Resting in the Stillness of Being

Posted on May 4, 2019 by admin

Notes from Boston, April 2019

Only 10 left of the 44 radiation treatments taking place here in Boston. Along with all of your love and prayers, an extraordinarily wonderful group of people at The Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and my cancer club friends here at Hope Lodge, are all taking care of me. A minor set of challenges and annoyances are arising from the accumulation of the radiation, mostly centered around fatigue and bladder confusion, but, all in all, I’m doing just fine. Life wants us to keep growing and evolving, so new challenges are created to keep us focused. (Fill in you own political metaphor here, if you choose!)

Where is the growth and evolution arising from? From a spiritual perspective, from the “Ground of Being”. As noted in the chart above, the terms at the top: ‘Ground of Being”, Tao and Brahman are interchangeably used to make an attempt to express the inexpressible. ‘Before all duality’ implies time, which is relative. ‘Beyond all opposites’ implies space, also relative. In the world of form, which includes our body/minds, all of creation and anything we put into words, everything appears as part of a pair of opposites. But know that in the depths of silence all duality dissolves and what remains the ineffable mystery. Be there. You are always there already. We have just forgotten to notice. We practice stillness or silence to ‘remember’ who we truly are.

There is no substitute for the practice of silence. There are no techniques, breathing practices or asana sequences that can lead you to what always was, is, and ever shall be. And yet if we do not make a conscious choice to make ‘being in silence’ a priority, the healing power, growth and insight that arises from the stillness will never be fully received. Spirituality grows in the world of paradox and is nurtured in meditation.

In sutra I-3, tada drashtuh svarupe’avasthanam, Patanjali describes yoga as ‘resting in our own true nature’, the unbounded Silence of Being, or Ground of Being, or Tao, and ‘staying there’. I love the word ‘resting’ as it is clearly not about ‘doing something’. Sometimes the word abides is used, as in “the dude abides’. Here the implication is that of finally coming home, recognizing home, and staying home.

As someone who has become addicted to ‘doing’, resting is not easy for me. There are so many layers of mental chatter, conscious and unconscious, that want my attention. My confusion from skandha 1 has left a belief system that says I have to ‘heal’ myself’, and has confused the layers of form that comprise the body/mind with “I’, myself. There is no solution from this perspective. Only an endless chasing after the illusion of ‘finally getting it right’ and an attentional field that never rests.

When we make a conscious choice to practice silence, something else happens. The mental chatter and the physical sensations do not go away in the beginning. And if they do temporarily disappear, they will come rushing back sooner or later. What arises is the possibility of a change in perspective. In the early stages of meditation, there is the cultivation of what is called ‘witnessing’. Whatever arises in awareness, usually thoughts sensations, emotions or an amalgam of all of these, is ‘seen’ and thus recognized as ‘not me’. If ‘I’ can see it, it cannot be ‘I’. We differentiate seer and seen. This process involves the two crucial components of spiritual awakening; attention and identification.

In witnessing, our attention is not drawn to what arises (the seen) but to the process of witnessing itself. We allow what arises to come and go as it will, and also allow our attention to turn inwards, not to thought or the inner sensations, but onto itself, where it spontaneously dissolves into silent unchanging awareness. We begin to notice that attention is the root of self ‘identification’. The more I habitually attend to the world of form, the more my self sense or identity becomes entangled there. When my attention dissolves into silent awareness (this is the meaning of citta vrtti nirodha, sutra I-2) my identification with the world of form also begins dissolve. Here is where we begin to more deeply question just exactly ‘who or what am I?

In sutra I-4, Patanjali describes this crucial piece to the spiritual conundrum: vrtti sarupyam itaratra or (at other times, that is when not in the state of yoga) there is identification with the world of form, the vrttis. Identification is the key. The egoic self, arising in skandha 1, begins to create a ‘me’ or ‘self’ from the likes and dislikes and then this entity evolves through the rest of the skandhas to fill out the egoic self. We make the mistaken belief that what arises is all part of me and therefore I am impelled to respond by grasping (likes), avoiding (dislikes) or ignoring. Grasping and avoiding, and all their behavioral cousins are mentioned by Patanjali in sutra II-7 and II-8, and the whole process we are describing in sutras II-1 – II-17.

