summer haiku

On blond-striped Hosta
Raindrop sparkles, slides, lets go.
Leaf lifts minutely.

Meditation Update

Sitting is essentially a simplified space. Our daily life is in constant movement: lots of things going on, lots of people talking, lots of events taking place. In the middle of that, it’s very difficult to sense that we are in our life. When we simplify the situation, when we take away the externals and remove ourselves from the ringing phone, the television, the people who visit us, the dog who needs a walk, we get a chance–which is absolutely the most valuable thing there is–to face ourselves. Meditation is not about some state, but about the meditator. It’s not about some activity or about fixing something. It’s about ourselves. If we don’t simplify the situation the chance of taking a good look at ourselves is very small–because what we tend to look at isn’t ourselves but everything else. If something goes wrong, what do we look at? We look at what’s going wrong. We’re looking out there all the time, and not at ourselves.

–Charlotte Joko Beck, Everyday Zen

It’s a little more than a year since I went to my first meditation retreat – one at Shambhala Mountain Center, led by David Nichtern and Cyndi Lee – and a bit longer than that – call it 14 months – that I’ve been meditating daily.

I’ve noticed that I am often judgmental of my practice. Some mornings, sitting is peaceful. Some mornings, it’s fascinating. Some mornings, it’s jittery. Some mornings, it’s a constant battle between distractions and effort. The thing is, I (or at least what I think of as the “small-I,” the self that sometimes seems all-encompassing and sometimes seems merely an object within awareness) likes certain kinds of meditation experiences, and dislikes others. And it translates “I like this experience of meditation” into “This is a good meditation session,” and it translates “I dislike this experience of meditation” into “This is a bad meditation session.” When I get into such a mind-mode, I try to remind myself of what meditation teachers constantly say to beginners: “Ignore your particular experience in meditation. Notice, instead, the effect of the meditation on the rest of your life.”

So in that vein, here’s what I’ve noticed about “the rest of my life”: whether a particular day or week or month of meditation is pleasant or unpleasant, since I began meditating, I’ve become more patient, I seem to see things a bit more clearly than I used to, I’m happier in an equanimous kind of way. I seem to be depressed a lot less, and I’m less attached to my manic days. I am more aware of my thoughts and my actions. I’m less reactive.

While it happens less frequently, I still go through lots of “small-I” experiences – getting angry at other drivers on the road, taking offense when someone says something that pushes one of my buttons, that sort of thing. But in recent months, even those experiences have changed, and that’s what I wanted to talk about here.

I’ve begun to experience this: even when I find myself unhappy or angry or offended, or annoyed – even though I still experience all of those things – it’s like they’re thinner somehow than they used to be – less substantial, less weighty, less important, less complete. (As I write, I hunt through Hartranft’s translation of the Yoga Sutra, and find that he uses the term “transparency” in expressing a related idea (III:56) – it’s a good match for what I’m trying to express.) It’s like I can see through the experiences to one degree or another, even as they happen.

Oh, don’t get me wrong – seeing through and beyond doesn’t mean that the small-I doesn’t react. If you’d been with me a couple of weeks ago when I stumbled into a bunch of stinging nettles along a backcountry stretch of the Henry’s Fork, you’d still have heard me swear loudly at the nettles. (The nettles were more equanimous and said nothing in response within my hearing.) But the negativity of the experience was easily contained in and perceived as the experience itself, not spilling out into other parts of life or mind. As I felt the needle-sharp pain in my calves and thighs, as I felt my body pull back, I was aware that it was the small-I that was responding, and not my whole being. It was like I was existence, and existence included the pain and consequences of nettles stinging but wasn’t limited to that experience, if that makes any sense at all.

* * *

In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali says that part of our experience of life includes an unconditional part – “pure awareness” (sometimes it gets translated as the “seer” or the “witness”) – and that it is not something that can be perceived directly. But he also tells us we can still perceive it indirectly, nonetheless, because pure awareness can color the mind itself, just as the phenomenal world does, also. IV:23 In other words, while the small-I can’t see the seer, it can notice when it’s obscuring the simple experience of pure awareness – like looking through a window and suddenly realizing that you can see not only the trees and sky outside, but also a reflection of your own eye, at the same time. I’ve had this experience occasionally in yoga, more frequently in meditation – the “small-I” settling down enough to see itself reflecting the pure awareness that is the awareness through and of the small-I mind, itself.

