Take your non-dominant hand and try to press the index finger and middle finger together and separate them from the ring finger and pinky which are pressed together, a V shape with two fingers on each line of the V.  Spock used to do this. Make it flat. Not too hard? Now press the ring finger and middle finger together and separate the pinky off by itself and the index finger off by itself. Make it flat. Can you do it?

     Apply yourself for a moment and you’ll get these. They require a bit of concentration as we tease muscle groups apart which usually work together. This act of leaning into our nerves so we can come up with something novel, by teasing apart something that usually works as a composite piece, is an act of tapas and I will call the region upon which it works a tapas-field. Tapas is a Sanskrit word which means “glowing fire” or “heat” and is used by yoga to convey a transformative act of concentration. The fire that will burn you clean. The tapas field here is: that moment where you can’t quite get the fingers apart, the fingers don’t just jump to it because they don’t know how yet; an act of learning something we can’t do yet.

     The Ashtanga system seems designed to always have us up against this field. Learned through teacher assisted self-practice setting (Mysore style), the student basically gets the green light to progress through the asanas until she encounters something that she can’t do. At this point, progress through the series stops and she stays there until she learns at least basic competency with the difficult thing; she learns to do something that she can’t do yet. An act of evolution.  As the progressive series unfold in Ashtanga, the degree of asana difficulty becomes an insurmountable curve, and even the most willing and able yogi eventually peaks out and gradually slides back down. Tapas is built into the system.

     After succeeding at the Spockfinger thing, we can move onto greater tease-apart challenges. A good one is Urdhva Mukha Svanasana, Up Dog: try to tease apart firm squeezing of the thighs with total relaxation of the buttocks. (For people with tender lower backs, this is a good skill). Mula Bandha goes further. If Ashwini mudra is the anal complex of muscles, and Vajroli mudra the uro-genital complex, Mula Bandha is recognized as the cervix for women and muscles further back at the base of the penis for men. Try teasing those apart: 1. genitals from anus, and 2. for women, the cervix from the muscles that hold back urine, for men, isolations between the front and the back of the root of the genitals. (Check Mula Bandha by Swami Satyananda Saraswati for more than you ever thought you wanted to know about this).

     We can move into the lungs and pranayama: hold your breath until you feel the urge to breathe, notice the nature and quality of this set of urges and the associations that can come with it. Tease apart a deliberate relaxed decision to resume breathing from the desire to react to the urges. In many ways, I see this as a very easy way to get right at the heart of yoga: a deliberate exercise of pushing ourselves right to the edge of life, in a very safe and contained manner, to open a laboratory of reactions in which we can train ourselves. Every little reaction-urge not acted upon is growth of yoga. Hold your breath long enough and the grim reaper himself shows up: what better teacher?! And how cool that you can get him after only a few minutes.

     And then moving to the biggie: teasing apart what I will call yogamind from discursive mind. This too requires that sense of bearing into, a quality which will be a joy and a rapture at times when we are up to it, and a burden requiring discipline when we are less inspired. It is the sense of taking on work. Why? I will argue that yogamind, although an aspect of the experience of all of us throughout life, is a way of being in time that comes only after a degree of competence is gained in discursive mind. True yogamind is born from the state of a mature discursive mind that has learned to value the benefits of yogamind but ironically, has a terrible time getting out of the way to allow yogamind to happen; too much of a klutz. And periodically even engages in heated debates with the ego, attempting to talk it out of practicing yogamind; jilted former favorite son. The practitioner has to fight through all this just to get yogamind established.

     But first, let me characterize my understanding of these two minds. Roughly, they can be divided between the two hemispheres of the brain, although higher states of both yogamind and discursive mind certainly integrate both hemispheres. But yogamind corresponds more closely to the right brain, which is less analytic more organic; less linear, more weblike; less about distinctive differentiation, more about relation and connection; less about survival, more about radiant delight. Human development goes through oscillations between these two poles, and people are spread across a continuum, in terms of their disposition, somewhere between hard right and hard left.

     Discursive mind can use different types of analysis, from the highly structured mechanizations of logic, to poetic flights of fancy. Mathematics is pure logical structure at its root, but higher math gets into more poetic states of mind without losing the foundations of its structure, and the same with physics; Einstein mastered horrid amounts of calculation capacities before he got wild with them. And in those fields, if the calculations ultimately don’t work, the wildness is considered pointless frittering. Great poets often never get good at math, and make a career out of such frittering, but may have a large command of the palette of multiple languages, or even language sum-total, the ur-language itself, as a means of expressing the vast vision they perceive, or the vast sound they hear, touch, taste, smell.

     All of these are discursive mind. None of these are yogamind. Yogamind, as I see it, is the great OTHER to discursive mind, to language and logic mind, to both mythopoetic and mathematic mind. This post that you are reading is not yogamind, although it is attempting to point it out. As such, yogamind is the great OTHER to almost all of that which has been generated by Western culture. Visual arts, music, dance, athletics and some religious rituals and rites use lots of yogamind but they haven’t been grounded in it. Some cloistered monks, manual laborers and bizarre alchemists have gotten close, but their expressions of it haven’t been as clear as those that have come from the East, although the final highest stages of realization may have been equally realized. (The yogamind I’m getting at in this post is not to be confused with the highest stages of spiritual realization although it is an excellent path to them- more on that later). (Also, from the sixties onward, the East became a significant part of the story of the West, and cultural productions have never been the same since. Thus, many stoners have gotten a strong taste of yogamind.) As a basic human capacity, yogamind isn’t something all that strange to Westerners so much as it never really had the analytic aspect truly teased out of it so that its own intelligence could be seen in its purity.

     Yogamind is a state of focused attention to the experience in the present moment exactly as it is projected by our perceptual capacities. At first this can be a seeing of the field in front of us as it is, just looking without interpreting; this can also apply toward hearing or touching or tasting or smelling. But at a certain point, these outward senses are folded into an inner sensing which is based on internal sensation, based on the data that the nerves take in from inside, ie: the feeling that we feel in our belly when it is full of food, or the stretch sensation in our hamstring as we do forward fold, two examples of the most rudimentary forms of internal sensing. Raw sensation such as full belly, stretching muscles are the predominant form of cognition in infancy. Needless to say, this begins to gain in sophistication, eventually giving rise to an intellectual way of viewing the self and the world, which includes internal sensate data in the calculations it makes. We could call this a mature adult cognitive capacity, an ability to turn attention to various fields and begin to work them out, with the help typically of both hemispheres. Again, some people are more right brain, some more left, some more in touch with bodily sensate data, some less.

     Yogamind relies on the emergence of the independent inner witness that was born with the maturity of discursive mind. This witness can put its attention capacity wherever it chooses, although total freedom as such is quite an accomplishment; most common is a witness that is free on surface levels, (ie: I can read this if I will it), but is often riding larger waves of self-inflicted karma over which it has no control. If such a witness were to turn its attention away from discursive noticings about events and actually hold in attention the deeper movements of the psyche which supports that witness itself, it may very well begin to get a bit shaky; this is material that discursive mind can take notes on, point out logical processes about, recognize images and themes, refer to what came before and predict what will come next, and so on. But it is also material which has such a strong psychic charge that discursive mind is helpless to take it and transform it. For this, the ego needs a mind which can contact felt reality itself, learn its valence in a wordless manner, and build the strength to begin the work of transforming it. 

     And here we come to the next step, and a radical move it is, and apparently not for everyone at this point in time. It involves the psychological concept of fusion which I was getting at earlier in this post: fusion is a condition that is necessary and unavoidable at each point in development and is only viewed as fusion when seen from a higher state of development. So, if you never tried to do Spock fingers, you would never wonder about your inability to do it. But the moment someone shows it to you, you become aware of a fusion of muscle groups as you take a moment to tease them apart. Only when you began reaching for the greater differentiation of hand muscles did anything like a fusion become apparent. Before that you were simply happily (or not so happily) fused. Let’s draw the concept into finer material: as a two year old, it was entirely appropriate to scream out “MOMMY!!”. As an adult, if you get off the phone with her and aspects of yourself are still screaming this at some level, you get curious about it, you recognize that some parts of your personality are still fused with Mom. A little fusion item is noticed, drawn into awareness as a result of the basic psychological urge to individuate from our parents, a process that many people never get very far with.

     And here is my claim for the teasing apart of yogamind from discursive mind: having arrived at the state of mature adult mind which is mature discursive mind, we remain there for a while before we begin to get itchy for something more. The process that presents itself as a solution to this crisis is the act of existing simply in the present moment and letting go of the mind that needs to think its way through everything. This strikes us as somehow a higher way of being, partly because we begin to get just a glimmer of how such a way of being allows a bit of traction on the deeper material in our psyche; and indeed, this is getting at the ways of being in time that the spiritual traditions of the East overtly advocate and those from the West obscurely so. Having spent some time just being, and recognizing the benefits, we suddenly begin to perceive intrusions of discursive or analytic mind as fusions, as something we would rather not have but can’t control…yet. And so the urge, when we are inspired, is to lean into the tapas field of mind control, and to seek tools and teachers who can help us with this. I see the Western movement toward yoga as a way of addressing this emergent developmental thrust.

     What form does it take? Mature adult discursive mind, now seen as a state of fusion, gives way to the work of seperating itself from yogamind. So what is yogamind? Much of the previous posts in this blog are attempts to get at it. It is the feeling substrate which gets marked up, affected, determined, by thoughts. Free it from discursive mind, then it soars. It engages felt objects directly and it transmutes them, the greater the focus, the faster and more complete the transmutation. Focus can be intensified with practice over time and the great yogis attest to how far this can go. Again, analysis and poetry can express all this, it can paint it or compose it in sound, but such representations aren’t actually doing it as yogamind can do it, just as this piece I’m writing can’t. Great art can inspire us to… engage reality directly.

     What does yogamind engage? What kind of reality is that? Well, if we see an outward visual field, that tree over there, we can’t really do much to it, without picking up a real chainsaw and going mad with ancient antagonisms toward the great mother. But, following the fifth limb of the eight limbs of Ashtanga, Pratyahara, which tells us to take outward vision and turn it inward, then we can begin to work on the fields that present themselves. The Tibetans would have us establish inner mandala-like visions, and then begin manipulating them. Acute outward vision can help put this in place, but it is the inward theater where the work happens. So, yogamind is inner work. Likewise with sensation, which is closer to the Hatha Yoga way: the capacity to feel a full belly matures into the capacity to feel subtle emotions, matures into the capacity to feel the feeling substrates to intellectual work, on up to highly subtle and powerful perceptions of cosmic processes, etc. These sensings begin to manifest in the cerebral-spinal circuit and projects from there into the larger cosmic body. Such work typically manifests as concrete samskara fields of varying density and quality which can be transformed with yogic focus.

     Here is where the alchemical roots of Hatha yoga assert themselves: samskaras become seen as fusion items which begin to take elemental form, and like the complexities of chemistry, many forms begin to emerge along with a qualitative aspect, ie: this here samskara is definitely not gold, but a little bit more like shit, or static, or the crud in the drain of my kitchen sink. But, I clearly sense it, and I’m willing to bear attention into it, I’m willing to work with my body in the recognition that the body is the theater in which this transformation process must happen. (Thus updog, mula bandha, pranayama, energy of  teacher, energy of a community of at least a few others doing the same, etc: various methods to get the energy level up so that we can do the work of yogamind). The samskara undergoes the alchemical process of purification, of teasing apart the strands that are mushed together, of feeling the greater energy that emerges from it as it becomes a finer substance, of feeling the energy that is released as that which was locked up in the crud is revealed and goes to work, of feeling the cosmos come in as another doorway of perception is opened, of feeling the heart quicken  and come to life as it instinctively senses something exciting happening which opens its desire to love and feel.

     This is the kind of thing happening inside the life of sages who are sitting there “doing nothing”. Such work can go on into evermore subtle sheaths infinitely, and it may altogether cease at times as the realm of Vedanta’s Brahman is entered (a state of apparent nothingness recognized by many traditions  by many names as the creative matrix itself). Of course, those who come near such a sage will feel something, because intense inner work like this registers in the energy fields of various material locations, including almost always in the general vicinity of the sage’s own physical body.

     A couple notes here: the yogamind I’m referring to here is not absence of cognition. It is rather yoga cognition, or alchemical cognition. Pure awareness divorced of cognition comes later. When Patanjali delineates yoga, we can see this at three levels at least: 1. freedom from distraction, 2. freedom from discursive analytic mind, 3. freedom from any manifestation at all: Brahman (if we follow the thread through to its Advaita conclusion).

     Yogamind and discursive mind are not enemies, although, as we pick sides in a sports contest just to have fun in that realm of entertainment, so we can pick sides between the two minds as we go through the arduous winnowing of coming to higher awareness. Fusion needs differentiation, and such a need will continue to assert itself until purified elements can stand on their own and both minds get a chance to do their work, which eventually will give way to a higher integration. Once yogamind has been established to a degree, the correspondences between the two minds is intimate. Busy intellect makes yogamind’s work much more complicated- the play in which discursive mind may take delight can result in long hard labor for yogamind as it tries to sort out the vibrational chaos left by intellectual experimentation. Or, if the psyche is caught in an old negative pattern, discursive mind may be playing old ridiculous tape loops while yogamind desperately digs down into the psychic dirt endeavoring to root up the mess once and for all. But, for the most part, a more sophisticated intellect will allow the potential for a more sophisticated yogmind, though it makes yogaminds’ work more daunting. And a deep masterful yogamind will make for truly compelling discursive expressions should the individual choose to do them.