In sutra II-11, Patanjali brings in meditation as the means to disentangle the identification process. II-11 dhyaana-heyaas tad vrttayah: Meditation eliminates the changing mind states (created by the kleshas). Meditation, that is, resting in stillness leads to citta vrtti nirodha and drashtuh svarupe avasthanam.

We now add to Patanjali, Mr. Donald Hebb and his famous axiom: ‘neurons that fire together wire together’. Our attentional field sets up neuronal firing patterns that get stronger through repetition. Our attention, identification and power of belief all function in this domain. This is the insidious side of habit. Neuronal energy wants to follow the easiest pathway and when our habitual attention is driven by the unhealthy skandhas, these pathways go through the fight or flight/fear’ center also known as the amygdala. The unhealthy skandhas become stronger and stronger. As the news continues to remind us, this plays out on the cultural level as well as the personal one.

However, meditation practice has been shown to shrink the amygdala and create growth in the neuronal connections of the pre-frontal cortex where we develop the capacity to see from a place of integration, clarity and wisdom. We might say that the buddhi or ‘intelligence’ is the linking of the pre-frontal cortex and with the emotional and spiritual intelligence of the heart heart. Here ‘citta vrtti nirodha‘ is seen as a re-wiring of the brain and its patterns of firing. Resting in stillness is a self-organizing process. Because of the nature and strength of habit, tremendous patience is required. In sutra I-12 abhyasa vairagyabhyam tan nirodhah: Practice and dispassion lead to the resolution (of the dysfunctional mind states). Patanjali lists the two key components of meditation, dispassion and stability.

I-13 tatra sthitau yatno’bhyasah
Practice leads to stable healthy mind states and stillness.

I-14 sa tu dirgha-kala-nairantarya-satkarasevito drdha-bhumih
Stability of mind requires continuous practice, over a long period of time, without interruption, and with an attitude of devotion and love.

Deeply ingrained habits do not go away overnight, whether in an individual or a society. The neuronal connections and cultural fields can be strongly wired, especially if they have been repeated over and over. To lay down new neural pathways and weaken the old ones takes time and patience. Devotion and love are required to make sure the new pathways are healthy and not dysfunctional. It is quite easy to react to an unhealthy pattern by creating another unhealthy one. “”I hate myself for having all this judgment,” is a common thought/vrtti. Learning to gently and compassionately see the thought and recognize it for what it is requires discipline and patience. Meditation practice allows us to see these thought and behavior patterns from a distance, as a witness to them, which is the first step in transforming them.

What we pay attention to receives our energy. By choosing to not react to our thoughts, but just let them come and go, we are withdrawing from them. We are letting them go. This is vairagyam, described in the next sutra. There are many vrttis floating about the mind field that are triggers for suffering, and they keep returning, even if we let them go, if they have strong roots. The ‘heavenly realms and the hell realms are both attractive to the unhealthy skandhas, and attachment to even the heavenly realms is a set-up for more suffering. That is why patience and persistence are the two key supports. Vairagyam is sustaining a healthy and alert immune system for the mind.

I-15 drshtanushravika-vishaya-vitrshnasya vashikara-sanjna vairagyam
The control over craving after any experience, whether sensual, psychological or spiritual, is known as dispassion.

The root of dysfunctionality is craving, the intense desire to acquire or get rid of ‘something’, to create a temporary feeling of wholeness or relaxation. These are emotional or limbic responses, that evoke a threat to our existence. To a self-sense that feels inadequate, there is always something that is threatening, that needs changing. Craving, as we soon find out in life, is a self-perpetuating path of inadequacy and subsequent suffering. Life is what it is happening moment by moment and true happiness is not dependent upon the constantly changing circumstances of life. If I believe that my happiness depends upon this moment being different from what it actually is, I will suffer. Seeing through this delusion is a crucial component of yoga. The true nature of the Self, the unchanging limitless existence and consciousness, (sat – chit – ananda) is undisturbed by any and all possibilities life throws our way.

With the discipline of vairagya we stop believing the craving thoughts, even if they keep arising. No, my happiness is actually not dependent upon getting rid of Donald Trump! This eventually leads to dispassion towards most craving. The subtle forms are dealt with in the next sutra.