Mirrors, everywhere.

* * *

At any rate, perhaps what I’ve recently experienced as the “transparency” or ‘thinning’ of experience is simply the small-I mind becoming a bit quieter, less impressed with itself, more aware. It is truly hard to come up with the right words for this experience. But whatever the correct articulation may be (and, dear readers, feel free to suggest any ideas that you have along these lines), the small-I seems changed by the simple experience of daily meditation practices of concentration and mindfulness.

Freer, in a word.

Off the Mat — Sadhana

Enough yoga people are refugees from overly structured jobs, overly organized religions, or just overly programmed existence that it’s easy to think of yoga like we think of a massage or a soak in a hot tub — something to be savored and treasured and absolutely free of all constraints. The relief it entails, alone, is worth the investment of time and money.

And when used in that fashion — as a counterweight to the pressures and disciplines of the other parts of our lives — there’s lots of reason to resist allowing our yoga practice to turn into one more item on an ever-ugly “to do” list.

But if your experience is like mine and many of my friends’ and students’, there comes a time in your practice when the initial motivations start to transform and give way to others. If you started because you wanted to be a bit more fit, a bit less heavy, a bit more flexible, you might have been surprised to discover that your mind was responding to yoga as much as your body. And without necessarily losing interest in fitness, you might become more curious about how to live off the mat more in the “flow” state of mind you occasionally experience on the mat. If you started yoga because you wanted an escape from stresses and pressures of work or family, over time you might be surprised at the insights into those very stresses or pressures that occur to you in a particular pose, and you might find yourself wondering whether yoga might have more to offer your life than just an escape from it. If your interest hasn’t transformed, don’t sweat it — there’s really no point in arguing with a seed about when the right time to germinate might be.

But for those whose motivations have begun to transform, in yoga — as in other parts of life — if you keep doing what you’ve done, you’ll keep getting what you’ve gotten. You reach a point where your current level of effort and action keep you where you are, but don’t continue to carry you any farther. This shouldn’t be a surprise to us. If we repeat the same poses again and again in exactly the same degree of extension, exactly the same degree of exertion, we won’t increase strength or flexibility — we’ll maintain where we are, whether we’re talking about Downward-facing dog, or Warrior 2 or Corpse. One of the cool aspects of yoga, though, is that while a particular stage of practice enables me to reach a particular point and become stable there, each stage also includes glimpses of the next. So “flow” states in my vinyasa practice start to persuade me that there’s the potential for more grace in life off the mat. The peace and equanimity of my de-stressing yoga enable me to perceive the possibility of greater equanimity in life generally.

So as my perception of what is possible starts to shift, so too does my sadhana — my spiritual practice — start to change. I go from sweating happily on a yoga mat to discovering unexpected spiritual aspects to the practice to becoming curious about meditation. I go from being curious about meditation to sitting for a few minutes by myself. When I start sitting for a few minutes, I immediately discover how flitting and unsteady my attention is. But I also find a little bit more stability in my attention, a little bit greater concentration. As I reach the limits of what that practice level offers, I become more curious about what I might find with a more frequent and more sustained practice. So I go from sitting every now and again to sitting for ten minutes at a time, a couple of times a week. That lasts for months. I discover a greater awareness of my mind-chatter, of the potential for being aware of my thoughts. I begin to discover that I can perceive the experience of depression without pressing farther into depression. This is nothing short of a miracle, and I find my depression lessens in both duration as well as intensity. As I become stable in this level of practice, every now and again, I have glimpses of a much deeper perception — of perceiving directly aspects of mind that I previously never noticed. And I change my practice, again, deepening the effort, increasing the discipline.

And so it goes.