      And there is no need to get ahead of ourselves and worry about whether to integrate or tease apart because the direction will present itself as a compelling urge when the time is right. How do we know which urge is compelling and which is not? Discernment of this kind I see as a great labor, but it’s again essentially alchemic: learn to determine the quality of the combination of elements which make up the urge, or even look for the pure element itself, which is gold. Because there is such a thing.

     In 2008 the world does not need a single fundamentalist more. This is urgent.

     How can we characterize fundamentalism in a yoga class? To me, the basic indicator is this: I, the teacher, state what I want you to do. You, the student, respond with a reason why you want to do it differently. And here’s the true test: at that point I, the teacher, either hear what you say and take a pause to consider it, or I don’t and rather simply insist that you do it my way. The difference between a dialogue and dictation. (See note 1 below).

     Joel Kramer, an old-timer yoga teacher in Northern California, co-wrote the book The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power. From what I know of Joel, I have some reservations about his capacity to surrender to tradition and teacher, but much of that book is an illuminating application of post-modernist power critique to Gurus and Yoga. And, to put it mildly, the power plays in our field are typically far cruder and easier to spot than much of what the humanities in academia began deconstructing in the sixties. 

    In an intelligent, sensitive and exacting dialogue, traditional Ashtanga Yoga will not wilt: there are many very very good reasons for doing it traditionally. Here’s a metaphor which has helped me: when I have traveled around parts of Tamil-Nadu, it has been fairly common to be allowed into the outer sanctums of a Shaivite temple, but to be denied access to the inner sanctum. I’m not a converted Hindu, or a wanna-be Hindu, but at  first I was irked by this. I was thinking about Joseph Campbell, who wrote  that this is the era where the secrets of the inner temples must be opened for humanity. I was thinking about the Dalai Lama, who in centuries past was complelety sequestered, his Buddhism only for the select. Then  the Chinese came in and smashed everything up, which forced our current Dalai Lama onto the world stage, where he is now one of the most readily recognized humans on the planet; he is now with his people, and he’s with us, and Tibetan Buddhism is for the world, and the world is better for it.

     But inside the inner sanctum of a Shiva temple is a Lingam: a penis in a vagina, with milk poured over it. Draw the parallel to a woman’s vagina: she doesn’t just let anybody in, does she now? Why? There must be something to be protected, something dear and intimate and vulnerable,  the matrix for the profound beauty of life itself, a field of subtle particles that can be disturbed, something to be treated with care by only those who know how to do so and have passed the series of tests and challenges.

     When I first got into yoga, early nineties, Southern California was the land of Vinyasa flow (still is really), and most teachers had never been to India. I found this yoga culture very appealing, very helpful. But when I began to do traditional Ashtanga, first with Chuck Miller and then in Mysore, something much bigger happened, much more powerful, the depth was so compelling. Something quite amazing in terms of its transformational potential had been cultivated and allowed to mature over time, had been protected and preserved. Adherence to a tradition had made possible the proliferation of a subtle particle field. I was astounded and in awe to recognize these qualities. But here’s the paradox: the intelligent engagement with what is arising now, and an openness to its suggestions and influence, this is what keeps the subtle field alive. Frozen dogma, applied with the hand of subtle violence in a conscious or unconscious attempt to maintain control or power kills spiritual life, and simply attracts students who are engaging a doomed attempt at solace and security and need someone to tell them what to do. The subtle Ashtanga spirit lives in both the rooms of Tim Miller and Richard Freeman, two teachers who have gone deeper into deliberate variation than I have. Ashtanga needs to be more than just a reaction to shallow professional yoga, but rather the clear statement of the strength of a lineage preserved and enacted in the now.

     Both September 11th and the Bush Cartel’s equally cynical, fundamentalist, far more violent, and only one step more civilized response now stand pretty clearly in the light of their actual motivations: blatant attempts at power, and the willingness to kill thousands of people to get it. In such a climate as this, what do we make of individuals from generous Western homes arriving at a true-believer version of Yoga, taught without tolerance for variation, and offered in a mean-spirited militant manner, replete with abuse and humiliation tactics? After coming so far, the Western seeker of truth and evolution arrives at this?

     Ashtangis themselves would do well to recognize the Krishnamacharya strain weaving itself around the perimeters of what happens in Mysore. If Krishnamacharya created and taught the (then) four series of Ashtanga during the Mysore palace days, he later would evolve it into the precursers of Viniyoga. Guruji’s book Yoga Mala offers several practice variations for people in different walks of life. Guruji himself has offered variations, such as Ardha Matsyendrasana for those who have knee trouble in Marichyasana D; and he showed me a work-up pose for Pashasana, not in class but later as several of us sat on his porch in Luxshmipuram: go against a wall and walk back slowly with your hands.  A look at how the form of the practice has changed in Mysore over the years, from drishtis, to subtle vinyasa details, shows us that Guruji is actually not anal about some impossible ideal of the perfect form, but rather has been moving his way along, allowing things to evolve, wise and patient with both paradoxes and apparent unclarities.

     This is called the dialogical process, the journey of coming to knowledge, the willingness to look at what you do, to receive and integrate energy and information from others, and to refine your approach. The disinclination to this, the desperate grab for dogma as an attempt to avoid the existential discomforts of life, is also a way to obliterate the uncertainty that comes from evolving past what you knew: the urge to not evolve. The USA was gripped by such a seizure following 9-11, and the results were really the ugliest batch of Americans ever. So what do we do with The Ugly Yogi?

     I would advise students of Ashtanga and yoga this: you are the final word on what you do, any Guru’s job is finally to help you find your own inner Guru. If you feel something to be a truth, and your teacher negates it, the final word rests with you: to get to the stated purposes of yoga, we must go way beyond any petty insistence on form or the power dynamics of a teacher. Before a teacher is entrusted with any kind of transference, which I hold to be the higher possibilities of what a good teacher can offer, you need to decide whether you want to let this teacher into your inner sanctum.

Note 1: This doesn’t mean that the teacher agrees with what the student says, or views it as wise. It doesn’t mean that I give her the OK to do it that way in my class. It just means that I take the information in, and respond to it, as opposed to simply ignoring it or basically stating that this isn’t a place where we do dialogue. Also: Implicit here is the recognition that each person passes through the phase we can associate with fundamentalist thinking as he or she developes; everybody starts at step one.

(Note: the funny thing about blogs…they go backwards, like experimental fiction. So, this month’s post is the leading edge of my thread, and it may seem esoteric. Go to earlier months to fill in some gaps if need be.  Also, this isn’t really a typical blog, in that I’m not offering my diary to the world so much as using this medium as a way to put my writing out for others. I go back and edit to make sure things are consistent, so it should hold up as a whole.

Also,  I was getting asphyxiated by spam,  so comments were restricted for a few weeks as I flailed around trying to get the spam filter in place. Problem has been fixed, hopefully; please leave one if you are so inclined. Thanks, steve)

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Carl Jung is the mosquito buzzing around the ears of the Western yogi. I find myself returning to him again and again and almost invariably I eventually put the book down with the conclusion that Jung is ridiculous and absurd. But then he creeps back up on me, and I pick him back up. He’s the mosquito that won’t go away. Why does he bug me so? Because several of his ideas are somewhat threatening to Westerners who have taken up yoga. Here’s one of them:

     If a Westerner does serious yoga, he will uncover deeper layers of himself. Those layers are Western, not Eastern; the more yoga the Westerner does, the further he will get from yoga. That’s my extension of Jung’s basic idea anyway. His response to this dilemma : the West will eventually build its own yoga, based on Christianity. This involves a few astute recognitions on his part, one being that in yoga, India has developed a “system of hygiene”  as he put it, which he saw as superior to anything comparable developed in the West.  However, he saw an elemental incompatibility when an Eastern cultural item is used to unveil the depths of a Western character formed on Western cultural items; the Westerner will begin to diverge from the kinds of developmental traces that informed the Eastern teacher and teaching. For example, a person of Anglo-Saxon descent who does serious yoga will begin to reach  deeper realms of character which will be Anglo-Saxon in quality: the themes given up by her imaginations and dreams, her deeper motivations, her worries and concerns, her style of approaching reality, that to which she is unconsciously drawn, all of these will begin to cluster around certain traits which can be traced to the specific culture and heritage of the individual, which Jung dredged many generations back. These various ways of being may not be well served by yogic techniques, in which case it’s better to pursue the things that Anglo-Saxons did, or Russian things (if I’m Russian), or Hopi things if I’m Hopi, etc.

     The whole cross-cultural post-modern thing: Although there are a great many ways in which people are similar across cultures, we can’t underestimate the major differences in the particle arrangements of psychic selves from culture to culture. Many post-modern scholars claim that this difference is so profound that it is impossible for a Westerner to actually understand what is meant by, for example, the Yoga Sutras. I think this position goes way too far, but it has some essential truth in it.

     So, although Jung and post-modernists rarely see eye to eye, they have a broad commonality on this issue. The next bothersome idea I wanted to introduce from Jung is that of enantiodromia, which basically says that whatever position or state that the consciousness of the individual achieves, this will eventually become subject to a counter-position developed by the unconscious. So: if we achieve a blissful state of serenity, this will likely be intruded upon by some kind of disturbance. This idea seems immensely unpalatable, but pose a question to yourself: hasn’t this happened to you everytime you have achieved inner peace, meaning: was that inner peace permanent? Jung would say that one of the upheavals of  that peace will be a demonstration by the psyche that another aspect of existence also needs to be considered.

     So, again, supposedly, the more yoga a Westerner does, the further he will get from yoga. But I see the limit to this: Shankaracharya, considered an essential teacher in Pattabhi Jois’ Ashtanga yoga tradition (which incidentally signals Pattabhi’s move from Patanjali’s dualism into an acceptance of the non-dual Advaita position; the Ashtanga path to the highest aims of yoga is through the Upanishads and Vedanta) endlessly belabors different angles into the way in which he sees ultimate reality as being other than anything that has qualities. Until causal emptiness has been realized, this distinction must continue. After the casual realm has been experienced, it is said to clearly cast relative existence in such a way that the two are obviously distinct, and the yogi no longer confuses relative things with the causal matrix. At this point, the non-dual sage chooses to join the fray, as it were, of his own desire, and thus it all becomes Lila, play, as opposed to grim drama, dreadful comedy of errors, etc., (where the relative drama is taken to be the ultimate drama.)

     So, in simple terms: the highest goals of yoga are cross-cultural, period; they take us out of the relative, with all its variations and differences, and into the causal matrix from which the relative emanates, which is one and without distinctions. Our innermost self is the same regardless of individuality and culture.  However, the depths of culture and tradition will be plumbed by almost none of us. So, since most of us will while away our days in the grip of the relative, we need to recognize that this is the realm where cultural and individual differences need to be recognized and honored.

     All of the mature global paths toward enlightenment: Vedanta, Mahayana, Chan, Zen: they all culminate in a state called “non-dual”, which implies a sage who has recognized the nature of the dualistic material world and has embraced it as the only realm in which we can live in this lifetime. But she also knows of the causal matrix, the Brahman, the emptiness behind the relative: she does both. So, this  part of us which is relative, even if we reach the highest states of yoga, this will always be subject to the cultural and interpersonal dynamics from which we have arisen. 

     So, the highest point of yoga is not really inner peace at all. It is full identity with the witness which sees existence. The yogi who sits in Samadhi may well be psychicly in tune with a pure emptiness without movement or any qualities. But his body which supports him while he does this will still be doing many of the things that it usually does, for example:  fighting off harmful microorganisms, viz: warfare. Shankaracharya’s main point is that the body and psyche all live in the relative and that the witness state is something other than the relative. And the relative is a zone of tension/release, conflict/peace, hard/soft, easy/difficult, nice/not nice, etc. That’s just the way it is. That’s the way of the world. What most of us will experience as a sense of inner peace is really just a moment where our bedeviling conflicts  have been brought to a degree of resolve. But this state is still something material:  perhaps a fabulous mix of elements of the highest degree of refinement, but still elements, still relative, still subject to a set of different elements which can confront it and question it as the final word. And Jung says, they will.

     But Shankaracharya claims that there is a final word and that he knows what it is- following after Nagarjuna, Patanjali, Buddha and all the other sages through Indian history who fully recognized and grappled with this drama of opposites- he claims to have found the “positive entity” which transcends all this. And with intense practice and proper guidance, he claims we can get there in this lifetime.

       Several years ago I attended a seminar by post-Jungian James Hillman, who at one point bellowed out “Don’t Go East!!” Why does he yell something like this? Because the Jungians/ Joseph Campbell people/ Archetypalists, hold that the Greek/Latin/Germanic tribes/Jewish tribes/Celtic tribes thing is to participate in myth and story and philosophical and alchemical analysis of various aspects of existence and to find  those constellations of elements and plots which our soul is drawn towards, and to follow that draw, to bring the old stories to life in a new way. An Anglo-Saxon who reads Beowulf may feel something deep and murky stir down there. A Jewish person who has never read the Bible will read the book of Exodus and have vivid dreams that night. Good movies stir up deep old archetypal gunk. Certainly this is a compelling approach to life. (For more on this, go to the 2nd entry under August 2006)

     One problem: I, Steve Dwelley, am one example among now millions of Westerners who are compelled in this same archetypal kind of way to practice yoga from India (or Tibet, China, Southeast Asia, Japan: these are the places on the planet where yoga has played itself out in the past; the story is now underway throughout the world). Lots of Westerners just do yoga to feel good or get sexy, but many of us are allured by a sense of purpose, a way of unraveling the mysteries of the mind, of gleaning some of the meaning of life. We are compelled by this Asian myth: the yogi fights through the “dragons” of the body and mind and attains degrees of ”the maiden”: enlightenment.

