ARTICLES APRIL 2009
AWAKENING THE HEART CHAKRA by Gordon Smith
Non-
Today the qualities of aggression and fierceness when they come to the surface in a civilised community, (for example, at a football match), are no longer considered virtues unless the nation is at war, when the fighting man resumes those qualities that ensure survival.
The inherited tendencies in man to procreate and survive are very strong indeed and every man must recognise the tendency for his head to turn and his gaze to follow every attractive girl that passes by. That which turns his head is patterned deep within his protoplasm and is the pressure of his ancestors seeking rebirth. The same can be said of the female who attracts the male in more subtle ways, with her interest in fashion and clothes. One is here reminded of the sea anemone, attracting the interest of every small fish that passes by. We really associate any of these qualities with individual free will.
Reflexive Self Consciousness
Fortunately man has another quality and that is his ability to be reflexive and to
look deep within himself for the answers. To break identification with the inertic
demands of the outer world has taken time and often with the guidance of enlightened
teachers both religious and Yogic. These visionaries who can see beyond the limitations
of the finite world have seen a greater purpose for mankind and have outlined the
steps to be taken in order to put their houses in order -
The Heart Chakra
The heart chakra is central to the way we feel and its seed symbol (Yantra) is a
six-
The Mystic Rose
Meditations of the heart are very much Bhakti meditations that enable us to mediate between the world of spirit and the temporal world of every day life, as the way we feel not only influences our actions but also the health and chemistry of the body. We have here chosen the rose as a Mandala for the heart chakra as it is a symbol of love and development, which when coupled with the light of consciousness can become a powerful link with higher levels of consciousness.
It is important to note at this stage that the foundations of Yoga i.e. the Yamas and Niyamas need to be well established otherwise the more refined levels of spiritual consciousness will find difficulty in finding resolution at the level of the physical, and if not accepted can cause problems of a psychosomatic nature.
Meditation
When meditating, visualise a rose at the centre of feeling within the heart, make it as beautiful and as perfect as you can. The rose is a creation of Intelligence and light, once established let the image of the rose fade back into the light from which it came. Holding the feeling of perfection, allow the image of the rose to return more beautiful than ever, its light refining the way that you feel. Light is a symbol for consciousness and as the meditation continues, the form of the rose and the light or essence from which it arises will become inseparable and the whole body will become filled with light. The breath also will become peaceful and refined and experienced as a healing breath throughout the body.
To find out more about Gordon’s work see www.yoga-
THE PURPOSE OF YOGA PRAGMATICALLY by Godfri Devereux
The purpose of yoga pragmatically, according to Patanjali is to free the body from tension (ii.47) and establish it in stiram sukam (ii.46), establish it in joyful steadiness, or establish it in tranquil stability. Tranquil stability or joyful steadiness means obviously no tension. So, in order to arrive in stiram sukam the body must be free from tension relative to that shape. Relative to that form. Each one of those hundreds of yoga posture forms, each one of those shapes addressing itself to the potentiality of tension in the body in a unique and different way.
So each one of those forms being a unique opportunity to release tension from the body.
Because most of the forms, not all of the forms, but most of the forms are to one degree or another unnatural, meaning not impossible, not outside the capacity of the human body but just not usual, not used by most people in their lives. Ok, some people, gymnasts athletes dancers acrobats more so, but even so, still there’s a huge range of forms or shapes amongst the yoga postures that bear very little relationship to the way that you normally use the body and therefore can be a direct and successful invitation for tension to enter the body if they’re not approached with care and integrity and understanding.
So if you’re doing a posture such as Warrior pose where you turn the trunk forward,
bend the front leg, stretch the arms up and look up, if this is not done with care
and understanding it will develop tension in the inter-
Even if it’s developing your concentration.
Even if it’s developing your determination, it’s still being bad for your back, bad for your neck.
So precision in the articulation of the body into the shapes or precision in the expression of form becomes your fundamental way of securing not only the effectiveness of the yoga postures, but also their safety. You could look at the form of the body in a posture and consider angles and relationships between planes and relationships between line as if the body was a geometrical arrangement of lines. But this is not very helpful simply because every single person’s body has a unique pattern of tension, has a unique pattern of limitation or a unique pattern of potential or capability and even though you could say that each posture has its inherently perfect line that perfect line exists only for a body free from tension and if your body is not free from tension then the perfect line is not available and trying to impose the perfect line or the perfect shape on your body is an invitation to tension.
