The Five Skandhas

Posted on September 27, 2018 by admin

In the previous post I covered various perspectives on the often negative inner dialogue running on in morphing loops through the human psyche. Amazingly enough, in my almost 50 years of spiritual inquiry, I had never encountered the Buddhist notion of the skandhas, which clearly describe the emergence and development of the egoic mental states and structures. Until now! Timing is everything, of course.

The revelation comes from the enlightened writing of Reggie Ray in his new book, “Pure Awareness”. Reggie comes from the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism as taught by Chogyam Trungpa, and what I love about Reggie’s approach is that it is all in the body, or soma. Meditation as an embodied spiritual practice is radical, as most traditions still teach it ‘top-down’, ie , use the mind/psyche to calm the body/soma. Reggie’s Vajrayana approach is to: go to the core of the soma to discover the origins of the egoic structures: see them from the body’s perspective; notice the suffering and unhappiness they unconsciously manifest; and transform them into healthy expressions of human possibility.

What is most fascinating is that this was my primary take-home message in the ‘Embodying the Embryological Foundations of Movement” workshop I attended with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen last month. A brief summary includes: 1. that the earliest stages of embryological development take place before the brain emerges; 2. the foundational intelligence of the body is ‘original (infinite) space plus movement; and 3. the body can ‘know itself’ independent of any act of mind.

In Bonnie’s ‘hot off the presses’ book, “Basic Neurocellular Patterns” she describes what she calls ‘The Embodiment Process’, which is also how she was presenting the material during the workshop.

” The process of embodiment is a being process, not a doing process; it is an awareness process in which the guide and witness dissolve into cellular consciousness.” (I’ll link this to the skandhas shortly!!) She list three processes leading to embodiment.

“1. Visualization: the process by which the brain imagines (visualizes) aspects of the body and informs the body that it (the body) exists. (We had anatomical drawings of the various stages of embryological development that we color coded. (Like being in 2nd grade again!)

2. Somatization: the process by which the kinesthetic (movement) and tactile (touch) sensory systems inform the body that it (the body) exists. In this process there is a witness – an inner awareness of the process. (Many hours exploring: solo, with a partner/guide, or in a larger group, using any means you desired. Yoga- centric ones used postures and yoga flow primarily, dancers moved, and everyone received hands on support whenever needed. (There were 30 assistants!)

3. Embodiment: the awareness of the cells themselves. It is a direct experience. There are no intermediate steps or translations. There is no guide. There is no witness. There is the fully known consciousness of the experienced moment initiated from the cells themselves. In this instance, the brain is the last to know. There is a complete knowing and peaceful comprehension. Out of this embodiment process emerges feeling, thinking, witnessing and understanding. The source of this process is love.”

This last paragraph is a good a description of fully embodied, non-dual, ‘Pure Awareness’ as you will ever see. And it is the ‘goal’, if we can call it that, of the Pure Awareness meditation process as described by Reggie in his book. This convergence of visionary beings in the present is a tremendous gift to us.

So what are the skandhas? Reggie uses the Greek word ‘soma‘, so I will use the Greek word psyche to describe the neuro-biological processes and dynamic structures that we might call thought, feeling and emotion that combine to give us a self sense, (the ahamkara is said to do this in Yoga Philosophy), and there are many more attributes we can find. (Modern Western Psychology calls these components of the psyche “parts” (Internal Family Systems) or “voices” (Voice Dialogue).

From an evolutionary perspective, ‘soma’ emerged from the depths of timeless mystery through the evolution our planet, Mother Earth, 4 billion years ago with the first primitive single cellular organisms. This soma, as a cellular intelligence continued to evolve over the next 4 billion years, and, still embedded in mystery, continues to evolve moment to moment, here and now. What we are calling psyche, in its human form, emerged within the soma somewhere within the last 2 million years or so, and continues its own unfolding into the present.

Somewhere along the line of evolution, the psyche developed the possibility of forgetting its origins in Ultimate Mystery and the primal cellular ‘soma’. When this forgetting happens, the psyche begins to create a separate ‘me’ and then feels an existential terror at being a tiny ‘me’ in a world where ‘dissolving into infinite mystery’ means the end of ‘me’. A bit of a Catch-22 here. In other terms, this is the eviction from the Garden of Eden.

