“How many of us go to bed with a sense of accomplishment because we checked a lot of things off our task list or someone told us how “great” we were, or we “helped” others? What if we walked off stage altogether and put God there instead? Maybe then we could go to sleep at night, not with a sense of accomplishment, but with a sense of wonder, because all day we had been an attentive audience to the divine play. (9)”
Dearest Yogini,
You and I number among the 36.7 million practitioners of yoga in the United States (as of 2016), up from 20.4 million in 2012. (12) With so many conscious contenders within our ranks, it stands to reason that the industry that yoga has become is just as susceptible as any other enterprise to our capitalistic culture: The drive for financial gain, competition, and success. I have no intention of taking us down a rabbit hole of politics and persuasion; instead, I feel it is important to restate the need for each and every one of us to take ownership for the choices we make along the path of yoga, now more so than ever.
If we are not the forerunners of consciousness in this country, then perhaps we take on the responsibility to act well in the world (in accordance with yama) and to transmute self-preoccupation into self-awareness through our practice of kriya yoga, the ‘yoga of action’. Kriya yoga is defined by Patañjali in sutra II.1 as a composite of tapas, self-discipline with a quality of burning desire to burn away the impurities of body, senses, and mind; svadhyaya, the study of the teachings in order to know one’s self; and Ishvara praṇidhānā, surrender of one’s body, mind, and soul to some force greater than ourselves.
While yama teaches you to pay attention to your thoughts, to your inner dialogue and behaviors, niyama teaches you to take action to support the work of yama. Self-discipline, self-study, and sweet surrender are three of the five elements of niyama. The practice of yama is to pull back on the reins of our habitual conditioning and train the untamed mare of the mind how to be in the world. Niyama is a purification practice that allows the gem of your True Self, your spirit, to shine as brilliantly as it is meant to, free of anything and all that dulls and subjugates it.
And so, our wise guide Patañjali offers you the five tools of niyama to guide you in your evolution towards harmony with yourself and your life. Niyama allows you to continue your journey inward toward wholeness and discovering your destiny as the truth of who you are.
I have learned that to embody the heart of yoga you must first and foremost learn to respect and honor yourself. To this end, the wisdom practices of yoga teach you to become more resilient in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, and other significant sources of stress—such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. In other words, by “tuning in” to yourself, you become more discerning around what “stuff” belongs to you and when someone else’s vortex pulls you away from yourself. You learn to find an anchor within yourself, to bounce back from difficult experiences, and to love yourself unconditionally no matter what. This then becomes the practice of saucha.
It has taken me decades to realize that my self-talk sabotaged the way I perceived myself, judged myself, and treated myself. I know I am not alone in this. This could be an entire book unto itself, but would you not agree that we are entire generations of women (and men, transgender, etc.) who have learned from our respective social circles, our culture, and our families to believe we are insufficient, not enough, objects of sexual allure, material pleasures, or discarded commodities withering from neglect or abuse? We learn too quickly to disabuse ourselves of our inherent goodness and lovability.
This process of ‘cleaning house’ requires a big dollop of bravery, a good dose of respect, a dash of humor, and the absolute knowledge you are loveable, loving, and loved no matter anyone else’s opinion of who you are or what you should do may be.
It can feel overwhelming to manage and feed the constant amount of effort and work that goes into keeping your world in a state of cleanliness, literally and figuratively. To start, it might take rather more energy to apply the quality of vigilance your situation may require to meet yourself in the right place. Yoga asks you to begin with ‘cleaning’ the body through diet and exercise—attention to the kind of fuel (quality of food) you put in your body and the practice of asana, or posture, the third and next step on the yogic path. And because the mind thinks thoughts that reflect ego-attachments to the material world, the mind too requires ‘cleaning,’ as it is more deeply enmeshed in the endless cycle of sensory pleasure and suffering.
