Being, Becoming and Belonging

Posted on February 2, 2021 by admin

I’ve had the title of this post for a while but have been struggling to coherently weave all the pieces together. Then this photo appeared. As the cliche goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Or ten thousand! Being, Becoming and Belonging. Look at the eyes, ears and nose of the deer and imagine how much of the world she is taking in moment to moment!

A four year old boy was playing in the back yard of a house in Virginia and met a friend. He brought his new buddy to the back door because he wanted to invite her in and share a bowl of cereal. His mother, a bit startled at first, had the presence of mind to capture this moment before explaining to her son that the baby deer’s mother was probably worried and that they should take her back to the forest behind the house.

The boy and baby deer radiate pure being: innocent, open and fully present. They are both becoming more aware of their world, of themselves, growing, expanding, opening to new possibilities that life is offering them. And their shared belonging arises because they know, intuitively, that they come from the same tribe, the same community of all beings, sharing aliveness and a gentle, understated but unconditional love. A fleeting moment captured as a message from Wholeness, teaching adults something we may have forgotten.

We all have, at the core of our being, this innocence and unconditional love for life and all of creation. As this is our True Nature, it can never be taken away, but it easily is buried away under layers of thoughts, beliefs, ideologies and other forms of conditioning. Innocence and openness are quickly replaced by mistrust and fear and we lose our way, both individually and collectively.

One of the great challenges on the path of embodied evolutionary awakening is learning how to refine our discriminating intelligence so we can weed out the pathological ideas and beliefs that obscure and inhibit the ongoing unfolding and integration of Being, Becoming and Belonging. The survival of our planet as a source of life and the nurturing of all life forms, including the humans, requires the continued nurturing of these three modes of Divine existence.

Humans are social animals and the need for belonging is a powerful force in our lives. Tribes and communities feed our emotions and emotions provide the energies that move us through all the dimensions of our lives. Emotions are the fuel of becoming and belonging and we are living in a crisis of belonging. The tremendous restrictions on normal social interactions in response to the the Covid virus has greatly exacerbated this crisis, and the acceleration of technological change will keep amping up the pressure long after Covid is gone. But the symptoms have been in plain sight for many many generations.

Far too many human beings find community in social groups based on ‘being against’ members of other groups. Based on fear and isolation, and easily degenerating into hatred, these social groups are driving the ‘collective becoming’ deeper and deeper into pathology and are a hugely destructive force on the planet. The news media and social media platforms, serving as a collective nervous system, support these groups, and easily become infected with lies and misinformation, spreading the infection far and wide.

How did we get here? And where exactly are we? Collectively, and individually, we are stuck in a case of arrested development. Becoming has lost touch with Being and this sends belonging into dysfunction and pathology. This disconnect is the primary definition of the the Sanskrit word duhkah, usually translated as suffering. Duhkha comes from an old Aryan root ‘kha‘, referring to the axle-wheel connection of a chariot. Sukha, easiness, effortless action, freedom, is a wheel that turns smoothly, being becoming and belonging as a single flow. Duhkha refers to a wheel that is stuck or way off center, giving a jarring disconnected ride.

How can we become ‘unstuck’? How can we alchemically transform duhkah into sukha, the dross of confusion into the gold of awakened being? To transform the collective pathology we must first do the work of investigating and healing our own inner worlds. We need to ‘wake up’ (to our True Nature), ‘grow up’ emotionally, and ‘clean up’ the ingrained traumas and the mess we have made of the environment. To truly move forward we also must make our spiritual practice the most important thing in our lives. As they say in Texas Hold’em poker, we have to ‘go all in’ on spiritual awakening.

An embodied spiritual practice a powerful entry into waking up and growing up. It allows a deepening of insight into how we literally resist the flow of life by creating boundaries, barriers and strategies of control, leading to and perpetuating the toxic emotions of irrational fear and anxiety. By sustaining attention on our inner world of sensations we can actually feel the contractions manifesting at all levels of the tissues, from muscles to fascia to nerves and cells. We feel the resistance to our breath and blood flow, to the peristaltic rhythms of the digestive system and the tension in our sense organs. These barriers, boundaries and resistance can be seen in the collective field as well, manifesting in the behaviors we see in society on a daily basis.

