Opening to the Bliss Body

Yoga touches all the layers of our being (kośa). At the end of our posture practice we let go into śavāsana, an opportunity to let go of everything, to drop into unscheduled time. We no longer make adjustments, we don’t try to fix anything, we let things be dis-organized. Holding ourselves together takes an enormous amount of effort whilst letting go can be disorientating.

When we emerge from śavāsana we can be in a rush to organize our experience rather than simply being in it. However, the mind, or mental of our being (manomaya kośa) is very small when compared to the bliss body (anandamaya kośa). It is incapable of making sense of our full experience. No past reference is suitable, no wise words are wise enough, in fact words can really straitjacket our experience. Instead, can we open up to what is arising and allow it to nourish us fully? No stories, no excuses, no need to understand.

When we open to the body of bliss we are practicing a radical act. We are opening to the experience of fullness that knows no bounds, costs no money, and above all is highly contagious. If you are resistant to the experience of bliss perhaps you are withholding your greatest gift to others, your complete and utter presence.

Rest

Moments of rest revive me, refresh me

Like a slap, a sniff of brandy in the old days

Nobody can run off air

I look at my pillow with one eye, the horizontal world, sliver of a bedroom

Did I slip that far? A moment ago it was noon and then a year passed.

From heaviness to light, like a Vedic prayer.

I like to spend time with you now, I need to.

It is the way my time makes sense

Not a foreign currency which cannot be exchanged

But valuable tender, valuable time.

When did humans decide to turn time into money?

It must’ve been the pivotal moment when everything changed

If you could follow the yarn, you’d come to the knot

The kind that can’t pass through the eye of the needle

When time became money, we got stuck on the other side

But something magical has happened now

We have been given words through which to understand it,

To understand her

I want to, need to, spend time with her.

And no,

I’m not depressed.

I just crave that slap that only she can give

The cool slap of love on Earth.

Full of Emptiness - a meditation

One of my teachers likes to remind his students to “empty before you begin”. Whenyou arrive into your first śavāsana, a reminder to set aside all the ‘stuff’ that follows you throughout the ordinary day. Because our yoga practice doesn’t take place in ordinary time. It abides by the timeless; spaciousness.

When we empty, we become full of emptiness. There is a softening of resistance. We become more receptive.

But how to empty? How to connect with the spaciousness?

We can slip into the slivers of space between the inhalation and the exhalation and the next inhalation. We can slide into the micro-moment between the passing of one thought and the arising of the next. We can harness all our awareness toward that moment, that spacious moment, in which we have noticed an emotion, a feeling, but we have not yet decided how we feel about the feeling.

 We can notice the breath flowing through the left nostril and the right nostril, and then we can simultaneously imagine a third nostril, right in the middle, connecting us to our central seam. A gateway to pure spaciousness and presence.

 As yogis we harvest these spaces, we are nourished by the liminal realm. We practice in the knowledge that this space is always there, readily available. We can take rest there, we can take others there, we cannot own it because it is free.

 We can be full of emptiness.

In the yoga space it pays to be really bold and open. Not magical thinking, but willing to be open to new possibilities.

Yoga was born in India, where philosophy was never practiced for philosophy’s sake. The mindful embodiment, deep enquiry and opportunities that your practice offers, promise something tangible and real.

While the physical practice chips away at physical restrictions creating more space and availability, cultivating strength and vitality, that is not all this practice is good for. The exploration of postures can be accompanied by a loosening of attitudes and restrictive ways of thinking. We become really attentive to what arises, the “stuff” that isn’t of the here and now. When you notice this “stuff”, there’s nothing you need to do, you don’t need to get overly involved, judge yourself or your thoughts. But having an awareness of those habits and tendencies that keep us tethered is the bastion of a mindful yoga practice. There’s no need to beat yourself up for trying to remember that bread recipe while in downward dog, or puzzling over last week’s encounter with a dog on the pavement while marking out your sun salutations. But the guide brings you back to what’s undeniable, here and now: your body, your breath, your supports… Only then can new ways of thinking become possible, new approaches to old situations. Awareness itself has the loosening effect.

In a cultural landscape where the body sits over here and the mind lives over there, the idea that both ride together on this path, can remain just that: a cool idea. It takes guts to slow down and do philosophy with the body. The courage to attend to our tendencies, to question our attitudes, our postures and our role in our relationships, this is not simply “headstuff”. It is a training of the body-mind towards greater liberation. A gradual and delightful path that you travel in good company.

you need to calm down...

