DOING YOGA
Yoga postures are very strange. Yoga practitioners don’t think so because they do them. They’re prejudiced. But if you look objectively, at almost any yoga posture, you can’t help but see strangeness. Kandasan, with the feet bent in towards the navel, is pretty weird. Chakorasan, where you balance on your hands and put your leg behind you head. That is very weird. This is not normal human activity. These postures can very easily create tension. If they are not done with care and attention. But if you use them with care they can challenge tension in the body. Provided you go slowly, slowly. If you are willing to proceed step by step. Gradually releasing the body from tension by using the the compass of sthiram sukham to guid you into your postures.
There is no need for yoga practice to be a struggle. There is no need for yoga practice to be difficult. It’s only difficult when you are acting beyond your capacity. If you go back and honour your capacity it becomes easy. If you honour your capacity your capacity increases. If you keep doing that you will soon be where you wanted to be in the first place, but with no struggle. If you keep doing that slowly slowly, step by step, staying with your capacity as it is, and in doing so allowing your capacity to grow organically, your capacity will soon meet your ambition. This happens without struggle or injury, but simply with practice. How far you go depends how ambitious you are, and what your actual capacity is. But there is no need to be ambitious in terms of flexibility of strength in order to know what yoga is. We all have the capacity to totally relax no matter how much tension we normally carry, no matter how deeply held. If someone were to inject you with anesthetic the tension would immediately disappear, immediately. It is not inherent. It is a very deep habit of holding on to the past. Not being grounded in the present. Yoga is a challenge to that habit of tension and running away into time.
Tension is muscular effort that is not related to action being taken. In other words tension is muscular effort that is not appropriate, not necessary. Whenever you are not lying down some muscular effort is required to resist gravity. This need not be tension but it sometimes is. So freeing the body from tension means to free the body from unnecessary muscular effort. This means to let go of deliberately making unnecessary effort, and to challenge chronic muscular activity that is there out of habit. So there are two kinds of tension. Tension that arises because you are working too hard or ineffectively. Tension that is there anyway, out of habit: chronic muscular contraction.
There is also a third kind of tension, which is a kind of blend of the first two. This is tension that arises automatically because you are in the situation that you are in. A tension that arises independent of the actions that you are taking. Some people become tense as soon as somebody looks at them. Some people become tense as soon as someone tells them what to do. This can happen to yoga students when they are being told what to do by yoga teachers. The situation itself creating tension. Underneath that kind of situational tension there is even deeper tension, tension that we carry around regardless of the situation. Residual tension that maybe left over from having been attacked by a dog. Tension left over from being told to be quiet all the time as a child. Tension left over from being told that you are too fat. Whether that is your friends telling you so or a magazine.
So yoga is addressing itself to all of these kinds of tension: active, situational and residual. But it’s challenging them with action: and action involves and requires muscular effort. So muscular effort, or contraction, is being used to release muscular contraction, or effort. Necessary muscular effort is being required to release unnecessary muscular contraction. Therefore we can not just take the easy way out. Sukham or comfort, does not mean least effort. Sukham means that the action being taken in a particular place is directly inviting deeper comfort in the bodymind as a whole. Effort is required. The particular efforts required can be unfamiliar. Learning them therefore can be difficult, and that difficulty can itself create tension. But once the actions are better understood and the body becomes better able to apply them they will not generate tension they will release it. This is a matter of practice, not study of anatomy or physiology.
The muscular effort required of yoga is directed towards stability or sthiram. Only within stability can comfort happen. If you don’t feel stable you don’t feel safe. Your body constantly feels more or less stable, more or less safe, no matter what your mind is saying or not. I’m speaking of the body feeling safe. The body will only relax if it feels safe. You can not force the body to relax, you can invite it to relax by establishing it in stability. Which fundamentally means to ground the foundation. To actively and evenly ground those parts of the body that are supposed to be on the floor. To do only that which is required to bring that about. Upon that stability the body is then articulated in space as an opening of all of the joints, as a challenge to tension in the joints. All muscles begin and end in the joints. This opening into the body is sukham. Releasing as you open, flowering as you release, as your roots ground you sthiram. So this is sthiram sukham.
The word asana in the yoga sutras refers to a quality in the bodymind. It is a state of awareness relative to the body, in which the body is free from tension, comfortable and stable manifesting the infinite beyond duality. I have a limited location in space, my body fills a finite amount of space. The experience of space is based upon the experience of opposites. Front relative to back, left relative to right, top relative to bottom: the polar coordinates of the three dimensions. It is our sense of these that makes us feel limited in space, it makes us feel finite.
In a symmetrical posture the articulation of the left hand and arm, when there is no tension in them, will be the same as the articulation of the right hand and arm, when there is no tension in them. If there is tension in one arm it will not be the same articulation as the other. But when the articualation of both hands and arms are the same, because they are both free from tension, there is no possibility of distinguishing between them. Unless you look at them, with your eyes or with your mind. But if you are simply experiencing your arms as actions and your hands as awarenesss, your arms as awareness and your hands as actions, you will not be able to distinguish between them. They will be singing the same song. Two voices one song, exactly in harmony, with exactly the same tone coming from exactly the same distance away and you can not distinguish between them.