How do we work with these insights? The deepest level of meditation, what Adyashanti calls True Meditation (see below) involves resting as Primordial Awareness and allowing what arises in the mind field to just be. If our attention is held in an open space of love and compassion, the innate cellular intelligence, without the intruding assistance of the ego, will help the knots of resistance find pathways of healthy release. But this is not a beginning level practice because when the conditioning is strong and deeply embedded, letting it just be just often allows the ego-conditioning to hijack our attention. Attention provides more energy, strengthening the conditioning. Where attention goes, energy flows.

By cultivating discriminating intelligence, (viveka in Sanskrit), we learn to differentiate between the deep stillness of Presence, (Purusha in the Yoga Sutras) where all healing takes place, and the transient movements of thought and qi (Prakriti). We discriminate Pure Awareness from the vehicles though which Pure Awareness functions. This leads to a shift in self identity from the transience of the egoic activity to Atman, True Nature, Wholeness, the Tao. When we can learn to align attention to Being, Becoming can find healing. Then our sense of Belonging comes directly from Being, including all, without borders and boundaries.

How do we discover and cultivate discriminating intelligence, As eloquently stated in a modern quip, ‘The mind is a dangerous place. One should not venture in there alone. Dante had the Roman poet Virgil and his angel Beatrice as guides. But with a good map and the support of millennia of spiritual guidance, we can also jump in confidently.

Vedanta/Yoga, Buddhism and Taoism provide us with many refined maps of the inner environment, giving us reference points feel where Being or Spirit is becoming manifest in forms. The Taittiriya Upanishad, one of the source books for the key principles of Vedanta, describes five koshas, interwoven layers or sheaths of embodiment that can either obscure True Nature/ Atman or reveal it. These dimensions of existence can either obscure the light of Being, creating suffering; or they can allow us to live a life of freedom, purpose and celebration. These five nested layers are also linked by a parallel model into three bodies or shariras, which follow very closely the three treasures of Taoism, jing, qi and shen and somewhat similarly to three bodies of the Buddha, the dharmakaya, the sambogyakaya and the nirmanakaya.

What follows is a guide for when you get stuck or lost your meditation practice or your daily life. As an exercise, allow your attention to find and feel the felt sense of these increasingly denser layers of existence. They are usually presented from gross to subtle, from ignorance to awakening, but we are going to start from True Nature and move from most subtle to most tangible. These layers or bodies are vehicles of the Divine that are continually emerging from Ultimate Mystery and sustaining themselves moment to moment. But they need attention and nurturing to bring them more fully into becoming and belonging.

Ultimate Mystery, The Tao, Brahman in Vendanta, the dharmakaya in Buddhism; Inconceiveable, unmanifest: beyond being and non being; beyond light and dark; the infinite source of all that comes into being. Atman, True Nature, Spirit. “Before Abraham was, I am.”

The first emergence of spirit into form, the most subtle layer, is the anandamaya kosha, the body of bliss or great joy. This is also known as the karana sharira or causal body, the sambhoga kaya and is related to the Taoist ‘Shen’ or spirit, the light emanating from the candle. Spirit’s presence in matter, in its purest state is unconditional love, joy and deep compassion, as this week’s viral photo, as anandamaya kosha as you can get, demonstrates. Far more open in children, this effortless being can manifest in an infinite number of ways, from simple open presence to ecstatic trance and everything in between.

Speaking of ecstatic trance, in my early days of my spiritual awakening I was blessed to live on the same block in Boston as the Ramakrishna Vedanta Society. In 1971 I began my studies with Swami Sarvagatananda on the Bhagavad Gita, and the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (I still have my copy!) and was introduced to the possibilities of the world of mystic ecstasy though devotional or bhakti yoga.