I don't teach yoga to calm you down

I teach yoga so you have a space

in which you can meet your red hot rage

and you can listen to it and you can get

really interested in what it has to say

and if it needs more time

you can get interested in that

and maybe there's some insight there

and maybe the way your shoulders feel like steel

and your hips like wood

and the lifeline of your spine is switched off

has something to do with the pain of the world

but only you will know that

only you can find out

because only you understand the words your

body wants to, HAS to say

and I teach yoga so that you can get quiet

enough to hear them

and perhaps, maybe, possibly

tap into the pool of sweet silence behind the words

and if that calms you down?

lovely

but that's not why I teach yoga

What's the point?

One-pointed focus is the holy grail of many practices. In yoga, dhārana has varyingly been described as one-pointed awareness, concentration, focus… It precedes the absorptive, blissful states that we yearn for. Modern mindfulness, with its emphasis on dealing with this moment in time, adapts the meaning of focus accordingly. It is to be non-judgemental, practiced “in a particular way.” In this era, multitasking, headaching and having one’s attention pulled in any which way is part of the parcel of being human. One-pointed focus is a luxury, is it not?

 My question is: do we need discipline to achieve one-pointed focus? Or do we need focus to cultivate discipline? The answer is probably: a bit of this, a bit of that. How predictably opaque. No wonder we wander.

Which is where āsana comes in, my friend. Our body draws our attention effortlessly if we but listen. Slowing down for the sake of slowing down was never the point. Turning inwards for the sake of turning inwards was never the point. The point is what we slow down for, the point is where we turn in to. And that point? It contains the world. Remember Blake? The world in a grain of sand, no less. Except the grain of sand is infinitely smaller, more elusive. Like sand rushing through our fingers, like our life.

So zooming in in order to zoom out? Sure, it can leave you in a bit of a spin. But in the spin cycle, your dirty laundry gets done. Now all you have to do is fold it up neatly and put it back into the drawer.

Begin with āsana, begin with breath. Allow yourself to be drawn in to that one point, the origin of all. There is deep rest there, energetic resource that is our birthright.

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Doubting Killjoy or Sceptic Reveller?

Where are the invisible lines that we are not prepared to cross? I imagine they are unique to each of us. Some people are prepared to work with a therapist but wouldn’t go near a healer. Yoga is woo woo but pilates is great. Are comfort zones to be expanded? Stepped out of? Should we face our fears? Engage with our trauma? Where do we start?

The wounded healer is the potential charlatan, the well meaning therapist is the inexperienced traumatizer. Scepticism is useful, doubt is a hindrance. Have you ever danced around these lines?

Discernment is key, it is said. By who? By the same people who are trying to confuse us, the same fake gurus. By the skilled practitioners and infinitely compassionate masters of the subtle realm. Ultimately the compass spins back to the north and there are you my friend. Naked. Alone. You better get used to being in your own skin. When we look outside we find great pointers pointing back in.

 So choose with care who you follow. What is their use of language? I was told to avoid anyone who told me what I “should” do. It served me for a while. To doubt anyone who claimed they were awake, yet I do have a penchant for self-proclaimed genius.

Perhaps, possibly, maybe, we all step our own path and make our own decisions, however unwise these may be. Perhaps our own foolishness serves us. Other teachers told me not to assume that a person would be better off without their problems. Where would you be without them? And if the noise becomes too much, see if you can find the still point without freezing. If the noise becomes too much, see if you can play with the dials, louder, quieter, now who’s in control?

I do hope you can have fun in life. Another teacher told me: we forget to enjoy life and think we have to be good at it. He told me: it is all a divine play. Lila. And that’s when you can’t help but wonder why the children are crying. I do love humans so.

A musing on Mind

The term mind is misleading. From my experience, as spiritual practitioners we are prone to dismiss the mind or ‘ego’ too readily. And yet there is a higher mind by which we feel guided, in which we feel safe, a mind that feels like home.

Bruce Lipton on a recent podcast talked of the conscious and the subconscious mind, which can be an interesting way of differentiating the voice that we wish would shut up from the voice that wishes it would. My understanding is in no way perfect yet my experience is that there is one eschelon of mind which is completely wild, untame, it throws up random content, continuously. How we relate to that relentless deluge of randomness is (in my mind) what can help steer us from insanity to sanity. The scary thing is that perhaps most of the time we mostly identify with the randomness. We have a thought and it carries us wherever it wants. This is perhaps why so many spiritual teachers hark on about awareness, about noticing, or noting, or observing, or witnessing. Yet personally I find it misleading and futile to consider this ‘awareness’ as something blemish-free, pure and objective. On the contrary, this awareness is stuffed full of all the qualities of divinity. Everything that we have known to be true, truly true. This awareness is not neutral, it is not empty.

