“Don’t move the way fear makes you move. Move the way love makes you move. Move the way joy makes you move.”
Dear Yogini,
How many obstacles do you face every day that you somehow manage to survive and work through? I hope the proverbial ‘putting out fires’ is not an everyday occurrence for you. Yet it appears as more and more a part of our harrowed lives where emotions fray and tempers flare. Physical obstacles—like illness and injury—strike me as among the most challenging types. To not be of sound physical health or ‘embodied’, or to not be able to partake in the pleasures of being out in nature—walking, hiking, swimming, kayaking—would surely take away my joie de vivre. This then tends to make me more attached to positive outcomes as when my body feels stronger and more agile (so yes, I do love my asana practice!) and averse to being waylaid by sickness or physical impairment of any kind.
Asana is a practice of bringing all the elements that constitute our physical being—earth, water, fire, air and ether—into balance. Asana quite literally signifies the ‘seat’ upon which one sits or the manner in which one takes that seat, as in taking a ‘posture’. This third facet of the eight-limbed path of yoga is established as the third ‘indirect aid’ to dissolving the impurities of the mind in order to bring about intuitive thinking, because it will bring you, the practitioner, up against nine impediments that show up in practice, described by Patañjali (in yoga sutra I.30) as (all shades of) illness, inertia, doubt, negligence/pride, idleness, sensual gratification, false perception, stagnation, and recidivism.
You have, and will continue to, come up against all of these in some form or another as obstructions to your personal progress and as distractions to your mind in asana. If you have ‘suffered’ the exertion of sustaining your concentration in the discerning muscular and energetic actions of a challenging warrior pose held for time, or the pockets of tension that arise when you are asked to feel into a yin pose, for example (typically a seated posture, sustained for time, at the edge of your comfort zone, with as little physical engagement as possible and with support as necessary to assist in disengaging muscular effort), you can conceive how the physical-sensory, emotional-energetic, and mental-spiritual impediments that come up for you in those instances can quickly deter you from your practice or further inform it. Practitioner’s choice. But here’s the gold nugget: When your consciousness is free from impediments, only then is self-realization possible, states Patañjali.
So ask yourself this, dear yogini: In what ways is your personal practice progressing or stagnating? Yoga, of course, is not built on philosophy alone. What I have come to value most about the path of yoga is the wisdom it proffers as a way to frame the conditions and experiences of life so as to minimize and reduce our reactivity to what shows up. Our human-ness, our foibles, and our flaws then become the substrate of our yoga practice and can serve as our best teachers if we can learn to see them, be with them, and act upon them with discernment rather than judgment, and with kindness rather than aggression.
I described for you in a previous letter how I lived in fear of cancer following my mother’s diagnosis with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. We all face fears of some adverse event befalling us or a loved one. These perceived threats to our existence stall us in our progress, putting us right up against the penultimate affliction, abhinivesha, the fear of death. Has this come up for you in practice dear yogini? You may have the advantage of an able body and a positive attitude to counter the effects of the years of wear-and-tear on the joints and the calamities of a broken heart. And still, you may well understand what it feels like to be limited by pain or incapacitated by some ailment, physical or emotional in nature. All of this then becomes a part of your yoga practice. It is when some event or circumstance of life feels impossibly hard that you notice that showing up for your practice becomes the challenge.
For me, this came in the form of a retinal detachment—two actually—at the grand age of 47. It is quite something to come up against the possibility of losing your sight, twice, and a whole other thing to be a front-row witness to the aftermath of a young daughter’s tragic and sudden death. My boyfriend-at-the-time lost his 18-year old daughter and sole child in the blink of an eye, this impossible incident framed by my two retinal events. His greatest fear realized, there is no turning back the clock, no rewriting this story, no undoing his horrid irrevocable reality. I cannot say how he gets out of bed every morning. But he does. One foot in front of the other. I cannot judge his experience. I will not color the effect it has had on me, on us, with the narratives and stories my mind is prone to work with to try to make sense out of the nonsensical. And I won’t call it perspective. My sight is imperfect at best yet seems prone to a particular consciousness: To see clearly things as they are. I still see the light and the light allows me to see. Over there, there is nothing but a finality to his ‘gone-ness’, an impossible darkness. And both are irrevocably true.
My practice has had to constantly shapeshift to meet the evolving requirements of eye surgery, recovery and healing; and then to support the space of a grief too profound to fathom. My physical practice looks nothing like it once did, but my yoga feels more intelligent, wiser, freer and more sincere. For now, I am learning to integrate all these sensitivities into my yoga practice as points of curiosity; without this inquisitiveness, I am as prone to dejection as the next person.
And to you I say, How much to you want to pay the price—physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually—of living and re-living in the present moment a narrative that is not yours? You have inherited and adopted and no doubt played out stories you were told as a child or perhaps too, narratives you created in your head to make everything okay because that was all you could do at the time to make sense of the confusion, the hurt, the horror. On the one hand, asana might be practiced on the basis of unspoken assumptions around its intrinsic healing capacities; on the other hand, asana might be thought of as a means to prevent such unfortunate instances from occurring in the first place. But at the heart of asana practice lies the discerning quality of intelligence that weaves its way from how we engage our body in action to touching in upon the subtlest energetic effects of these actions. There is no hiding from or controlling the stuff of life as much as we may deceive ourselves into thinking we can. However, we can become more sophisticated in our reaction to and how we manage life’s incidental liabilities and gross misfortunes when they do rear their heads, and more particularly when they reveal themselves in our body and pour forth onto our yoga mat. This is where the work of knowing yourself begins in earnest.