The neuroscientific perspective on inhibition offers tremendous insight for yoga students. In Buddha’s Brain” authors Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius describe the capacity to “simply not respond” to limbic (emotional) activity. There is not the inhibiting of the emotional activation which manifests as physiological sensation, but rather inhibiting the next level of neural activity, the story I tell myself that perpetuates the suffering. Repressing emotional content is not healthy on any level, but recognizing it as it arises, positive, negative or neutral, awakens a meta level of awareness. Then I can use skillful means to help the emotional energies move to a more integrated state.

Important note! Vairagyam is not the absence of passion! An integrated self is highly passionate, just not insecure and needy.

I-16 tat param purusha-khyater guna vaitrshnyam
The more advanced form of dispassion involves the full realization of self as the absolute and the dropping away of the most subtle forms of craving and attachment.

see also sutras II – 26, III – 5, IV-29 – 31

In I-16, Patanjali restates I-3, the knower/seer resting in its own nature, as an example of the culmination of refined discipline/dispassion. My mind may generate wants, needs and desires, but I can see their origin and not turn them into issues of survival. I may want an ice cream cone, but getting one, or not getting one is not a big deal in the overall scheme of things. Or, I have been diagnosed with cancer, which is the last thing I want, and the mind wants to rebel. At some point in time, I will face the reality of this and do whatever I can, in the world of form, to help heal. But in any case, I recognize the undying Nature of the Self, and take refuge there.

Somatic Meditation and the Skandhas

Posted on February 21, 2019 by admin

(For a review of the skandhas, please see the previous few posts.)

The Three Key Steps

Somatic meditation practice takes us right to the second skandha, sensation, where the nervous system has immediate encounters with the more tangible aspects of the world of form. This realm is pre-story, pre-thought and thus where we want to ground our attention. Meditation begins with gaining proficiency in directing and sustaining the faculty of attention and the sensory realm is a great place to start. Following the breath is the foundation of somatic meditation and one of the best ways of reigning in the wandering mind away from its addiction to thought. As simple as it sounds, this process takes years of practice and even then, the mind, by nature, wants to keep moving. Patanjali describes this concisely and elegantly, in sutras I-12 – I-16, abhyasa and vairagyam, the first practices given in the Yoga Sutras and the root of all to come.

To practice somatically, sitting, or in any posture, we start with the intention to keep our attention localized in the breath, recognizing that the habitually wandering mind will resist. When the mind wanders off into thought, as it will, we lovingly and compassionately bring our attention back to the breath. We then ask ourselves where in our bodies do we feel the breath most clearly, and that area becomes the ‘seed’ or ‘bija’ for our attention. We are not trying to change or alter the breath, but just feel it, receive and release it, one breath at a time. Our practice unit is ‘one breath’. Then we begin again. Just one breath. This is the first step and amazingly enough, we are always taking the first step.

The area of the body where the breath is felt most clearly is liable to move around and that can be a very revealing experience. Married with attention is an underlying intelligence known in Sanskrit as the buddhi, and as the buddhi awakens, another level of our somatic practice begins to emerge. We may feel that we only feel the breath on the right side, and the intelligence notes that you are unconsciously leaning to the right. A subtle shift of your weight allows the breath to be a little more even. Notice this was not an attempt, based upon an idea, to change the breath, but a felt recognition of a somatic imbalance that, when adjusted, released the breath into a more open spacious feeling.

A similar phenomenon can occur when you notice the sensations of breath remains up in the chest. The buddhi recognizes that this is caused by tension in the belly, and when you drop the belly, the breath opens more fully into the lower body. How does the buddhi know this? Because you have been practicing for a long enough time that it has learned what that sensation is trying to tell you. Those of you following these blog post for several years might recognize this as ‘samyama in asana‘ where, as Iyengar described, the organs of action, organs of perception and the intelligence become a single conscious movement in the entire body. The term ‘samyama’ comes from Patanjali’s sutras III-1 – III-8, and samyama in asana is somatic meditation. This awakening of the buddhi/intelligence is the second step in somatic meditation and the possibilities growth here are infinite.