Saucha of the mind is the practice of seeing, then ceasing and desisting with thoughts or emotions of (self) hatred, greed, pride, lust, envy, jealousy, etc. Once these improper habits are scrubbed clean—to the extent possible—from the slate of memory and conditioning, the original sattvic, or luminous, quality of the intellect shines forth, like a diamond, unclouded by such impurities.
This is joy. It’s not that the habitual tendencies don’t rear their ugly heads, but once recognized as such, the platitudes fade and your innermost light reflects back to you your own brilliance in the form of individuality, inspiration and ingenuity.
This is courage! Keep up your travails and the burden of efforting shall subside. Our attention is always somewhere other than here; so notice, right now, where is it, this attention of yours? Connect with it and become curious about where it was and what it was doing (assessing, judging, criticizing, defending, analyzing, planning, etc.). Keep up your practice of mastering your senses: Of bringing the eyes back to inner focus; of listening in with the auditory faculties; of the taste buds savoring with savvy and discernment; of touching in upon the conditions of the body and qualities of the heart with kinesthetic sensitivity; of bringing the olfactory senses back to scent (scent is the sole sense capable of engaging us uniquely in the present moment).
And when you have gathered your senses and cultivated eka-grata, one-pointedness of the mind, when all your faculties become absorbed in this moment and no longer depend on external or mental stimulations, you have accessed santosa, contentment. This means that the next time an ‘object of desire’ (i.e. the beep or buzz of your phone) floats through the realm of your awareness, you catch yourself in the midst of any and all complicit tendencies, and restrain your senses from reaching out and embracing the desired reward. This practice requires a measure of dispassion so that, little by little, the object that craves your attention can be left alone without your need to reach for it. The vigilance and hard work you apply to your practice of catching yourself in the act of gratifying your craving softens with repetition until the day you arrive at the realization of its effortlessness. This means you can’t think of a better place to be right now, embodied, and present. This, dear yogini, is your practice of santosha.
In yoga, santosha is ground for the absorbed state of samadhi, the eighth step or facet of the path of yoga, described by Patañjali (in sutra III.3) as your means to arriving at enlightened perception, a “fusion of the knower [you] and the process of knowing [intuitive wisdom] with the object to be known. (13)” How else might you define your state of ‘enlightened perception’, dear yogini? Your moving towards this state (of samadhi) with your practice of yoga—this movement towards seeing yourself more clearly—now extends to you the possibility of living right into clear resolution of your dilemma.
What are you passionate about dear yogini? What about your yoga sets you on fire? What makes you show up? I wish to know what fascinates you about your yoga! Tapas is the driver of passion and refers to the discipline it takes to show up and sustain your yoga, all the more in the face of hardship and challenge.
Personally, it is no longer the same passion for practice I once had when I first came to yoga that compels me to show up every day for my yoga; the practice is, after all, a practice: Some days I show up for it with ease, and others will take everything I have to not talk myself out of showing up in the way yoga asks me to. I have found every excuse in the book on the hardest days to not be with the dark and icky parts of myself, the parts that are vulnerable and insecure, the places that are tense or hold pain. Frankly, it is fearsome and, in some instances, downright insufferable.
Do I do this in solitude? Yes. You don’t have to, but it is one way to see beyond the lies and mistruths we are subject to telling ourselves in order to get past the stuff we really don’t want to see. The other way to see what needs to be seen is in relationship to someone who can hold you accountable or in whose presence you can see yourself more clearly. The passion for yoga reveals itself when you begin to experience the ways in which this practice sets you free.
The practice of tapas allows you, dear yogini, to burn through your own complicit consciousness and purify your conditioned reactivity to the people and events in your life that are certain to challenge your sense of what is valid (thinking, speech, behavior) and what isn’t. You know that person—a boss, a parent, a former lover, a friend—who is subject to the same human condition as you or I. He hides his insufficiency behind the mantle of masculinity overcompensating with his alpha-ego or physical build, playing big by design thereby diminishing the ‘other’. She shields her insecurity behind a façade of self-importance and maybe self-deprecating wit, seeking solidity and self-worth through actions that condescend to or belittle another’s right to be. These patterns of conditioning are universal and laden with ruthless passive-aggression to match the pain and suffering on the backend. They make the perpetrator’s ego-self feel better. And then there comes a time when what shows up for you feels less like anger or condemnation of the situation, and more like understanding and compassion for his suffering, for her pain. With determination and discipline, or tapas, you get to not participate in the theatrics and place yourself at a remove.
