The Yin and Yang of Spiritual Practice

Posted on June 23, 2015 by admin

Last week we looked at the obstacles that crop up for the more experienced students Patanjali addresses in the Samaadhi Paada, the first of the four chapters that cover the study of yoga. For those of us here, the awakening is proceeding along, but as we quickly realize, awakening is the beginning of yoga, not the end goal. Years of karma and negative psychological and emotional habits do not just disappear, but, with proper understanding and continued practice, they can become food for spiritual growth. Add in the societal and planetary karmic challenges we also face and there is nourishment for all of us for many incarnations to come.

So, how do we develop proper understanding and practice? Patanjali jumps in with both feet to help us right at the beginning of the Samadhi Pada. In sutra I-12, abhyaasa-vairaagyaabhyaam tan-niroddhah ,he introduces the ‘yin and yang of spiritual practice, abhyaasa and vairagyam, as the primary upayas (skillful means) to attenuate these habits and stabilize the samadhi state. “The negative vrittis (described in the previous sutras) are resolved through practice and dispassion.”

Abhyaasa describes how to invest your your embodied energy, be it physical, psychological, emotional, relational, or spiritual (which essentially covers all of these.) Patanjali’s advice; invest your energy in stabilizing your spiritual health. I-13: tatra sthitau yatno’bhyaasah. The Sanskrit root ‘stha’ shows up every where in the spiritual teaching of India and indicates stability, steadiness and stillness. Sthira sukham asanam, II-46, is well known to hatha yogis. In chapter 2 of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna describes ‘sthita prajna, stable wisdom, as the goal of life to Arjuna. (See also PYS: I-35, II-18, II-39, III-31).

Modern neuroscience also has a deep appreciation for the need to stabilize emotionally healthy mind states, and how growth and development requires the capacity to stabilize new learning in the process of integration. (See all writings by Dan Siegel, Rick Hanson etc). From Hebb’s Axiom we know that continuous attention brings stability. “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” In sutras I-33 – I-39, Patanjali gives us our meditation practice many possible neuronal pathways to ‘attend to’ and stabilize the healthy states. An ‘awakened’, i.e., ‘heart centered’ hatha yoga practice is another powerful way to build a healthy form of spiritual stability. As we will see a bit later, our choices off the mat also offer the opportunity to practice ‘abhyaasa’.

Because what we pay attention to over and over ‘sticks’ in the mind field, for better or worse, Patanjali also includes vairagyam, dispassion, with abhyaasa. Here, dispassion means the recognizing of the unhealthy psychological, emotional and spiritual patterns that we are habituated to, and consciously choosing, through mindful awareness, to stop ‘feeding’ those patterns with energy. If we use a river as a metaphor for the flow of energy through the mind field, vairagyam is the intelligence, the buddhi, building dams, barriers or gates to direct the flow of mental energy away from the fields of suffering, while abhyasa creates new channels to send that energy to places that are healing, nurturing and stimulating to growth and further awakening. This takes a lot of ‘self study’ as we have to learn to discriminate between healthy (flowing through our heart) and unhealthy (flowing through our egoic or self centered beliefs) habits and actions. Sometimes, especially on the subtle levels and when it comes to our relationships with family and friends, this is not at all clear .

Therefore, in addition to our personal practice, our relational, cultural and societal choices are also included cultivating stability and dispassion. After a long day at work, we could choose to go to a bar, or a yoga class. We can work to find a collection of friends and mentors that support and nurture our spiritual aspirations. Every time we meet and are relating another human being, a social group, or any living being, we have the chance to practice mindful awareness and choose, as best possible, to channel our energies through the heart field and not our whiny, self defensive egoic structures. Moment to moment, say yes to this, no to that. In this way habits change through conscious choice and the awakening stabilizes creatively and dynamically.

Krishnamurti on ‘Understanding’

Posted on February 26, 2015 by admin

Spiritual teachers have the delightful challenge of trying to articulate the ‘(already I’m in trouble here!) inarticulable. There is general agreement on the two points of view available to the human consciousness, although the words used to point to these two vary. For the overwhelming majority of humanity, the dominant, and perhaps only point of view is that of limitation and impermanence. This is the world of forms. All forms are inherently limited and impermanent, whether we are referring to a thought or a galaxy. In this ‘world’, our self sense is composed of pieces: ideas, beliefs, memories, likes and dislikes. There is never stability or peace of mind for me as everything that is ‘me’ is constantly shifting. We can struggle and fight to hold on to something, trying to keep this ‘self’ intact. We build grand edifices out of beliefs and philosophies, we align ourselves with religions, political parties or cults, trying to find our ‘self’. But in the end, these edifices are castles of sand. Finding our ‘self’ here a hopeless proposition, but one we cling to lifetime after lifetime.