(Gadadhar was Sri Ramakrishna’s given name.) ” At the age of six or seven Gadadhar had his first experience of spiritual ecstasy. One day in June or July, when he was walking along a narrow path between paddy-fields, eating puffed rice that he carried in a basket. he looked up at the sky and saw a beautiful, dark thundercloud. As it spread, rapidly enveloping the whole sky, a flight of snow white cranes passed in front of it. The beauty of the contrast overwhelmed the boy. He fell to the ground, unconscious, and the puffed rice went in all directions. Some villagers found him and carried him home in their arms. Galadhar later said that in that state he had experienced an indescribable joy”. In his later years, Ramakrishna explored many other religions though his vast open heart, demonstrating that they all lead to the same awakening.

May we all blessed to discover and re-inhabit such innocence, openness and freedom. For this Divine Love to fully operate in the world, it needs Divine intelligence and thus the next layer emerges. The rest of the koshas to come comprise the nirmanakaya, the body of Buddhas incarnation.

This next three koshas, comprise the suksha sharira, or subtle/energy body, the flame of the candle. The first is the vijnanamaya kosha, the sheath of intelligence and wisdom, also known as the buddhi. The Buddha was the one whose buddhi had fully awakened. Here the foundation is openness or presence and is the source of insight and cosmic vision, integrating infinite wisdom with the infinite compassion of the anandamaya kosha .

The Sanskrit word Mahat refers to the Intelligence of the Whole or the Universal Mind, and the vijnanmaya kosha is the link that opens to Mahat, allowing inherent wisdom of the Universe to manifest in the individual, so they may realize wholeness while still immersed in the ever-changing flow of an individual life. An awakened and integrated vijnanamaya kosha guides all of our daily decisions and actions from a place of wisdom and compassion and meditation practice strengthens this.

A living being wanting to survive and thrive in a complex world has a lot of information to process. This is handled by the manomaya kosha, the center layer of both the three subtle body koshas and the five koshas of the whole model. This sheath of mental activity or manas is highly complex vehicle of consciousness with its own inner levels to handle its differing functions and it is here that problems can arise.

Its first and primary function is to receive and organize information coming through the five outer sense organs and the inner senses of proprioception, kinesthesia and relational mirroring. Each sense has its information stream that can be cultivated through sustained attention. A musician trains their ears, a body worker their sense of touch, a chef their sense of taste and smell, and so on. We all use these to one degree or another and in meditation we are looking to open all the sensory portals so we may more fully take in the richness of the world. Dan Siegel’s ‘Wheel of Awareness meditation explore these information streams in a profound way. The sense organs and sensory perception are highly important in mediation and daily life is the information streaming is always in the present moment.

The manomaya kosha also records, stores and releases memories, activates imagination, and interprets our experiences by giving them meaning. These mental activities are also available for noticing in meditation, and in time, throughout our daily activities as well. Through learned memory, the manomaya kosha unconsciously facilitates habitual actions and in its more unconscious modes, it carries ideas, beliefs, myths and prejudices from our collective past that continue to shape our perception, thinking and behavior. Because of its capacities to operate unconsciously, this level of the manomaya kosha is where we all get stuck, affecting our perceptions, beliefs and behaviors.

Where I keep getting tripped up is in the habits I have encoded in meaning making process of mind. In my own personal practice, as I discover, or uncover places of resistance and holding, my first immediate reaction is fear. At the meaning making level, the unconscious interprets resistance as scary and dangerous and immediately triggers three possible actions: push it back into the unconscious and hope it goes away; run away from it through some form of distraction; or begin to wrestle it to regain control. Some of these patterns are part of a freeze response to some form of danger, real or imagined, but all in all, these are dysfunctional emotional patterns.

