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.

Yoga, Taoism and the Intelligence of the Yin Organ Systems

Posted on September 25, 2020 by admin

Introduction

In the previous post, we introduced the seven karmic lessons of life and some explorations of these using the microcosmic orbit and some anatomical references on the front and back body. Keep working with whichever of the lessons is relevant to you in your life right now. Our next exploration of these lessons will come from the interior perspective of the yin organs, but that will come in a future post as first we will need some preliminary work linking Yoga, Taoism and the Organ systems to help keep us on track.

Remember that our karmic lessons pertain to every moment of our lives. Fall of 2020 is going to be a turbulent and challenging time and we all need to remain grounded, heart centered and clear, no matter what arises. Keep resting in Being and allow Life to flow through you, as best you can. Stay safe, support small businesses, be kind to one another, and do what you can to help get out the vote. Don’t waste energy worrying about things you have no control over. Keep the the loving open heart channeling into the human energy field and we will get through this.

Before we continue, I have to pass on Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s wisdom, as presented in the introduction to her Fall 2020 series of classes on the Spine, offering us a clear vision of inner dimensions of our somatic explorations. She is the voice of Somatic Spiritual Awakening.

CELLULAR CONSCIOUSNESS
Each cell in our body has living intelligence. It is capable of knowing itself, initiating action, and communicating with all other cells. The individual cell and the community of cells (tissue, organ, body) exist as separate entities and as one whole at the same moment. Cellular consciousness is a state in which all cells have equal opportunity for expression, receptivity, and cooperation. Attuning ourselves to our cellular consciousness brings us to a place in which we can find the ground from which flows the intricate manifestations of our physical, psychological, and spiritual being.

EMBODIMENT
Embodiment emerges from our cells’ awareness of themselves. It is a direct experience. There are no intermediate steps or translations. There is no guide, no witness – just the fully known consciousness of the experienced moment initiated from the cells. Here, the brain is the last to know. The process of embodiment is a being process, not a doing process. It is an awareness process, not a thinking process. There is complete knowing and peaceful comprehension. Out of this embodiment process emerges feeling, sensing, thinking, witnessing, understanding, compassion. The source of this process is free; it is love.

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Patanjali and Lao Tzu: The Meeting of Yoga and Taoist Practices

In general, the cellular consciousness referred to by Bonnie is unconscious in most of us. The journey is to awaken to this always present flow of energy and information and then allow any and all sense of separateness to dissolve into this fundamental embodied aliveness. Patanjali, in the beginning of the Sadhana Pada, the second chapter of the Yoga Sutras entitled “On Practice”, lists three essential practices known together as Kriya Yoga, that guide our journey. They begin sequentially, but then intertwine into an evolving spiral of awakening and integration.

Taoism has many parallels that take us right into the organ systems. Chinese Medicine is process based. Rather than referring to anatomical structures such as kidneys, it refers to organ systems, including all metabolic and integrative processes associated with the organs and their related hormones. Organ systems also have a subtle psycho-spiritual component unseen in Western medicine.

The first essential practice is discipline or tapas in Sanskrit. Without discipline, there is no practice, or no ability to sustain practice when difficulty arises, and this is true no matter what the subject matter, no matter what level of experience we may have. This is very true in spiritual practice, and Patanjali introduces the more advanced expressions of discipline, abhyasa and vairagya, in chapter I, the Samadhi Pada, sutras I-12 – 16. Abhyasa is the constant directing of our energies to create layers and levels of stability. This includes grounding in the world of form, through bones, fluids and mind, and also stabilizing our awakening in the formless. Vairagya is the constant directing of our energies away from habits and patterns that perpetuate unconscious delusion and suffering, and transforming them towards into patterns that are stabilizing and Awakening. Abhyasa and vairagya are tow sides of the same coin

Discipline is a form of will power, and In Taoism, Will is one of the five Shen or Spirits and resides in the Kidney Organ System. In Taoism, will has a yin and yang component. The Yang Will involves both the day to day and major life decisions and its active and dynamic energy helps us stay focused on the tasks at hand. Yin Will is quite different. Ted Kaptchuk, in his book on Chinese Medicine, “The Web That Has No Weaver”, describes it this way.

“Yin Will is the other side of Will. It is the deeper encounter with the inexorable and ultimate destiny that already exists hidden in the undifferentiated seed. It is the recognition that the deepest force requires no effort. The Yin Will is elusive, almost intangible. It is noticed in stillness. It has a quality of irreducible mystery. The Yin Will is about the inevitable, about a direction we each move toward that can only be seen when we turn around and look at how we have developed through time. It is about fate and destiny. It is about the unknown and depth.