But there’s an easy-to-overlook risk to this kind of work. At each level of experience, there’s a real risk that I’ll attach to the practice itself, that even if I start simply going authentically where an experience leads, I’ll derail at some point and pursue a practice because I “should” — because conforming to my view of myself (or to my view of others’ view of me) requires me to do certain things, to practice certain ways. Whenever we shift into that mode, we’ve moved into reinforcing an artificial sense of self, whether in my own eyes or in the eyes of others. Ego is a sneaky critter, and it’s as content to hide behind spiritual practice as it is to parade around in more obvious forms. When we adopt a new sadhana for ourselves, when we change our current sadhana, when we continue a sadhana, it’s always worth asking, “who wants this, and why?”

As plenty of Buddhists have discovered and taught, enlightenment happens as an accident — it is absolutely not a product of yoga or meditation. So why practice at all? It seems that deep practices of yoga and meditation seem to make us accident-prone.

* * *

For myself, I haven’t worked out exactly what the perfect relationship might be between structured discipline and letting go. Some days, it is clear that letting go is the answer. Others, that more discipline is the answer. I like to remember a comment from a Zen teacher — I think it was Ajahn Chah — to the effect that his students complained that his instructions were contradictory. He said that when his students were about to walk off the path to the left, he’d tell them to “go to the right” and when they were about to go off the path to the right, he’d tell them to “go to the left.” The instructions only seemed contradictory to one who couldn’t see the path or the students.

Some of the answer, I’m confident, is found in Krishna’s instruction to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita:

You have the right to work, but never to the fruit of work. You should never engage in action for the sake of reward, nor should you long for inaction. Perform work in this world, Arjuna, as a person established within himself — without selfish attachments, and alike in success and defeat. (2:47-4

This approach is, at once, both the practice and the objective of the practice — it is a practice that enables us to let go of the insistence that the practice deliver us the objective of the practice. If that sounds contradictory, then I think you’ve got it.

Perhaps some of the answer can be found in the Heart Sutra’s teaching that Form is not other than emptiness — Emptiness is not other than Form. Discipline of any kind — like embodiment itself — involves imposing constraints on consciousness. Imposing those constraints is a wonderful way to enable perception and attention and focus. There’s nothing like a hamstring at its fullest extension to enable us to feel clearly. Similarly, there’s nothing like a long meditation to enable us to see how our minds twist their ways through attachment and aversion and delusion. Maybe what we need to remember in the middle of a disciplined effort is that as valuable as it may be, it’s simultaneously emptiness — nothing to attach to. If that’s right, perhaps the other side is equally true — whenever we find ourselves insisting on freedom and liberation, it may be worth reminding ourselves that it’s found in and through all Form, including — sometimes, at least — highly structured and ascetic-looking practices that, in the end, are just being.

Nobodhi spoke to me

As much as I benefit from reading them (thanks, Google Reader, for making me able to follow more blogs than I could possibly click on consistently) I don’t always remark on what I find in other people’s blogs, but today one of my favorite bloggers, Nobodhi of Nobodhis Yoga Journal posted something that seemed to speak to me not of my experience today, but rather something toward which my experience these days seems to be pointing.

Have you ever had the experience of noticing slight changes arising in some portion of your life, seeing them strengthen and grow, but rather than see them as steps along a path, you see them just as changes? But then, a bit of a sudden, you see what they portend, to what they point?

The last several months, I’ve noticed that my awareness has begun to reawaken in my asana practice. Now I know that sounds a bit strange, as yoga is supposed to be about mind as well as body, but for the past few years, my practice has been to press my mind so deeply into my body that my mind’s job has been only building and maintaining. At any rate, during the past few months, I seem to be seeing my practice from the outside of the inside, if that makes any sense. Some part of my mind finds itself no longer wrapped up (or in) the practice, but watches both my mind and my body working there. I suppose it would be accurate to say that I seem to be identifying with something other than the mind-body on the mat. And that seems most peculiar. I assumed that it was a function of my meditation practice, and perhaps it is. But rather than taking me away from the practice, it seems to have taken me into the minutiae of the practice – the feeling and distinguishing of sensation of finger bones and hand tendons pressing into the floor, the visual rhythm of my gaze swings in sun salutations, the stretching of individual muscle fibers tying vertebra to vertebra. I tried to say something about that experience in my last post on the solo practice in Santa Monica – something more about the same in my post about my photo session with barefoot bhakti. The perspective makes the practice fresh again in ways it hasn’t been for years. New. Enlivened. Freed.