That means looking for the line or establishing the form of a posture has to be an enquiry, it has to be a self enquiry, Svadhyaya, it has to be an investigation of what your potentiality is, what your capability is right now. Without regard to what your capability was yesterday and without regard to what you would like your capability to be. So this means that everybody to a certain extent lines themselves up slightly differently. But the basic shape of the posture in order for it to be that posture must still be there. In other words in Virabhadrasana nobody should be bending the back leg, even if that means you can only bend the front leg one degree. The bending of the front leg is not the point of Virabhadrasana. The point of Virabhadrasana is what’s happening in the whole body. And if the back leg is bending the lower back is under stress. The lower back is being compromised and probably damaged. The damage doesn’t become obvious until perhaps a few years later. And then it’s obvious that it wasn’t from Virabhadrasana, it was because somebody pushed you over or you fell off your bicycle or whatever. This is not necessarily the case. Perhaps you fell over because you damaged your back in Virabhadrasana and the integrity of the spinal muscles was lost.
So even though the description given of the movements to be taken refers to a shape, you could say a geometrical pattern, exactly where you go, exactly how you express that, exactly how you accommodate your limitations to that depends on you. Patañjali has given you a compass to guide you. And that compass is stiram sukam. That compass is steadiness, stability, groundedness and comfort, ease, release. And that steadiness stiram, ease sukam applies to the body as a whole, to the shape as a whole, to the form as a whole and to every single part of it. So if one part is not stable the whole cannot be comfortable. If one part is not comfortable the whole cannot be stable. So stiram sukam has to be applied throughout your awareness of the whole of the form of the body in the form of the posture. And even though the postures are many your addressing of yourself to the form of the body in the form of the postures is always basically the same. You always have two legs, you always have two arms, hands, et cetera. This doesn’t change no matter what the shape is. So you’re looking for a similar awareness in each posture within diversity, unity. So for example, how far apart should your feet be in Virabhadrasana? This is not determined by any geometrical criteria. This is determined in your own practice by the presence or absence of stiram sukam. So what this means is your stability is always that upon which your comfort depends, and in a standing posture your stability always depends entirely on the manner in which you’re grounding your foundation. Any builder will tell you this is obvious. There is no point in bothering yourself with the roof if the foundations have not been correctly laid the roof will be off. There is no way out. And this is the same in a yoga posture.
So, the active grounding of the foundation, the laying of the foundation of the yoga posture happens breath by breath, second by second, moment by moment. It is not like building a house where once you’ve laid the foundation you can forget about it. You have to lay the foundation breath by breath, moment by moment. And basically that means you ground whichever parts of the body are supposed to be in contact with the floor as fully, evenly and actively as possible.
Recognising that that contact, that grounding is by necessity constantly fluctuating.
All you’re trying to do is to minimise and stabilise that fluctuation. So it’s not about being aggressive. It’s not about imposing, forcing stillness or forcing stability. It’s, again, an enquiry. Is it possible to keep my front foot and my back foot as grounded as possible.
And as the answer starts to become, “no”, then the question has to be asked, “have I gone far enough?” or, “have I gone too far? “ and if the answer is yes you can’t be stable across your foundation.
So what that means for many people in this example of Virabhadrasana, is that the bending of the front leg which is the most obvious thing, and the forward movement of your body and your attention, which is the most obvious and natural thing, must rest upon and come from the grounding of your back foot.
The keeping of your attention, your awareness to the back.
And the grounding of the back foot, especially of the heel but also of the inner edge of the foot depends upon the activity of the leg, as always. The grounding of the foot depends always on what the leg is doing. And if the legs are not doing, if the back leg is not doing, then the back leg is going to bend and even if the back heel does not come off the floor, doesn’t actually leave the floor, it loses full contact with the floor, and then the spine is no longer being safely supported. And the going deeper into the bending of the front leg is punishing the spine. You can’t feel it because you are thinking about something else, which may be how difficult it is. How difficult it is is something else. Bending the leg doesn’t require any thought. It’s just happening like that. Your thought if you need to use it should be “am I grounding my foundation?”. But thought isn’t really necessary. Feeling is enough. Feeling is what tells you if your foot is grounded enough. Not thought. Thought might ask the question, but thought cannot answer the question.