When you apply this process to the whole of the body: every left part relative to every right part; every front part relative to every back part; every top part relative to every bottom part; every inner part to every outer part: the finite nature of the body no longer asserts itself. You all know this. You are no longer treating your body as an object at all. There is simply an effortless awareness of your undeniable existence which has nothing to do with the parts of your body be. Within that there is a feelling of being totally unrestricted. This is what Patanjali means by manifesting the infinite: unrestricted, no longer feeling limited or finite. This is a result of having gone beyond duality. Having balanced lefts with rights, fronts with backs, tops with bottoms, insides with outsides: in action.
This is incredibly powerful. Simple though it may be, unexciting as it may sound. Nevertheless its power is undenibale when you start to see that left and right, front and back, top and bottom, inside and outside are simply functions of perception. They are all relative perceptions, and not absolute facts. They are how we perceive and explain objects and actions. This relates not just to the dualities of the body structure, but also to its implication: to self and other. That self and other are also functions of perception, not of actuality. And on the basis of the activation of your body in the postures, the objectification of the body dissolves. This has a deep conditioning impact on how you live. The objectification of life also begins to dissolve. The perception of self and other, and the seperation that this implies, the warfare that this generates, begins to dissolve.
This is what it means to manifest the infinite beyond duality. To no longer insisit that the left is separate from the right. To no longer insist that the right is better than the left; the white is better than black; female better than male; muslim is better than jew etc. This is the gift of yoga, being delivered in action. There is no need for philosophy, no need for opinions, agreement or disagreement. Yoga, freedom, only need actions and the recognition of the deep implications of direct experience. This is what yoga is for and when Patanjali talks about the deeper limbs of yoga, he´s simply taking about how this unfolds. How the mind becomes free from right and wrong. This doesn´t mean it becomes free from accurate and inaccurate; accurate and precise actions are required. However, if an action which is required is not possible, the action that takes it´s place is not wrong, it is right. The action that you are capable of taking is the right action to take. Trying to take an action of which you are not capable is wrong. Not taking an action of which you are capable is wrong. I´m talking about actions in yoga postures; there is a right and wrong. Let us not become too politically correct and damage ourselves as a result.
All actions are not equal. NO: all actions are unique. If we do not keep our back leg straight in Virabadrasan we will damage our lower back. If we cannot keep our back leg straight in Virabadrasan then we should not be doing Virabadrasan: because we are not able to. So we should not be pretending to because that pretence invites injury. But that injury can be very subtle, incremental and gradual. So that when you finally become aware of it you tell yourself that something else caused it. This is because you love your yoga practice and you don´t want to say bad things about it. But you must be willing to do so in order to protect your body. Whatever technique it may be that you have chosen, in order that it not create injury, exhaustion, pride, frustration, anger, Patanjali gives us guidelines.
The first one is ahimsa. Mahatma Gandhi toppled the British Empire through the utilisation of this one principle, for once India was lost the British Empire could not sustain itself. Gandhi toppled the British Empire. This is how powerful ahimsa is: The greatest empire the world had ever known toppled by one little man dedicating his life to ahimsa. Imagine what we can do in our bodies if we do likewise. But Patanjali didn´t just give ahimsa he gave more; he also gave satya which Gandhi also espoused. But he also gives asteya, bramhacharya, aparigraha, sauca etc. Five yama and five niyama.
Sensitivity is the application of ahimsa to practice. Honesty is the application of satya to practice. Openness is the application of asteya. Focus or presence is the application of bramhacharya. Generosity is the application of aparigraha. Integrity is the application of sauca. Acceptance is the application of samtosa. Passion is the application of tapas. Looking within is the application of svadhyaya. Directing that enquiry to the source of action is the application of ishvarapanidana. These are the ten principles Patanjali gives us to guide our use of technique. So that our technique might free our body from tension.
Sensitivity means feeling what you are doing, not thinking about it, not talking about it, not judging, not evaluating: just feeling it. Honesty means responding to it. Sensitivity also means feeling the impact of what you are doing and honesty means responding to that also. Doing what you can to become more stable, more comfortable requires you be sensitive and honest, that you feel what is happening and that you do what you can on the basis of what you feel. In order to be sensitive and honest you also need to be open. If you are not open to the fact that you may not be able to straighten your back leg, you willl not be honest about the fact that you aren´t doing so, and you will stay there injuring your lower back by being insensitive. So you must be open to whatever may be possible, whatever may actually happen. In order to be open, honest and sensitive you have to be present, you have to be focused. Otherwise how do you know, how can you tell? In order to remain open you need to be generous to yourself about what you have found: what you can and can´t do. In other words do not judge what you can or can´t do according to your expectations, your desires, your assumptions or your ideals.
Obviously this is not necessarily easy to do. To be continuously focused, open, generous, honest and sensitive to what you are doing is not easy. However it is the necessary foundation of your integrity. So you could say that the five yamas invite sauca. If you come to your mat and you happen to find that you have very little integrity, or commitment to what you are doing today you are likely to hurt yourself if you do what you normally do when you have commitment. Your integrity and commitment are expressed in your tapas, your passion, the depth of your interest. Your tapas is an expression of your commitment. Your commitment is an expression of your tapas. Your commitment depends entirely on how interested you are. If you are not interested you will not bother. This is why tapas is so important. On the basis of your enthusiasm and your passion, your commitment arises and supports sensitivity, honesty, openness, generosity and focus. On the basis of your commitment, your passion arises and supports sensitivity, honesty, openness, generosity and focus. On that basis alone can integrity of action take place.