When my actions and perceptions become stuck in the manomaya kosha, a fear-contraction/fear-avoidance emotional feedback loop becomes established that is cut off from the level of intelligence, allowing no new information can get through. My noticing this, of course, is coming from the vijnanamaya kosha and the beginning of the healing, because it is no longer unconscious. This is still very challenging because the unconscious conditioning still has karmic emotional momentum

Too make it even more ‘interesting’, my self identity has also become entangled in the meaning making response. It is not just that my body/mind believes there is danger where none is present, but that it is my fault and that is because there is something inherently wrong with me. Shame and or spiritual terror are some of the wonderful gifts of my Irish Catholic DNA patterning. (There are also many good ones, such as my ease in connecting to the mystical world.) From the anandamaya kosha I can find compassion and from the vijnanamaya kosha some cosmic insight and context (so that is where that shit is coming from!), so I can patiently sit with the process and healing continues.

Now some stored traumas can carry a huge energetic charge of repressed energy and the guidance of a trained trauma facilitator may be necessary to help guide the nervous system through the resolution of these trapped energy loops. Working with my friend Caryn McHose over the years in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing has been very helpful in safely navigating the stored traumas triggered in my psyche over the last few years. I am very grateful to have had her support and guidance. Now the pockets and places of resistance are minor and I can see them and the habituated reactions more clearly. They are still annoying and sometimes scary, but even those are conditioned reactions I can laugh with, some of the time.

The manomaya kosha is intinmately linked to the next kosha (and the densest level of the energy body), the pranamaya kosha, the sheath of prana. The pranamaya kosha has its own levels, from the subtle cellular activity all the way to the energies that move us through space. Here we find the most tangible manifestations of our emotions, our autonomic nervous system. The ‘stress response’ and the ‘relaxation response’ are easy to track, as we feel ‘wound up’, hot under the collar, or uptight’ under stress and chill, cool and calm when relaxed. We can feel quiet or depressed, aroused or agitated; too much energy (rajas), not enough energy (tamas), or ‘just right’ (sattva).

The breathing is the entry point into the pranamaya kosha and in the beginning, we allow the breath to keep letting go, to keep expanding and softening, noticing how various postures can facilitate this. When we link the vijnanamaya kosha to the manomaya kosha and pranamaya kosha, the three sheaths begin to operate as a single dynamic intelligence. Integration continues the healing as the light of the anandamaya kosha shines through all the layers. The pranamaya kosha can be explored in a more advanced way through pranayama practice, but it is important to note that ultimately we are looking to drop all efforts to control the flow of the life force, which is why pranayama is approached with caution.

The final sheath is the anamaya kosha, the sheath composed of food. This body of weight and mass, solid and measurable, is also known as the sthula sharira or gross body and corresponds to the wax of the candle. Gravity awakens this sheath through our felt sense of weight and lightness. In people who are ‘living in their heads’, this sheath is unconscious and the body is approached from thought. “Can you feel that?” ” I think so!”

As the anandamaya kosha awakens, bringing light into the density of matter, the whole Universe becomes our body. We realize Being as the source, becoming as the evolutionary journey of the Cosmos, belonging to life and all of creation, and Ultimate Mystery, The Tao. We feel the aliveness flowing through our body/minds moment to moment, from the micro-phase quantum levels emerging as quarks and electrons, to the macro-phase powers of gravity as Mother Earth dances with the sun, moon, stars and other galaxies. We come to know that Universe action is the source of all of our actions, all manifestations of creation, all emerging from an infinite unknowable spaciousness. The ultimate source of our body/mind is unbounded spaciousness. Ultimate Belonging is communion with all of existence, our Cosmic family.

Being: I am; Presence; The infinite Now; fundamental existence: ‘is-ness’. Before I am becomes ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that’, there is just ‘I am’, Unchanging, Unlimited, Aware and Awake. Resting in Stillness, resting as Stillness, resting as True Nature.

Becoming: Growth and decay; evolution; learning, changing; continuously transforming; transience, flow. Body changing, mind changing, citta vrttis, weather and politics and more.