If the back foot becomes ungrounded, stability is compromised, lost. Stiram is not present and sukam cannot therefore be present no matter how easy you are taking it. No matter how much you are giving yourself a break from effort. Effort is not the point. Ease does not mean no effort. Ease means no tension. And there is a difference. Sukam refers to that. It doesn’t refer to doing the posture in the most lackadaisical line of least resistance way. This is not yoga. This is stretching to relax without regard to damage being done to the body. So you could say that your effort is directed primarily to stiram. To stability. Your effort is directed primarily to stabilising, grounding, securing your foundation. And then some action may be going on elsewhere to create freedom and ease. But it depends upon the effectiveness of you generating stability through your foundation.
So, to take another example, could be the same kind of posture but could be one in which you turn the pelvis and don’t bend the leg, the front leg. How much you turn the back foot depends on the capacity of your body. Or you could say how much you have to turn your back foot depends on the restrictions in your pelvis.
Likewise, whether or not you move the front foot to the side or not.
If you move the front foot a lot to the side you become more and more stable, but you become unable to release, you become stagnant, you drop downwards and there is no lift. But if you don’t more your right foot enough you can’t turn, you can’t release either. So the foot is moved not according to a geometrical measurement. The foot is moved according to stiram sukam to give you stiram sukam. And this is always the case, with every adjustment in every posture. You refine the shape of the posture into its true form and the true form of the posture is that wherein your body is being most deeply released by the posture. So you establish that true form which is always individual and always changing with the compass of stiram sukam.
So I don’t take you into the classical postures because you are not ready. You don’t have the body awareness; you don’t have the training in the muscles to safely do the classical postures. And if you do them as you do you will be hurting yourself as you actually already are in your yoga practice. But if you go step by step, again if you do Viniyoga you know what step by step means and you know how important it is to go step by step. If you go step by step you will know when you are ready for any action and the taking of any action will therefore only be beneficial. The taking of an action when you are not ready when you’re putting yourself into the weird strangeness of a yoga posture is bound to be harmful. No matter how much it may develop your strength, your pride. It is still nevertheless going to be harmful if you’re not ready for it. So little by little, step by step, life unfolds, like that. Yoga also.
Patanjali’s definition of asana is this: Joyful steadiness in the body free from tension.
Joyful steadiness in the body free from tension.
Stiram sukam, joyful steadiness.
Other way round. Steady joy. Stiram is steadiness. Sukam is tranquillity, ease, release, openness, effortlessness. So this is what you’re looking for. Not flexibility, not strength, not stamina. You’re looking to release the body from tension on the basis of establishing it in stiram sukam.
Because yoga practice is not physical exercise.
Yoga is not a form of athleticism. Yoga practice is an invitation to awareness of that which is actually happening so that you can live your life as it is instead of pretending to be something that you’re not.
That your life is something that it isn’t.
Because despite the popular belief otherwise, you only live once and when you’re dead, you’re dead. The genetic code which gives you your unique existence will never ever exist again. So you only have one chance to live your life and it’s now. It’s not tomorrow.
It´s Right Now.
And yoga is simply an invitation to that. To honour the life that you’ve been given.
And by living it according to the capacity that it has.
Not trying to make your body be like John Scott or Richard Freeman. This is an invitation to despair and dissatisfaction. Subtle perhaps, unadmitted maybe.
But dissatisfaction nevertheless.
The form of the yoga postures are fundamentally a lens, a lens through which you can find out what is actually happening in your life. A lens that Patañjali has given us, within which or through which or by which to most effectively clarify that which is actually happening. A lens that has ten facets: and that’s Yama and niyamas. So within the form of the postures you are being invited to recognise the presence or absence of sensitivity, honesty, openness, focus, generosity, commitment, contentment, passion, self awareness and selflessness. When your body is more challenged by the shape, when your body has less capacity to make that shape, those factors will be compromised more than when your body has the capacity to do the posture or to do the shape. So the amount of compromise to those factors that you become aware of is an indication of how far you should be going. So the application of the principle compass of stiram sukam is within the context of Yama niyamas.