Recognition of Yin Will allows for the creation of the virtue of Wisdom. This Wisdom is not about knowing things. In fact, it is more about being deeply connected to the unknown. Wisdom is a recognition of the fact that life is an intertwining of known and unknown.”

We will soon see how Yin Will links up with the third practice, but Yang Will will leads to the second practice of Kriya Yoga, svadhyaya, Self-study or Self inquiry. Yang Will involves choices (when and how do we apply discipline) and for this we need to cultivate discriminating intelligence. The first stage of Self study is the examining the rules and laws that govern the world of form (known as Prakriti in the Yoga Sutras) and the nature of our own habits and behaviors. In learning what aspects of our lives and mental activities to cultivate and what to eliminate, we discover a discriminating intelligence that can be awakened and refined to guide us in our day to day and long term decision making. This is very true on the collective level as well and is a life long endeavor also as our habits have layers and layers going back through our ancestors.

In Taoism, this discriminative intelligence is another of the five Spirits and resides in the Spleen-Pancreas Organ System. The Spleen-Pancreas, in Chinese Medicine, extracts the ‘pure from the impure’. On a biological level, in the digestive process, the nutrients and anything else that is beneficial are separated and absorbed into the blood stream, while the rest is sent along for elimination. The blood is also filtered and monitored for potential infectious agents, engaging the immune system. The Spleen-Pancreas also discriminates at the psychological and spiritual level, helping us make intelligent descisions about all aspects of our lives. This processing is analogous to the Samana Vayu in Yoga.

The second stage of svadyaya is inquiry into Who, or what am I. What is this “I – me – mine” mind set that drives my behavior? What is change? What is stillness? Can I discover my innate True Nature, as and in the Stillness at the core of my heart? Self study includes reading sacred scriptures that discuss this question, such as the Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad Gita, The Upanishads, the many Buddhist Sutras, and mystical poetry. It is about Being and not doing, as Bonnie described above. In the Yoga Sutras II-26 – 27, Patanjali discusses this deeper dimension of discriminating wisdom. In Taoism, is the recognition of the small Shen, the ruler of the Five Spirits that resides in the Heart Organ System and the fullness (purna) of the Big Shen, one of the Three Treasures.

The third practice, Ishvara Pranidhana, is the dissolving of the egoic structures into Being. It is allowing Life in its Wholeness to flow though you effortlessly. This is Yin Will in action. Egoic structures are energetic habits of thought and belief that perpetuate the illusion of ‘separateness’ that causes so much suffering. The energy held in these patterns can be transformed by first seeing them for what they are and then exposing them to the direct realization of True Nature, where they dissolve like a wave returning to the vast ocean. Because of karmic momentum, the egoic patterns will keep coming back. But if we can recognize them as just waves, transient phenomena arising out of the depths of True Nature, and stop feeding them by resisting or giving into them, eventually the karmic momentum resolves back into the Source and they come to an end.

The fact that in Kriya Yoga Ishvara Pranidhana comes after Self Study is crucial. It is easy to ‘let go’ into unconscious habits and believe that the ego is letting go. This is one of the great tricks of the ego. You can see obvious examples in spiritual teachers who have had a powerful ‘waking up’ experience, but haven’t done enough ‘growing up’ emotionally. The results are not pretty. The cultivation of discriminating wisdom helps keep all of us from our own self delusion.

Ishvara is a Sanskrit word that points to Divinity as manifest in the multiplicity of forms in the Universe. It is infinite creativity in action. As my Vedanta teacher Swami Dayananda used to say, “What is, is Ishvara”. There are many layers to the practice of Ishvara Prahidhana as demonstrated by Patanjali using this expression in three different sections of the Yoga Sutras. In the first chapter, sutras I-23 – I-29 are all devoted to Isvara. And all three of the Kriya Yoga practices are included as part of the Niyamas, one of the eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga described later on.

There are two more Yin Organ systems associated with the Five Spirits that we need to consider and they are linked together in a quite interesting Yin-Yang way. The Lung Organ System is associated with the Spirit known as Po, the corporeal soul. Po is the denser yin expression of embodiment, associated with the five elements, concerned solely with this body and this incarnation, and returns to the Earth at death. There are seven Po, related on the physical plane to the seven sensory openings: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and the mouth. The are also related to the seven Karmic lessons of life discussed in the previous post.