Asana, this third facet of Patañjali’s ashtanga yoga and the physical aspect of your practice, can be used to hone your skills at inhabiting your body with more wisdom and sensitivity. Asana practice includes equal measures of persistent effort (abhyasa) to realize the objective of self-knowing and a corresponding release of attachment to the stuff that stands in the way (vairagya). (15) Do you get discouraged in practice? Bored by the sameness or rote repetition of postural sequencing? Easily distracted? Abhyasa reminds you to be fiercely focused and present to how you are engaging in practice and what you are engaging with, and so persistent effort builds on itself—the more you show up in practice, as in life, the more your practice and your path reveal themselves to you. Vairagya implies that consciousness is colored by all the things that have no measure of permanence—material objects, people, ideas, opinions, thoughts—and therefore also defines how we identify ourselves and relate to others. So the fluctuations of conscious are to be controlled through abhyasa, your persistence to show up for your practice, and vairagya, the mental strength you develop to overcome all obstacles to practice.
What attachments come up for you in your consciousness, dear yogini? What is it in your physical practice that stands in your way? Have you told yourself you are “too tight,” “not flexible enough,” “have no coordination,” or do not have the right “body type” that makes you shy away from showing up? Perhaps your competitive or perfectionist drive pushes you towards an aggressive practice, or your proclivity for inertia towards intention to show up for practice minus the motivation. I have seen my own practice shift over time from an intense physicality to a milder physical practice. Whether I like it or not, my body is feeling the ailment of aging. So now my practice builds on endurance (holding poses for time) and being with the sensitivities of my body with more discrimination in each posture and with my mind at attention.
In sutras I.21 and I.22, Patañjali emphasizes the critical importance of the strength of our ‘desire’ in determining how easily we will attain our goal of attaining victory over the mind. It also determines how well you will overcome obstacles when they arise, in practice as in life, and indicates what kind of yoga aspirant you are. The aspirant you are in yoga is not a given; it must be earned. This means that, no matter what, keep showing up. Over the course of our lives, we will all vacillate between three levels of aspiration in practice where the mildest degree of desire can be neutralized by fear of failure, the spark of motivation too subtle; the moderate aspirant starts their quest with great enthusiasm but drops into disappointment or denial when confronted with obstacles in practice; and then there is an intense burning desire that consumes all other desires and the deterrents of practice, although burnout is a potential risk to those with such an enthusiastic drive.
There was a time I strived for perfection in practice. The dancer in me, the ‘good daughter’, the ‘people-pleaser’ sought to avoid conflict at all costs. I began my practice of yoga with the intense fire of desire that burned through all initial obstacles because I was fighting my mother’s cancer, my father’s death and a plethora of other unconscious conditions, including, ‘though I couldn’t ‘see’ it yet, the demise of my marriage. And then life taught me to slow down, and not always gently. Whether you strive for standards of external accomplishment, or listen to the ‘shoulds’ and the ‘cannots’ decided by your ever-fickle mind, or quash the traumas and tragedies of the heart that have taken up residence in your body and are stored in your subconscious, all of it bubbles up at the end of the day.
If it does not show up on your yoga mat, then it will show up in your life. So perhaps it is not such a bad thing if you can take the seat of asana and ‘act’ upon your body with wisdom. Notice the distractions, the discouragements, and the boredom that are inevitable components of practice, and allow those unprocessed narratives and emotions behind them to rise up and occasionally disturb the smooth surface level of pretense that protects your inner realm. You don’t have to know where these sensitivities come from or what they represent. The yogic wisdom asks that you simply notice them as they arise in your awareness, acknowledge and feel into them in your body, and then discern how your practice shifts as a result of placing your attention on the stuff that shows up.
On your mat, you follow a directive in class, and although you conceptually grasp the action or intelligence behind it, it makes no sense to you in this moment. There is no signal from brain to body. In fact, it may feel like it is in direct opposition to what your body wants to do or everything you think you know. As the directive permeates your consciousness, notice the chatter: “No way. I’m not doing that!” shrieks the Fear. “That doesn’t feel right,” grumbles the Body. “Why on earth would I do that?” sneers the Skeptic. “I don’t think so. I won’t, I can’t. I’m not [good, able, competent, thin] enough,” whispers the voice inside your head, which you barely hear, but it is sufficient to shut you down to your experience.
And then, with some passage of time, you are back on your mat once again for your asana practice. The inner narratives are too slow on the uptake today, and something else happens. I know this to be true from my own experience and as feedback from way too many practitioners to not believe its inherent value: Your body’s innate intelligence bypasses your brain. Your somatic body automatically processes what the instructional directive is implying without going through the machinations of your thoughts that hinder and obstruct the flow of information and insight. I call these instances “moments of samadhi,” or brief flashes of insight and absorption that amount to a mini-moment of enlightenment where the brain and the body sync up in agreement.
I can’t tell you exactly how this feels to you in your body and in your experience of the posture once arrived at, but the practical contact with asana itself offers up the dual qualities of steadiness in action infused with ‘sweetness’ or ‘ease’. Patañjali describes these postural textures as sthira and sukha respectively, in sutra II.46—sthira sukham āsanam, his singular description of asana itself out of this entire collection of sutras. When your body arrives at the harmonious blend of strength and softness in postural practice, “steadiness of intelligence and benevolence of spirit, (16)” then you have, in essence, “taken your seat.”
In my experience, this dichotomous essence of asana permeates my way of being in the world, steadfast and grounded on the inside while fluid and adaptable on the outside as I begin to trust in my own experience and in myself.
Patience and persistent practice, dear yogini; the fruits of your efforts will continue to reveal themselves in their own time and space. This is a promise.
Sincerely yours,
Nicole