This recoiling in horror at the vision of Ultimate Mystery is actually the first skandha, known as the ignorance of the nature of form, or just form. The ‘Truth’ of form is that ‘forms’ (Prakriti in the Yoga Sutras) are continually arising from and dissolving into ‘Emptiness’. The psyche, itself a form, being horrified by its own impermanence, starts to create all sorts of problems. My own personal experience with PTSD and panic attacks, in retrospect, was this first skandha in action. Yes, there was stored trauma in the body and psyche, but ultimately the resolution was to let the body heal itself by staying present. For the Yoga Sutras students, this is also the first klesha, avidya, as described in II-3 to II-5. Also, Arjuna, in chapter 11 of the Bhagavad Gita, gets a very abrupt, full on introduction to this skandha. Some aspects are shattering, but fortunately he has Krishna as his guide and Krishna helps him return to a state of inner peace before his skandhas get too scrambled.

Of course the psyche is highly unlikely to say to itself “Oh, my bad. We’re all cool with impermanence, emptiness and unbounded mystery. Lets ‘let-go’ and enjoy the ride.” It almost always desperately looks for something to grasp onto for security, something tangible to feel, so it (the psyche) can be reassured of its own ‘solidity. It begins to divide the infinite world of forms into ‘things I absolutely need’ and ‘things I absolutely need to avoid or get rid of. This is the second skandha, known as vedana, or feeling”, where the pain of craving is born. The ego starts to gain in solidity. In the Yoga Sutras, II-7 and II-8, these are described as two more kleshas.

The third skandha, perception/impulse, is the playing field of spiritual practice. Once craving arises the psyche begins to develop strategies to deal with this craving by manipulating its personal world. The three primary strategies are passion, aggression and indifference. Passion is the energy that drives us to acquire what we desire; aggression provides the energy to fight off what we are afraid of: indifference allow us to numb any other unpleasant or unresolvable feelings. In this skandha, our life energies are conscripted to pursue the endless cycle of passion and aggression, or the numbness of indifference leads to depression. Our primary self-sense is that we are ‘lacking’ or ‘wanting’ and there is never a resolution. As we will see later, impulse is our entry point into the skandhas and the one place we can begin to make changes.

The psyche, its its own clever way, needs to now validate all this impulsive 3rd skandha activity, so it begins to categorize, label and organize its behavior and observations. The fourth skandha conceptualizes and names, and is thus known as the skandha of ‘Intellect or Concept’. This leads to memories and habits, or what are called samskaras in Sanskrit, and karma. Think of samskaras as the immediate response to an impulse, and karma as your full history of all responses. Thus the full personality structure or ego is almost complete. (See Sutra I-43 where Patanjali describes the healing of this skandha.)

Finally, we need something to integrate impulse and intellect and the Sanskrit word given to the fifth skandha is Vijnana, or Consciousness. The ego is now a fully valid, conscious entity. Chogyam Trungpa, Reggie Ray’s teacher describes this skandha eloquently:

“Consciousness consists of emotions and irregular thought patterns, all of which taken together form the different fantasy worlds with which we occupy ourselves. These fantasy worlds are referred to in the scriptures as the “six realms”. The emotions are the highlights of ego, the generals of ego’s army; subconscious thought, day-dreams and other thoughts connect one highlight to another. So thoughts form ego’s army and are constantly in motion, constantly busy. Our thoughts are neurotic in the sense that they irregular, changing direction all the time and overlapping one another. We continually jump from one thought to the next, from spiritual thoughts to sexual fantasies to money matters to domestic thoughts and so on. The whole development of the five skandhas–ignorance/form, feeling, impulse/perception, concept and consciousness–is an attempt on our part to shield ourselves from the truth of our insubstantiality.”

The Five Skandhas:
(Ignorance of the true nature of) Form – Feeling – Impulse – Intellect – Conscious

In our somatic exploration/meditation practice, because we have trained our attention to stay in the immediate somatic experience (dharana, dhyana, samadhi, or Samyama) we are able to feel the level of impulse, skandha 3. Because the body, the soma, is both fully present and effortlessly embedded in Ultimate Mystery, totally comfortable with impermanence, our capacity to stay here gives us a non-grasping anchor resisting the winds of impulse. When, as Bonnie describes, the body becomes ‘conscious’, or awake, the infinite space is just there, present, luminous and alive. This is ‘embodiment‘. When an impulse arises, we can choose not to respond and just stay present in the soma. This, by the way, is the meaning of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra I-2 and I-3; yogash citta vritti nirodha; tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam. “Yoga is not responding to impulse, but remaining stably in the infinite (illumination reflected in the soma.) Or “The Drashtuh Abides”.