The Liver Organ System is the home of Po’s yang counterpart Hun, or the non-corporeal soul. The Hun is lighter, more expansive and more subtle than the denser Po. It is the aspect of spirit that has no attachment to the physical body and at death leaves the body to dissolve into more ethereal realms of existence. It is the Hun that is the vehicle for shamanic journeying. There are three Hun, sometimes referred to as three spirits or energy fields of differing densities surrounding the physical body (the 7 Po). The ethereal is the densest, the light and finally the true spiritual plane. Taoist master Jeffrey Yuen also teaches that Po is related to space and Hun to time.

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An Overview of our Inner Anatomy

Let the Kriya Yoga of ‘Discipline/Self Study/Letting Go’ guide our explorations as we use breathing, the leverage of different postures and micro-movements to bring attention/conscious awareness to some of these inner spaces of the body, the organs that embryologically emerge within them and the energetic flow of the organ systems. These micro-thin spaces between fascial layers surrounding the organs are also in relationship to the organs through the flow of fluids, Qi and intelligence. Yang Will focuses the attention and keep sit from wandering. Yin Will allows the innate intelligence of the Qi/Fluids/Cells to reveal itself in Being, without any attempt of the ego to manipulate the situation. The habits of the ego are relentless so be patient and compassionate with your Self when working at this level.

We’ll begin our journey into the intelligence of the organ systems by feeling the the anatomical spaces of the torso. The illustrations above left show the three anatomical spaces of the abdomen into which our inner organs emerge during embryological development. These comes from one of my favorite books, “Spark in the Machine” by David Keown, an English medical doctor and acupuncturist, who tells the amazing story of how embryological development serves as the foundation of the acupuncture channels, and much much more. My fascination with embryology, thanks to Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, has become a spiritual journey into the roots of creation itself as it manifests, here and now, in our embodied Presence.

Translating into Western terminology, Jue Yin, the most anterior, is called the peritoneal cavity; Tai Yin is the anterior para-renal space, and Shao Yin is the retro-peritoneal space. For somanauts, these three spaces provide a way to differentiate the depth spaces of the body, the most challenging of the three spacial directions. Head to tail is simple with the three Dantiens the starting point. With side to side we have the innate bi-lateral symmetry of the human form, i.e., 2 eyes, ears, arms, lungs, legs etc. Front to back is challenging, especially in the upright posture, so we really have to slow down and allow the sensations and perceptions to come.

Frank Netter’s drawing of the a cross section at T-12 , similar to the one above, is viewed from below so you have to reverse left and right, but the cavities are the same. Notice the space behind the stomach, where Bonnie allows her ‘embryonic breathing’ to originate. Also, the liver, kidneys and spleen. These will be key areas in our explorations, as we track the flow of breath/qi, through the micro-thin spaces between two layers of fascia surrounding the volumes and the organs.

In Chinese Medicine, these Yin inter-fascial spaces or channels also have an upper (above the diaphragm) component, as seen above, and are linked to the lower through the three openings in the diaphragm. The Qi flows through these three ‘channels’. These channel also branch out into the limbs to complete the meridians associated with each organ system.

Jue Yin follows the opening for the Vena Cava and links Liver Acupuncture Channel with the Pericardium Acupuncture Channel. Tai Yin follows the esophageal opening, linking Lungs and Spleen/Pancreas; (embryologically speaking, the lungs emerge from a bud on the oesophagus near the vocal cords.), and Shao Yin follows the opening for the aorta linking Heart and Kidney channels.

Exploring the Jue Yin

As an example, we see how the Jue Yin channel combines the Pericardium channel in the arm/upper body with the Liver Channel/leg in the lower body. ‘Absolute’ is one translation of the character ‘Jue’. Others are reversing or returning. Jue Yin runs from Liver-1 on the inside of the big toe all the way to Pericardium 9 at the tip of the middle finger. The pericardium channel also has an inner branch extending down the vena cava linking the three burners.

Dynamic Practice

Setu Bandha Sarvangasana and its variations are great poses to explore Jue Yin. Activate the inner big toes and middle fingers to open whole meridian. For the ‘Leg Jue Yin’ Liver meridian, track flow from the inner big toes along the inner legs and knees and through the groins. (Right and Left) Upper and lower channels meet at the upper front diaphragm.

Feel the liver and pericardium rotating in opposite directions to open space for the vena cava. The Jue Yin channel is where yin has reached its maximum and begins to reverse or return to yang, like at the winter solstice. It is where the de-oxygenated venous blood is returned to the heart and lungs to be re-vitalized. Setu bandha is a more yin backbend allowing the yang to build gradually. As the Jue Yin channel opens, more challenging backbends can be added. This supported (yin) ‘sort of’ kapotasana is still more yang. Without support, backbends become even more yang. Open slowly.