     The world is so interconnected now that I believe the souls of those of us living now (and the next generations will go even further) have the entire cultural and lived offering of the history of life on Earth in all its parts  open to us, and we may be drawn to any part of it, and in an unconscious manner, we will be. And the West and East are drawing toward one another irresistibly.

       So, to return to the above example of Anglo-Saxon particles: I hold that such revelations of our deeper self, and their peculiar nature, which may be other than want we thought we wanted for ourselves in life, these must be honored and integrated.  As we get higher in consciousness, we simultaneously go deeper into who were were, into that which has formed us. We can transform who we really are only after we have found out something about it.

      So, if a Westerner is using yoga, she must keep integrating new revelations of her old self with the yoga which is catalyzing the revelation process. Honoring this, we can certainly return to yoga, again and again, in each moment if so desired, but we negate this dialogical, cross-cultural process at our own peril. There are deep Western vibrations that don’t quickly fit with Eastern vibrations and the synthesis process needs some tending, it will take some psychic time in each individual for this synthesis to happen.

     To make some blatant, broad generalizations about differences: the classic Western view of India is that they just stand around doing nothing, praying to God while their buildings collapse and their buses fly off bridges, while Indians often get a belly laugh at how helplessly Westerners flail and thrash against the emptiness and despair in their lives. The other side: Westerners have made the manifest world their God, and such a view has provided them a profound intensity and motivation to the way they pursue material development, and they have created apparent miracles. Indians have understood causal psychic existence and their great sages have offered it to their people at large, providing mass realizations of acceptance, contentment and meaning among a populous who haven’t a fraction of the material advantage of Westerners. And what they have done with psychic energy has produced apparent miracles. Putting these two together seems so natural.       

    So, I’m not letting Jung have the final word on this. I’m sure he’d be delighted.

     I went with Michele and the boys to a hotel in Los Angeles where Mata Amritanandamayi (hugging Mama) was making a stop on her tour. When she sat down, she beckoned our children and others to come sit on her lap for a fifteen minute meditation. I noticed several things immediately- I hadn’t seen her in 9 years, and in the time between she had obviously gone through the divine wringer- Amma was fairly beat up, and yet beautiful and at peace. At that moment I confirmed what I had been sensing since I walked in the door of that hotel: in the presence of this woman, as she is right now, 2007, I could weep intensely, possibly forever.

     In 1998, in India, she was a hoot, undoubtedly profound but with joy and evident delight: that darshan was not sexual but it was erotic to the core, in the sense of eros, cosmic love in full pleasure of the human form. The utter relish she takes in pulling us towards her is no secret. For that first hug she was hilarious and wild, a warrior determined to smack her love straight into the deepest part of my heart, the cosmic heart, no nibbling around, direct at the bulls-eye, and then lean back and go “Whoaaa!!!!” She stared straight into my eyes, conveying the most impossibly exciting journey one could envision, the mad ride she was on and had no intention of ever getting off. I’d never seen anybody so deep in Lila (the divine play), not high jazz guys, not my own Guru, nobody.

     This time,  2007, a darker world stage, and if anything, she was far more deadly accurate, discarding most of the playful part, but willing to go to the grimmest, most horrifying pit, utterly regardless of the ravages on her own body, she’s sobbing and shaking in my ear. The sorrow she knows, the pain she carries, this is unreal. And then a beautific, young-girl-in-delight smile, chocolate kisses, we stagger off, she goes onto the next. A little research and I discover that she basically took that 2005 tsunami- which actually hit her ashram- straight in the face, an unspeakable amount of agony, right there with the people and their tears and tatters and microorganisms and psychic drag. And her charity network is gigantic, she is attracting political leaders, she’s on a very large stage and yet still taking, as Timothy Conway put it, “tidal waves of negative energy” into her own body, on a person to person level, and carrying it. I looked at ravaged beautiful Amma up there, holding my son while he sucked on his sleeve, and could weep forever. In the following two weeks, I was astonished by the way she still lived in me and the kinds of assistance she was providing, deep psychic restructuring, dream presence: I recognized the signs of a Shaktipat of the highest order. I could barely believe that there is someone out there with the strength and courage to do such a thing, let alone on such a grand stage. Who is this Ammachi?

     Why is she so great? One way of expressing it would be: she is so high but so willing to get down. Up and Down: two cosmic directions. I’ll start with Up or ascension and with an example. Let’s say that you are involved in a relationship which, as it progressed, began to reveal various limitations within yourself which play out as dysfunctional relationship dynamics. In the beginning you were happy to engage the relationship, no doubt compelled by the urge to address these limitations. But as time goes by, you begin to get fairly clear about the limitations of your partner. At some point, you make the decision that you are going to force a change in this relationship, either confront it or discontinue it. You then proceed to go about doing just that.

     This process can be seen in terms of ascension, up:  a planet (the relationship) whose gravitational forces once held you in sway are now an orbit from which you can break free, and you want to break free because there is something amiss, or incomplete, or simply because the evolutionary urge becomes irresistible. Maybe it took four years, it took that much learning before you could transcend the gravitational pull of the system: finally you are able to ascend out of it into a larger  system. The impressions left by the relationship no longer compel you to pursue them. (I’m not getting down on loyalty and faith, here I’m talking about situations such as dysfunctional relationship where one person refuses to respond, or is not up to, the attempts to address the dysfunction or lack of development by the other. Or it could apply to working at a job that begins to get extremely boring.) Of course, this is different than bailing out on a situation because it brings up too much of your own stuff. In such a case, you have not left the planet behind, but rather, you are still sucked in, have not learned the code which breaks the gravitational spell. In this case, discerning between that which is your own stuff and that which is your partner’s is a major accomplishment in itself.

     Anyway, I’ve mentioned the cave yogi before, and he could be seen as a pure ascender: with ever increasing intensity of yogic focus, he breaks out of orbit after orbit, attempting to transcend his conditioning in its entirety. He lives in such a way that minimizes new impressions from outward experience, and also keeps inward discursive activity to a minimum. He breaks away from his immediate society, then gets into Mom, Dad, keeps going through archetypes, large regions of the collective, and eventually, his need to hang around the body itself.

     What does a pure descender look like? One who goes from experience to experience, accumulating one after another, and never allowing reflection to occur, living to satisfy basic drives. In past posts, I’ve remarked that there is really no such thing as a pure descender because the human organism learns from experience despite worst intentions, is a profound theater of eros even in the most degraded individuals. But we could say that a descended person is one with little inclination to reflection or focus at all.

     Now, traces from experience become the fuel for transformational acts. Let’s say you go to a yoga class and it makes a nice impression. The yogic act (after you leave the class) would then be to let the impression work through you until  the subtle structure has been been created which is an expression of the process of mastering the impression. This is an ascension, and it transforms the impression-from-the-experience into something more mature than it was. We want to free ourselves from traces that have us in their grip, this is a basic human drive. If you stop reading this for a moment, close your eyes, and feel whatever it is that you feel right now, you will get in touch with the traces that are in play for you now. Yogic practices are designed to move those very traces, to move them toward…something less dense, something that feels like delight, or doesn’t feel like anything at all. (The delight is usually experienced as the trace is in the process of transmutation. This process often trips off the heart, opening it. Also, the nerves appear wired to say a gigantic YES to this transmutation, and send out messages from happiness to deep rapture. Once the transmutation is relatively complete, we are left with nothing at all, or typically, the next, deeper samskara/impression fund comes into play). As we get through inward traces, we begin instituting outward changes in our lives.

     One of the primary resistances to evolutionary ascension is the fear of loneliness. This is because the orbits we inhabit are sources of love, some of which is nourishing. But, inevitably in love, two things happen. One: we get bugged more and more by the parts that we don’t want, we feel the need to resolve these to something higher within ourself. By this I don’t mean that long term relationships are impossible, but rather that we become compelled with the urge to transform our responses to things. For example, it appears now that your wife of twenty years may never change certain parts of herself, but they finally no longer fire off your stuff. In fact, your reaction has been slowly transformed into a deliberate response, and now you feel compassion for these aspects of herself, or you can now appreciate them as an integral part of who she is. Certainly the relationships worth pursing are the ones that remain compelling in the long run, with an understanding that conflict, and fallow or plateau periods, are a natural part of healthy relationships.

     And two: we develop a taste for higher love, a higher frequency, a larger view. This draws us up. But it also takes us into a realm whose love may not come in as clearly, or as supportively, or as comfortably as before. And to that I would add, it’s not coming in like that yet. I have spent time around several high souls, and their great importance is that they demonstrate the fact that you can’t outgrow nourishing love. However high you get, it will come in. In fact, it appears to come in far stronger the higher one gets, far more real, although it may illuminate different regions of one’s being than the stuff one was into twenty years ago.

     The souls recognized as the High Ones through  spiritual history have struck a balance between ascension and descension. Take the Buddha as an example. A burning young man, well provided for, chooses to undergo years of asceticism, has the will to keep going for quite a while. Eventually, he reaches a crisis point, and vows that this time he will either resolve the overwhelming conundrum that compels his being or he will sit working at it until his bones scatter across the field in which he is sitting. As one version of the story goes, it takes him seven days of strong determination to attain the desired resolution, which becomes one of the great achievements of human spiritual endeavor. So far, Buddha is basically a pure ascender. He then begins the second part of his life where he works to share his realization with the world, a mission in which he succeeds. In this teaching phase he advocates the middle way, which does not promote severe asceticism, but rather a mixture of practice which takes us up and participations in life which take us down. It’s important to note here, however, that the reason Buddha is compelling to us is that he got so high with his ascension before he brought it back to the lower realms, and the same is true of Ammachi (she was never a normal child and in her late teens/early twenties self-administered a lifestyle of severe austerities). When the high chooses to engage the low, something beautiful and alluring happens.

        What is Ammachi’s delight in hugging? The passion of a high soul bringing love to lower regions: the love of God for creation. The delight of the gods for Lila, cosmic play. And Ammachi has loved the lowest of the low, just as Buddha was humane to those who tried to kill him, just as Christ managed to love those who did kill him. I have noticed and admired Pattabhi Jois’ willingness to continually engage new relationships which, sure enough, involved the reception on his part of basic crude negative projections: when a student is caught up in his junk, he will project it anywhere, including onto the master who has taught for sixty years, forget about respect. Guruji takes it; a higher soul in contact with those who may not be so high will result in unconscious transference processes on the part of the student. (This gets into hierarchies and may rub you the wrong way. My response is: all are ultimately equal, but some have developed certain regions further than you have. Go stand in the batter’s box with Barry Bonds facing Major League pitching and see who is higher in that realm. Go get hugged by Amma and experience a heart like that. For more on hierarchies, I believe that Ken Wilber, ironically using systems theory, has put in the final word on the debate: hierarchies are unavoidable.) And I will add: there are characters out there who are higher than you are.

     Anyway, from the perspective of some seated meditation practices, Hatha Yoga itself is a descended form because it goes so deep into the body. I won’t get too far into it here, but my response to this claim is that although Hatha Yoga may get the soul free a little slower, it gets it up in a very stable manner, and the tortoise may eventually pass the hare. For example, Mula Bhanda appears to be a practice which sublimates the most dense energy in our psychic system. Undertaking such an endeavor may bog one down at first, but eventually it provides a way for the deepest, lowliest, earliest stuff in us to get smart.

     So, the typical way here is to work to free oneself through ascension practice such as yoga, to break through the various orbits which hold us in their sway. At various stages in this work, we are compelled to act creatively in the world, to descend, receive impressions, sublimate them. Get up, dip back down, get it back up, go back down. Of course, most of us need to work a job, are required to create regularly, with deadlines, etc., and we are somewhat smothered with impressions. In that case, yoga can help us rise above some of it, maybe all of it, so that we want to get back into the mess that is this world, so we can love it.

     Go get as high as you can , and then go walking in the world and see what happens…

     Psychologist: “Oh shiny yogi!! Your own bliss prevents you from ever seeing your shadow! But the rest of us can see it quite easily.”

     Yogi: “Why are you scientists and mytho/poetics hanging around in the muck when the light is so exciting, and feels so good?! It’s because you have no way of getting out of the muck!”

     I got a degree in Counseling Psychology but wrote my thesis on yoga for this reason: it seemed psychotherapy worked quite well for relationships but I noticed a gap in effectiveness around actually helping individuals transform themselves. Indeed, the field of psychology seems to rely more and more heavily on pharmaceuticals to help in that regard, something that actually changes one’s chemistry, instead of just using the talking cure. People in trouble need strong stuff it would appear, and drugs are obviously as strong as you want them to be. But as I was practicing ashtanga, especially the backbends, I noticed that this was strong stuff, was altering my chemistry, blowing junk out,  far superior to any drug I’ve ever taken. Of course, in the short-term, it doesn’t appear as easy as drugs…

     But the undoubted challenge that Western Psychology has to offer yoga is that of the shadow, and shadow work. I’ve been belaboring the point lately that yoga in the West does not feel all that mature, that it’s often like a bunch of bees (save the bees!) chasing after some special buzz, it’s all tied in with the celebrity paradigm (high flying characters with raging shadows and egos, highly disinclined to look at either), or popularity contests, it becomes a haven for behavior that wouldn’t last a minute in Psychology circles (including verbal abusiveness). Not that Psychologists are perfect,  far from it, but they’ve got a leg up on us in this regard: part of their game is a willingness to face the shadow.

     Easy indicator of a New Age flake: as soon as the going gets challenging on the “self-improvement” quest, an easier or different path is sought, i.e.: one who is allergic to looking at his own shadow. “This hurts and is unpleasant, God must be wanting me to do something different.” Why? Because the shadow is not always such a nice thing to look at. And for yoga to exit the shallow realms of the novelty spiritual item and actually take root as an enduring part of this culture, it needs to go through a winnowing, and a trial of the shadow, and survive.