On the other hand, it is possible to ‘see’ the world from the eyes of wholeness, where absolute silence and stillness echo through eternity as all forms arise and dissolve in their own time. This is the Absolute, Buddha Nature, Brahman. Here, the “I am” rests in its own wholeness, with no separation, no division, no other. “Tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam” says Patanjali. There is no struggle to become, or to self-improve. The Self is already whole and complete. This does not mean that life, in the world of form is without challenges and struggles. To embody this teaching in the world of form with death and disease, is difficult. But we do not have to make the innate difficulties ‘personal’. They are not about ‘me’. They are just as aspect of being alive, in this body, on this planet, in this moment. We feel, we act, we learn, and we keep moving along. Or more accurately, life just keeps flowing through us, as the forms come and go.

In the following quote from “The World Within” , reprinted from the current edition of the Krishnamurti Foundation of America newsletter, Krishnamurti uses “Understanding’ to point to the realization of “Unbounded Wholeness” and describes the human struggle to ‘recognize’ this.

“Understanding is not to be gained eventually, in the distant end. That which is not understood continues, and that which is understood ceases to be. Understanding is not accumulative; there is no experiencer who understands. What is incomplete remains as a memory, giving continuance to identity, to the ‘me’ and the ‘mine’. That which is understood and completed ceases to be, as it does not leave traces, memory. Understanding can exist only where there is freedom, not where there is bondage, not when the mind is crowded with memory. The end, the goal makes for and strengthens memory, and memory or accumulated experience does not bring about understanding. Accumulation creates a self-enclosing centre, separative, exclusive, and what is enclosed is never free, and so the experiencer can never understand. The experiencer is ever experiencing, and so the experiencer is ever incomplete. He can never understand, for understanding lies in freedom.

How can there be surety, certainty in freedom? That which is free, immeasurable, is beyond all comparison; it is beyond and above all opposites. He who is uncertain craves for certainty, but is not all existence uncertain, insecure? Death, disease, old age is upon us, which creates impermanency; yet we seek certainty in the impermanent. In death, in decay, in the transient we seek surety. How blind we are!

“But we must surely live in this world. Who will give us our daily bread?”

In seeking the Real, bread will be supplied; but if we seek only bread, then even that will be destroyed. Bread is not the ultimate value; when we make it into the ultimate, there is disaster, there is murder, there is starvation.

Through the transient seek the eternal. There is no path to it, for it is ever-present.”

2014 YLT, 11th Weekend Summary

Posted on February 10, 2015 by admin

Working with the Prana Vayus:

This is the eleventh entry in a series of twelve posts summarizing the basic material covered in the year long training which began in January of 2104 and will come to a completion on February 15th. Previous posts can be found on this blog page. A lot has been covered over the past year. If any questions arise, please feel free to contact me.

We are now working with the subtle energies, so some quietness and reflection is needed, even in dynamic postures. Meditation is primary in all poses, and the heart is the place to start. We are cultivating subtle streams of perception in both the fluid body and the etheric or spatial body, so some patience and persistence is required. Developing the skill of resting in stillness will allow the more subtle energies to reveal themselves.

Vayu means air or wind and the term Prana vayus refers to the five fundamental organizing movements of the energetic body. We will be working from the tensegrity/fluid body/pressure cavities perspective to make these movements both tangible and integrated. For anyone living in their body with sensitivity and intelligence, three major pressure cavities can be experienced, the cranial vault, the thoracic region, and the abdominal/pelvic region. Relative to the outside world, the head and abdominal cavities have positive or higher pressure and the thoracic cavity has a lower pressure. To present this in a more dramatic way, if you puncture the head or belly, stuff squirts out, but if you puncture the chest, it collapses inward, as in a collapsed lung. The basic point here is that this pressure gradient of the body is constantly moving energy toward the heart, i.e., pressure draws energy from higher to lower to create an internal equilibrium that is a major player in all of the fluid movements of the body.

This equilibrium can cover a whole spectrum from very dynamic, vital and healthy, to highly restricted and pathological. Our process in yoga physiology is to maximize the dynamic relationships for optimum health. And, it also turns out that in doing so we cultivate a deep inner presence in the heart center that is a place of infinite stillness and wholeness. Tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam. We have to make it stable, of course, through practice and surrender, abhyasa and vairagyam.

We’ll begin with our Hoberman spheres and begin to feel the energies of the two directions: opening the sphere, expanding out from a center, which we can call the yang or centrifugal energy; and closing the sphere, condensing from the perimeter into the center, the yin or centripetal energy. When they are in balance, we can find a dynamically stable state of the sphere at any where along the spectrum from open to closed.