Within the context of sensitivity, openness, honesty, focus, generosity, commitment, contentment, passion, self awareness and selflessness.
With these ten factors, or you could say twelve with stiram sukam, ahimsa, satya,
asteya, brahmacharya, aparigraha, suaca, santosha, tapas, svadhyaya and isvara pranidhana,
these twelve factors being lenses through which you are being invited to become aware
of what is actually happening, to become aware of what is actually possible. In
other words they are the tools of your enquiry. You are not an engineer. Life is
your engineer. Life has determined what you can do. All you can see is how you
are doing it. Your physical capacity in the moment, right now, any moment, is pre-
To just use it.
To let the shape of the posture, the form of the posture be an invitation to your capacity to express itself.
So the result or the form or the appearance of what you are doing is not the point. The point is what’s happening inside. Stiram or not. Sukam or not. Ahimsa or not. Satya or not. Et cetera. Are you actually awakening to your capacity? Are you actually alive to your life? Or are you trying to pretend to be something else, to be someone else? And no matter even if there were in here two identical twins, they would still not be two identical bodies, not two identical forms. Each one is unique. Each one of the postures is unique and each one of our bodies is unique, but nevertheless each posture and each body is guided and articulated in the same way. And only one aspect of it has so far been talked about: these twelve principles. Yama niyamas, stiram sukam. But just bear in mind when you’re practicing that you are never likely to be as stable, you are never likely to be as relaxed as you would like and that’s ok. Just enquire into how stable and how relaxed you can be and as that becomes ok you will relax more and as you relax more you will be able to become more stable if you are able to accept your restrictions, if you are able to accept your limitations, if you are able to honour your capacity as it is. Then your capacity will increase.
Utilisation of the shapes and the utilisation of the freedom of stiram sukam within the shapes according to Patañjali is directed towards one single and very simple end which is simply to free the body from tension. All kinds of things have been said about yoga since Patañjali most of which lead only to a dead end if they’re pursued. A dead end meaning you may well develop x, y or z, you may well develop strength, you may well develop the ability to hold your breath for five minutes, you may well develop the ability to read people’s minds, but these things tend to make you less relaxed for all kinds of reasons. Anxiety about losing them, pride about having them. So there’s a huge magical element that has been imposed on Patañjali by the Hatha yogis of the middle ages. Of course if you’re interested in magic then fair enough. But if you’re interested in living in harmony with yourself, with others, with world and with life itself then beware of all of these temptations that are presented in yoga books about power, about shakti, about siddhis, about your ability to control your life and other people’s. It can be done. You can exert control over your life up to a point, you can control other people’s but not at the same as being relaxed. Not at the same time as being at peace with yourself. And not with any understanding of what control really means. What power really is and where power really comes from.
This end to which, according to Patañjali, the yoga method is directed is simply to free the body from tension. When the body is free from tension Patañjali describes what that feels like and his description of what it feels like when the body is free from tension is what the word asana means. Asana is not a shape; asana is what is being invited to happen, perhaps, within the shape. So you can have Pascimottanasana. Pascimottan means to intensely stretch the back of the body, that’s the shape. Asana may come. May not come. It’s present according to Patañjali when the body is manifesting the infinite beyond its structural dualities. He defines asana completely as joyful steadiness in the body free from tension and manifesting the infinite beyond duality. But because Patañjali is talking about the body being free from tension, the duality that he is talking about is the dualities that occur within the body. Which of course are many but most directly, most immediately, their structural dualities are front back, left right, top bottom, inside outside, centre and periphery.
And the significance of the words manifesting the infinite beyond duality, or the phrase, is quite simply that you don’t feel your body any more.
That you don’t feel sensations that are telling you that you have a left side of something.
You don’t feel sensations that are telling you that you have a front of the body or a front of the knee or a front of the arm or a front of the head. You don’t have sensations arising or you don’t, let’s say, you’re not perceiving any. What’s happening in the nervous system is not happening in your conscious mind, relative to left right, front back, top bottom, inside outside, centre periphery. And you all know what I am talking about. You all know that, except when I am annoying you by telling you what to do, you are not really necessarily relating to your body as an object. You’re just in the body, in the flow of awareness, in the flow of action. So this is what Patanjali means by manifesting the infinite beyond duality. He doesn’t mean anything weird, esoteric or beyond your capability. When you lie down in a hammock in the shade or on the beach in the sun, most likely for a moment you will experience that state. Your backache won’t bother you. Your left hip being tight won’t talk to you. The lack of mobility in your right shoulder will not be manifesting, impinging itself on your consciousness. So asana is this state of, you could say, freedom from the body as an object while within the body. In yoga posture the possibility of this is highly developed by allowing that to happen in the midst of intense action. In the midst of incredibly complicated action, nevertheless, using each part of the body in a specific way but no longer feeling those parts of the body as separate entities.