      Much of this flighty approach to spirituality can be seen as a wholesale swallowing of the media culture’s promise of unending delights surrounded by beautiful people, a topic well covered by George Leonard in his book Mastery. There has also been a confusion of celebrity with Guru. Celebrities often get highly rewarded with massive attention for immature behavior,  it is built into that system to never mature as a person. And contemporary Western culture is beyond gaa-gaa for famous people, notice how much importance people place on a simple celebrity sighting, as if they were Gods who could confer some massive blessing and seeing them is a mega-darshan.

     Yoga Journal has propagated this in the yoga world, with their elite stable of special photo-op teachers who have at times dominated their pages to a ludicrous degree. The divergence between actual creative power and celebrity has always been quite wide and in yoga it amounts to the difference between those who have slowly cultivated a special kind of presence and those who have had the spotlight placed upon them with little connection to yogic capacity. The sad part is that Yoga Journal was a fairly interesting magazine, when for example Rick Fields (author of “Fuck You Cancer!”) was the editor, over ten years ago. Rick’s dead now (of cancer), and the magazine has migrated towards Cosmopolitan with a green bent, which admittedly serves an important role out there in the mainstream media; in fact, that is exactly how it got onto that big stage; when compared to other magazines with that much influence, Yoga Journal looks good indeed.

     A widely accepted critique of our current society is that of Flatland, (a subject in which I’ve found Ken Wilber to be helpful.) This is entirely apart from celebrity-addicted shallow culture, but rather a lamenting of the lack of value that is allowed in materialistic discourse, which in this setting translates to: there can be nobody who has a higher state of consciousness than you, and the idea of spiritual depth is a dangerous elitist illusion. So, one who has steeped herself in alchemical yogic processes over the period of a long life has nothing to offer of value in that regard. And in turn, without depth we get narcissism and nihilism: there is no depth or such a thing as development, so the only thing left is to  find the instrumental means to storm the gates of popularity and celebrity, power and wealth, to ease my pain and gratify my own ego.

     Krishnamacharya is the elder behind most of the yoga in the West, and he is so much the antithesis of the celebrity paradigm that it must be some cosmic process of opposites that brought him into connection with some of what goes on in yoga now. He is the essence of long slow patient intense labor, of great material sacrifice in order to follow a deep sense of his calling in alignment with a profound art and to properly develop it. Of perseverence in the face of unpopularity and material insecurity (he raised five children as perhaps the first professional yogi once his royal patronage dissolved). Of a person who still developed in his fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, hundreds. He mingled with many of the “illuminatti” of his time and society, but this was based on recognition of value in his achievement. His students BKS Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois also embody beautiful fruits of long patient labor, and have also become celebrities of a different kind, as a recognition of the value of mastery: not as celebrities, but rather  as teachers who have received media attention.

     In short, celebrity is often based on charisma and guru is based on mastery. The two can converge, but often don’t. Charisma, beauty and popularity can be wonderful, but mastery is a different animal. It is also something very real, and there are individuals walking in the world now who embody it (i.e.: Mata Amritananadamayi: Ammachi the hugging mother). Personally, I try to support yoga at whatever level it is operating, but at the same time, depth is real, and I want to be a voice for the possibility of mature spiritual development in a shallow materialistic culture.

     So, what happens if we persevere with this, continue practicing and living yogically, spiritually? Does it bring us straight to the light? Well, yes, but I would say it needs to go through the shadow to get there. What is the shadow? The stuff inside us that we don’t see, don’t know about, don’t acknowledge, but which directs our actions anyway. Steady yoga practice will get us into the bliss zone one day, but the psyche responds to bliss by initiating a release of a deeper layer of stuff, as if it senses that everything is ready. And the stuff: some of it ain’t fun, won’t look good on the cover of Yoga Journal, advertisers aren’t flocking to it. (Actually, there is a shadow side to media-frenzy culture: the love of the scandal, and the sheer delight of malicious gossip.) Anyway, here’s an excerpt from a response to a comment I left to the March 2007 entry :  

Depth sounds nice but the reality is a bit different than “nice”: there’s chaos down there: worms, bugs, grim dark dangerous warriors on strange murky quests; the little blessings that we’ve relied upon may get snuffed out, our good luck may turn bad, our antanae get confused and receive strange unwanted songs, etc.

Why go deep at all?

Because we have to. Anyway: resolution of chaos ultimately allows the mind successive degrees of quietude. My claim is this: the great sages didn’t know everything, ie: they can’t sit down and speak Icelandic, but, they had resolved their internal history into a state of beautitude, saw the beauty behind the chaos, could hold that energy with a quiet mind, which is closer to the anabolic state, the healing state. The sages dropped deep into the heavies and resolved it for themselves, and for humanity. They weren’t air-heads: they had mastered complexity so that it could be seen easily.

      The shadow is dark scary stuff which, if subjected to practice over time,will transmute into something we understand, into something we can accept and love, where it becomes the fuel for brilliance. We pull old stuff out of the ocean and lift it up to the heavens. In alchemy this is the “long slow opus”. Basically, as systems theory tells us: we can be comfortable in a limited setting for a while, but eventually there is an urge to break through to a deeper level. This urge can either be the result of a stretch of inspiration or a need that arises in the wake of a crisis.  The title of Jack Kornfield’s book After the Ecstasy, The Laundry expresses the former: after the inspiration wears off, we find ourselves in this bigger realm,  and, correct me if I’m wrong, but it would appear that you can’t go back.  Evolution seems to be hardwired into the human nerves.   Once we become aware of a reality, we either hold it as something we know, or we repress it, and repression is a big part of the Psychology story. Why do we repress is? Because knowing it is too scary, threatens our sense of self-organization. The shadow we carry is full of stuff that we already know but don’t really want to look at.

     So, the chaos part: the bigger realm contains entities that don’t harmonize with the smaller world we used to live in. They show us contradictions that we didn’t notice before, which suddenly become unnacceptable. The new system is not worked out yet, but we are living in it anyway: chaos. That’s the alive anxious side of it. The other side is the drudge part: massive immovable objects that we now can no longer ignore, and act like black holes in the psyche. The alchemical lead or base metal, a long ways from gold, but which will transform in that direction with, for example, focused sustained learning yogic attention. So,  as the theory goes, chaos or sludge slowly gets organized in the auto-poietic system, reaches a state of some degree of competency, and then the evolutionary urge thrusts the system into the next level of inclusiveness, the next unknown realm, process begins again.

     The personal experience of this: the chaos phase has moments of great excitement and highs, and rather intense bummers, the latter of which can be seen as a grappling with something about which we have no clue. So, to return to that yogi-psychologist dialogue at the top of this peice: yoga is fabulous technology for getting things well organized, and it also reveals deep shadows to put  into that work. But Psychology, in my view, has come up with interpersonal dialogical methods which point out shadow with greater effectiveness. The two together is a good combination.

    Finally, yoga will get us high, but the bliss of the yogi doesn’t care if it’s high or low. True bliss is OK, period. Living fully means moving beyond what we know, the willingness to encounter what we don’t know, is not addicted to being high, even the most natural pure healthy high. And what Jung calls a moral response beyond the ordinary is the willingness to engage the darkness, and not just flit back to the light we know. And I would add: if you go into the shadow, you better bring your yoga with you, because you want a chance to get back out.

     Why do you do Ashtanga? What brought you to the practice? This post will be my story, but I would love to hear from any of you. Tales of  bodily and mental transformation, maniacal obsession, intimidation overcome (or not), gentle delight, whatever. I welcome any replies to this: a story, impressions, what drew you in and what it was like at first, what it became over time, anything. Just leave a reply at the bottom of this post.

     My story: I was raised in Santa Barbara and went to college in LA. It usually felt like a gigantic morass of very weird madness down there, and I engaged my share.  But in my studies at Occidental College, I gravitated toward Comparative Religions, seeking meaning and solace. The on-campus evangelical Christians actively attempted to draw me in, and I learned quite a bit from them but didn’t buy the party line. One Christian thinker who compelled me however was Thomas Merton and  my Bachelor’s thesis drew heavily from his writings. The one that really hit me was his Asian Journal, which captures his thoughts and acts leading up to his death.

    He was an unusal combination of monk and popular writer. His writings were subject to the Catholic censors and much of them feel stifled by an authoritarian tone, although his profound spiritual realization is unmistakable. But the Asian Journal and his posthumously published journals reveal a different voice, at times in clear conflict with the Church, very human, funny, delighted. Nonetheless, the substantial royalties he earned through his writing all went to his monastery in the woods of Kentucky, and he remained a monk in poverty, praying for the rest of the world. 

     He deeply understood and appreciated yoga from Asia in its various forms. Year after year of arduous practice in the Catholic monastic tradition transformed him into an awesome yogi indeed, and  high Tibetan roshis recognized him as such. He used mountains as a metaphor for stages of spiritual development, and his final mountain was Kanchenjunga, the Himalayan peak on the border between Nepal and India. He photographed it obsessively on the journey on which he would die in 1968.

     It would become my first mountain. I was 22, it was 1989, and yoga was just beginning its transition from curiosity to actual cultural force in the West. I met a great man in his late fifties, Virgil Day, therapist, buddhist, mountaineer,  the father of my girlfriend at the time, who was planning an extensive trek through the wilds all around…Kanchenjunga. I came up with the $2000, quit my job, vacated my apartment, and joined him.

     We spent 34 days out on the Nepali trails in the most stunning country I have ever seen, bar none. Rivers, mountains, leeches,  all larger than life.  Kanchenjunga was mysterious. On the first few days, from a distance, she showed her hulking face through the clouds. We then dropped into the deep valleys and worked our way through them for two weeks, walking closer and closer. She stayed hidden, though I could feel her radiant presence. Her proud consort, Kumbhakarna, a massiff like the Matterhorn but on a much larger scale, made a dramatic appearance, out of the clouds suddenly, straight above us and way up there, Virgil on a distant terrace shouting and waving his arms wildly, the wind blowing, a moment which stained my mind forever.

    We finally made it to a sheepherding region called Pangpema, the main vantage point to see Kanchenjunga’s incredible north face. But she was hidden. Our Sherpa, Ram, was scratching his head as we walked along: where was the great mountain? A huge rock face eventually showed from behind a shoulder and he announced, “There is Kanchenjunga.” It was big for sure, but we remained quiet, trying not to be disappointed. He muttered, “It doesn’t seem right”. We continued, and a bigger massiff appeared. Still we walked. Another massiff, an impressive one indeed, much the biggest of the three, but this time Ram said nothing and kept going.

    His genetics were part mountain goat, and he was quite ahead of us at this point, I had spots in front of my eyes from the alititude. We turned a bend to see him sitting with a serious look, and there she was, immeasurably larger than the prevous three,  a radiant wall of  gold and blue, an experience akin to Krishna’s presentation to Arjuna of the true face of God, completely overwhelming. We’d been hiking for two weeks, courting her, and only in the last four minutes of that part of the trek did she finally reveal herself. Her naked beauty was beyond…

     I was dunked into the Nepal/Tibet/India matrix and romance, and to this day I have not recovered. The next two months were spent wandering India, including encounters with sadhus, the poor of Calcutta, the beaches of Kerala. I came home from that trip looking like a sadhu, and fairly skinny from several micro-organisms. My family was a bit shocked.

   We had a copy of Iyengar’s Light on Yoga on the shelf and, inspired, I went to work.  Four years later, March 1994, I found myself again in India, amazed. This time it was the city of Mysore and I was preparing to meet Pattabhi Jois. I had only been doing Ashtanga for two months, and had some major thresholds to cross in the pelvis and hamstrings, was a little concerned that he’d give me a bodyslam in these regions. I was part way through the first year of getting a master’s degree in counseling psychology, and was planning on pursuing the career, and here I was in India again, recognizing with trepidation a rapidly approaching huge dark cloud of a major internal crisis.

    It went like this: my long time partner had already been there for two months, and as I lay down next to her that first night I dimly sensed that there was another man in the picture. What the heck was this? As we talked, I recognized this presence was Guruji himself, and that her time here alone had awoken all kinds of life in her, I was a classic lumbering threatened boyfriend. I intellectualized it: this is an evolutionary engagement she has with a helper (albeit a fairly potent one), and I support this. So that left it in my court: why am I so threatened by this? Could it be all the monsterously bendy yogis everywhere, when I was stiff and initimidated? No, that wasn’t really it. I lay there awake all night from the timezone shift and considered this.

     Next morning I went to the Nilayam to watch, planning on paying that afternoon. This was during the slow period of growth in the community that preceded what was to become an explosion. The old Shala used to have eight students at a time, eventually that grew to 12, which filled the little room. Guruji would periodically settle onto his creaky stool in the corner, and then get up and adjust students. His grandson, Sharath, would sit at his feet by the wall, also getting up to help.

     We walked in and he burst through the door of a prana-packed room like a demon with a fiery sword from some mandala, confronted me, demanded to know where I was from. He then turned and went back at it. I noticed that he was totally stoked, in and among his intensely focused yogis. He was manly, radically receptive, very deliberate, commanding, I couldn’t believe he was completely lying on top of people. Not your typical 80 year old.  He would bark an order at someone and then turn to us with a sly smile, deconstructing himself with hilarious twinkly eyes. He would go on for hours. He was chanting something under his breath which I later discovered to be the Isa Upanishad. Somebody was cooking something delicious in the room next door.