The third step begins with allowing the self organizing capacities of the body awakened in this practice to continue on, sustaining the posture, and to let your attention move to the overall field of energy that extends out beyond your skin. This field is transparent, and if you can relax without letting your mind wander, your attention may flip, like with the famous young woman/old woman optical illusion, from being the field, to being infinite, timeless spaciousness, the Ground of Being in which the field is continuously arising.

When you can rest in this stillness stably, and recognize ‘I am This’, you will have the direct experience of both the PYS I – 3: tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam: then the identity of the Self (I am) with pure Awareness becomes stable; and the famous Vedantic mahavakya, ‘Tat Vam Asi’ or That You Are. The first section of the 46th Psalm verse 1, Be still, and know that I am God, unfolds the Christian version of the same sutra, however, with usually a different interpretation.

Resting in stillness is likely to be an unstable state and the mind will return to thought and the process begins again; pause, relax, feel the breath, allow it to flow. We are always beginning again. Somatic meditation can be done in any pose, not just seated ones. Restorative yoga poses offer many different opportunities to explore samyama. Remember, step one is to bring your attention to the breath/qi/pranic flow, step two is to open to the deeper realms of intelligence waiting to be discovered, and step three is to expand towards and then rest in the stillness when the intelligence takes over the operation of the pose. The stronger the coherence in the energy fields, the easier it is to rest in silence without distraction.

When you are not in a somatic meditative state, the intelligence continues to operate, keeping the flows of digestive peristalsis, circulation, respiration and cerebro-spinal circulation going, but it is non-conscious and shaped by old habits in the musculo-skeletal and nervous systems. These patterns tend to become more deeply embedded in the tissues and more difficult to transform. This is why aging brings out all sorts of issues. Through conscious somatic meditation, the opportunity arises to let the entangled energy patterns to release into more coherent, more efficient ones. Aging, if experienced as a state of continuous somatic meditation, can then be a way to become less stuck and more open, rather than the opposite.

The education of the buddhi is crucial for this process to deepen and build greater coherence. When are attention and psychic/mental energy is constantly being consumed by trivia or dysfunctional thought patterns, learning ceases. The reliance on habitual patterns can be very useful if they are wisely chosen and continually checked for relevance. This frees up attention for observing what is new, more subtle, more ineffable and allowing this new information to be integrated. This is described by Patanjali in sutras I-23 – I-27 as ‘ishvara pranidhana’. Difficult to translate, Ishvara can be seen as the foundation intelligence of the universe, and all of its manifestations, and all of its possibilities, in all realms of creation. Pranidhana is intention-less total devotion or bhakti, here dedicated to the mystery of Ishvara. In somatic meditation, this is a living presence.

The buddhi is nurtured in silence, so this third step cannot be over emphasized. It is also the most elusive and challenging, as the mind really dislikes stillness and rushes in to fill the space. Discipline is crucial in not getting sucked into the habit. Another challenging aspect is that often, when the buddhi is engaged, the thoughts can be ‘enlightening’, as they are coming from a deep connection to the core of being. The fourth klesha ,asmita, mentioned by Patanjali in II-6, addresses this dilemma. The buddhi is still of the world of form, and the small self insidiously attaches to and takes claim for the buddhi and the revelations. Another version of possible confusion arises because the buddhi is channeling insight is still a transient state that will come to an end. If we ‘believe’ that this is the awakened state, when it does end, as it will, we are likely to feel that this means we have ‘lost’ our way and plunge back into the confusion of the dysfunctional skandhas.

In the silence of stillness, the egoic thoughts begin to dissolve. In ishvara pranidhana, the devotional mind set, coming from the heart, also helps negate the attempts of the egoic self to stake its territory.

In the next post, I will present some alternative poses to practice and more subtle layers of the energy fields to explore.

More Fun with the Skandhas

Posted on February 11, 2019 by admin

Fun with the skandhas ? Are you kidding! Yes! No! … We have to have sense of humor about the human condition; otherwise we would all be nuts, because it is not always easy and not always fun. Sometimes life can be terrifying.

One of the problems for spiritual ‘seekers’ is that we tend to have a fantasy view of enlightenment/awakening and continue to compare our immediate experience to this fantasy. Nothing more frustrating and depressing then this side trip along the path. Observing the skandhas in action, just as they are, is seeing the human condition up-close and personal. No fantasy needed. Reality speaks. But keep your sense of humor to balance the inevitable anxiety/fear/terror that arises!
(For an intro to the 5 skandhas, see the earlier post linked here.)