Bear with me, I am still figuring this all out, and in the figuring I am noticing where I like to hang out. Perhaps you’d like to join me in noticing which parts of the random, insane, subconscious meandering mind you identify with.

Novelty Wears Off

What is it about us humans that we like things new and shiny? It applies to the obvious exhilaration around gift giving but also to experiences. Collecting experiences has become the measure by which we value our lives. In these times of global shutdown, where do we get our kicks?

      The pursuit of novelty is everywhere. It is the reason why ‘It’s for life, not just for Christmas’ hits home hard. A bouncy, cuddly puppy may be irresistible but in a week’s time you’ll be fed up and in a few years, the dog is an appendage, you can’t imagine life without it.

      Proust reminds us in his Search for Lost Time that it is not about seeing new things, but seeing with new eyes. This is just as pertinent to our yoga practice. It is so easy nowadays to skip from one teacher to another, to shop around and consume class passes. Often the teachings are barely absorbed by those imparting them, who are themselves delighting in the novelty. It is a precarious age when the fetishization of instantaneity has us ricocheting around the inner sanctum.

      So stay a while. The most precious insight comes from staying. Is lockdown showing you that? Is your suffering showing you that?

      When I experienced the sudden loss of my father, all I could do for a few weeks was Sudoku. I was hovering on a plane of existence that had me tasting the novelty fully. I could not make any other move. Filling in the little squares with numbers was as much as I could do to function somehow, go through the motions. But I needed time to let the full feeling absorb, there was no pondering, reminiscing, searching, calculating… the brain had calibrated itself to hover. I had to allow the novelty of the loss to become me, my loved one to become me. This was also the first and only time that I followed the classic ashtanga system of practice, for those few weeks. The stacked, mechanical sequencing helped me stay the course, without searching.   

      Sometimes we need tools to stay. Just like I needed Sudoku. In yoga we have asanas, we have various pranayamas, some chant mantras or count mala beads. These are our tools to stay the course.

      Ultimately they are only that: tools to let time filter in, they are how we soak it up, the full juicy illusion of it. And by time I mean life.  

Meditating with Eyes Open

There is so much happening in the world at this time.  While there is a tendency to somehow separate oneself from the world, in our yoga practice it is important to stay focused on the subtle connectivity between the internal and the external. There are many methods of aligning to this connectivity, for example via meditation on the four qualities of the dharma. These are as I was taught: intimacy, immediacy, spontaneity and the obvious. While it is important to continue the good work of the more restorative yoga styles: slowing down, stretching with languor, ‘softening into’ postures; it is vital not to lose track of why we are in this practice ultimately.

It is part of our practice to continuously question why we do what we do. Of course the answer will always be different. Can our practice be one of constantly recalibrating our intention? Of re-aligning with the four qualities of the dharma?

We all have our different motivations for starting out on our ‘yoga journey’ in the first place. For most people it will be the desire or need to cultivate peace with the physical body. Perhaps because of a pain, descending posture, distracting states of nervousness… As yoga master B.K.S Iyengar points out, these are all very valid starting points and shows that we are practical people. However, the physical body is not the end point of practice.

When I started my yoga practice I was focused on quite the opposite: on transcending the physical body. In the greater scheme of things, this approach is just as limited.

Which brings me to the matter of meditating with eyes open. It has become a more urgent concern for me since I identified that pursuing transcendence is my tendency. Sitting comfortably, closing my eyes and gradually dissolving the components of my physicality; a sort of ‘tuning in’ and ‘dropping out’. Reflecting on the world around me however, I can see that this approach does not always cut the mustard. And so I begin my practice with the eyes open, softly but surely.

With social upheavals becoming more substantial, environmental and political affairs more critical, it is harder to hide from the truth that our spiritual practice cannot and must not occupy its own separate compartment. We are also at a point in terms of information where the risk of overwhelm is real but so is the capacity of access. The masterpiece that is ‘Radical Dharma’ by Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens and Dr. Jasmine Syedullah for example, reminds us what it means to be truly awake in the world.

A spiritual practice that excludes the obvious is a questionable practice. Whereby periods of quiet contemplation are necessary and attending to ourselves as we would to others is an all-embracing act of compassion, it is possible to go too far one way. And so, to conclude a passage from the Ishavasya Upanishad:

‘Those who only follow the path of avidya (action in the world) enter blind darkness. Conversely, those who are only absorbed in vidya (the internal knowledge of the mind and more precisely the meditative practices) also enter blind darkness. The one who knows both vidya (the internal world) and avidya (the external world) goes through the abyss of death via avidya and attains immortality through vidya.’ (9-11 Ishavasya Upanishad)

In yoga, don’t leave anything out.