Another way to explore Jue Yin is through the forward bend back bend flow mentioned in a previous post. In fact, you can explore the three yin “Great Channels’, by adding Tai Yin, (Lung and Spleen/Pancreas, the middle layer; and Shao Yin, Heart and Kidney, the inner most layer, anatomically speaking. Iyengar begins all his forward bends in ‘Light on Yoga’ by opening Jue Yin. The completed pose opens Shao Yin with the Tai Yin, the middle layer balancing the two.

Most beginning yoga students collapse in at the Pericardium/Liver junction, and the compensate by over constricting the very outer layer, Tai Yang along the back body to stay upright. By aligning and opening the three inner or yin channels, both back bends and forward bends become organically beneficial.

Inner Practice

In meditative or restorative poses, allow your imagination/attention rest in the opening in the diaphragm for the vena cava as it passes from behind the liver up and into the heart. Bring compassion/Loving Kindness to your heart area so the Pericardium, the connective tissue surrounding the heart, also know as the ‘Heart Protector’, can relax a bit.

Allow you imagination attention follow the Jue Yin as it passes from the feet through the groins. Imagine where the common iliac veins converge to form the inferior vena cava. This is the area of the ‘Hara’. Rest and soften here, bringing Loving Kindness and Compassion. Allow the whole space from the bifurcation up to the heart soften and relax. This is the Middle Burner. Notice the inner link as the inferior vena cava links heart in the upper burner, IVC and aorta in the middle burner and below the navel lower burner. Add inner arms and legs.Have fun with wherever this qi takes you. Be Yin/receptive, allowing, not trying to control, as best you can. Be grateful for having a human body.

For more detailed work and multiple postures and sequences for Jue Yin, see Ruth Knill’s YouTube page. Ruth is a long time yoga practitioner and teacher as well as a licensed acupuncturist working in Arlington, MA. She is teaching a regular ‘Zoom’ yoga class on line every week.

Taosim/Chinese Medicine Background

Foundational to all of Chinese Medicine is the Taoist non-dual principle of yin and yang, representing the three primary realities of creation: dynamism, inter-connectedness and change. The dynamic energy comes from the opposite polar charges of yin and yang. Although ‘opposite’ there is no ‘pure’ yin or yang; each is embedded in the other, no matter how deep you go. There is continuous flow between the two, one waxing, one waning, and then the reverse. What flows is known as qi, (or prana in Sanskrit).

Chinese Medicine describes 12 Primary acupuncture channels, six yin and six yang, that regulate the flow of qi in the body. Each channel is associated with an ‘organ’ (more of a set of energetic processes than the physical organ of Western anatomy), and has points located along the surface of the body. However the channels also have branches that dive into the interior of the body.

In general, yang organs are hollow and move substances throughout the body. They are: (capitalized to differentiate them from the western anatomical organ) the Large Intestine, Small Intestine, Stomach, Bladder, Gall Bladder and a quirky one known as San Jiao, or Triple Warmer. There is no western equivalent, but the San Jiao balances the flow qi through the three burners, which we might see as a regulation of the whole digestive process An ancient Chinese medical text states: ‘The Upper Burner controls intake, the Middle Burner controls transformation, the Lower Burner controls elimination.’ It can also be seen as the mediator of tensegrity in the fluid/fascia living matrix. The San Jiao is a key for our heart/hara balance.

The yin organs include: the Heart (the most yang of the yin organs), Pericardium or Heart Protector, Lungs, Spleen/Pancreas, Liver and Kidneys (the most yin of the yin organs.

One way to group the 12 Primary Channels is in yin/yang pairs of 2, giving us the 6 Great Channels. The six pairs link yang upper body/arms with yin lower body legs. There are three arm yang channels linking with three leg yang channels, and three arm yin channels linking with three leg yin ones. The Great Channels actually arise from 6 embryological, fascially distinct cavities that are arranged spatially from the yang, Governing Vessel back body to yin Conception Vessel front body, in this order:

Tai Yang – Yang Ming – Shao Yang – Shao Yin – Tai Yin – Jue Yin

These also determine a flow with Tai Yang being the Beginning of a cycle and Jue Yin the end of the cycle, which is why Jue Yin is called returning or reversing Yin where

Thank you and credits to Frank Netter for his anatomical drawings
and Marc Ignacio on Upsplash for his candle photo.

As always, questions on practice and editorial and copy editing corrections greatly appreciated.

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.