The term skandha is a Sanskrit word means heaps or aggregates and refers to the various components of what we refer to as ‘consciousness’. In fact, the word ‘consciousness is used to describe the fifth aggregate, the integrated expression of the first four. The skandhas are not added together as much as entwined realms of experience. From simple to complex the five skandhas are: (1) the basic encounter of the spirit with the world of form at incarnation: (2) the immediate resonance with the world of form through sensation/perception; (3) an impulsive response/action to the sensation/perception;
(4) the story/memory/plans, concepts and schemes that organize our impulses in our relationship to a complex world; (5) the personality/egoic structure as an integrated entity.

We need the skandhas to function in the world, but they need to be functioning from wholeness, and not a sense of separation. Healing them is the goal of an embodied spiritual practice.

Skandha 1. The unbounded spirit incarnates into the limitations of the human form and the arrival into this realm creates a bit of a shock. There is a cosmic imperative for life to continue and flourish and to do so, it must survive. In an impermanent world, this is no simple matter. Thus fear is an inevitable and necessary component to the energy field of this new being. It needs to be able to identify danger and respond accordingly. However, the skills to do so have to evolve over time and in the beginning, the new being is totally dependent upon its caregivers. And the caregiviers are not always present and available, or even conscious of their role. This is especially true in utero.

In utero, the soul being is immersed in the physiological and emotional state of the mother and the emotional stability of her immediate environment. Any stress, fear, anxiety or trauma happening to the mother is immediately passed on to her unborn child, who, at this point in time, has no sense of a separate self. This comes much later. There is certainly no time, presence or maturity to quietly reflect on the current condition, so these fears become encoded in their tissues. If we look even more deeply, we can trace the traumas of the mother and father back through the generations, just as we can trace the genes.

Fortunately, the healing process usually begins immediately as well, as when (or if ) there is unconditional love coming through the mother from one of both parents, a nest of non-dual wholeness is created, and the emerging pre-natal being can temporarily relax and let go into the flow. The challenges and complexities of life doesn’t usually let these moments last very long.

The intensity of birth and the birth process, unfortunately sets up another set of traumas for this new being, and with the cutting of the umbilical cord, true separation or ‘aloneness’, arises. The biblical metaphor for this stage is Adam and Eve being ejected from the Garden of Eden for the ‘crime’ of becoming self-aware. A separation occurs, one is naked and alone in the world, and the life journey begins. Because at this stage in the infant’s development there are no words, ideas or concepts attached to the fear, the fear is absolute and primal. This is the wonderful world of the first skandha. This primal fear can be transformed and healed and this is the core of an embodied spiritual practice.

As in the pre-natal world, unconditional love from one or both parents, and others throughout life holds the space of wholeness and healing, but in life the traumas also keep coming. The word trauma is used here in a general sense to describe any experience that reinforces the feeling of being separate and alone and strengthens the egoic structures that are built on the foundation of separation. The acute trauma of violence is an extreme example of this and does far more long lasting damage than the smaller ones, but thousands of small ones add up in their own way.

In PTSD language, an embodied being’s response to this primal fear is to contract around the place where the fear localizes, (usually the heart and 1 or more of the chakras, or organs) and then to dissociate to escape the pain of the contracted fear. In dissociation, we ‘leave the body’, or more accurately, cut ourselves off from what the body is telling us. The first skandha is called “ignorance of form” or just ‘form’. Spirit, through its connection with its expression in the world of form known as ‘soul’, has to figure out how to integrate the reality of impermanence into its moment to moment experience.