The Yogic Wisdom invites you to notice your emotional reactivity to these types of scenarios, to take a breath, a step back, then to zoom out and observe the whole mise en scène through a wide-angle lens. Notice the feeling that develops as a result of the conflict and respond with self-awareness and diplomacy, so to speak, to the offense in question. As yogis, you and I have the privilege of the practice and the possibilities of insight to perceive beyond the surface layer of such behaviors to an underlying dynamic that neither divides nor justifies but has the potential, always, to move each of us in the direction of harmony.
Tapas has the attribute of wisdom underlying its application to anything you do but especially your yoga, and allows you to sustain a consistent and dedicated practice without injury to yourself or others. This explains how you might bring the intelligence of tapas to your practice as a way of replacing old patterning with new habits while supporting the inward journey of the mind. What is the point of good practice, dear yogini, without the underlying friendliness (towards yourself and others) and the wisdom to be with what shows up?
When you embody the heart of yoga in the spaciousness of upekshanam or equanimous mind, so vast it can hold all of life’s contradictions, you will notice that you are not disturbed by many of the things in your life that may once have sent you into a tailspin of reactivity, dejection, loneliness and depression—all states of relative impermanence, and the breath shows us this. (We will get to the power of the breath at a later time dear yogini).
Notice how your body feels, how your mind frames your experiences, and how you respond to the people, events, and circumstances in your life, and in this way, you begin to cultivate your ability to hear your inner voice of wisdom as it permeates the realm of your conditioned consciousness. Tuning into yourself is a way to bring you back to the place of your own heart so that you may live your life in truer fashion or at least as a truer reflection of you. This is the practice of svadhyaya.
Svadhyaya is all about getting to know yourself really well and perfecting the art of equanimity by seeing the space between a stimulus, or ‘trigger’, and your reactivity to it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our triggered response to an event that recollects a previous trauma. Resilience in the face of adversity is not something you have or don’t have. It involves behaviors, thoughts, and actions in adaptive and self-regulatory capacities that can be cultivated through the practice of getting to know yourself and through the breath.
It is not so much what needs to be done that is in question. Instead, notice how your mind dismisses, resists, rebels, or revolts against accepting or admitting the existence of a truth it does not want, or is too painful to see. Be vigilant in your own practice, dear yogini, as you notice any tendencies you may have towards dismissing that which keeps presenting itself to you in your practice as in your life. When denial is present, my experience is that life will find a way to throw adversity at you in a way you can no longer ignore. Should the path you find yourself on be ridden with obstacles, use the yogic wisdom to trust that another door, another way, will open up to you.
The responsibility to follow your path becomes a driving force as your yoga reveals itself to you in discrete increments and opens you up more and more to yourself. Use the tenets of yoga, yama and niyama alike, to be gentle and friendly towards yourself in the process of your evolution. We are too quick to subscribe to the thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes that will mislead us in our practice of yoga. When you rest in svadhyaya, studying yourself and your mental, intellectual, emotional, and physical predispositions, you can challenge the paradigms that present themselves to you. In this moment of seeing, you can shape-shift the context and texture of your thoughts to more accurately reflect how to be in alignment with what you want for yourself and how you wish to be in the world. Your dilemma may be a sticking point, so listen well to that within you which seeks to be heard. Does the prospect of teaching yoga feel like a ‘calling’ or is it an ideal towards another end?
