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It's been maybe five, six years since I began my Astanga yoga asana and pranayama practice. But I feel like I only began to practice some of the other six limbs during the past one or two years. I had never practiced seated meditation -- seemingly the original asana and form of yoga -- more than a few times in my life and those few times were without purpose and vigor.
So it was recently -- literally several weeks ago -- after making a breakthrough on some inner work I had been doing that I decided I am ready to learn how to teach yoga. Thus I began to immerse myself in the various translations of the yoga sutras along with beginning a once-a-day early morning seated meditation practice using the pranayama method. I started with just twenty minutes and now am up to forty minutes sitting still on a cushion with crossed legs, with my thumbs and forefingers together, using the breath and then the third eye as my objects of concentration, putting effort towards mastering the incessant vacillations of my mind. It is often very hard work and it was immediately obvious that a high degree of devotion is required to make consistent progress.
I'm quite surprised and pleased, two attachments I aim to let go of :-) , at how quickly I began to receive the benefits of this new practice. I feel a new sense of tranquility in life and a new lightness of body and mind that I haven't felt for a long, long time. Maybe never. Following are six insights and direct experiences I've gained in these several weeks. If you practice as I have, maybe you will gain similar insights or much different ones.
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| image shared under CC license from horizontal.integration's flickr site. |
1. Yoga is compatible with any religion because the end-goal of meditation is to become so still and so aligned with Spirit, or the Source of All, that your Self becomes absorbed into it as you transcend all suffering and achieve perfection. You can choose to focus on any manifestation of that Spirit you wish: God, Jesus Christ, the life force that resides within each of us, Mohammed, the Buddha. Yoga doesn't much care which deity we choose. The practice will not discriminate and everyone has access to all the benefits.
2. The conscious mind, it's persistent vacillations and perceptions is not the Self. It is an object that the Self is witnessing as is everything in nature including thought, emotion, pain, pleasure and attachment to any of these. Cementing this discrimination is one of the goals of yoga.
3. The conscious mind is a labeling machine and, in most, predominantly an avoider of what it perceives as pain and a seeker of sensual pleasure, indulgence and sensory stimulation. In addition to reacting to the objects of its perception, it draws on a store of latent impressions (or what I think of as the contents of the subconscious mind) to make meaning out of everything it perceives. These latent impressions (some of which are said to come from previous births) are the source of all our judgements, likes, dislikes, prejudices, stereotypes, sense of self, and all the attributes we've unconsciously applied to everything our minds know about.
4. The mastery and eventual dissipation of our atavistic desires, urges or instincts to avoid pain and gain pleasure and becoming attached to these is one of the higher goals of yoga. Those desires and instincts includes some stuff we like to think of as "hardwired" like sex/procreation, fight/flight, etc.
5. When you begin to cultivate awareness and conscious observation of how your mind does what it does, you begin to realize that all worldly experience is the same, follows the same path and thus becomes less attachment-worthy. That path is presented to the sense organs of the body (an object can be thoughts, emotions and all the things we perceive as being external to us) > sense organs send signals to the nervous system > nervous system carries the signals to the mind > the mind makes meaning of the signals by tapping its store of impressions or associations > then a perception occurs > which often (if you're not attending to your Self) results in an unconscious reaction in the form of a thought, emotion, action. This last part usually leads to a whole chain of reactions that result in the creation of additional latent impressions. Karma.
6. The dissipation of the mind's incessant patterns of thought and labeling through consistent yoga practice result in longer and longer gaps in the thoughts, a new awareness of the individual moments of time flowing from one to the next and an accompanying sense of tranquility, and a newfound ability to accept what is and to see things as they really are.
The sutras seem to say that what I've talked about in this post is only the beginning of the stilling process because the beginning stages are "…accompanied by four kind of cognition: analytical thinking, insight, bliss, and feeling like a self" (Chip Hartranft's translation). Sometimes I get glimpses of bliss in my seated meditation. What I've written are insights and seem very analytical to me, which is consistent with my self-image. So I guess at some point I might see all of that fall away. Where are you in your yoga meditation practice if you have one? Let us know in the comments below.
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