     I was thoroughly alarmed. Here was a legitimate Hatha Yoga master in full flight. He didn’t correspond or act according to the protocol of  the Psychology Board. Some of his students seemed like masters themselves. I was also struck by Sharath’s calm simplicity, and his complete absence of any egoic caricature. I could tell that there were lots of rules lying around but that they were operating from pure intuition. There was a strict code and it was open to revision, something so much more than fundamentalism, yet so grounded in tradition.

     We went back to our little flat and I spontaneously flung a bag of coins against the wall, which smashed into my partner Jessica’s shrine, blowing it apart. Needless to say, she was perturbed. What was going on?! A little later I was subdued and decided to work a bit on the practice which I hadn’t memorized yet. As soon as I began practicing, my head became dramatic theater for dialogue akin to a combat scene from one of the epics, and during a particularly heated exchange I dragged my toe jumping through and broke it good and proper with a big POP. It soon swelled to the shape and color of a plum. Thus culminated my first trip to Mysore.

     I staggered home and got back to my life and plans. It was during this time that I felt Guruji offering a valid response to the anxious rumination that always seemed to accompany my triumphs and travails in  the Western world. Something like “Do this and you will grow steady, strong and true, like a great Holy Tree.” Was it a psychic emanation? Was it just the mature flowering of the strong impressions left by my journey to Mysore? My answer now: it was both, I’d received a tumultuous darshan from someone who was up to the task,  and it was working in me now. Regardless, my confusion in India was an early radioactive expression of a deep calling  to undertake Yoga as a vocation, which was not in my plans at the time. Deeply laid plans leave blood on the psychic floor as they get ripped apart. But the exhilaration…I chose to go with that instead of the dread. (For more ideas on this, go here, scroll down to Global Heart.)

     Back in California I began teaching yoga at gyms, the little crumbs at the perimeters of the schedule doled out to new teachers at The Yoga Center, anywhere. I taught so many classes that first year, took anything and everything. One weekend I took a workshop with Chuck Miller, one of the founders of Yoga Works, an ashtangi who went on quite a wild ride during that Santa Monica institution’s incomparable heyday (the first half of the nineties). Shiva Rae was assisting. It was at the White Lotus, in the mountains of Santa Barbara. One night, we watched the video of Iyengar doing Ashtanga with Krishnamacharya on Chamundi Hill. I was struck by Krishnamacharya’s demeanor and the radical bandhas and kriyas he was engaging. That night he came to me in a dream, covered with a thin layer of fur, holding an ancient staff, beckoning. I woke up with chills. Before long, I left for Mysore and stayed nearly a year. I existed in and around Guruji’s psychic space, lived across the street from him. One day near the end, Michele came walking in, and the rest is, as they say…

     I would take two more treks with Virgil: First was 24 days out in the Dolpo region of northern Nepal, a close recreation of Peter Matthiessen’s journey told in one of my all-time favorite books The Snow Leopard,  an incredible tour to the Crystal Mountain and the monastery there, Shey Gompa. One of the highlights of our trek was a fist fight  between our cook and one of our guides.

     Next was a tour of Holy Mount Kailash and the surrounding region, in Tibet. Michele went on that one and jumped naked into sacred Lake Manasorover, madwoman! …and now forever blessed by the icy water.  She also saved the life of a 60 year old psychologist who was on the trek with us, charging to his aid, screaming, just in time to prevent a truck from crushing his skull, he stumbled up from his nap, the truck roared off, he dramatically collapsed in her lap, she held him in that little field by a stream, weeping. He regarded her as the All-giving Great Mother for the remainder of the journey, which got a bit weird up there. The night before we began our circumambulation of Kailash, drunk Chinese soldiers broke into our little room, rifles pointed. Quite a way to wake up. We struggled to get the candle lit, yelled at them, inexplicably they left. Just a little demon trying to scare us off before we could take darshan from the Holy Mountain. Can’t let that stop you…

Thanks for your indulgence,  namaste,

Steve 

     ….well, you’re always with God, the yogi just tries to realize this consciously…

     Ashtanga means eight limbs. Ashtau: eight, anga: limbs. I know, this is probably review, but:

     limb1: yamas:  things not to do , 2. niyamas: things to do, 3. asana: focusing on physical processes, 4. pranayama: focusing on breathing processes, 5. pratyahara: taking the outward senses and turning them inward, 6. dharana: focusing the inward senses and/or the mind, 7. dhyana: attaining lengthy periods of such focus, and progressively increasing its concentration, 8. samadhi: transforming the object upon which concentration rests into the subject which does the meditating, where it dissolves, and all that remains is the pure subject. In this post I’ll tease the gobbledegook in that last one apart.

    We’ll start somewhere simple, on our yoga mat. We come to Ashtanga practice, in class, on our own, whatever. We find ourselves in triangle pose. We know that the final form of the pose, as taught, has us keep that front leg straight, holding onto the big toe with thumb and  first two fingers, with shoulders over the leg, upper shoulder lined up right on top of the lower one. Iyengar could go further in that direction, but you get the picture.

     Let’s take the front leg. Say I’m a tight guy and if I keep the leg straight, I can’t get to the toe yet. If I keep my shoulders over the leg, the furthest I can get is about half way down my shin. The question becomes: what is it between where I am now, and the finished form of the asana? My answer to that: stuff. What happens if I practice regularly and eventually get down to that toe? The stuff goes away, it dissolves as it were.

     Physiologically what happens? Well, the fascia, muscles, and tendons in the leg, and probably a few ligaments in the foot, lengthen. A physical density has been cleared. Yogically we could say that a dark area has been put into the light, an unknown region has been presented to awareness. Mentally: we go down into the stretch until we can feel a field of resistance, and then we have something into which we can “deploy our attention”, a place where focus can rest. As Hatha Yogis, we bear our minds into the fields of physical sensation generated by the act of the asana. In Pattabhi Jois’ Ashtanga, the physical body is systematically cleared this way, each asana presenting a different set of regions of the body, a different set of fields to perceive. Incidentally, injury has little to do with this: we work the fields presented by the body we have today. Also, it’s not about getting to the finished form of the asana, so much as working the fields presented by the asana, which we might get all the way through in this lifetime, might not; it’s about working the region, not about perfecting the asana.  Agree or disagree, at least we’re clear so far?

     Next: at some point in doing this, we begin to make the connection between proceedings in physical processes such as this and those in our psychic life. This is the jump from the fourth limb to the fifth, taking “low” operations and making them “high”. Physical yogic work begins to operate at the psychic level. Pattabhi Jois says: “When the body is strong, the mind becomes quiet.” Once we have some degree of peace of mind, we begin to notice the traces left by the thoughts that pass through us. (For my understanding of the basics of this, please see the October 2006 post “Sublimation of Impressions”.) Basically, our thoughts leave an impression, lay down a trace that can be somatically perceived, and the yogic act is to take attention away from the thought and turn it to perception of the trace itself. Basically, instead of thinking, feel the traces left by thought.

    And the great hatha yoga move: just as bearing force into our leg in Trikonasana will clear the leg, bearing attention into the traces left by thought will clear the trace, a process that eventually clears the heart/mind.  Every trace cleared in the mind makes the heart a little bigger. Attention, if cultivated, gathers power over time, gains potency with practice. The stronger it gets, the heavier and deeper the stuff it can engage and transcend.

     So, what next? We’ve covered the physical and the psychic. Vedanta has one more primary division of being: the causal. Here’s how I see it: as the mind begins to clear/transcend, we get to deeper layers. As those layers clear, deeper ones appear successively. Now, there is no end to the layers, because once we get through the personal we begin hitting the collective, in fact the collective and the personal get cleared together, infinitely. But, at some point here, spaces open out between the spheres of stuff, and reports from this journey claim that this space presents itself as something more real than the stuff which gives way to reveal it. This is experienced to be the clearing in and from which manifestation appears. Patanjali calls this place the seer, which implies the person who sees, minus the person part. Our own personality who experiences the world has been progressively winnowed away, but of our own choosing, because…we get this compelling sense that there is something really important and utterly fascinating in there behind our little self. We just can’t help but want to know what it is.

     Now, Yoga offers essentially two views about what this is, this causal space. One is that it is nothing at all, merely the space from which things arise: nothingness, emptiness, the void, the abyss, Brahman. But terms like these can’t really capture this place, no word can really be used to describe it. Vedanta and much of Buddhism holds this view. (If you want a real headache, try Nagarjuna’s neuron crunching Buddhist dialectics, guaranteed to induce rapid true delta sleep- he gives us a sense of the causal realm from this perspective by showing everything that it isn’t). The other view is that this is Godhead, and in this space we will find the personality of God, such as Krishna, an active living being from which humans are modeled, much like the God of the Bible. This is known as the impersonalist versus personalist debate, a long term food-fight in India. On one side the Shakaracharya monks, on the other the Bhaktis, flinging ghee at each other.

    Those who conduct alter puja to Ganesh, Vishnu, whoever, can fall into either camp. Meaning, some would hold the view that the causal is absolute nothingness at all, and place Ganesh or any other diety as clearly within the realm of manifestation, although truly deep, at archetypal levels, an energy manifestation to which one attempts to become harmonious through regular and often incredibly complex ritual.

     Anyway, whether we’ve hit Krishna or the void, this is the place that Patanjali talks about when he says “Yoga is the cessation of conscious fluctuation, at which time the true seer arises standing within itself. At times we identify with the seer, at others times we identify with the fluctuations.” I hold that quote to be the essence of Ashtanga. But its a bit of a journey from our practice on the mat to these higher spheres, and yet I hold it to be a very clear and well walked path, a very real, robustly experienced and thoroughly confirmed possibility. This is not mumbo-jumbo or wishful thinking, this really is the way it goes: the physical body gets clear, the psychic body gets clear, and we begin to get glimpses of that which throughout history has been called God.

     Big issues arise for those of us doing this, and I’ll get into those next time: basically, once we start getting high, we hit a realm of both delights and perils. Hitting the perils, it is not uncommon for practitioners to give up on their path and try a different one, which really isn’t a solution, since all legitimate paths will lead to this place. The perils include hitting big deep internal stuff that many people would never bother with in this lifetime, and with good reason: they’re nasty, and can just completely mess things up. People living the unexamined life just go along sort of bugged by stuff but never really addressing it. That doesn’t seem to be an option with intentional spritual life, which often leads us straight into our deepest complexes, ie: Mom, Dad etc. Another is the growth of sensitivity and the carrying of other’s pain, so that you really do begin to feel the explosions in Iraq, or the struggle of the person on the mat next to you in class, you may have a hard time differentiating between what is hers and what is yours. (The good side of this is the possibility of blissful communion with others, the greater the sensitivity, the greater the bliss.)  Another is what I call the activator field: this is when you’ve undertaken the spiritual process and it begins to become very real, such that you simply come to class and all kinds of internal process becomes quite active, you have no choice, it doesn’t just shut off. If a yoga class is conducted well, with a community of people intentionally practicing, this is what should be happening, although it may seem like a long way from this nice little class where you thought you were coming just to stretch out a bit and walk out feeling happy. True psychosomatic fulfillment is a different animal than that altogether.

thanks for getting to the end of this,

Steve

     Just about everybody runs into physical pain and injury at some point in their lives, especially those of us who exercise regularly. If you move your body actively, it will occasionally hurt. For some of us, it frequently hurts. We choose to get fit, tolerating aches and pains, because the alternative is…slow murky creep towards dark dreadful sluggish inertia and death- or something like that.

     In all honesty, Ashtanga will initiate more aches and pains than gentler yoga. On the other hand, the potential for bodily transformation and psycho-somatic purification is far greater. Those who do the practice typically find the periodic aches and pains worth it in exchange for bodily vitality, improved postural disposition, a general feeling of well-being, healthy appropriate appetite and digestion, improved sleep, insight into relaxation and stress management, mental clarity, the capacity for delight in the present mundane moment, surfing around in the higher spheres, occasional mystic glimpses into the bigger picture (or permanent ecstatic residence up there). See the comment below for more on this.

    Occasionally, in Ashtanga, as in other forms of athleticism, actual injury happens. I will make the claim here that, if approached intelligently, Ashtanga is one of the safest ways to get highly fit. However, hurts happen sometimes. Most people who sustain practice over time, will eventually run  into something. I’ve run into many snags, but I can attribute that to the fact that I went at this like a madman when I was in my twenties. Also, I’ve had a heavy teaching load for 10 years, and teaching Ashtanga, especially doing the backbends with people, is notoriously rough on the teacher. But I love it so much, what to do? Now, at the ripe age of 39, and with two dependents, I’m a bit more measured, as those of you who practice with me have probably noticed, the jackrabbit devolved into a tortoise. Anyway, there are many ways to address such an incident, many professions devoted to helping people heal. In this post, I would like to offer a way to approach injury from a yogic perspective.

     Vedanta, the mature Hindu system of philosophy and practice, has placed great importance on the three major states of human consciousness. Existence was basically divided into three categories. The great sage Ramana Maharshi expressed these as:

1. The Open Courtyard: the physical body, the gross waking state, matter;

2. The Middle Chamber: the subtle body, the dreaming state, psychic stuff;

3. The Inner Chamber: the causal body, deep sleep, the void, nothing at all, but the matrix from which the others originate.

     The accomplished yogic sages , certainly Maharshi himself, were able to realize the second two, dreaming and deep sleep, while fully awake. The completion of yoga is to pass through the 3rd stage, the causal body, and to recognize the way in which the things of life arise from the void of the causal body. This is non-dual awakening, the capacity to simultaneously hold the emptiness of the casual body with the all the stuff in the other two bodies. It’s a mega-paradox, a monster polarity, for the few and the brave. Fear of  wearing the wrong thing to that party, financial hardship, failure, pain, existential dread, old age, death…gotta get over all of that stuff. But in non-duality, we can participate in all of this with what could be called the ultimate perspective.