Trust the trials and tribulations of time to serve as your guides should you wish to opt in to learning from them. I can reflect back on my once ardent desire to attend medical school (having applied three times) and recognize that, at each turn, all manner of excuses (in the guise of what was going on in my life at the time) persisted in holding me back from moving forward in that direction. By odd twists and turns of fate, I have discovered within my practice and teaching of yoga a holistic science of physical health and mental-emotional wellbeing that is far more suitable to my proclivity towards addressing the whole of a person rather than their disparate symptomatologies.
Get to know yourself, dear yogini, or in the language of yoga, practice svadhyaya. Insights and feelings arrive in all shapes and sizes and much of the time we miss them because we just aren’t paying attention. Self-study is the practice of showing up again and again, tuning in to yourself, and seeking understanding through resources and persistent practice of the stuff that manifests in your awareness to always arrive back at yourself.
It occurred to me as I was writing that I do not yet know your outlook on life. I have come to trust in its importance in how we approach life. My father was a driving force for the person I am today (and am still becoming) in the world. My brother and I would refer to our dad as the “optimistic pessimist.” My father had an attraction to the more Shopenhauerian view of passion, irrationality, and pessimism as drivers for his sense of general discontent. My father, though, believed he had risen above it in a Nietzschean force-of-will such that his pessimism about the world in general was tempered by his optimism about his own position within that world. (14)
If you picked up this book, chances are you stand in the same strand of privilege as I. I am White (and while skin color should not separate us, it does my friend, and we must continue to strive for an un-coloring of cultures around the globe); I am a Woman; and I am a product of Western culture. The first ‘coloring’ affords me complicit anonymity from racial bias. The second means I am subject to the same patriarchy of those of my generation but because of the third I have access to a voice that I can make heard. I was born with certain privileges, such as education and a stable family life, many can only aspire to. And although my sight is compromised, I live in an able and intelligent body, and for this gift I am infinitely grateful. In other words, you and I hold a position in the world that demands that we take a stand and take action for the benefit of all humanity.
But first, the yogic wisdom informs us that, while our thoughts matter, they cannot be believed because they are subject to our conditioning, or samskaras, and the whims of our ego-self. They can, however, be controlled once perceived. This is our work through yoga. The whole first chapter of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras is dedicated to describing the mind waves, or fluctuations of consciousness, to help the yoga practitioner to better understand and access the eight ‘aids’ and practices of ashtanga yoga. Your thoughts determine your speech, and your narratives determine your behaviors and the way you are in the world.
At first, the tenets of yama guide you to forego doing harm by directing your thoughts and communicating and acting with reverence and kindness (ahimsa); to dedicate yourself to the truth (satya); to refrain from desiring “more than” (asteya); to devote yourself to leading a balanced and harmonious life (brahmacharya); and to cultivate non-attachment to possessions and relationships in your life with awareness of the abundance that is already there (aparigraha).
Then, as the tenets of niyama instruct, you forego the attempt to strive and learn to respect, honor, and love yourself (saucha); only then can the awareness turn around and find that everything is there already (santosa); as you persist in your practice with the discipline and determination of tapas, this fire removes the distortions and impurities of your diamond-Self by burning through the toxicities of your complicit conditioning. This readiness for cultivating tolerance and knowing your very own truth is referred to in classical yoga as svadhyaya, the ‘study of the self.’ Finally, you arrive at the practice that cultivates the art of letting go and letting be, breath by breath, pose by pose, moment by moment; this is Isvara pranidhana.
In yoga, each neuronal impulse, every single cell and molecule of your being and all the fibers of your soul, are engaged towards this end—the surrender to something far vaster than the experience of our thinking faculty and the feelings of ‘I’. It is to engage with the realm of quantum physics, to develop a faith that is born of your own experiences, and, ultimately, to trust in a supreme, universal, cosmic intelligence. Such release or movement towards the divine, states Patañjali (in sutra II.45) brings about the light of pure consciousness, revealing the radiance of the diamond of the True Self. Is this not the direction of your seeking? What else do you seek to see within yourself? Revel in these contemplations dear yogini. I bid you a good night and sound sleep!
Peace and beautiful practice.
Sincerely yours,
Nicole