No longer feeling those actions as separate actions.
So you could say that this is what the articulation of the body in space or through space, or form in yoga is for.
To free you from objectifying the body. To release you from making your body into an object.
Not meaning that it never happens again, but just to show you that there is another possibility and that within that possibility there is an incredible spaciousness and lightness and ease. If you are doing something that interests you a lot, whatever it is, provided it is not a physical thing, so watching the sunset or listening to Mozart, or whatever it is, you are only likely to perceive your body if there is something wrong with it. If you’ve got a stomach ache or a backache or a toothache you will notice it, but otherwise you will not. Your body is not there as an object of your perception. Of course it’s there as an object in space, but not as an object in your perception. Even the parts of it that you are using, your ears are not there as objects of perception when you are listening to Mozart, or at least when you’re hearing Mozart. So we are all familiar with this. We all know what asana is without necessarily recognising it as being anything special and it is not anything special in the sense of hard to get. But its specialness becomes apparent when you recognise it’s happening and you recognise the significance of the happening of that relative to the happening of making the body into an object of perception.
Now I want to speak about how the structural dualities of the body are pragmatically transcended in the yoga postures. Most effectively this is really coming from the bandhas because the body has an infinite potentiality for abjectness. You can make an object out of any aspect of the body. And the more refined your perception, the more objects you can make. So you see this. Mr Iyengar has made objects in the body that he didn’t even know exist and he’s felt actions that were occurring in your body but that you could never feel. And this can go on forever. You can carry on making objects and making actions as you refine your perception forever. And just like the scientist, you never get to the fundamental particle. You never get to the fundamental part of the body because perception can go on refining itself. Get a more powerful instrument. And you see something smaller.
So this goes on and on forever so the beauty of the bandhas is you don’t have to go in that direction. You can do what yoga implies; you can unify instead of fragment. And you can allow the bandhas to move out of the core of your body equally into the left upper, right lower, so going into the left arm left hand, right leg right foot, etcetera, and in order to express the bandhas freely in let’s say the right arm, the right arm has to be free of tension. You don’t have to address yourself to the tension. You don’t have to say, “is there tension in my shoulder?”, you just try and express the bandhas and you let the left hand expression of the bandhas speak to the right, the left foot left leg, etcetera, speak to each other so that they can encourage each other so they can say, “we’ll look, I’ve got it it feels like this you do now”. You can therefore find it more and then you just look for it. And then you look for it everywhere and you are looking for the same thing everywhere. Which is this broadening, lengthening, opening, spiralling that creates space, that creates lightness that creates effortlessness in action. So that eventually the actions that could be analysed into separate actions by an anatomist, just generate each other. You don’t think about them, you just think I’m going to open. That’s all, I’m going to open. I’m going to open and release. I’m going to open and relax. In order to open and relax which is sukam, I must stabilise. And then the process that I’m using is the bandhas. Mulabandha gives you stability and Uddiyanabandha gives you sukam. Opening. Uddiyanabandha gives you opening and Mulabandha gives you stability. So when you activate the external foot spiral, let’s say first you activate the internal feet spirals in Uttanasana, forward bend, feet apart, then you can feel that releasing the pelvic floor, the buttock bones coming apart, but if you carry on that too much you start to fall forwards, so if you use the external feet spirals that action grounds you and it limits the opening of the buttock bones and it compresses inwards from the hip bones and that compression inwards combined with the opening pushes the spine out like toothpaste from a tube and the spine goes down from that stability effortlessly.
So the process, the mechanism, for freeing the body from tension so that it manifests the infinite beyond duality is the bandhas. Which means so that this process of the bandhas is bringing about an equivalent freedom, left right, front back, top bottom. Rather than just focussing your freedom where your intent goes; hamstrings, lumber or whatever, shoulders. So then you do get a relative freedom but usually that comes at the price of some restriction somewhere else. Not always, but very often.