     To get anywhere near this kind of realization, one must learn to bear that which was unbearable; that which is unbearable now, may become manageable with practice over time. If you are dealing with something difficult right now, it could be seen as preparation for much higher states of awareness. That’s no platitute; the only way to reach the higher states charted by the yogis is to get a handle on strong stuff which may be terrifying the first few times you touch it. The degree of difficulty of a challenge, that is exactly the degree of freedom one can gain from it, once the trace left by the challenge is accepted and metabolized. 

    Okay, so,  the causal body: all of us hopefully pass through this every 24 hours or so, sleep research calls it Stage 4 sleep, or true delta sleep. Adults fall into it rather quickly upon falling asleep, and usually stay there for less than an hour.  There are no dreams during this state. This is the hardest state from which to wake somebody, and she may feel disoriented upon waking from it. The body needs it to survive. The consciousness of the most non-yogic person in the world goes there every day.

     The science of Physiology describes two important states: catabolic, the breakdown of cell structures, and anabolic, the synthesis/growth of cell structures. Anabolic steroids will help your muscles grow into the size of balloons, a very polluted way for the weight lifter to maximize his residence in the anabolic state. Catabolism: imagine you’ve had a long day, with not enough to eat, and your kids keep you up all night, (Have twins and you can stagger through a phenomenological thesis on this state.)

     Sleep research indicates that stage 4 sleep appears to be the maximum anabolic state, the time when you heal the fastest, when the breakdown from your day becomes the stimulus for growth and development. Physical exercise and work stresses the gross body, which with rest, allows it to grow stronger. Typical family and job stress works the psychic body, which includes the higher part of the emotional body, and with rest it also gets stronger. Without rest…well, both bodies slowly or quickly get worn down. (Yoga also has a term for too much rest: tamas, which means dark sluggishness).

     I’ll introduce a final element here: Patanjali’s main sutras, 1:2 and 3: “Yoga is the ability to cease fluctuations in the consciousness. At which time, the seer shines in its own true brilliance.” I’ll  offer a physiologic reduction of this: “when the busy mind is quieted, the anabolic state can happen.” Busy mind, worry mind, becomes catabolic relatively quickly. Essentially, steady yoga practice will bring us closer to Patanjali’s yogic state, it will allow us the choice of quieting our minds when we so choose. If we do this over time, we will gain some understanding of the subtle and causal realms of existence, little glimpses here and there. Not everybody will be able to maintain the witness state while in the causal realm, but every inch towards this capacity is healing. The  great spiritual traditions of the world tell us that the causal state is the creative matrix from which all form arises, including the forms of your own body and mind.

     In last month’s post, I posed the question of why the yogis in the Ashtanga lineage have lived long lives, (Krishnamacharya 100, Indra Devi nearly 103, Pattabhi Jois still active and strong at 92, BKS Iyengar, still active and strong at 89) and my response today is that the ability to remain close to these higher states and to choose to invest such energy back into the body, this will make the body very happy. Yogis will gradually work their way closer to maintaining degrees of the anabolic state at all times, and to turn it on at will, and we could even pose the possibility of some individuals developing the ability to stoke it way up through long-term focus development. Which is to say: to heal injury and disease at will.

      Practical application: (this is how I’ve healed from multiple, occasionally scary injuries incurred from being an Ashtanga teacher): when you retire in the evening, begin your rest lying flat on your back and quiet your mind by feeling your body. Stay with this night after night and you will begin to feel your way deeply into the inner psychosomatic sheaths of your being and the mind will begin to quiet. Next: feel the area that hurts or is hurt- if given attention, an injury should begin to reveal itself, it may throb or hurt, or  it may just be something you can feel down there. “If you feel it you can heal it”. Notice the qualities of the sensation of the injury, keep noticing over time. Relax tensions in the area as they become apparent. Breathe steadily and direct the energy in your breath into the sensation. Practice Pratyahara, which takes outward vision and turns it inward: see your injury, which I hold to be the visual part of your brain redirected to give qualities and features to felt sensation. The same for hearing, tasting, smelling. This will set the stage for the anabolic state soon to follow: true delta sleep, the “medicine by which you need no medicine”.

     My point here is that besides all the outward modalities of healing- acupuncture, physical therapy, all that good stuff- there is also the option of developing a way of being that promotes healing, entirely apart from diet and nutrition, ingestion of drugs or outward manipulation: the way of the yogis: life as a path into the inner chamber, direct knowledge of  the place from which all life forms originate.

    Thanks for reading,

 Steve

Hi Everybody:

There was a batch of emails sent out under our name that invite you to join hi5 Network.

First of all, we’re really sorry if you trusted us and chose to join this hi5 thing- Michele made the mistake of doing the same from someone we trust and this is what happened:

they actually tagged our entire address book and sent out invitations to everybody, almost like a worm. First of all, how the heck did they get all those addresses?  Our address book is on Yahoo, what does Yahoo have to do with this? I do NOT suggest you join hi5, or anybody who conducts business like that- if you did sign up I strongly suggest you cancel, easy enough to do. It is NOT a virus, it’s a business using borderline virus techiniques, some precarious combination of virus and legitimate business. They seem like a normal enough networking service, but if you sign up they will take your entire address book and send out emails that give the appearance that you stand behind what they do. They do this unless you carefully tell them not to. Who knows what else they will do unless you carefully tell them not to. Amazingly, they actually have a shingle on the street:

hi5 Networks

455 Market Street suite 910

San Francisco, CA, 94105

415-404-6094

I called them and demanded that they delete every address they took from me, I’ll do what I can to see that they do that. And I let them know I was not pleased. They didn’t get back to me. They’re a faux business, with no accountability, getting away with it for as long as they can. They trash my business in order to propogate their own.

If you haven’t opened it yet, it says “Hey Steve Dwelley ” ( or whatever your name is) and then has a link with either Michele’s name or the Ashtanga Yoga Shala. I suggest you press the delete button firmly. Again, we’re really sorry if this got you, cyberspace is fairly intense these days and we were caught sleeping at the joystick.

We didn’t collect all your emails to send out stuff like that, and it won’t happen again.

Our humble apologies,

Steve and Michele

Ashtanga Yoga Shala Santa Barbara

Hi All:

1. February 1st is the full moon. Kosmic particles will come to life, the Shala will be dormant.

2. There can be a tension among Ashtanga practitioners between the body and the mind. Specifically, several prominent teachers in the lineage are explicit that heady intellectualism is not the way, including Pattabhi Jois himself. Here’s an example from his book Yoga Mala:

Great scholars and intellectuals who attract attention by using
pedantic Vedantic terms which mean that all things are transitory
and that only the supreme self is real, are only impressing themselves
and their listeners for the moment. But soon, the net of delusion is
sure to bind them. (p 31)

     His cure for this, of course, is honest yoga practice. I’ve personally seen him accosted by eager students who pepper him with complex yoga concepts, and his response has been to walk away, leaving a trail of perplexed aspiring yogis. Indeed, the tension in this issue has bedeviled me for years.

     I’ll attempt to describe my understanding of the deep yogic way as presented by the gurus in this lineage. We could call it radiant heartfelt somatic vibrational presence, a wonderful state to be in and not terribly common. And it gets most interesting when offered in receptive exchange with others. In keeping with the fundamental hatha yoga maxim that health is the real wealth, this state, or approximations of it, are highly conducive to radiant health and freedom from injury. How do we account for the long active lives of the yogis in Krishnmacharya’s lineage? Did they all have good genes, or did they live in a way that cleaned the roots of disease in their bodies? Also, the feeling of being in this state is incredible, joyous bodily existence, where the horrid dramas of life seem kind of overblown, and psychic disturbance resolves itself.

     I would like to qualify that last phrase: I dislike trite yogic aphorisms such as “Come to the place where all is light and free forever”. Yeah, right. I absolutely believe in states of enlightenment, in the reality of successive levels of permanent attainment of the radiant state, but the truth is, life sends us endless lessons, there is always the next moment and the morning after, and the month after, and the next decade. By choosing life on Earth, we have all signed up for endless incoming experience, and new experiences are a threat to the radiant state until the traces from those new experiences are integrated such that they are no longer THE OTHER but are now part of ME. Yogic life is an endless expansion of identity into everything that comes my way. Also, when we are inspired, we quickly push ourselves right to our growth edge- that is the place to be. But in so doing, we are asking life to come in- and it will. And the state of inspiration won’t last forever, so we are left with lots of new impact, and a less than stellar outlook. Of course, this will eventually rise back up to the fun zone again, but we don’t always know that at the time. But, what, shy away from deep bliss? Unfortunately, I believe a large percentage of humanity has chosen just that, has chosen not to evolve, is not up to the adventure. It appears that it requires the second half of life, where death begins knocking, to wake most people out of relative sleep-walk.

     So, first of all, how to we get to radiant heartfelt somatic vibrational presence? Pattabhi Jois says, basically, a heck of a lot of sincere practice, sustained over time. This changes our neurology into a system that is able to connect the open feeling heart with the traces left by experience, gets better and more sophisticated at doing just that. Neurologic change is a very real possibility, but it requires a certain attitude, the willingness to be with the evolutionary edge. Try writing with your non-dominant hand, feel that field of resistance which only slowly yields. That is the feeling of nerves growing new connections, and, as neurology recently concluded, new nerves growing. That is the place sincere yoga practice asks you to make your home.

     So, I”ve just flung a succession of thoughts your way. Are these thoughts themselves part of the problem, distractions from the deep vibrational place where thoughts become less important? Here’s my take on it:

a. The thoughts that are the greatest threat to yoga are negative thoughts, ie: “this is really bad, and basically I’m failing, and I’m not good enough, and that person is laughing inwardly at the way I look”. All of us have lots of those, and they reveal themselves in layers of a hidden psychic plate tectonics process as we go through life.

b. Pattabhi Jois himself is a life-long scholar, and his guru Krishnmamacharya had the equivalent of 6 Doctorates, so the position here is not anti-thought. Rather, I believe Pattabhi has a deep grounding in heartfelt vibrational experience and can clearly sense when this is completely absent in a conversation, and has little interest in such exchange. And I would add that the connection between heart and mind is more important than either one separately.

c. Frequently in life, thoughts require attention right now, and the realities they propel us into may not be conducive in the least to deep vibrational presence. However, we set aside time to do regular yoga practice to learn how to connect the various life-states in which we find ourselves with the deep conscious vibrational place. Do this for years and the two begin to merge. Or, I’d say, life begins to migrate into the deep heartfelt presence. But the greatest challenge to this is the taming of a mind which may simply mope its way along, or flit around like a butterfly, or is disinclined to break through habitual vestigial unhelpful thinking.

     The way in Ashtanga appears to be this: the heart is the cure for the lost mind. Noticing unhelpful mentation and feeling its trace as opposed to running with its thought is a way to eventually get higher heart into the picture. For more on traces or imprints, or in Sanskrit, vasanas, see my blog, July 1 and October 3, 2006 entries. Basically: stay with the trace, work the body, and eventually the trace itself will forge the connection to the heart’s awakening. A very smart way to go. And it feels good.

Did that make sense?
Steve

     There are many systems of yoga, and not all of them affirm the act of using the body as the object of yogic focus. Some yogis, such as Ramana Maharshi, went further and actually advised practitioners to turn focus away from the body, lest we be attached to it when we die. Despite this, asana is the most popular yoga practice on the planet. Many would say that much of this is not serious yoga, but rather, people simply enjoying asana’s benefits towards health and feeling good. Of course, there are lines of asana practice which would fit under the category of serious authentic yoga, and ashtanga is one of them. What do I mean by serious authentic yoga?

     1. It has as it’s underlying purpose a clear expression of the possibility of self-transcendence in this lifetime, and

     2. it is undertaken with a rigorousness that offers the chance of this self-overcoming actually happening.    

     Historically, India has offered several serious views of self-transcendence, two of which are especially relevant for ashtanga:

     a. The old Brahmin themes which I’ll lump under ”neti-neti” which means, “No, not that, and no not that, and no not that either, etc”. Anything that expresses itself as an object which can be perceived by our awareness cannot be the goal to which we are striving, because God has no qualities. The God of our own innermost self is entirely free of any features at all. I view this as the inferior view, simply because it was included in the larger vision of tantra which followed. But the essential aspect that no yoga, or no system of self-development, can ignore is contained in this neti-neti view. I’ll try to explain my understanding of this as clearly as possible:

      The self that views things “out there”, the person you are right now who sees and experiences your outer and inner world, has plenty of stuff tied in with it; you are not aware of much of this stuff, it is beneath your level of awareness. (If you are already enlightened and free, please forgive my condescendence). Your eyes are not the eyes of the pure witness (although you may achieve this at times) but rather, eyes which ride on the contours of your personality and see things in a way which includes these contours. These contours can be completely dominant, as in children, or quite subtle, as in certain mature wise people. But for the neti-neti yogi, none of those contours, no matter how subtle, are the goal, all of them are illusion. These lenses which alter the perception of the pure witness are still within the realm of things, and the witness is not a thing at all. Shankaracharya, in his little book Aporakshanubhuti, says “The yogi is indifferent to both the highest emanation from heaven and the shit of a crow.” In his Brahma Sutra Bhasya, he says that higher things have more virtue than lower things, but that none of them are Brahman.

