sense of completeness and self-sufficiency you seek to cultivate through your practice: I want what that person has; and not only do you not have enough, I want that ‘other’ thing over there, that body, that house, that job, that life. This means that the present moment has evaporated, and you find yourself sucked into a vortex of unexcavated envy that sours into resentment, indignation, silent condemnation, and anger. And guess what? Most of the time, the other person has no clue about how you feel.
It takes inordinate self-mastery to go into yourself to perceive the experience that emerges in the moment from your individual belief system, from your fears, from your ignorance and lack of understanding, from your desires, your temptations, your assumptions and expectations, from your past experiences and future imaginings. We define ourselves as good at yoga or not good at yoga; flexible enough or too tight to do yoga, and in this way cleave life into the duality of “me” and “the rest of the world.” Our collective mistruths and grievances, subtle or overt, steal the harmony from our relationships.
I craved fulfillment in my marriage that made me seek from my spouse validation and acceptance he couldn’t give me. When my insecurities bumped into his tendencies towards isolation and self-denial, I believed myself to be unattractive, unloved, and completely insignificant. How I lacked the understanding to see myself separate from all those vacuous markers of self-worth! It makes me so sad to think this is how I once perceived myself and that my standards for self-worth and self-love reached so low.
In essence, I had to learn to befriend myself again, to probe beneath my lack of fulfillment and find its cause. I had to look long and hard at this tendency to steal from myself and give to another, to play small so that someone else’s light might shine brighter. And understand why I felt the imperative to acquire knowledge and expertise so that I might feel sufficient, enlightened perhaps and quite possibly superior. And I had to finally acknowledge the position of privilege I was born into just by being White and didn’t realize I occupied until I was called out by a gentle and compassionate friend; I still have to work at this practice of standing in that ‘other’ person’s shoes to see the world from their point of view and experience, more so Today than ever before.
Everyone falls into the habit of dividing and classifying the world into comparative parts because we think that the accumulation of wealth, the acquisition of knowledge or certification, losing weight, being a more accomplished yogi will always appear to provide fulfillment where it lacks. Pride and lust and greed build complex walls of made-up stories and ideals, securities and safety systems, pontifical abuse of power and privilege, diagnostics, and diagnoses behind which we hide from our unwillingness to see and acknowledge the truth when it is revealed to us. When you stand up and say out loud, I am not going to participate in this anymore, this is asteya, literally ‘non-stealing.’
We experience life through our senses, do we not? Close your eyes for a moment. What sensate memory awakens in you a quality of desire, pleasure, or transportation? Is it the sweet carriage of rose in summer? The succulent taste of honey or the bitter, full-flavor of coffee on your tongue? The soothing sounds of the ocean impressed upon your consciousness? An image of color and beauty cast in film upon your retina and imprinted in the recesses of your visual cortex? The felt sense of touch, of silk or velvet or other soft pleasure against your skin? Do you see how beauty and joy and sensuality occur when we are in the moment? We abandon all these possibilities of spontaneous élan when we are instead seeking excitation of the senses, mere transitory pleasure, immediate gratification.
In the classic wisdom of yoga, this practice is referred to as brahmacharya, a concept within Indian religions that literally means “conduct consistent with Brahma.” In simple terms, brahmacharya is the path of Brahma, or universal consciousness, where the yogini controls her città (mental fluctuations or processes) in order to moderate her words, thoughts, and actions with respect to the gravitational draw of physical, sensate, and sensual pleasures. More commonly translated as “celibacy,” one can hardly expect today’s yogin to refrain altogether from sexual activity.
However, I raise the point because confusion and misunderstanding, personal struggles, and abuse of discretion abound where sexual issues are concerned, not just in the general realm but in yoga too. How many so-called gurus have exploited their positions of power, their gift of privilege, and their points of access in pursuit of gratification of the senses and sexual proclivities? What does being a teacher of yoga mean, to you?
This question is significant not just in terms of how it relates to sexuality and gratification and attachment to the limiting values of the ego but in how teachers of yoga, now more than ever, must uphold the tenets of yoga as an example to their students. Patañjali’s code of ethics exposes all of the human condition and shows us that we are all fallible as human beings. Have you looked at what gratification and sex and desire means in your life? How has it shown up in the past? Is it relevant? Are we, as a culture, doing the work of peeling back the layers and observing ourselves in action? Can we perceive that which lies at the root of our distortions and delusions of desire? What is it within us that is seeking to be discovered, uncovered, and recovered?
Think about this for a moment, dear yogini. That you are seeking to know more about your yoga and the Yogic Wisdom says to me that you are already in a process of self-reflection and perhaps willing too to shift something primordial within yourself to access your truth. This is how you come to find yourself in the midst of your dilemma working from a vast collection of memories and karmic experiences in reach of some desired outcome, acting now upon that desire. This is how you find yourself in the middle of a question that can only be lived into in the present; otherwise, the present becomes a way to fashion the future according to some ideal or power play in your head or replay of some past experience. In essence, all your difficulties are created by this division of your experiences into time.
There are never enough hours in the day, dear yogini, not enough weeks in the calendar year, no empty space in daily life in which to ‘not-think’ or ‘do’, and so little time to do everything that needs to be done. All of this precludes us living right here into this breath, into this moment, and then when the time comes, into the next. If you cannot resolve your dilemma, dearest yogini, how can anyone else possibly resolve it for you? Self-discovery, yogic wisdom teaches, can only occur in relationship to the present moment. At every moment, you are capable of looking at yourself, your thoughts, your feelings, and the way you act and behave. You have a teacher, you seek a teacher, or you want to be a teacher. No matter. Remember simply that you are your own best teacher for leading and inspiring your journey along this path, for yoga invites you to know yourself better than anyone else possibly can or ever will.