But if you work with the bandhas that can’t happen.
If you’re going from the bandhas and you could say you’re radiating the bandhas from the passive core of your body to the periphery then this radiation over time will equalise, left right, front back, top bottom, inside outside.
So when this is happening, when the bandhas are coming out to the left hand coming out to the right hand, the left hand is more free, the left arm is more open, speaking to the right arm more open or more opening coming through that communication because that means that the brain, the left side of the brain controlling these muscles can tell the right side of the brain controlling those muscles something. This is not anything to do with your thinking process. It is just how the body learns, transmitting information through the neurons according to your intent to balance.
As you are doing this, as you activate the feet spirals for example, you feel very clearly what’s happening in the pelvis. Perhaps not so clearly, you can feel nevertheless what’s happening in the lungs. And when you combine the impact of the feet spirals, what’s happening from there in the lungs with what’s happening in the lungs because of the arms, then you are deeply in a process that you don’t need to conceptualise. Though conceptualising of it while it still hasn’t matured can be helpful. This is that you no longer are operating as if each part of the body was separate. And you are no longer operating as if each action was separate. You can feel that exactly what you do to the ball of the big toe can be felt in the lungs. So what this means is the distinction between the different parts of the body, here’s the finger, here’s the hand, here’s the forearm, here’s the upper arm, here’s the shoulder, becomes recognised to be just a function of the mind and that if you say to yourself, “extend the little finger” you can feel it in the lung, so that you have actually done something to the lung, to the shoulder, to the arm, to the elbow, to the forearm, to the wrist, to the hand by applying intent to your finger. So the separate parts of the body turn out to be connected. But that they turn out to be connected in a very specific way which is that they are absolutely and totally interconnected. So you can take any part of your body and if you are sensitive enough you can move any other part of the body and feel it there. Any part. So all the parts of the body are totally interconnected and when you are somatically, functionally comfortable with the interconnectivity of the apparently separable parts of the body. Ok that phrase was said very specifically, very deliberately. When you start to realise that the apparently separable parts of the body are not actually and inherently separate then the significance of the word yoga is being manifest in your experience. You haven’t unified lung and finger. You have discovered that lung and finger are not separate. So yoga is not something that you do in the terms of make union happen. Union is there. Unity is there. Non separateness is there. And that non separateness can be recognised in any moment, and it can be any time, you don’t have to have done yoga to do it, really. Yoga is not about making things happen. The process of yoga is about seeing what happens by itself so that you can be free by that recognition from your false assumptions about yourself and about life.
So what can happen is when that interconnectivity becomes clearly, pragmatically, functionally, experimentally non separateness in a moment that’s when the infinite is manifest. That’s when the body as a whole is no longer an object because the body as a whole is manifest by its apparent parts. And if the apparent parts are not saying “me” then there is a total silence in the body and the body disappears as an object of perception. And this the bandhas invites very rapidly. It doesn’t matter how strong you are. It doesn’t matter how flexible you are. It doesn’t even matter if you’ve got tension in the body because the bandhas are inviting you to drop below that level of perception. To experience more deeply what’s happening and in that dropping of your perception to a deeper level a relaxation in the body happens, because to a great extent tension in the body is maintained by the habit of objectness and if I stick a needle into you with an anaesthetic it goes away, gone because the mind has gone and the habit of objectifying your body has been stopped. And then I can do whatever I like with your body because your mind has gone. So your body has gone soft. Your body no longer has parts, no longer has restrictions. And this can be dangerous if you fall off the operating table because you don’t have any resistance to the impact of gravity
So it’s the mind that’s creating the tension and when the perception drops and the bandhas internalise your perception, because you are looking for subtle things, and you are looking for connections between things, then the objectness of the body and the tension of the body just dissolves. It doesn’t mean that it won’t come immediately back. It will when you come back to consciousness of object but momentarily it can be suspended. So ultimately this is the significance of form. The significance of form is that it is a function of perception.
To find out more about Godfri’s work see www.windfireyoga.com.