     One value of this view is that it puts the practitioner on a truly steep and fast learning curve, in this manner: one way we humans develop over time is like this: the eyes by which we saw in the previous moment become the stuff that we see in the next; the subject of this moment becomes the object of the next; when our person is revealed over time, its elements can become things we consider; aspects of who we were yesterday become things we can consider today. Before that, we had no choice, these elements were fused into our personality and not available to the light of our awareness. We acted from them but we could not see them. Now, with this in mind, notice that the neti-neti yogi immediately disidentifies with the elements of his own personhood as soon as he recognizes them. Any element that he can perceive is not God, and he knows that in his innermost self he is God, so he lets go of any identification with the phenomena he sees or hears or feels. This is the process of maturity that we all go through at some pace, but the old Brahmins explicitly stated a method which works quickly, and doesn’t dawdle. The upshot: fast track to freedom from the limitations of himself. The bummer: possible pathology, as he loses track of who he was and has only dim and devalued structure from which to operate in this world.

     b. So, in response, around the eighth century, in good old India, emerges tantra, the path by which one can lose her ego but strengthen her nerves, where the personality dies to the larger universe but the body radiates happy health. Freedom in this body, through this body. Ashtanga yoga is a tantra. Essentially, tantra introduced the view that self-development is not just a process of disidentification, but also that of building internal structure: the mature tantric has robust subtle-physiology. The psychologists Blanck and Blanck tell us that the self “metabolizes experience” to “build structure”, and I think this view well-describes what we do in Ashtanga. I’ll get into my understanding of that next month.

Namaste,
Steve

1. I did a podcast for yogapeeps. Interesting little website.

2. I’ve been sending out these posts, thoughts about yoga and such, and the question may arise, what do all these things have to do with the daily physical practice that I teach, that we do? I’ll make a stab at addressing that here.

     The Ashtanga system is based on Tantric techniques of arousing internal energy processes in the bodymind. This is achieved in three primary ways in the Ashtanga room, 1. through the process of exercise, basically comprised of stretching, strengthening, balance and coordination, all of it done with full active breath. 2. the guidance and physical touch of the teacher, 3. the energy of the collective, that which happens when people practice in a room together. I’ll take these one at a time.

1. Exercise: in Ashtanga, we all start with Primary Series. The first half of primary is a thorough excavation of the pelvis: multiple angles into the hips and a deep clearing of hamstring tension. This essentially addresses the first two chakras, the root and the genital, clears out space for them to exist energetically in ways other than their overt function, i.e.: elimination and sex. This seats the practitioner deep in her pelvis and builds an energetic foundation for what is to follow, basically getting her grounded. The second half of primary emphasizes pure strength and coordination, as well as inversion (upside-down), and there’s also more pelvic stuff. We finish with backbends and then lots of upside-down. This is a steady building and lifting of energy, culminating with the backbends. Second series and beyond is about nerve purification and progressively rigorous energy uplift.

    Essentially, the tantrics began to discover what can happen when we exercise, the kind of energy that can be awakened through the porcess of becoming physically fit..

2. Contact with the teacher: try this: sit at home for a while and get as centered and calm as possible, keeping the mind clear. Next, from this place, go get physically close to someone, your wife, friend, whomever. Go up to her, or pull him down to you, something like that. Notice what happens. If possible, notice this very precisely.

     Physical contact with another person is strong stuff, as strong as any exercise, and will awaken energy processes. Many of these processes may be shrouded, and will only register as confusion or some kind of variant on uncertainty. Others will be easy to discern, can go all the way to unbearably strong. Now I know what some of you are thinking, but it’s important to note that sexual arousal is just one of many kinds of phenomena available here. In my esteem, sex is good stuff, important to explore with someone, once an appropriate degree of sacredness has been established in the relationship. Sacred sex is unparalleled in its capacity to free up and make available certain aspects of our developmental being.

     Contact with a teacher can be intimate but, hopefully, is of a different kind than sex. What are the avenues pursued with intimate, sensual but non-sexual touch? Essentially, it is the recognition of the special opportunity for energy movement when two dynamic systems merge for a moment. Of course, this can happen from across a room (some say from across the planet), but when bodies actually physically collide, a deeper kind of “hook-up” becomes possible. This is transcendent to gender difference.

     A skilled toucher does some version of the following: he is centered and sensitive, so when the hands go on, he feels a field of activity which is the interaction of his energy with yours. In Ashtanga, we follow the overt needs of the pose: teacher puts the student into, or moves him towards, the proper position of the pose. Simultaneously, an energy exchange is happening, the basis for what in yogic circles is termed Shaktipat, which means “descent of power”. I prefer to see this as the power possible when two people touch, as opposed to the teacher subjecting the poor student to his power.

     I have found Pattabhi Jois remarkably synergistic on this issue. He is famous for that last push, where he climbs on your back after backbends, gives you a squash. I was fortunate enough to have this experience six days a week for nearly an entire year, at the time I associate with his energetic peak, the last year before beloved Ammachi, his wife, died. This was 1997, he was 83. At that age, he wasn’t an elite asana practitioner anymore, but his internal energy mastery was unequaled. He would give a push, and it would be a strong statement, but I could feel his receptivity- actually, it was the fact that I sensed this receptivity that awakened a willingness in me to participate fully in the exchange.

     A person will allow herself to be dictated to for only so long before she needs to have a voice in the exchange. If her voice is denied, it becomes a domination thing, which some people like, to their detriment. This is fundamentalism: personal oblivion in the face of the utterly dominant “God”, an expression of the need to master others, and to be mastered by another. There have been many problem gurus on this issue, Pattabhi Jois isn’t one of them.

3. The collective: as we do asana over time, and we follow the promptings of our own practice, we begin to transcend the grossly physical, we begin to register subtle energy events of whose existence we were previously ignorant. In asana class, the character of the group of people in class with us will become more prominent. It may even be a disturbing force while we are still gaining strength in this realm. Also, as we grow into the energetic realm, which again, is exactly where yoga practice is taking us, we will project more of ourselves “out there”, and this requires increasing degrees of responsibility. There is the story of a well-known contemporary guru who was going to come back as a rock in his next life because he had gained extreme levels of energy mastery and was messing around with it in uncouth ways.

     For the highly evolved, much is expected. But what’s the alternative, go backwards?

Anyway,

Namaste,

Steve

Hi all:

     Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, one among many, operating now in your brain. It has multiple functions- the reason I’m bringing it into this story is because it is often seen as the central biochemical involved in an organism’s reward system. If a process is accomplished which satisfies criteria developed over millenia in the human neurologic system, dopamine is released into the neurotransmitter cocktail of the moment and it’s effects are experienced, which can range from mildly pleasant to overwhelmingly euphoric. Food and sex are seen by evolutionary biologists as the two biggies for dopamine-reward release: they serve basic functions for survival of the organism and the species. Connoisseurs of food and sex have focused on the various delights of anticipation and pleasure involved in the build-up and consummation of these arts.

     Another way to get at dopamine is through certain drugs, especially cocaine and heroin. These two have been described as hijacking the neurological reward system, and if used extensively, seriously deranging it. All you have to do is take the drug, it’s a way of cheating the reward system, and it obviously wreaks havoc on the user. A true perversion: trash yourself, get a reward.

     So, yoga: various processes of meditative focus can also tap into the reward system, but in ways that get at the essence of health as opposed to destruction. In last month’s post, I wrote about the sublimation of impressions. In short: we receive impressions from outward and inward experience, they both leave a mark on the psyche/soma, joining the cumulative fund of impressions that began from the moment we were conceived. If we have spent some time practicing yoga and have learned to value and realize a mind relatively quiet of discursive thought when we so choose to quiet it, we find that when the discursive mind is quiet, a felt sense of impressions left from experience comes to the fore. This felt sense can then become the object that we focus upon, and that very act of focusing does something to the impression- if we can feel an impression, and focus on it, it will begin to transform into a higher version of itself, wherein it will also begin to integrate itself with the rest of our experience, becoming a more harmonious component of the whole which is our self.

     The testimony of countless yogis reports that at a certain point in this sublimation-of-impression process, the heart begins to awaken- basically, a surge of energy begins to accompany the yogic act, and it registers prominently in the heart, ie: it begins to beat bigger or faster, or skip a few beats and then find a deper kind of synchronization with surrounding energy fields, maybe it feels incredible pleasure or excitement. One claim I am clearly making here: the heart is a sense organ and it senses energy fields, both our own and others.

     Another claim: our nerves are wired to reward evolutionary activity, and if impressions are sublimated sufficiently, the nerves will send their reward. Why? Well, a sublimated impression has been mastered to a degree, and no longer holds us in its thrall, ie: the social trauma you received in high school. Reductionist evolutionary science may say that the trauma no longer slows us down, and this has life-value because the slow will perish. Interestingly, dopamine can initiate the release of adrenaline which stimulates the heart. This isn’t hijacking the sytem, it is tapping into a higher realization of legitimate reward, the bliss of successive yogic realization. And if a group of people do this together in a room, they have access to each other’s delight (or grim drama, but we all have to start somewhere)- this is a not a small matter and I’ll address it again later.

     Last part: this legitimate reward cannot be faked, which means that we must be actively applying ourselves to real impressions, which is very different than wanting or praying for yogic bliss to happen. It is actually doing yoga, an arduous, at times chaotic inner learning curve, and we need to stay on it for actual reward. When I said “the essence of health” above, I’m getting at a concept of health which implies an honest, courageous facing of developmental urges more than lack of a dripping nose and a good tan.

Thanks for reading,

Steve

     I won’t be doing the talk/ led class thing this Friday, October 6th, since I’m in New York City . So, I thought I’d regale you through this medium instead:

    My basic premise here will be that thought, in whatever form, leaves an impression on our subtle physiology. What do I mean by subtle physiology? That could be answered both objectively and experientially. Objectively, it refers roughly to the nervous system, and within that, the limbic system and outwards to the cortex of the brain, in particular the somatic region of the cortex. It also refers to the yogic concept of nadis, which are subtle energy channels throughout the body. Contrast this to gross physiology: bones, heart muscle, pancreas, pinky finger. The experiential aspect: when you have a thought, whether intentional, or far more commonly, unintentional- the thought being something offered to you by your nerves whether you want it or not- when you have this thought, it has a feeling aspect, comparable to fingers touching skin, it makes a mark, like a stick in wet cement, which can be perceived at varying levels. For instance, a major thought, such as “the woman I love just left me and she’s never coming back”, will leave a powerful imprint, may even elicit temporarily debilitating responses like sobbing, shaking, etc. When Einstein connected his way to e=mc squared, we can assume that this thought, in its original revelation, had a host of feeling toned accompaniments for him. Now, most thoughts that most of us have most of the time are smaller, ie: “I’ll get lunch together for the kids”. Nonetheless, these leave an imprint too, just a milder and smaller one: all thoughts leave an imprint.

     What is an imprint? The yogic traditions speak of external and internal experience as leaving a trace upon us. My point in the previous paragraph is that internal events, like thoughts, leave an impression on our being, just as outward experiences do. Thought processes are the nervous system in action, often rewiring itself as it thinks, the rewiring process a product of the thought. The imprint would be the change in our gross and subtle physiology after the thought (inwardly) or the frisbee that jammed our pinky (outwardly).

     So, the jammed pinky slowly heals, and becomes a slightly beaten down version of our original pinky. And what happens to the imprint left by thoughts? My response: it changes over time too, in a manner similar to gross level pinky healing. So, for example, our poor sad fellow who lost his love has received a large impact on his subtle physiology, an impact he may be increasing with ongoing negative thinking. Well, as time passes, his psyche begins to mend, despite him, and one way to see this process is through the idea of sublimation: the low becomes high in the living organism. The eros of life will take the psychic wound and reorganize it, the unbearable will become comfortable, and the wound will actually become the Darwinian imprint from the environment which will initiate new capacities.

     This eros process happens even in the lowliest smirking couch potato (sorry to all the low smirking couch potatoes out there, I don’t mean to marginalize you), he is a theater of eros occuring right now, until the day he dies. Viz: the neurologists used to think that our numbers of brain cells died off from age 3, and no new ones could be grown. All downhill from age 3. This has now been debunked and the elderly have been confirmed to grow new brain cells which make new connections in the areas of life in which they participate. Anyway, our couch potato’s psychosomatic being is taking the imprints from his outward and inward experience and gradually, inevitable bringing them to a higher level of organization. The thing is, he’s just mucking through this life, doesn’t care at all, and profound amounts of eros are happening anyway, it’s what keeps him there.

     But the yogi: yoga tells us that if we deliberately put our attention on the imprints of inner and outer experience, evolution will happen faster and much much better. This is why yoga places such value on a mind that can free itself of chatter when it so chooses: the eros, the organizing healing evolutionary force, can get stronger when it receives deliberate attention. How strong can it get? It would seem that God is the limit and God, by definition, has no limit. And when thoughts are mucking up the works, leaving constantly new impressions, the process never gets a chance to really concentrate. It still happens, but in couch potato form, or in the case of the always-thinking intellectual, who knows so much but can never really realize it in terms of energetic liberation or happiness. And yoga is pointing us to that place in our being which is beneath thought, telling us to put our attention there, to experience our subtle physiology directly.

     So, what happens if a yogi focuses on a feeling and stays with it? My answer: it begins to feel better (although initially it may have to dump out Pandora’s Box, which may very well include the dreaded feelings that he didn’t want to have to feel). It feels better, and if he stays with it, it will reach sublimated form, which will trigger off an awakening of the heart, which I hope in my next post to connect with dopamine and the novelty edge, the rewiring of the brain for constant access to bliss. (Hint: you have to stay on the chaotic inner edge or bliss will never happen.)

Until next time, happy channel surfing,

Steve

     Pattabhi Jois speaks of “the mind in the heart”. When he says it, he puts his hand on his heart (which is also what he often does when people bow to him in respect). What can be said about this?