I don’t want to overdo the experience of my practice these days – it’s often quite what it has been for the past few years – but it has been changing bits at a time, and I’ve been noticing the differences.

But this afternoon, as I read this post by Nobodhi, it was like wandering around comfortably in mist, and then when the mist clears briefly, you discover that you’ve actually been moving toward something.

Nobodhi – may you be healthy, may you be happy, may you be peaceful, may you be clear.

And when you are, may you find new voice, if not for your-self, for us.

Soloing on a back porch

Monday morning I found myself on my brother’s terra cotta tiled back porch in Santa Monica, CA. By the time I had finished with some early work, two of the household were out, two others still asleep. I cleared some patio furniture to the sides and began the sequence of sun salutations that I’ve repeated more than a few times. The temperature was pleasantly cool, heavy with ocean.

As the salutations progressed, I re-re-re-discovered mindfulness in solo practice. I love my daily practice in studios, my twice-a-week teaching, but I’m always surprised at how much more is available to be felt and seen by a quiet mind alone. Gazing across fingertips in Warrior poses, seeing the ground in Plank, feeling joints and tendons and muscles in my hands connected to the earth in Dog poses. Reopening energy pathways in lunges and backbends. Integrating mind and body in balances. And yet my self-hungry mind looked for glimpses of reflections in window panes, of sweat drops falling on mortar between the patio tiles.

When I finished the practice, I grabbed a patio chair cushion, arranged my legs and hands, and sat.

And saw.

And saw the seeing.

I bow in gratitude to all who cared and preserved and taught these things across the course of their centuries to mine.

Click-worthy

anonymous julie wrote this:

I think it’s easier and more comfortable to continue to believe in one’s bondage than to take responsibility for one’s freedom.

here.

She nailed it, exactly.

Bhakti

 

Few people are capable of wholehearted commitment, and that is why so few people experience a real transformation through their spiritual practice. It is a matter of giving up our own viewpoints, of letting go of opinions and preconceived ideas…. Although this sounds simple, in practice most people find it extremely difficult. Their ingrained viewpoints, based on deductions derived from cultural and social norms, are in the way.…

If we have a relationship with another person, and we love the person but don’t understand him or her, the relationship is incomplete; if we understand the person but don’t love him or her, it is equally unfulfilling. How much more so on our spiritual path. We have to understand the meaning of the teaching and also love it. In the beginning our understanding will only be partial, so our love has to be even greater.

~ Ayya Khema, from When the Iron Eagle Flies

* * *

I’m holding a scissored and revolved version of what I think of as Crow Pose – an arm balance – in an asana room of Cosmic Dog Yoga, a Livermore California studio that’s under construction but nearly finished. Sunlight streams in from the west-facing windows.

“Come forward about three feet, and face this way.” She gestures. I come out of the pose, back to my feet, and move forward. I resume the pose. Now I can’t see her, but I hear.

“Extend your foot from the ankle.”

I adjust the foot.

“Now holding the foot-ankle extension, draw your toes back toward the shin.”

My peripheral vision notes that she’s lying on the floor nearby, propped on her elbows. She begins taking pictures.

The heels of my hands press into the floor. The right, unweighted, forearm begins to tremble.

“Lift the forward foot slightly, the light angle’s wrong.”

I shift. Another picture.

“Can you draw your spine and neck into alignment?”

I try lifting my neck into alignment. Maybe the neck moves a half inch, but no more.

* * *

In the world of yoga, the word bhakti is Sanksrit for devotion. It is a path toward liberation through devotion – encountering the divine as You. Not an impersonal third-person Independent Divine that we perceive as a Deist might the Kosmos. Not a first-person manifestation of Divinity as Walt Whitman conceived of Self. But rather second person – You – a relationship – a friend.