As more mature beings encountering this primal fear of impermanence * in our practice, or in life, we can recognize that it arises because we have ‘forgetten’ that form and the formless are one, not two, and we have become ‘lost’ in the world of abstract thought that was created in the next few skandhas. To heal is to awaken to our True Self as unconditional love and unbounded spaciousness, spirit and soul, which is the source/ground of all the sane and crazy stuff we humans experience. * (This primal fear is known as abhinivesha, one of the 5 kleshas mentioned in Buddhism and Patanjali ( sutras II-2 – II-12))

The second skandha, vedana, is usually translated as feelings, but this skandha is about pure sensation and perception, before labels, judgment or interpretation arise. Emotions arise in the third skandha. The embodied being feels/hears sound, perceives tactile vibrations through the sense of touch, sees light, smells the odors of its environment, and tastes whatever it can get into its mouth. We live in a world rich with sensation, most never reaching the conscious level. Psycho-tropic substances highlight how much we miss because our ‘doors of perception’ are often very limited. There is a survival purpose to this, of course, as too much sensation can overwhelm the nervous system. Spiritual training helps expand our capacity to take in the vast majesty of creation safely. As Arjuna discovered in chapter 11 of the Bhagavad Gita, absolute fullness is not so easy to digest! The second skandha involves life’s moment to moment encounter in the present moment, in and with the world of form or what Samkhya and Patanjali call Prakriti. A mature mindfulness practice takes us here and helps us find a stable ground. (See PYS I-12 – I-14)

The third skandha, impulse is where craving and aversion are born in response to the sensations and perceptions that arise and the underlying fear of impermanence. These sensations/feelings of the second skandha are quickly divided into ‘likes’, ‘dislikes’ and neutrals. This is totally natural and desirable, up to a point. To survive, the being needs to move towards safety, healthy food, water and air and away from danger. To grow and evolve, we need to seek out teaching and lessons that nurture our higher selves and avoid situations that drag us back into unconscious pathology.

Unfortunately, the sense of being ‘separate’ can distort a healthy action. The likes lead to craving, the dislikes to aversion and the neutrals to indifference. This separate ‘me’ begins to experience the world through these three lenses and impulsively reacts when triggered. Healing and growth are ignored for immediate gratification of the unconsciously terrified egoic self. ” I want my wall. I have to have my wall.” Not to point out the obvious, but we all have our moments like this. The magnitude of the delusion and the damage caused by Trump are extreme, but we are all needing to wake up to our own unconsciousness.

This stage is often described by the action of The ‘Three Poisons’ of Buddhism. These are often translated directly from the first three (of five) kleshas (see sutras II-2 through II-10 in Sadhana Pada of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras), as avidya or ignorance, raga or craving/grasping, and dvesa or aversion/avoiding/hatred. (The other two kleshas are asmita or confusion about the ‘I’, and abhinivesha or fear of death.) Raga and dvesha, grasping and avoiding are both expressions of avidya/ignorance and are the first two poisons in action. Frank Ostaseski pointed out in his book, “The Five Invitations”, and I agree fully, that in our moment to moment lives, distraction is really the third poison. Avidya comes immediately in the first skandha. So we will call distraction as the third poison.

In “The Network of Thought”, consisting of talks from 1981, Krishnamurti describes the trap of distraction. He observes that as humans begin to have more and more leisure time, are they “going to be absorbed in the field of entertainment? … Or are they going to turn inwardly, which is not entertainment but something which demands great capacity of observation, examination and non personal perception. These are the two possibilities. The basic content of human consciousness is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of fear. Is humanity going to increasingly follow entertainment?” One hopes these ‘Gatherings” are not a form of entertainment.” (The Gatherings’ are Krishnamurti’s famous public talks, many of them given here in Ojai.)

Distraction is a very common expression of the third skandha, ‘impulse’, where our moment to moment strategies to avoid the locked up fear and pain mask as something ‘useful’. Entertainment is a tricky example of this, as one can be ‘entertained’ while abiding in a place of wholeness, and experience a sense of joy, delight and learning in the creativity of Mother Nature, or possibly writers, artists, athletes or entertainers. So we are not saying the entertainment is a problem. But if its pursuit stems from a forgetting of our True Self as infinite Love and leading a life of continuously avoiding the inner pain and conflict we all carry around, then that is unhealthy, from a spiritual perspective.

Impulsive behavior is just that, so the emerging ‘egoic self’ needs to organize these impulses, crave, avoid, distract, into coherent action. Therefore, the fourth skandha, concept, develops, where we create memories and habits, concepts, and strategies that enable us to live our lives within a coherent framework which may or may not be based on delusion. All of the mental processes oof the first four skandhas, taken together as they arise moment to moment, comprise the fifth skandha, consciousness.