What Bonnie taught me this past month was to stay embodied and be in the world at the same time. That was the primary lesson for me, and it took her catching me in the exact moment of losing the soma to really get it. We were exploring some new inner spaces and feelings while staying aware of presence and the outer world simultaneously and I got distracted by some new exciting revelation. She was tracking me and immediately snapped her fingers. At first I thought she was signaling the class, but when I looked at her, I realized that she was calling me back into the soma/infinite that she was holding effortlessly, while being present to all, inner and outer. The whole workshop was captured in that moment. Sustaining this is not easy, but that is why we practice. (see Sutras I-12 – I-16). This is the transformation of the skandhas.

This practice goes on forever, of course, as impulses arise from all over the field of human consciousness, wanting to take us back careening into ignorance and delusion. Especially as we engage dynamically with the world. It is one thing to be in a monastery on a remote mountain top where the outer world is no longer present. You still have your own inner world to deal with, back back on the street, back in society, many many more triggers are activated. Less time and more need to practice. A bit ironic.

By the Way, in Pure Awakening, Reggie has some deep insights into the relationship between technology/social media, the near total disembodiedness of much of our youth, and the sheer terror they feel at actually having to face their own unpleasant feelings. Without the support of the body/soma, the option is to try to avoid anything uncomfortable and blame someone/anyone else for causing this. Big skandha problems here. The ‘adults’ in Congress and the business world don’t seem to be much better at dealing with reality than the youth, so it makes our own urgency to build a strong embodied field of love and compassion that much stronger. The skandhas can be transformed. We need their healthy expression to fully function, as individuals, but also as a society. Our culture has its own skandhas.

So how can we train ourselves to abide in the stillness while simultaneously being engaged in the world? Got to your mat and find out.

Choose a pose: (easiest in a sitting posture of course to go all the way with this.)
Find flowing connection to yin/ground/weight and yang/lightness/sky.
Find your center channel, (chong mai) feel it open at the crown into heaven and root into earth;
Relax and open your heart to find center.
Connect root and crown with small orbit meditation, completing the circle in both directions to open and relax the larger energy field that connects and integrates inner and outer worlds, yin (cv or ren mai) and yang (gv or du mai).
Add the girdle vessel (dai mai) for horizontal stability.
Let your breath further awaken the lower dantien, broadening and spreading your base to deepen the rooting in the soma, away from the psyche.
Open even more deeply to Mother Earth.
Let your breath fill the inner space effortlessly on the in breath and let it dissolve into emptiness on the out breath.
In that dissolving feel the infinite space that receives the breath and illumines the body. Rest in that luminous emptiness for a (second .. few seconds– minute…)
and then return to any of the steps above and begin again.

When you find yourself lost, retrace your way back through the skandhas. Impulse – intellect – ego story. Drop the story. Bring your attention back to the soma as a felt sense of weight, breath, volume, whatever works for you. When you feel the impulse, resist. Practice nirodha. Open back into the infinite space and the aliveness of the soma. Over time, the habits/impulses begin to lose energy because we are no longer feeding them with our attention. Our fears begin to subside as we feel the fullness that the soma provides. Our concepts and conscious choices begin to reflect a deepening sense of well being that is actually our ‘True Nature.” What a surprise! Continue for the rest of your life in this body. Be a radiant presence embracing your own very real and very human failings.

Healing, Meaning-Making and Story

Posted on July 27, 2018 by admin

In the last post, I included a link to an article on Non-dual Chinese Medicine and the Chong Mai or thrusting vessel, as there were many aspects raised by the author that intrigued me. One that struck home was his comment on the existential angst ‘fundamental to Western consciousness’. Given the state of the world these days, a certain amount of anxiety is impossible to avoid if you are paying attention. But author Michael Greenberg is referring to something more subtle, and more deeply embedded in the psyche.