Belonging: inter-being; sharing, relating, linking, joining, supporting, nurturing, communing.
“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.” Grouch Marx

Adyashanti on True Meditation

True meditation has no direction or goal. It is pure wordless surrender, pure silent prayer. All methods aiming at achieving a certain state of mind are limited, impermanent, and conditioned. Fascination with states leads only to bondage and dependency. True meditation is abidance as primordial awareness.

True meditation appears in consciousness spontaneously when awareness is not being manipulated or controlled. When you first start to meditate, you notice that attention is often being held captive by focus on some object: on thoughts, bodily sensations, emotions, memories, sounds, etc. This is because the mind is conditioned to focus and contract upon objects. Then the mind compulsively interprets and tries to control what it is aware of (the object) in a mechanical and distorted way. It begins to draw conclusions and make assumptions according to past conditioning.

In true meditation all objects (thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories, etc.) are left to their natural functioning. This means that no effort should be made to focus on, manipulate, control, or suppress any object of awareness. In true meditation the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness is the source in which all objects arise and subside.

As you gently relax into awareness, into listening, the mind’s compulsive contraction around objects will fade. Silence of being will come more clearly into consciousness as a welcoming to rest and abide. An attitude of open receptivity, free of any goal or anticipation, will facilitate the presence of silence and stillness to be revealed as your natural condition.

As you rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive control, contractions, and identifications. Awareness naturally returns to its non-state of absolute unmanifest potential, the silent abyss beyond all knowing.

The Spaciousness of Being, the Activation of Purpose

Posted on August 22, 2020 by admin

(I’m working on my next post but Kate passed this onto me and it is so good I want to pass it along to you as well. I have not heard of Philip before, but it is always a delight to meet a fellow somanaut and voice of Collective Awakening with a unique and universal perspective. Thank you Philip!!)

By Philip Shepherd (from his blog)

We are in the midst of an extraordinary moment in history – witnesses to and participants in a global unravelling. It is a potent storm fuelled by three converging vectors: the untold damage human activity is inflicting on nature; the disruptive virus that nature is inflicting on human activity; and the ideas of power, inequality and entitlement, ossified within human institutions, that are inflicting pain on fellow humans.

There is no telling when this storm will pass, or how it will alter our world. One thing seems certain to me, though: it’s never been more important to ground yourself in being and feel yourself aligned with and carried forward by your deepest purpose. This short essay reflects on the nature of those challenges.

Your body takes up space in the world. Everyone’s does. But think about it for a moment: the space your body occupies is not an encroachment on the world’s space, or an intrusion into it. Nor does it represent some kind of annexation, wherein your body claims ownership over that space and holds it separate from the world. The space your body takes up belongs to the world as much as it belongs to you. The world courses unstoppably through it. That happens in the form of light, sound, gravity, electromagnetic waves and particle streams, of course. But also with every breath you take, with every morsel you eat, with every tear you shed, parts of you are turning into the world and parts of the world are turning into you. So the space occupied by your body is not where you hoard the self, but where your self and the world converge in a living partnership. There is no ‘me’ apart from that partnership. That partnership is the process of your being. It is the fundamental nature of your reality.

Your life is carried forward by that partnership for all the days you spend on this earth. Your existence depends on it: you cannot dissolve the partnership without dissolving your life. What you can do, though – and what we all tend to do – is to grow forgetful of it. Even as the partnership continues to sustain us, our awareness of the body tends to dim as we learn to contract our thinking more and more into our heads. We leave the spaciousness of being and hem ourselves into the consolidations of doing. We come to observe the living convergence of self and world through the static prism of idea, and eventually we stop feeling it. Which means we stop feeling our reality.

The values and hierarchies of our culture encourage that retreat from our natural spaciousness. We are told to uphold a fiction of the body as a mechanical thing that operates in a mechanical universe, and to fabricate a sense of self that stands aloof from all partnership. But there’s more to our culture’s message than mere encouragement. I think our culture is so attached to its fantasies of independence, domination and control that it looks upon the spaciousness of being as though it were a death threat – because once you feel the spaciousness within your body in its continuity with the spaciousness of the wide world and beyond, the self-important ego suffers an existential shock, and can tailspin into confusion and disorientation. Your cherished little concretized certainties are suddenly awash in a tidal wave of mystery.