St. Teresa of Ávila wrote that her form of contemplative prayer, oración mental, “is nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.” This is also the essence of bhakti yoga – a relationship of worship. It is the path described in the Bhagavad Gita: “One can understand Me as I am, as the absolute, only by devotion. And when one is in full consciousness of Me by such devotion, he can enter into the kingdom of God. (B-Gita 18.55). It was Jesus’ message to his disciples: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends…”

* * *

Laurie climbs the construction scaffolding, and I hand up the cameras.

“Let’s see Triangle.”

I move through the eight or nine actions involved in building a Triangle Pose: ground back foot heel-to-toe, angle foot out 30˚; place front foot four feet ahead, align heel and toes to the front. Lift the arches of the feet, engaging the groin muscles. Extend torso and abdomen, draw front arm forward…

As I move, from above the camera clicks.

* * *

In the political circles I frequent, devotion isn’t at the top of the agenda. It does not affirm or fortify the independence of a soul, but rather the discovery of spirit in the utter interbeing of each with the other. It is not the clear, structured rationality of logic and formalism, but rather the discovery of freedom through submission, of liberation through discarding insistence on self, of coming to life by uprooting the individuality-hedgerows we’ve planted and watered and groomed. It does not bear the hallmarks of scientistic objectivity. It is, instead, a path into and through subjectivity. Not so much a “moving toward” as a self-surrender.

* * *

“Let’s try uttanasana.”

I stand, big toes touching, side by side, heels parted an inch or so. I raise my arms and gaze up to the ceiling, then bend at the waist, bringing my hands first to the floor, then to the backs of my calves, my face to my knees. I extend my spine. My face presses into my shins.

“Rotate slightly to your left.”

I shift to the left.

* * *

Part of the modern objection to self-surrender is rooted in historical recognition of Jim-Jones style cultism, “just-following-orders” war crimes, and perversely co-dependent pathologies. Those problems are painfully real, and I’m not entirely sure how to describe and contour my sense of how they differ from bhakti yoga. I suppose one could avoid those problems by confining the scope of one’s devotion to bounds set by rationality, but that very constraint seems inconsistent with the whole-hearted connection and liberation that characterizes bhaki. Perhaps there are more and less mature ways of engaging in bhakti, just as one can engage in a variety of non-rational ways of being, some pre-rational, unaware and dismissive of all that rationality has to offer, others post-rational, incorporating all that rationality offers, but wider and deeper than rationality, not confined by its limitations.

Or perhaps, though, bhakti is just stepping through a darkened doorway.

* * *

“Deepen the twist.”

“Now lift your head.”

“Draw your chin back a bit.”

I comply.

* * *

Bhakti is the part of yoga that most resembles religious practices. Consequently, it is the part that can make those devoted to a particular religious practice –and equally those opposed to religious practice altogether – distinctly uncomfortable.

In bhakti, I find joyful, whole-hearted connection. Some bhaktis love the embodiment of that connection in imagined images of divine. For me, I find it in the twisting wisps of smoke rising from a smoldering incense stick, in chanting.

Now in fairness to my specific-religion friends and to my specific-no-religion friends, if I chant Jaia Ganesha Jaia Jaia Ganesha Jaia intending to curry special favor with an invisible, portly-human-bodied, elephant-headed god named Ganesha who is particularly inclined to remove obstacles from human endeavors for those who worship him repeatedly, then yes, I’m engaged in a kind of pre-rational worship that may well conflict with a belief in a different deity that is appeased or approached through a different set of practices or with a “no-deity-no-way” policy. I get those ways of looking at the world. I lived versions of them myself for a long time. And I don’t criticize anyone who finds them useful or good or important. There is neither point nor good in rejecting what is.

But there’s a way of devotion, a tao, that is more immediate, that is neither petitioning of an independent Other, nor simply empty ritual, but that is intermeshed with consciousness in the very act of devotion itself, whatever form that devotion might take, whether burning incense or paying tithing or feeding the hungry or cleaning toilets or weaving flower garlands or painting the Sistine Chapel. And that tao dissolves everything but the devotion, both lover and beloved, both teacher and student, both subject and object.