The principles of behavior that Patañjali places before us enable us to be ‘in’ the world rather than ‘of’ the world. Aparigraha is the fifth yama and offers us an opportunity to practice not getting too attached to the idea of ‘more.’ The ego and its grasping and clinging and wanting for something ‘other than’ creates walls that imprison us within the confines of our, by nature, self-limiting perspectives. Have you never craved a little ‘more’ from your yoga practice—more ease, more flexibility, more power, more stature, to be ‘more’ like someone else—and then tried to squeeze yourself into some uncomfortable ideal or concept (of a pose or the practice itself) that doesn’t meet your needs or feel good?
Yoga tells us that this entrapment in the illusions of needing ‘more’—and we can always use more confidence, more money, more fame, more attention or validation or love, etc.—is nothing but a fearful operation that craves permanence, a sense of safety and security. The problem then becomes our dependence on outside forces for our satisfaction and sense of fulfillment. We can want for all of the things in the world but add to that our attachment to an ideal or concept we’ve been sold, and we risk striving for something that isn’t real and then suffering the distress of losing something we never had in the first place.
Consider all the things that we reach for outside ourselves that illustrate this precept only too well: Food, alcohol, drugs, sex, fame, fortune, social media, material goods, our looks, are all such examples. Your yoga asks you to refine the positive qualities of the mind that breed respect and friendliness (ahimsa), to stand in your own brilliance (satya) and align yourself with your indivisible truth (asteya), and practice conduct consistent with who you are in truth (brahmacharya) so that you can stand solid in the midst of temptations and ideals that distort or draw you away from who you know yourself to be (aparigraha).
We can take action and hold onto the promise of a specific outcome with the risk of defaulting to our original state a little worse for wear. And we can elevate ourselves to gain recognition risking a bruised ego. Until we explore the root causes of our attachments and come to see them for what they are—greed, vanity, success, affirmation, security, etc.—any attempt to create non-attachment only strengthens the source of our attachment.
So in your practice of yoga, dear yogini, persevere at assuming ownership for the choices you make. It is not the choice itself that is subject to scrutiny in practice but rather the attitude with which you approach the choice you make and the sincerity behind it. Ask yourself this in practice: Is your decision intentional? Is your choice colored by craving? Do you seek individuality (not inherently a bad thing)? And if so, is there a something underneath that individuality that seeks to perpetuate continuity, immortality, or that fragment of thought that divides the world into me and not-me, mine and not-mine? Are you cultivating a relationship with the world around you that preserves your independence? Are you stepping into the world without possessiveness?
I experience aparigraha as a practice of simplification, of reducing my needs to only the most essential elements. I can’t say it is an easy practice, but I have learned that when I don’t hold on so tight to everything I cherish, and learn to loosen my grip on it, then I get to experience firsthand the full impact of my attachment. With each and every takeaway I have learned a little more about myself.
My largest lesson in this practice of aparigraha has been to value my self-worth and to not compromise myself. Nothing in this material world of ours can define your self-worth. You will want to take all that yoga is teaching you on the mat into living your life, and not let the world (or anyone in it) define you and who you believe yourself to be. You are not defined by your body; you are not defined by your posture; you are not defined by how hard or well or far you travel in your practice. You are only defined by how well you have learned to love and to live your life, informed by the lessons gleaned in learning to ‘let go’. This realization is aparigraha.
Like atman (your true self), the sun shines its continuous light. Anything that covers your innate brilliance or anyone who turns you away from the sun denies you the ability to see your true nature. When your thoughts and emotions cloud the mind, you only suffer for not seeing the sun. Perceive the contents of your mind for what they are, and notice too the ways in which your thoughts seek some semblance of constancy and sameness, holding onto outdated paradigms and tales that do not belong to you. Your practice becomes one of carefully teasing apart the fragile construction of your habitual thinking and daily existence. Practice the abundance of aparigraha to replace what must be let go of.
As you travel the path of yogic wisdom you will refine what it is you are seeking for yourself in yoga, and as you do so, you will start living into the answers to all your questions including the ones you have yet to ask. You need not know your direction or destination, but without a firm understanding of yourself and how you want to be in the world, how are you to resolve your dilemma? How are you to relate to others? How are you to explore the ever-widening aspects and divisions of our outer world?
The practice of ahimsa only dissolves the violence of our culture and our self-hatred once we have perceived what lies at the root of it, within ourselves. The practice of satya only disperses the lies, deceit, and dishonesty when that which lies at their root has been perceived. Asteya emerges from the dissolution of our sophisticated paradigms of comparison that divide and isolate each of us from the other. The practice of brachmacharya tames the pangs of pleasure and immediate gratification until self-realization is arrived at by degrees. And aparigraha teaches us to let go little by little of the things that get in the way of our perceiving our inner truth and the light of our collective consciousness. These are the principles of yama.
Niyama then takes us on an inbound journey to the center of our personal solar system where atman, or soul, abides. The practice of niyama now serves to purify our physical, energetic, mental, and intellectual sheaths, or koshas, of the debris that obscures the light of spirit. Then perhaps we can perceive Self as connected to the vaster realm of consciousness, that ‘something’ larger than ourselves that Patañjali refers to in the yoga sutras as Ishvara. Let this be the topic of our next encounter, dear yogini. Until then, may your dilemma gain clarity as you continue to travel the path of yama.
Peace and beautiful practice.
Sincerely yours,
Nicole