In “The Untethered Soul”, a beautiful and powerful book on the enlightened state by Michael Singer, chapter 11 is titled ‘pain, the price of freedom’. Without using the term ‘skandha’, he nails the process of the skandhas precisely. The chapter begins…

” One of the essential requirements for true spiritual growth and deep personal transformation is coming to peace with pain. No expansion or evolution can take place without change, and periods of change are not always comfortable. Change involves challenging what is familiar to us and daring to question our traditional needs for safety, comfort and control. This is often perceived as a painful experience.

Becoming familiar with this pain is part of your growth. Even though you may not actually like the feelings of inner disturbance, you must be able to sit quietly inside and face them if you want to see where they come from. Once you can face your disturbances, you will realize that there is a layer of pain seated deep in the core of your heart. This pain is so uncomfortable, so challenging, so destructive to the individual self, that your entire life is spent avoiding it. Your entire personality is built upon ways of avoiding it. Your entire personality is built upon ways of being, thinking, acting and believing that were developed to avoid this pain.”

This ‘personality’ Michael Singer describes is the ‘Network of Thought’ of Krishnamurti, and the action of unhealthy skandhas. It takes over the mind field and spins a web of delusion using grasping, avoiding, or distracting. The mind demands something to do, so it can avoid the existential terror, and at the same time validate its own existence. It uses fear to create a smokescreen so the reality and perceived pain of emptiness cannot be seen. (Sounds like Trump and his demand for a wall! Spirituality and politics are inextricably intertwined.)

A somatic meditation practice offers an opportunity to go back into the body, being present to the pain residing there and just holding it in loving kindness, like a parent would do with a suffering child. Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, in the Embryology Workshop I attended last August, described bringing your attention to the place of interest and staying there (samyama) as the only action (yang) required. The innate wisdom of the body does the rest (yin). Being this receptive is not easy in a culture where the yang-doing dominates. The restless mind wants to ‘do something so it can avoid actually feeling the intensity of the stored pain.

Pschotherapist and spiritual teacher John Welwood coined the term ‘spiritual by-pass’ to describe the ways in which we can use a ‘spiritual practice’ as a distraction from this deep unresolved pain. I believe this is a natural outcome of our yang culture which is so invested in ‘doing’ the practice’ that there no space or time for pausing, listening, waiting or allowing is created. This is why slowing down and feeling the moment to moment reality of the soma is crucial for practice.

Practice

Of course, to feel and experience the skandhas in action, we need a meditation practice, or at least the capacity to be a still and silent witness to your own mental movements Patanjali calls the citta vrittis and how the soma/body responds to these movements. Sitting is the best way, and if your practice matures, you will be able to keep healing the skandhas as you go throughout your day. Find a comfortable pose, balanced and relatively relaxed. Begin the mantra: Pause – Relax – Open – Allow.

For a beginner in meditation, both the body and mind are infinite sources of distraction. Sitting can be painful for a novice in embodied presence. Use a chair, cushions for support, a wall, (not that one !) or anything that allows you to relax enough to begin to feel and follow your breath. All it takes is one conscious breath. Just one. Then you begin again. Relax, find the breathing and follow it in and out, not trying to change anything. Just receiving.

Even after the body becomes relaxed enough that the urge to immediately get up and escape the discomfort, following the breath is still very challenging. Our attention usually wanders off to some’thing’ else that is happening, probably thoughts or sensations. In that case, stay with any of the physical sensations as they come and go (2nd skandha), not the thoughts or stories (skandhas 4 and 5). After a few moments, return to the sensations of the breathing. Repeat. when you discover the mind has wandered because of the unconscious pull of the third skandha, rejoice in your discovery as this is what awakening is all about, and gently and compassionately bring your attention back to the breathing.

This process is known as ‘samyama‘, described in the third chapter of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Samyama is the simultaneous practice of limbs 6, 7 and 8 of ‘Ashtanga Yoga: dharana – bring your attention to the point of your attention, hear the breath; dhyana – remain there through disciplined resistance to the impulsive desire to wander; samadhi – remaining there effortlessly because you are totally absorbed in the process. Samyama practice recognizes that you will be distracted sooner or later and ask to just begin again, over and over, compassionately and kindly.