* * *

“Navasana.”

I sit. Balance. Grasp my toes. Extend my legs. I lift my heart toward the ceiling.

“Hold it there.”

I hold.

* * *

My first experience with bhakti was singing. My earliest memory in life is sitting on my mother’s lap in a rocking chair, singing with her before bedtime. I was, I think, about 3 years old at the time. The memory remains, I’m sure, because it was the first time I recall singing dissolving into harmony – perfect fourths, if such a distant memory can be trusted. As I grew up, I sang in children’s choirs at funerals and church meetings. I sang in school choirs throughout grade school. I spent more hours singing in college than I spent in course work for either of my majors.

Singing – an activity made of breath, vibration, and mind – can be entirely self-focused concentration. But it can also be bhakti – devotion. It takes all kinds of forms, ranging from Protestant hymns in 4/4 time with rhyming lyrics sung in well-lit chapels, to textured drum-beating, tabla-droning, body-swaying kirtan chants in Sanskrit to Ganesha in a half-dark yoga studio, to Gregorian plainsong chants intoned in stone cathedrals, to OM continuously chanted in a circle of friends sitting on the floor of an office, converted for a time into a sacred space.

Or, as happens most mornings of my life, an invocation sung quietly to the field above my yoga mat before I step into that sacred space.

Really, we don’t sing to communicate information. We sing to embody feeling. We sing to embody ideas. We sing to vibrate in a harmonic dance with the universe.

When I sing, I open my heart, not to myself, not to I, but to You.

* * *

I’m in hurdle pose – balanced on my hands, arms bent at elbows, my left leg angled forward, resting on the back of my left tricep, right leg extended into the air behind me.

“Can you draw your left leg forward a bit?”

I press. Not sure whether anything moves or not.

“Engage your toes.”

“Now lift the left leg a bit.”

I lift.

* * *

As I said, for a variety of reasons –some pre-rational, some quite rational – not everyone finds the path of bhakti to be particularly appealing, so many yoga studios scale back the overtly bhakti aspects of the yoga they practice. The studios where I practice most of the time tend toward the austerity of postures, heat, and breath. But for a person inclined toward bhakti, the lack of a Shiva statute or a Buddha mural isn’t really an impediment. The basic elements of bhakti yoga are still always present: there’s the devotee, and there’s the teacher.

Exactly what it is about working with a gifted teacher, I truly don’t know. There isn’t much about the western practice of yoga asana, breath, and meditation that makes obvious the need for a teacher. Lots of people practice their yoga based on a few books, a video or two, in the solitude of their own homes. I have a home practice, myself. But nonetheless, many of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had have come through yoga, and almost always have come through teachers.

…love is the vehicle through which you can much more quickly learn the language of your own True Self. Precisely because this learning is driven by love, it happens more rapidly than sitting alone, in the corner, on your meditation mat, counting your breaths.

Ken Wilber, One Taste, pg. 209

* * *

“Do you have a standing backbend?”

I position my feet.

“Come closer to the scaffold.”

I move toward the platform.

“Face away from me, and bend back toward me.”

I turn 180˚, lift my arms to Mountain Pose, then widen the pelvis, rotating the femurs inward, creating space for the sacrum to descend. The tailbone rotates down and under, the pubic bone rotates up and forward, bringing a stretch to the quads. Spine lengthened, the shoulder girdle begins its motion up and back.

“Relax your arms – bring your hands to heart center, anjali mudra.”

I press my palms together, just above my heart. The back bend deepens. My eyes gaze upward, but now up is back. I breathe slowly, each exhale taking me more deeply back, the entire front of my body from knees to pelvis to ribcage to sternum to chin is bow-string taut, vibrating with fatigue.

“A bit more.”

I exhale again, the backbend deepens, my gaze travels across the ceiling and suddenly, I’m seeing into the inverted eyes of the photographer above and behind me in the air.