The spaciousness of being hums with every possibility. Every consequence of past events ripples untraceably through it as though through a fathomless ocean, as does the potential for every event that is to come. Like the quantum vacuum, the spaciousness of being is the empty nothing out of which everything is birthed. And even as the spaciousness of being contains your body, your body contains it. All that lives through it lives also through you.

The body can recover its natural spaciousness when it empties of expectation and comes fully to rest in the present. But that process of emptying directly contradicts our cultural directive to secure the self within a fortified boundary. So let’s look at that emptying. To allow your body to truly come to rest on the earth and in the present, you need to find ways of opening it to the present and the earth. And that undertaking will necessarily draw you into a process of deep undoing. It requires a dismantling of the body’s inner barricades and divisions: bringing voice back to the silenced shadows within its flesh; dissolving its congested anxieties; softening any resistance you might have to belonging to something larger than yourself; and disarming the insensate patterns held in the body that fortify you against uncertainty. As all those frozen energies yield and thaw and harmonize, they open within the body a cavern that is spacious enough to receive the world – a cavern that welcomes the empty nothing out of which everything is birthed. The currents of the transforming present course through that cavern within, even as they flow through the spaciousness of the world around you.

The spaciousness of your being is like the space within a bell – it is what enables you to attune to the world. Such attunement is very different from sitting in your head and noticing the world ‘out there’. Attunement enables the world to be also felt ‘in here’ – in the empty resonance of your being. It allows you to come home to the fundamental reality of your life: feeling ‘your’ space as a continuity of the world’s; feeling your life as a continuity of the world’s. Moreover, as you attune to the living world that holds you, you cannot but awaken to the intimacy of your partnership with it. That partnership summons you to come and play and give the whole of your being to help ease and deepen the harmony in which you live. And you’ll find that the service or task to which you are summoned is one that directly activates the gifts of your deepest nature. By surrendering to what the world is calling from you, then – by allowing your being to be so profoundly activated – you also surrender to the flowering of your fullest humanity.

Feeling your life carried forward by that partnership relies on your ability to sensitize the body’s spaciousness to the spaciousness of being to which it belongs. But there is a compelling reason we tend to consolidate within ourselves and barricade the door against our fundamental nature. The spaciousness of being is something you can join, you can be carried by, you can dance with – but it is not something you can control. And in a culture that obsessively asserts agendas of control over the natural harmony of the world, that partnership looks scary. Control is what we trust. Harmony, a property of the whole, is way beyond control. You can find guidance in the world’s harmony, but you will never dominate it. Furthermore, if you accept that guidance and undertake the work it is calling you to, it will not offer you a map, a clear destination, or any assurance of success. All it can guarantee is that by giving your life to what the world is summoning you to, the whole of your being will come alive, and your purpose will be illuminated by being lived.

A body trapped in its own consolidations is like a singing bowl filled with sand: it cannot ring to the world around it. When you cannot yield to the spaciousness of being and attune to the world, there can be no felt partnership. There can be no palpable guidance. You are immunized against the juicy exhilaration and wonder of feeling yourself being organized by the mindful whole. What you are left with instead is your aloneness, and the endless, stale task of organizing yourself.

It seems our culture has made a choice: we would rather feel ourselves alone in the world than to feel ourselves not in control of it. By siding with the fantasy of control, we turn our backs on the experience of feeling the whole moving and speaking through us. We miss the grace and wonder of life itself. On the other hand, once you identify a choice that your culture has made on your behalf, you are free to begin forging a new one.