     One amazing fact: Krishnamacharya- the modern father of the lineage, whom I consider the primary inspiration behind perhaps 75 per cent of the asana practice on the planet- could stop his heart at will and suppress it for two minutes. He had incredible control of his own physiology, a control that went deep into his autonomic nervous system, generally considered beneath the level of will. (Check the book Sri Krishnamacharya the Purnacharya, available through the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai, www.kym.org, the school established by his son Desikachar, for testimony by Western scientists who were seeking valid verification of supposed yogic tall-tales.)

     We can use the term “liminal line” for the transition zone between that which is conscious and that which isn’t. Above the liminal line is everything of which we are aware: even if we don’t understand it, we can still have some grasp of its existence and can to some degree manipulate it with our will. Beneath the liminal line…this is where it gets interesting. Biologists have explained countless physiologic processes operating with astounding complexity, which almost always work perfectly, in our own bodies, over which we have next to no conscious awareness or control. Systems and complexity theorists have refined this understanding in an inspirational way under the concept of autopoiesis which means: organization or self-renewal which happens by itself, exchanging elements but maintaining the same basic underlying order, with a limitless potential for new kinds of order. Incredible.

     The basic access tool to these underlying physiologic processes is felt internal sensation, including kinesthetic sensation: the muscle sense and proprioception: the stretch and bodily positioning sense. Both of these are processed in the somatic cortex of the brain. Basically, this is the act of feeling that which is going on inside our skin, which is related to but different from touch of the skin with outward objects. This internal sensing can be summed up under the Sanskrit term: vedana.

      I previously belabored the process indicated in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras about quieting the chatter mind, the thinking mind. (Check July 2006). When this is successful, vedana is revealed. When the thinking mind gets quiet, a field of internal feeling presents itself to conscious awareness. In turn, anything in conscious awareness may become the object upon which the yogi can choose to focus. If she chooses to focus on the sensations of the heart, as it beats, as it responds to life events such as romance or fear, she will begin to get a little smarter about the heart. If she keeps this focus up, “over a long period of time without interruption, earnestly” (that’s yoga sutra 1:14) what can happen?

     My answer to that is that the liminal line will begin to drop, and she will slowly get control over the actions of the heart. This is deeper yoga, but it operates at the same level as simple asana practice: the first time you tried handstand, what happened? Chaos theory. But, if you apply yourself over time, order begins to emerge from within the chaos, as strength is built and nerve circuits created. The potential was there all along, you just couldn’t contain it yet, your physiology just wasn’t ready, just like a child’s physiology is not yet ready to walk.

     Controlling the mind is harder than handstand. And it doesn’t just happen because we want it to, we have to apply ourselves just as we do in handstand. Over time, psychic strength is built, nerve circuits created, we can gradually quiet thoughts when we want to. And one of yoga’s great tools to achieve this is to focus on vedana, the sensations in the body, as a place to redirect conscious attention away from the chatter in the mind, and asanas are an excellent means for this because they make physical sensation obvious in an orderly, progressive manner. Focus on the body and the mind will discharge its load.

     So, the mind in the heart: if and when we fall in love, (to use one of the great dopamine drenched passages of life as an example) we find that the heart responds vividly to that which passes through our minds, and often responds to things of which the mind in our head knows nothing. But, as the philosopher’s would say, there is a referent to that heart experience, there is something real out there to which it is responding: the heart knows things the intellectual mind does not: the heart is often that which introduces these things to the intellect.

     As the story circulates in Mysore, Pattabhi Jois was learning to stop his heart and Krishnamacharya eventually instructed his pupil to forgo that quest and have a family, which has been known to do a thing or two to the hearts of the parents. The teaching here seems to be: use yogic techniques to gain access to that which others may not have access, this yogic attention will begin to alter and mature and gain control over the internal phenomena which it pays attention to. And these yogic techniques  include that of living a “normal” life and observing what this does to the heart. And through the heart, sharing life with others.

Namaste, Steve

     Last month I wrote and spoke about the difficult practice of clearing the mind of thoughts to allow a bit of the stuff represented by Soma and Heart into the stream of consciousness. Allow me to offer a short autobiographical account:

     In 1995 I completed my Master’s Degree in counseling psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. If you haven’t heard of it, take a look at www.pacifica.edu, one of the great centers on the planet for depth psychology and mytho-poetic thought. Joseph Campbell sensed this early on and left them his library, significantly furthering their cause. They draw strong influence from C.G. Jung, and in turn James Hillman and Marija Gimbutas, as well as most of the other luminaries in that field.

     To survive the rigors of grad school, I discovered I wasn’t turning to the medicine I was learning to use, i.e.: psychology, but rather, found incredible help through yoga. I finished the degree, embarked upon my third trip to India, undertook my first serious surrender to Pattabhi Jois and the Ashtanga lineage, came back and began to teach yoga full-time. I was compelled by yoga, and enough of our society shared this feeling to allow me to make a living doing it.

     I consider Jung’s and Pacifica’s world to be that part of our being which responds when we are deeply stirred by a movie, a novel, heroism, romance, visual art, a dream, conflict in relationship, crisis in ourselves. Jung traced this response down, seeking the roots of the psyche and unearthed and beautifully expressed essential interpersonal dynamics such as archetype, shadow and projection.

     A common criticism of Jung however, as Aurobindo noted, is that he hung around in the mud of existence and didn’t know much about how high we can rise. Jung’s archetypes draw us down, (closer to amoebas) whereas he was wary of the other end of the spectrum, such as Shankaracharya’s archetypes which compel us up (closer to Spirit, by whatever name). Getting down has great value, doubtless, but it is not the whole story by a long shot. (Maybe you agree with this, maybe you don’t, comments and challenges are welcome. Ken Wilber at www.integralinstitute.org is the great resource for this dialogue in my experience.) To that I would also add that Jung knew the unconscious mind but was less astute about the experienced body.

     Long story short, by the time I was 22 I was swimming in the mind and the archetypes and craved clarity and strength. I was in Darjeeling that year, in the mountains above Calcutta in India, marveling at the wonder which is Mount Kanchenjunga. We had recently completed a 34 day trek on foot, circumambulating about 2/3rds of this majestic peak, third tallest in the world. In Darjeeling, I would awaken in my hotel room and look at it out the window. Walking along an alley on the terraced steep hillside, musing, I peered in the open door of a small house to see a man practicing dhanurasana, a backbend. I hate to admit that my first response was envy, but that soon gave way to an urgent desire to undertake a serious Hatha Yoga practice, to use the body as a means of controlling the mind, to learn to articulate and mediate my reactions to the stuff emerging from below: my past, and that of my collective. And I had intuitions of various kinds of furniture coming in from above, those were interesting: a sense of what was coming.

     So to finish here, I would like to offer the position that a focused yoga practice can bring the deep stuff of the psyche to a fuller and higher expression than Jung’s alchemy alone. Granted, the “nonsense” and paradox of alchemy appears to generate a kind of psychic clearing and tension similar to that which appears through  Asian yoga practice. Also, novels, music, movies, performance and ritual that deeply affect us are unequaled in the capacity to loosen stuff up in the first place; India has great epics but they have not pursued story and symbol like the West; their music is equal to ours, as is their ritual and performance. However, I hold Asian yoga to go much further and to get much higher in terms of its clarity about the possibilites of higher consciousness; in general, the methods for how to realize higher consciousness through practice which have come from the West are hapless compared to those from the East. Jung viewed Western alchemy as being about the closest the West has gotten to the yoga of the East and he felt that Westerners should build on that instead of pursuing yogas developed through Eastern cultural environments. As the world has become more global, that concern of his becomes more and more moot.

     So, it has emerged that the Eastern ways, of which Ashtanga is one, need to be combined now with the Western ways, of which Jung is one. It should be noted that every Guru from the East who has touched our Western lives is currently in an active engagement with the West.  Indeed, a huge aspect of India’s history since the 1500’s is its engagement with the West. Krishnmacharya attempted to become pure East, a master linguist who purposely avoided learning English even though he was surrounded by it. His students Pattabhi Jois and BKS Iyengar however are not East so much as East/ West; the engagement with the West is a huge part of their story. The same can be said of the Dalai Lama.

     The West says, “Think and you shall Be”, the East says, “Wake up from the dream which is the movie of your mind.” The complete picture is to do both. Depth psychology’s heartmind just never gets high enough. But quitting life to do full-time yoga in a cave with eyes rolled back may never allow large portions of our psyche to get into play at all. The thing which is bigger than mind and fuller than no-mind is global Heart. Let’s do that.

More on Friday.

Namaste, Steve

Hi Everybody:

          My teacher in India, Pattabhi Jois, says “Ashtanga Yoga is Patanjali Yoga.” As I see it, the basic thing Patanjali is asking us to practice is the act of quieting the discursive mind, the thinking mind. I’m a lover of unbearable paradoxes and there is a good one here: Patanjali’s sutras are all thoughts, every last one of them. Here is a supposedly profound thought that tells us not to think. What’s left? Where did Patanjali get his thoughts from? Did they emerge in complete form from his pineal gland?

     The emerging answer seems to have become: do both, think and don’t think. And I believe the crux of the matter, especially for Westerners, is that we can’t not think. We try to quiet our minds and it doesn’t happen. We spend our days working through all the issues within thought, such as: replace bad thought with good thoughts, try to replace kookoo mind with intelligent orderly practical mind, replace mind altogether by doing the American thing: drinking beer and watching TV.

     We do the dishes and conclude that George Bush has subjected his unresolved father complex on the entire world, at horrible cost, without a lick of self-reflection on his part. But the inner yogi asks: can you just do the dishes, just this once, without thinking about him? Or yourself? Or anybody or anything? Just being with hands, water, dishes, soap, bits of food, your own body, feeling your brain instead of living in it? Returning to these concrete realities when thoughts do come. Can you do that?

     Why? One reason: there is a whole realm of bodily feeling, emotion, sensing, intuition, instinct, deep knowing, meaningful suffering, purposeful process, wounds waiting for attention, heart-centered delight, self-organizing vital energy, all of which I put under the heading of Soma, which is often partially or totally masked and obscured by the thought train. Worse, it is susceptible and radically manipulated by a mind mostly ignorant of the havoc it wreaks on its own vessel. If I could, just this once for starters, just for this hour and a half while I practice, live deeply in the soma, the heart mind, which opens the possibility of a psychosomatic process purified and sublimated by sustained yogic and meditative attention, which may eventually reach up to the level of Shakti and cosmic experience not analyzed but directly and immediately known- and then enter that data into my thoughts…

Namaste, Steve

Hi Everyone.

1. Tomorrow is Memorial Day and we will only have one class: 8-10 am, so you can sleep “late” and observe the dead in the afternoon.

     About the dead, to put things in perspective, I’ve been scolded by my fellow Ashtangis for getting up so late now that I have kids: 4:20 in the morning. The earliest regular wake-up time I ever had was 3:15 am, it was consciousness altering. Michele and I would go to concerts, lectures and dance performances and fall asleep.

2. Speaking of Michele, she will be wrapping up her Ashtanga Basics course this afternoon at 5 pm. Next week will be the beginning of a regular class, open to drop-ins, dropouts and everyone else, on Sundays from 5-6:30 pm, Ashtanga Yoga for Beginners. She’s describing it as a class for people just getting started, or those who want to take a slower approach to the practice. If Mysore-style threatens your sense of homeostasis, you might try this one.

3. I’ll be doing my led Primary class this coming Friday, June 2nd from 5-7 pm. Please bring your burning questions and existential dilemmas. I’ll be offering a few more comments on my understanding of the differences between Body and Mind and the arduous and glorious job of getting them to sit down and talk to each other. Eventually talking leads to flirting, which leads to…

Namaste, Steve

Hi Everyone.

Great quote from Gary Snyder, poet:

     I was working for a trail crew up in Yosemite Park. I found myself doing three months of long, hard physical labor, out on the trails week after week. At the beginning, I found myself straining against it, trying to exercise my mind in a serious intellectual kind of way, while doing my work. I was reading Milton and had some other reading. And it was frustrating, although I had done the same thing before on many jobs. Finally, I gave up trying to carry on an intellectual interior life separate from the work and I said the hell with it, I’ll just work. And instead of losing something, I got something much greater. By just working I found myself being completely there, having the whole mountain inside of me, and finally having a whole language inside of me that became one with the rocks and trees. And that was where I learned the possibility of being one with what you were doing, and not losing anything of the mind thereby. Excerpted from The Real Work , (1969, New Directions).

Hi everyone:

Greetings from the Santa Barbara Rain Forest [this was a period of seemingly incessant rain]:

     I’ll be carrying on with the once a month led class. I’ll begin with a short talk, please bring questions, and then we’ll get part of the way through the first series, maybe about halfway. Everyone is always welcome to just do what they can. I won’t whack anybody with a stick. If the universe begins to look bleak, you can always lie on your back. Beginners are welcome to this class, just be aware that Ashtanga is a little different than EZ yoga: expect to get some exercise.

     If you’ve experienced confusion in the Myore-style class, this should help. If you experience confusion in this class, well…1. It could be the obtuse style of my teaching, in which case, hang in there, some order may begin to emerge from within the chaos, 2. you are in the grip of the cosmic polarities, somewhere between above and below, which I take to be a good sign, an indicator of existential courage, sure to resolve itself in a rush of prana, or 3. this isn’t for you, in which case I’m sure I could refer you elsewhere.

Namaskar,

Steve

PS: Our “office” is a bit haphazard at times. If you view your inclusion on this list as irritating, presumptuous, completely boring, totally irrelevant or something to be aggressively ignored, please let us know, I’d hate to be seen as another internet misfit.