Looking into Laurie’s eyes, I feel the prana of devotion to the presence above me, and I see that the next stage of the backbend is constricted not by the limitations of muscle or sinew, but by fear and self-protection. I release them and trust the pose, the teacher, the photographer, the alignment of existence, the internal point of singleness, Shiva.

Ishvara pranidhana indeed.

The spine arches more deeply, the abdominal and diaphragm muscles release slightly, and my gaze moves from the photographer’s eyes, to what is beyond them.

* * *

Eye-to-eye, we connect: the unity, the dance, the connection, the not-two-ness of the experience – bhakti – a way of relaxing the attachment to self.

It is momentary freedom, beginning as one, discovering another, and each disappearing, leaving only the twining.

[For more pix, go here.]

Arguing in circles

A recurrent idea/sensation/feeling:

 

I look out the window of the plane I’m on and see the clouds, the still-light rim of horizon beyond the clouds, and then I see not only clouds and sky but the plane window framing them and the periphery.

 

And then the idea/feeling/sensation occurs:  “I” am composed of the same stuff as everything around me – plane, air, light, body, mind – and “I” am not separated from what I see – “I” am the world seeing itself.

 

*   *   *

 

There is a phrase I learned in law school:  “a distinction without a difference.”  In our common law system, judges are supposed to decide like cases alike.  So when considering a decision, a judge often looks to see how similar cases have been handled in the past.  Your opponent proffers prior decisions in prior cases to the judge, arguing that they require a decision in her favor and against you.  You scrutinize the cases for a meaningful distinction, an argument, a plausible way for the court to conclude that a decision in your favor is really consistent with the prior decisions on the same subject – they turned out the way they did because of some key aspect of them that is not present in your case.  Sometimes you see and articulate the perfect argument that makes it clear that a particular case doesn’t compel a decision against you.  That is called “distinguishing” your case from the prior case. 

But sometimes you build your arguments as well as possible, finding all the ways in which your case is different from the cases argued by your opponent, and in the end, they just don’t distinguish your case from the prior cases.  “Yes,” the judge tells you, “you have found a way in which your case is distinct from the prior case.”

 

“But your argument is really just a distinction without a difference” 

 

*   *   *

 

The idea/feeling/sensation I get when I look out the plane’s window and see the clouds and dimming horizon-rim of light is that argument separating the seen and the seer is a distinction, but it’s a distinction without a difference. 

 

Not “we” are one. 

 

Rather: I am That. 

 

Or as the Chandogya Upanishad tells it:  Tat twam asi.

 

That thou art.

A letter to my teacher

Dear [Teacher],

 

Thanks so much for yesterday’s practice. 

 

I’m a little leery of binding the experience into the straitjacket of words, but I do want to capture a little bit of what happened and share it with you.

 

As we began by talking about prana and perception of it, there was a familiar feeling of basic honesty, of reality that I profoundly appreciate when I work with you.  I think that that basic background makes a lot of perceptions possible that otherwise can’t happen.

 

One of those perceptions was this:  I think I remember that in our discussion, even though I was the one who brought up the topic of the jump forward from down dog to standing forward bend, I didn’t feel as though it was my idea.  And when you suggested the jump-forwards be the focus of yesterday’s practice, I felt a little resistance arise in me.  It started as a “this is just the same-old, same-old” response.  But the basic orientation I have toward bhakti readily overrode the initial resistance to the practice.  The important part was that shortly after I felt the resistance arise, I noticed it.

 

As we worked on position and jump-forwards, you described the flow from feet to hands to feet to hands, comparing it to those wave toys that some people have on their desks.  That visual connected to our discussions about the experience of perception of prana.  And so with a jump, there came the awareness of energy from feet into legs into buttocks, and what felt like the “end” of the energy at the spine, below the back ribcage.  The energy sequence-flow just seemed to stop at that point, and the legs came back down to the floor, the hips never reaching alignment with the shoulders or the hands, the energy never reaching the palms.  Through that practice I perceived the energy stopping, and the place where it stopped.  I had not seen that before, though I’m not particularly sure why not, as once it was seen, it seemed obvious. 