Centering Down

Posted on April 9, 2020 by admin

“Centering Down” is a Quaker expression referring to the act of becoming quiet, still, and silent, so as to be open to receive inspiration from the Divine. In the Quaker tradition, there is no priest, rabbi or minister because the belief is that we all have the spark of Divinity within ourselves and do not need a religious intermediary. In Quaker meetings of worship, members sit in silence, holding presence, and any member, if so inspired, may rise and speak. Kate and I were married at the Haverford Friends Meeting outside Philadelphia, and it was quite fun when the guests, after sitting in silence, most unfamiliar with Quaker traditions, finally realized they could stand and speak. There was a lot of heartfelt and playfully competitive back and forth between our west coast and east coast friends. The whole experience was a real time example of the two spiritual instincts merging in a flow of love and joy.

Centering Down is also the title of a book written by Dona Holleman in 1981. As a teenager, realized she wanted to study yoga, and her mother, a student of Krishnamurti, suggested she ask K for advice. She went to Switzerland, told Krishnamurti her desire, and he tells her; ” there is a yoga teacher from India living here and teaching me. I’ll introduce you.” Thus Dona became one of B.K.S. Iyengar’s first European students.

I met Dona in 1981, just as Centering Down came out, and immediately became inspired and impressed with her approach to yoga. She was super dedicated, with a precisely organized practice schedule, morning and afternoon sessions, timed with two different watches. Her poses were gorgeous and effortless, her teaching clear and precise.

And she also had a spiritual side that was very different from any of the other Iyengar teachers of the time. She quoted Yaqui shaman Don Juan from Carlos Castaneda’s writings. And she talked about the Quaker tradition of centering down into silence, and embodying this in the hara. In my yang youthful enthusiasm, I missed the part about silence. This morning, in wanting to develop the heart and hara theme from the previous post, I opened “Centering Down” and came across this quote:

“Soon we realize that we have to start ‘practicing silence’ instead of waiting for chance moments in our daily life. We must find a space and set a regular time to practice the art of sitting in silence, to allow ourselves to forget everything and approach our center within.” This comes at the end of the book, after many detailed instructions on alignment and practice in the various types of asana. Dona then continues with instructions in step by step somatic meditation, releasing layers of tension until, with grace, the Ground of Being reveals itself as unbounded ultimate mystery. It is a wonderful book, still available on Amazon.com.

Dona’s embodiment of the hara was profound and clear as her quick assimilation of Iyengar’s teaching shows, and in ‘Centering Down’ she offers the following observations on the this key area, and yoga. (My comments follow in italics)

DH: The sacrum is the holy bone: the lower abdomen (between navel and pubic, and bone) should be in contact with the sacrum. Where they meet within the pelvic bowl is Svadisthana Chakra (self-energizing earth center), or Hara. This is the center of gravity.

AK: The lower abdomen includes the points CV 2 through CV-7 on the Conception Vessel. Jeffrey Yuen says that we tend to feel more at home in one of these six points. Explore how you feel in this area, using your fingers to bring more sensitivity.

DH: Hara is the rock on which we build the temple of the body. Those who are centered in the chest have too much ego and those centered in the head have too much intellect. The chest and head must rest on and be stabilized in the center of gravity.

AK: Hara is the rhythm section of the body, the bass and drums of our inner and outer dancing. The African term “Get Down”, which has taken on many meanings in pop culture, usually involving dance or sex, originally referred to “a dance, posture or movement, involving the act of bending at the waist and knees, bringing the body low to the ground in moments of ecstasy or intensity. This was an expression of profound spirituality and connectedness to the earth”.

DH: In Tadasana and all other postures, the only parts which should uphold the body are Hara and the spine ‘growing’ out of the pelvis. The energy of the rest of the body, especially the energy of the head, shoulders, chest and diaphragm, should be withdrawn and transferred to these two parts. The skeletal body should be completely firm and straight, the pelvis and spine should never sag, but the muscular body should be empty. Hara is the earth center: from here the coccyx and legs “grow” downward as roots while the spine ‘grows’ upward, each vertebrae rising away from the one below.

AK: This was written 40 years ago when our sensitivity to the subtle fluid body was less articulated, especially in the yoga world. From the stability of the Hara, the spine awakens and learns to rise up from the release of not only the yang skeletal muscles, but the awakened qi of the organs, connective tissues and blood vessels connected to the spine.