If the breath can relax and you can stay in the flow, begin to notice the natural pauses that appear. The pauses are portals to what might be called ’emptiness’, groundlessness, or ‘no-thing’. A taste of this may be temporarily relaxing, but in the beginning our attention cannot find ‘ground’ there and inevitably returns to ‘something’, as opposed to ‘no-thing’. Rarely, the primal fear may arise, as a PTSD moment. If this happens, Pause, relax, bring the breath down into the lower dantien. If it is too intense, get up and move to keep the qi flowing

If your breathing can stay relatively relaxed and easy, try to let your attention rest in the pauses and let the breath fade into the deep background. Feel the ’emptiness’ as a vast opening into larger dimensions of consciousness. Do not try to grasp anything. Pause – relax – open – allow. If your ‘mind’ will not let this happen, slow things down if possible and notice the process of the skandhas. Dharana … dhyana …

For most of us, the core of the practice is continually returning to skandha 3 when you realize that the mind has wandered away. In the beginning, it happens so fast, we do not notice. We just suddenly realize, oh, my mind has wandered. With gentleness and humor, bring your attention back to the breathing. If distraction (the vikshipta mind described by Vyassa in his commentary to the very first of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras) is strong, as it is for most of us for a long period of time, the usual instruction is to give the mind something regular and repetitive to follow.

The breathing is the most common ‘seed or bija‘ to use, but it can be a simple mantra or phrase that is repeated over and over again. A favorite of mine is from Thich Nhat Hahn: ‘Breathing in, I know I am breathing in. Breathing out, I smile.” Counting the breaths to 10 and then repeating is another simple way to focus attention. This is dharana – dhayana of the 8 limbed Astanga Yoga of Patanjali, preparation for samadhi and deeper states.

Perhaps the distraction is not so subtle. Maybe you are jsut settling in when the neighbors car alarm goes off. Or you forgot to turn your phone off and it starts beeping or ringing. A simple sensation (skandha 2) evokes aversion. Or perhaps you can notice the sound, and notice the psychological reaction to the sound, or the physiological/somatic reaction to your psychological reaction, from a space of open curiosity. Or maybe some tasty smell wafts your way from the kitchen and you think, ‘I want some of that. How much longer do I have to sit here. By the way, that reminds me of a dinner we had ….blah blah blah .. oops …lost in thought…pause, relax, open and allow.

If you are experiencing some mild pre-natal PTSD, you are meeting the first skandha. This seems to be a common occurrence in the world of spiritual practice these days.The trauma of gestation and the birth process is stored deep in the non-conscious levels of the mind and long sustained practice of opening and unfolding eventually gets us there. Working through and healing this trauma somatically is a major goal for those of us in the evolutionary field.

When PTSD kicks in a stronger form, it is more then just simple aversion. It is acute panic in the nervous system with terror and dissociation fighting, like trying to jam the brake pedal while the car engine is racing at 6,000 rpms. If you have had some experience with Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, you know the first step is to identify the present moment: this is PTSD in action. It is a somatic memory arising in the present moment and I am perfectly safe and totally loved right here right now. This is called changing the narrative. Then call upon your resources that you have developed in your home practice; Pause, get up and move to keep the qi flowing. Get out into nature if you can. Feel where in the body you feel the ‘freeze’ or closing down and invite the breath to soothe this area. Repeat a mantra. Find someone to help hold the space.The body naturally wants to complete this experience, heal and move on. The body will do this if we understand the process, although it will take time.

You should seek professional support with a somatically trained psychotherapist if your resources are totally overwhelmed. Fortunately for all of us, this is a field co-arising and growing with he increasing number of people engaged in spiritual practice.

Just remember, as this vulnerable being, you, me and everyone else, becomes conscious and begins to interact with the world of form, it begins to notice that the nature of the world of form is impermanent and ‘other than me’. It thus feels separate and alone and forgets that the emptiness and the vast groudlessness in the background is actually unconditional love continuously giving birth to form. Duality is born, a certain level of fear sets in and the being contracts. “Make the smallest distinction, however and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart.” (Hsin Hsin Ming)

But ultimately, this is the process of life awakening. We are all held and supported by infinite love and the wisdom of all of creation. Let it all flow through you as you move and are moved through your day. Be the expression of your soul’s wisdom that brought you here in the first place and join in the celebration of the moment.