Adyashanti, one of my major mentors in the field of awakening has been exploring this Western angst, as he sees it in many of his students (and probably himself earlier on) and has developed a home study course on what he is calling ‘Redemptive Love.’ Adhya gets right to the point: “Unworthiness is the pandemic of Western Culture.” I love this quote as it points to a serious barrier to truly deep awakening. Many years ago I heard of the Dalai Lama responding to a question from a Western student about low self esteem and having no idea what that was. He was puzzled !!! I’m not. I have heard parts of Adya’s course, but now need to really absorb it more deeply as I my own personal angst is demanding attention. This angst can be seen as continually re-occurring disturbances or dissonance in our bio- energy field, so we can make sense of their nature, we may be able to tease out and release many of these patterns.

A common source of this angst/unworthiness are the many unresolved issues of our childhood. Michael Greenberg, cited above, has a book on healing journeys called ‘Braving the Void’, and in the chapter entitled ‘Childhood Terrors’, he states: “While the average adult can control or mask unresolved childhood traumas, as we reach old age these mechanisms can weaken, allowing the hurt of fearful child to reappear. I believe this is why we so often see older people regressing to childhood behaviors and behaving irrationally. It makes sense then to try to come to terms with these fears at a time of life where we have the energy and will to integrate our various contradictory feelings.” My recent PTSD experiences are clearly coming from this dimension.

A more insidious example of childhood trauma is shame. Tara Brach, in her extraordinary book ‘Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of the Buddha” offers this commentary on the same Dalai Lama story I mentioned above. “While all humans feel ashamed of weakness and afraid of rejection, our Western culture is a breeding ground for the kind of shame and self-hatred the Dalai Lama could not comprehend.” This quote comes from the very first chapter, entitled ‘The Trance of Unworthiness”.

From another perspective, this angst can also be fed by a flawed story embedded in the ancestral field through the DNA field our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents etc. Their belief systems around religion, personal value, cultural values and parenting all impact our personal energy fields in the present moment. In Classical Chinese Medicine, the ‘jing’, one of the three treasures is the carrier of our ancestral karma and learning how to nurture the jing can lead to more healing and transformation.

This involves the epigenetic fields and cell biologist Bruce Lipton is a great source for studies and practices. Epigenetics is where we learn about how changing environments, internally and externally, changes the ways in which the genes and DNA are activated. By healing ourselves, we are also healing our lineage/ancestors ‘now’ through the epigenetic DNA fields, and our planet needs lots of healing. We can also employ active dreaming and shamanic journeying to work with the ancestral karma.

Belief systems also manifest in our movements through what we can call ‘meaning making structures. I first encountered the idea of meaning-making as a self-organizing component of our biology in “How Life Moves” by Kevin Frank and Caryn McHose where they describe four structures that underlie how we move through life, and how life moves through us. These include the physical structure of muscles, bones, connective tissue; the perceptual structure where we store patterns of attention that determine how we perceive the world, inwardly and outwardly; the co-ordinating structure where we store learned patterns of movements, small and large that the body can call upon, and use in combinations, when movement is required; and finally, the meaning making structure, where we create stories/ideas/beliefs about ‘what things mean’, and embody those meaning in patterns of movement and also inhibition, where certain movements are ‘not allowed’.

As a simple personal example of these four structures, in my ongoing sax education, the physical structures of my whole body have to engage to facilitate new subtle movements in my fingers, wrists, throat, jaws and diaphragm. The co-ordinative structures have to keep evolving when new note combinations and different fingerings are required. The perceptual structures are being challenged by my sax guru Karl to hear nuances in pitch, rhythm, note lengths and chord harmonies. These are relatively straight forward. But when my meaning making structure is dominated by the inner critic embedded in the ‘story of unworthiness’, which probably extends back generations, there is no joy or delight possible when challenged.

If my primary interpretation of a challenging situation is that ‘obviously my being is flawed or ‘I am fundamentally unworthy of being whole’, my cellular capacity to respond from its own deep intelligence is compromised. What fascinates me is that I get the absurdity of this belief system intellectually, but that understanding is not penetrating into the biology. In fact, as I dive more deeply into the cellular/biologically driven sub-conscious and unconscious in my embodied practice, more of these strange energy fields are being released into my conscious awareness. My current ‘meaning-making’ model of the flaw in the core ‘meaning-making’ structure is that I am awakening in the DNA field of my Irish Catholic ancestors (with some English pathology as well) and ancestral healing is being requested.