When we come to the body and the Prana vayus, we first come the first, also known as the prana vayu, which governs the process of taking energies into the body/mind. (I’ll use a capital P when refering to the general term including all five, and a small p when referring to the intake. The prana vayu ,or prana, is an expanding field that creates space and invites energy to move into the body. This expansion is centered in the mid chest at the heart and balances the negative pressure usually felt in the chest which causes the outer world to press in upon the chest. If you hadn’t noticed, as people reach middle age and older, the chest has more often than not sunk in a bit from this pressure. Gravity and the aging belly energy also play a part in this sinking. By consciously finding, feeling, creating an expanding field from the heart, the chest opens, the heart lifts, and we are ready to be present to whatever the world offers us in the moment. If your connective tissues have fallen into a collapse of any level, it may take a while to reconfigure them. The intercostals and other chest muscles, as well as the diaphragm and mediastinum are involved. The prana vayu is usually associated with respiration, but on a sublte level governs everything you take in, from emotions to ideas, sensations and images.

As we are open systems, we have to balance taking in with moving out. The second vayu, apana, governs elimination, or what we let go of, at all levels. Apana is a squeezing or condensing energy, complimenting the expanding of the prana vayu. Expand to take in, squeeze to move out. Very simple. Most commentators focus on the downward flow, as solid and liquid wastes are eliminated predominantly out through the pelvic floor, but the apana is more complex than that. Sweating takes place throughout the body. Exhalation of the breath takes place through the nostrils or mouth. Regurgitation, a hopefully infrequent form of expelling unwanted material, moves out the mouth.

Ultimately apana is a radiallly condensing energy. However, it also has an unusual role in that the downwards aspect is also what governs the action of the legs and tail, real or imaginary. So we might say the the abdominal/pelvic cavity also can be expanded to include legs and tail. As we saw with the prana vayu, aging often takes a toll on the connective tissue structures of the body. The apana is a squeezing energy, but the belly has a positive or outgoing pressure. Aging often leads to this positive pressure creating the pot or beer belly, giving many middle agers the look of being slightly pregnant. With this state, the ‘sqeeziness’ is also much weaker, creating all sorts of problems from poor elimination and digestion, to lower back problems. From the perspective of Ayurveda, the medical wisdom of the Vedic tradition, poor elimination is the beginning of the disease process.

The samana vayu, classically associated with digestion, governs absorption. It is the decider or mediator between what comes in and what goes out. When healthy, we retain the ‘good stuff’ and eliminate the ‘bad stuff’. From the perspective of the pressure cavities, samana sits between the expanding center of prana in the chest and the squeezing center of apana in the pelvis. When healthy, the expanding nature of the abdomen is carefully directed away from the abdominal wall and aligned with the spinal axis. Some of the energy lifts up through the diaphragm and into the heart, supporting the prana vayu; some of it extends downward to grow legs and tail, supporting the apana vayu. This action can be felt as a natural, mild uddiyana bandha. Here Krishnamacharya is demonstrating a slightly stronger version as part of pranayama practice.

The vyana vayu circulates the energies throughout the body. First felt as the fluid flow of the blood, vyana also governs the nerve currents circulating information throughout the body and the flow of Prana through the subtle energy channels known as nadis. There are fourteen principal nadis, of which three are most commonly known. Ida is the lunar or cooling nadi associated with the feminine and parasympathetic nervous systems. Pingala, the solar or masculine nadi, works with the sympathetic nervous system. Susumna, the center channel, works with the central nervous system. There are some parallels with the meridian system in Chinese medicine.

The vyana vayu has both expanding and condensing energies and also governs movement. The grace and elegance of the limbs in movement is an indication of healthy vyana.

The udana vayu is a fascinating one. An upward moving energy, udana governs growth and development at all levels of reality. At conception it facilitates embryological development and triggers the urge in the baby to move out of the womb and into the world by extending out through the crown chakra. This same energy takes the soul out of the body through the crown chakra at death. During your life, udana is a sustaining field of intelligence that integrates the other four pranas in an on-going urge to grow physically, emotionally and spiritually. When udana gets stuck, it feels as if our whole life is ‘stuck’. Coming back to the heart center and resting there is always a way to get ‘unstuck’.

In any poses you choose, find these energies. In dynamic postures such as standing poses and back bends, to much muscular energy is a sign of blockage in all the vayus. Start with opening the prana vayu and follow it through the others. In more restorative of meditative poses, find the udana vayu as a field of integration and stillness, where the whole body mind is awake and relaxed simultaneously.