SAVASANA: THE ART OF SURRENDER by Pete Yates
Savasana or the Corpse Posture is thought by some pandits to be the best of all Yoga
postures. This might be surprising to the newcomer to Yoga since this posture requires
no athletic ability or super-
All that Savasana seems to entail physically is that the practitioner lies quietly, flat on her back. It seems to have little to do with Yoga as it is widely understood in its current phase of popularity for, in East and West alike, we have come more and more to equate Yoga with a process of extending the limits of the body as a means of perfecting the will power.
Superficially, this is indeed the project of Hatha Yoga, the currently highly popular branch of Yoga practised in the West under various brand names like “Astanga Vinyasa”, “Iyengar”, “Power” and so on. (The word “Hatha” means “will” and “force” amongst other things.) And certainly, gaining an enormous and indomitable will is an initially attractive proposition, placing within our reach perfect buns, business success and, at least theoretically, the guarantee of long life. Perhaps this promise is the key to its popularity, so achievement–hungry are our egos.
Pushed to the limit, however, this project loses its attraction and this is implicit within its inner logic. What or who, after all, controls the controller? The answer might well be “Fate” or “The Universe” or “God”, in short, that which is bigger than self and out of the reach of our will. Or else we have to posit an infinite regress of entities, each one controlling the one beneath it in a monstrous hierarchy. Practically, this means that even the life of the most powerful human being will remain itself stubbornly out of control.
Thankfully, the ultimate futility of the quest for indomitable personal will is recognised in the Yogic traditions. Hatha Yoga is not generally understood in the Yoga traditions as the blend of narcissism and asceticism it is in danger of becoming, but as a preparation for Raja Yoga – the Yoga of meditation.
This Hatha-
Savasana is a means to take that dive, to let go of the will project, to open up to the vastness beside which our egos become infinitesimal and finally melt. It completes Hatha Yoga practice, making it a profound exploration of the interplay of will and surrender, of those personal dramas which partake of the vast, impersonal and universal rhythms of growth and decay, and life and death, which pervade the entire universe. Looked at like this, Savasana is not just a simple rest taken at the end of sessions of posture and breath work. Rather, it is the culmination of the practice session which the prior physical work has aimed to facilitate.
Though it works very well like this, Savasana can also stand alone. Those who have no inclination or energy to practice Hatha Yoga postures and breathing disciplines can also practise it with benefit. It is also very useful to those who do sitting meditation. And, as well as being a door into our inner vastness, it also has powerful therapeutic benefits, both psychologically and physically.
These benefits of Savasana derive from the experience of letting go. But letting go of what, and why is this beneficial? What, more specifically, is pointed to by the metaphor of diving into the ocean?
To answer these questions, a Yoga analysis of the human condition needs to be given. Such an analysis starts by taking a cool, clear look at where we are now, what the quality of our feelings is, what the way we experience our lives is like. This cool, clear look then needs to extend to the people around us and outwards to the world at large. We need to walk in the crowded market place, looking at the faces without judgement, letting them speak to us. We need to listen to our friends and relatives, alert to the music of their voices. This experiment, I am sure, will convince you that most of us spend our lives hanging on for dear life. We are anxious about the future, especially as we know that sooner or later we will have to face death. We have learned to be anxious about the future in our past. Thus we are tyrannised by time, our past conditioning making us unable to meet the future with equanimity. Therefore we cling to any moment in which the suffering is at a merely normal pitch, resisting the inevitability of change. This unhappy aversion to the unfolding of our lives has another consequence. It makes us crave anything which produces a temporary forgetting of our fear and a lessening of our tension. Consequently we become easily addicted to poisonous pleasures and anaesthetic compulsions and then in turn, we cling on to these.
Clinging, then, is the problem. We hang from a cliff edge by our finger nails. To let go is to stop doing this.
Through the practice of Savasana we learn that it is alright to let go of the rigidities we cling to whether they are addictions or anxieties. We do not die there and then, at least not physically! We do not go mad, though we do not remain “normal”. Our worst fears, whatever they may be, do not suddenly manifest because we lowered our guard for an instant. On the contrary, a universe of wonder opens up to us, right now, in the present moment.
It takes enormous energy to hang on to that cliff edge, day after day. Desisting releases that energy and with free energy in abundance meditation is possible and easy.
To find out about Pete’s work see www.heartyoga.co.uk.
GODFRI DEVEREUX | GORDON SMITH