This idea of inherited story opens lots of portals into fun explorations. First of all, it gets us into Dan Siegel’s work on ‘narrative integration, (see The Mindful Brain), where we need a healthy and ever evolving capacity to tell our ‘self-story’ by organizing all of our personal experiences and integrating them into our behavior. Religion and spirituality, and in fact all aspects of culture are transmitted through story. My mentor Thomas Berry, along with Cosmologist Brian Swimme, co-wrote ‘The Universe Story” as a primary story for all humanity in the 21st century, orienting them to the magnificence of creation as everyone’s personal story. I’ve been studying Vedanta for almost 50 years, and Vedanta is all story based. The Bhagavad Gita, a mini story, is embedded in the 1.8 million word “Mahabharata’ one of the greatest epic stories in human history. The Katha Upanishad tells the tale of a young boy calmly confronting Lord Yama, god of death. Vedanta’s overall perspective is that this angst arises because we ‘forget’ our inherent wholeness, or ‘basic goodness’ and just need to be reminded, through teaching.

The Tao’ists believe that the human at birth is placed in the center of the creation process, providing a link between yin and yang, making them naturally connected and relevant. Like the Vedantans, the Taoist view is that our humanity is always an expression of the whole, the macrocosm, the Universe, but because we inhabit a world of constant change, we need to continually ‘re-tune’ ourselves through practice. going out of tune, experiencing imperfections, confusion and doubt are all par for the human course. We just need to learn some skillful means (upayas) to navigate our lives and fully participate in the unfolding of our soul’s journey here on Mother Earth in the early years of the 21st century. We all have a unique contribution to add to the story of our time and place. Discover it and live it fully.

Fascia, Sitting and the Micro-cosmic Orbit

Posted on July 12, 2018 by admin

A key realization of our somatic explorations, in whatever form they take, is that fascia is both connective tissue and an integrated system facilitating the flow of energy and information throughout the body. The second part sound’s a lot like the definition of mind postulated by Dan Siegel: a self-regulating process that organizes the flow of energy and information,” which is why the Taoist model of Qi flow is directly related to fascia. And remember Taoists work with verbs, processes and wholeness, not nouns, objects and duality. And please check out Jean-Clause Guimberteau’s mind boggling “Strolling under the Skin”, here on YouTube, to see the fluid component of our amazing fascial matrix. Even if you have seen this many times, it is still ….wow!

The fascial system, along with the circulatory and nervous systems are the three anatomical systems, that, in isolation, show the fullness of our 3-D embodiment. If we consider fascia, in addition to being structural, as an organizing and integrating aspect of embodiment, we can begin to deepen our inner sense of its 3-D presence and its crucial role in maintaining the dynamic postural relationship Patanjali calls ‘sthira sukham‘. As we discover in our seated meditation practice, this ongoing balance between stability and mobility in the tissue is directly related to the stability/mobility relationship of the ‘mind’ as a whole. And, as mentioned in the previous post, the fascia also stores trauma in the form of ‘trapped’ energy.

How can we relate our meditations on the microcosmic orbit with our embodied feel of the fascia? We see on the left the ‘thoraco-lumbar fascia’ circled, and we will come back to this soon. But first notice the yellow connective tissue running from the skull down the length of the spine to the coccyx. Imagine that line as an entry point into more and more interior expressions of the three dimensional fascial web. This is the path of the Governing Vessel, right on the median line. Also notice (or even better, feel in your own body) the large latissimus dorsii and trapezuis muscles that span the same length, and check out the region of overlap.

On the right we have the linea alba, a thick band of connective tissue running up the mid-line of the front body, from the pubis to the xyphoid process of the sternum. The connective tissue continues over the sternum and up the throat to the bottom jaw. Feel this as a tangible entry to your Conception Vessel. Notice all the branches of muscles and tendons coming together at the mid-line. Hard to see in 2 dimensions, but there are connections to three dimensions to be felt here.

Our next leap is to add the Dai Mai, or Girdle Vessel, to the Microcosmic Orbit, to bring in the horizontal plane to our upright posture. The gyroscope gives us a great example of the first four Extraordinary (or Curious) Vessels. The central axis is the Chong Mai or ‘Penetrating Vessel’. This is the ‘blueprint or chakra line of the body and also provides ‘lift’ to the organs. (Here is a fascinating article on the Chong Mai and Non-dual medicine.)

In our gyroscopic metaphor, the Conception and Governing Vessels create the vertical circle. (Below, they meet at the root chakra, but above, they meet at the mouth, not the crown chakra. The horizontal circle is the Girdle Vessel and this stabilizes the vertical axis in gravity (by spinning in a gyroscope.)