DH: The body is a self-healing organism. Yoga serves to remove unconscious tensions, stiffness and blocks in the flow of energy (Qi), all obstacles to self healing.

DH: Yoga is to silence the body, mind and heart. A silent body is a body that has natural dignity.

Practice: The Structure Supporting the Hara

We now spiral back from the interior of the torso of the previous blog and rediscover the intelligence of the bones, especially the pelvis, legs, sacrum and coccyx. The key to awaken this area structurally is ‘double action’, where we simultaneously create two opposing actions to open joint spaces. The first will be the double action opening the hip joints.

Opening the Hip Joints

Human hip joints, like most mammals, primarily flex and extend, as this is where we find the speed and power to move. In most positions, including standing, the pelvis flexes and extends over the stable femur heads. However, there are positions where we can flex and extend the femur heads over the stable pelvis. We want to learn to flex and extend simultaneously to create a dynamic stillness the creates space in the hip joints. This double action has been helping me keep my dysfunctional hip from totally collapsing.

The easiest way to feel this action in the hips is to imagine-create-feel two opposing circular movements, one of the femur head, the other the acetabulum. This is the primary action in tadasana, the foundation pose for all other asanas.

In a simple standing forward bend like uttanasana, begin in tadasana by stabilizing the feet through K-1 and the heels. Then, as if sitting into a chair, move the femur heads backwards and downwards in a circular manner. Feel this all the way into the heels and recognize the is the same circular direction as GV-1 to CV-1, or ‘tucking’, up the front – down the back to the heels. To complete tadasana, remain extending upright with the pelvis lifting up off the femurs, but create the opposite action around the acetabulum, CV-1 to GV-1. This will create a nice release at the bottom of the groins that you will feel down to K-1, without tilting the pelvis forward.

To come into uttanasana, maintain the femur action, create the opposite at the acetabula, but now let the pelvis rotate, coming around the corner and down. As the pelvis begins to move, maintain the opposite femur action. (Always double action, especially in movement.) Feel this down the front into K-1, in the circular action of CV-1 to GV-1 or ‘untucking’, and up the back, lengthening the hamstrings up to the sitting bones. Keep the knees firm without hyper-extending. Continue both circles as you remain in uttanasana and then drop into stillness as the two energies balance in sthira sukham.

To come back to tadasana, reverse both circular actions; heads of femurs down the front/up the back; sitting bones down the back/up the front. As long as you have the double action, you can reverse femurs and acetabula actions to see if one or the other is more helpful. Of course, while moving, the movement determines the pairing. Apply this action at the beginning of your sitting practice to root the hips. Integrate with the double action larger microcosmic orbit and drop into stillness. This action is crucial in every pose.

Opening the Sacroilliac Joints

I couldn’t access this file for the blog, but check out this amazing video clip to see what is being described. This lateral view (Courtesy Joseph E. Muscolino. Manual Therapy for the Low Back and Pelvis – A Clinical Orthopedic Approach (2015)), shows the movement known as counternutation of the sacrum.

To open the sacro-illiac joints, we create another double action. First is an slight/subtle anterior tilt of the illium, following the circular action of; down the front-up the back/CV-1 to GV-1/ untucking/ pelvic flexion. The we add the circular action of the sacrum, as shown above; down the back-up the front/ GV-1 to CV-1/ tucking. This is best accomplished at the bottom of the sacrum where it joins the coccxy. This is the GV-1 to CV-1 that seems to be missing in many people. Balance the two actions in every pose.

Integrating

Notice you can link sacrum and femurs with the pelvis suspended between the two. Femurs and sacrum ‘tuck’; pelvis ‘untucks’. Or the reverse. Which feels better for you. Try this in sitting. Feel how it activates the hara. Link it to the micro-cosmic orbit as well. Feel grounded and centered, ‘centering down’. Drop into stillness and allow Being to Be.