 

For reasons I don’t understand, there is a resistance that arises there.  As we talked about it, instead of the word “fear,” you suggested the word “trust,” which resonated deeply for me.  Here’s why:  when I admitted to myself that I no longer held my the belief set of my religious tradition, I lost a lot of the experience of trusting.  There seemed so many things that were not trust-worthy.  That led, quite directly, to a kind of existential despair, suspicion, separateness.  I lived that way for years.  But during teacher training a couple of years ago, some experiences began to draw together. 

 

At the core of those experiences seemed to be this: the more I looked squarely at my preoccupations and my obsessions, and my insistences, and my attempts to control – the more I pulled them into the light of day – the less solid they looked.  But as I began to see past them, through them, what I found was not nothing, but a surpassing warmth.  Love.  Describing it, I wrote to a friend, “I have come to trust existence.”  I no longer felt the fear, the need to try to control, existence.  So yesterday when you said, “trust,” what resonated with me was a sensation that now, hours later, I can describe as the discovery of a residue of distrust.

 

Something else you said also fit into a slot my mind had open:  talking about the energy stopping point, you said something like “once you’re aware of it, it isn’t a block any longer.”  That sounded like a familiar idea to me when you said it, but my mind twisted it a little bit into an external description of my mind seeing resistance in my body.  And once I did that with the idea, while I superficially agreed with it, I simultaneously made it not true.  Not that what you said was false – rather, I took a statement about unity and turned it into a statement about duality. 

 

Last evening, I was reading from Ken Wilber’s book, No Boundaries, and he said the same thing you did: 

 

What on the surface we fervently desire, in the depths we successfully prevent.  And this resistance is our real difficulty.  Thus, we won’t move toward unity consciousness, we will simply understand how we are always moving away from it.  And that understanding itself might allow a glimpse of unity consciousness, for that which sees resistance is itself free of resistance.

 

p. 136.

 

And what I saw last evening is that your statement was right: a block seen is no longer a block, because the seer and the seen are not separate, and the understanding of the mind is not separate from the experience of the body.  But then I constricted my perceptions from unity to duality, from a body/mind that dissolved a block by seeing clearly to a subject mind seeing an object body’s blockage.  And once in that duality, the ego-stroked mind persuaded itself that it could “see” the body’s problem, as though it weren’t the ego’s own problem.  And so it reinstated the block while deluding itself that it was superior to it. 

 

What have I learned?  I need to practice seeing the block while jumping forward.  Drishti indeed.

 

[Teacher], thank you for guiding me.  Sometimes it is easier for me to see clearly with your eyes than with mine.

 

Be well,

 

greenfrog

Who’s Breathing?

For much of my life, breathing has come in two modes.  The first is natural, guided by my autonomic nervous system, fluctuating with the oxygen requirements of my body, with my emotional state.  The other is an act of pure, conscious will, structured, managed, controlled, like the long, slow breaths I would use to calm my mind even before I discovered the pranayama breath control practices of yoga — or the formally structured six-count inhale to maximum capacity followed by six-count exhale evacuating all but the tidal capacities of my lungs. 

Yesterday in meditation, I added a third mode – one that I don’t recall hearing about before.  Usually in meditation, as my mind quiets, my breath becomes quieter and slower, just as it did yesterday.

But toward the end of my sitting time, the breath began to increase in depth and speed until it crested and held at a strong pranic pace and depth, drawing up along the back spine, circling down the front chakra sequence, up the back, down the front. 

The breath itself wasn’t unusual – it was quite similar to a pranayama practice that I use periodically.  What was unusual was that “I” didn’t breathe that particular breath.

It breathed me.

It arose at a time when my body manifested no obvious need for oxygen, no emotional state that linked to breath.  It manifested a rather ornate structure, pace, and sequence. 

And the will-powered self that thinks it’s in control of just about everything didn’t have anything to do with it.  At that point in my meditation practice, as usual, that self was busy watching thoughts arise, sustain, and subside.  When the breath arose, the self turned to watch it arise, watched it sustain, and watched it subside. 

I’ve been breathed by a breath.

Kind of turns the entire notion of pranayama as a form of intentional breath control on its head.

Fascinating.