In the human body, we have girdling fascia and musculature which converge on the mid-lines of the front and back bodies. Patanjali has another ‘unique’ Girdling Vessel, none other than the Divine Serpent, Adhisheysa. This drawing of Patanjali*, (autographed by BKS), sits above my altar where I do my sitting and I am always fascinated by his lower body support. It’s hard to see the mid line, but you can feel the support of the snake as it surrounds him.

And I have just discovered some new information on the girdling fascia in a wonderful book entitled “Fascia: What it is, and Why it Matters”, by David Lesondak. I’m an esoteric anatomy nerd, and I have a new favorite, the ‘Lumbar Interfascial Triangle’ ak LIFT, as seen in the diagram below, from David’s book, and based on the fascial research by Frank Willard et al. (Frank was one of my favorite presenters at the First Int’l Fascial Conference in Boston in 2007, where ‘Strolling Under the Skin was first presented.)

The LIFT connects the thoracolumbar fascia (see above) with the Transversus Abdominus, the inner most of the abdominal layers running parallel to Adhishesa. This is a fulcrum region, balancing both front and back, vertebral segment by vertebral segment, but also balances the horizontal force of the transversus abdominus with the vertical fibers of the quadratus and erector spinae muscles. Find the LIFT in your practice.

When you find the energetic field in the body that supports the fascia that engages this balance of vertical and horizontal, you begin to feel like a coiled spring. Because we are even more complex, there is actually a right coil and left coil, a spiral right and spiral left the wrap around each other. This is of course symbolized by the caduceus of Hermes, with the bonus of extended wings. We are going to keep our wings into the body for the time being as we return to our sitting practice.

I have been experimenting with my hands and arms behind for extended periods of time me while sitting. Sometimes separate, sometimes interlocked. It seems to work better with my elevated virasana, (all my knees and hips will allow at the moment.) With the slight height to the pelvis, I have more room for my arms. This engages the latissimus and traps and allows me to engage my deep abdominals. With help from the Lumbar Interfacial Triangle, this action widens the spinal column from the inner back body.

The deep abdominals do not contract in isolation, but maintain a vibrant and integrating tone through the pelvic floor and into the lower back fascia, and hopefully throughout the whole body. The LIFT is very helpful here. The pose is a bit more ‘yang’ than with the arms and hands forward and the pelvis elevated, but because there is an engagement of the front body ‘yin’ through the lift, the yang stays internal, is integrated and not distracting.

If you feel your way around inside you may find the coils easier to find down below and more challenging in the area just below the sternum, right at the middle burner and kidneys. Use your imagination to fill in the field of coiling expanding energy so the whole abdominal/pelvic area, from the diaphragm to the pelvic floor, feels balanced in energy and tone.

Up inside the upper ribs and the sternum are the transversus thoracis muscles. They continue analogous to the transversus abdominals, and then begin to veer diagonally. Use them to lift and open the sternal area by engaging them opposite to the t.a., that is away from the midline. This will help keep the the kidney region of the back body relaxed and dropping, along with the inner shoulder blades. We habitually use the kidney area to hold ourselves upright, leading to a blockage in the Governing Vessel and tension in the spine, so this is a good antidote. Now feel how the diaphragm has more room to move, especially the center dome rising up to lift the heart.

On the outside of the sternum you can fine the continuation of the rectus abdominus fascia travelling up to the back of the skull, as shown as part of Tom Myer’s ‘Superficial Front Line’. Here, the back of the skull can release up as the kidneys drop down. Feel the sternum bone floating between the fascial tissues in front and behind and connect the tail of the sternum, the xyphoid process, with tail of the spine, the coccyx, in both directions. This will open and stabilize the connection between CV-1, the seat of the yin, and GV-1.

Release the open coiling feeling up through the neck/throat to the base of the skull, relax the skull bones and soften the crown chakra. When I sit in sukhasana, my other pose of choice, my pelvis is lower and there is not the same feeling, but as I go back and forth, each position informs the other. And in the deep background, the ever-present ‘Awareness’, your drashtuh svarupe, awaits your surrender. As the body stabilizes in an effortless (relatively) vibrancy, just enjoy the Being’ and stabilize your presence there.

And all of this carries over into all of your poses, all of your postures, all of your movements, all of your life. Enjoy the ride. Not always fun, but always moving into deeper and deeper clarity and awakening.