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Attending to the Presence of the
Self
by Doug Keller
Discrimination
and Hatha Yoga
As a hatha yoga teacher, I've seen this
look before - the perplexed look of a student intent upon doing a pose,
yet feeling somewhat lost. "This doesn't seem right. I don't get it.
Where is the stretch?" The face is quite familiar - it's my own. I've
glanced distractedly at myself in the studio mirror, and I'm surprised at
my own hard and puzzled features. I wonder "Is this my yoga? Is this
what my practice is about?" I take a breath and smile.
Discrimination is the remedy for this
kind of predicament for yogis. Discrimination, or viveka, is basically the
awareness by which we tell the true from the false, which in yoga means
discerning the perishable from the eternal. More to the point,
discrimination is the ability to distinguish between the ever-changing
person that I commonly identify as "me," and my true essential
Self. Only when through discrimination I actively experience the
difference between the two can I even begin to fathom the fundamental
teaching that my true Self is perfect, limitless, timeless, supremely
loving, and all-pervasive. Otherwise, this teaching may be ?held as a
philosophical belief, but it's not a lived experience.
In hatha yoga, discrimination between
body and Self is a challenge. How can I not be caught up in the awareness
of my own body as uniquely "mine" or "me" when
"I" seem to be the only one in the room who cannot touch my
toes? How can such a physical practice as hatha yoga take me beyond
absorption in my own physical being? This is a real question; it greets me
every time I step onto my yoga mat to begin my practice. How does this
practice teach me that kind of discrimination?
My practice does hold an answer.
Discrimination is an act of true self-recognition, a recognition of my
essential nature apart from all the ideas and judgments I hold about
myself. I was treated to just such a lesson in discrimination recently
when practicing the shoulder stand in a hatha yoga class. I thought I was
doing pretty well; I was focused on the teacher's instructions and was
working hard. The teacher gave us time to settle into the pose, and after
a while he came over and sat down next to me. Then he leaned back against
a nearby pillar and watched me. Although I couldn't see his face, I sensed
that he was puzzled. This of course puzzled me. I shifted my weight,
trying not to let on that I was adjusting in an attempt to look good. It
didn't erase his puzzlement, and it only increased mine.
"What do you feel on your left
side?" he asked, and then paused. "Do you feel how your hands
are different, and how one elbow is light and the other heavy?"
Now, this was subtle. But once he brought
my attention to the feeling of dullness, of an almost existential
emptiness in the whole left side of my body, the truth of it was plain. It
had happened because my right shoulder had gone inert, and the weight of
my body was bearing down upon it, collapsing my left side. Once he drew my
attention to feeling the problem from inside, I understood. I recognized
the problem as me: "I' wasn't awake in the pose.
But what to do? The problem wasn't just
on the outside. Shifting the hands and pressing the lazy elbow down more
hadn't helped. Yet, now things were different: he was directing my
attention to the feeling first, and only then to the details of hands,
shoulders, and so on. Until that moment, I hadn't inquired beyond the
details, the sensations in the limbs that only described the problem. The
problem was with my own inner state of awareness. I was out of touch with
it.
He made an adjustment by placing a prop
under one elbow, and the feeling of the pose changed dramatically. It
became surprisingly light and strong: I was seeing myself in the pose, as
if scales had fallen from my eyes. The prop did no more than support my
body where it needed it most, taking some of the struggle away so that I
could truly feel the pose from the inside out.
Though the help might seem to have come
from the outside, the manner in which the teacher pointed out the problem
to me urged me to realize that this was something I could have discovered
from the inside. His lesson was not really about how to correct the pose;
it was about practicing discrimination. When I attend to the inner feeling
first, the outer problems become easier to handle and far less perplexing.
Through discrimination I can come to know myself as I am, both as a
particular person at a moment in time and as the Self, who holds a much
larger perspective - the Self, who is a witness to "my" efforts,
learning, and growth, and who is a guide.
This may seem self-evident, perhaps even
trite, unless and until you take seriously the most burning question of
all in hatha yoga - the question of progress in your practice. At one
point or another, every student asks at least one of the following
questions: How do I make progress? How do I know I'm making progress? And
what is progress anyway?
As soon as the word progress comes up,
it's natural to get caught up in ideas about my own process of becoming
the judgments, aspirations, victories, and disappointments that describe
my restlessness and searching. It takes an act of discrimination to see
and appreciate in the moment the real (i.e., truly enduring) fruits of my
efforts. And I've found that the real fruits rarely turn out to be what I
thought they would be when I first set myself to the task.
My first attempts to practice hatha yoga
were Just like that. A single experience of a good hatha yoga class
inspired me to start a practice, and I tried to follow through on that
inspiration with the help of a book in the solitude of my room. Thus began
a serendipitous practice in which I would page through asanas in the book
and try those that suited my fancy. Fancies wander, and so it wasn't long
before other things in the room drew my attention. A magazine on the table
would call out to me to be read; I would notice that my desk needed
straightening up; or it would suddenly become very important that I check
my phone messages; and so on. So, my first experience of asana was really
of the kind of distractedness of mind that was typical of my life at that
time. It isn't surprising to me that my hatha yoga practice easily fell
(at first) into the same pattern of doing that easily gets gnarled up with
my many other projects and diversions.
Yet the grace of the practice - as with
all the practices of yoga - is that the practice can accept the pattern
you impose upon it, and then subtly begin to change that pattern. This
happens when you begin to have genuine experiences of the practice even in
spite of your own errant approach to it. That's been the case with my
experience of asana. I've arrived at a point where I can certainly do the
asanas more gracefully - which was my original aspiration - but what
matters to me now is that I be at home in the postures. The practice takes
as much effort as it ever did, if not more, but the experience that has
made all the difference to me is that I am far more comfortable with
myself in the midst of my practice than I have ever been, and my original
restlessness is gone.
This is thanks to the power of
discrimination that, through grace, is awakened by the practice. Now I can
recognize those genuine moments of being "in" the pose because I
recognize myself in it. I recognize the essential and enduring
"me" that has been present throughout the process of change and
growth, directing the process. It's from that Self that I have always
derived the wisdom to learn from my experience, and have received the
courage to forge ahead. I can't help but think that this is the essence of
spiritual practice ? to clearly perceive the beauty and worth of my own
inner being here and now and to find in that the strength to move beyond
my shortcomings. For me this speaks volumes about Baba Muktananda's
essential teaching that you already are that which you are seeking. That
one teaching sums up the essence of discrimination. It's my ability to
distinguish between my experience of the person I am, through my efforts,
always in the process of becoming and my connection with who I already am,
the here-and-now truth of my own being. Discrimination is knowing - and
appreciating - the difference between the two.
The question of discovering what I
already am, and by the same token how to be, has never been abstract for
me; much of my process of growing up has been concerned precisely with how
to be - how to be with myself, with others, with God. Understanding my
yoga practice has helped me with this. The point of practicing a hatha
yoga asana is learning to be in the asana. The word asana does not simply
mean "posture," and an asana is certainly not just a stretch: in
its most fundamental meaning, asana means "a comfortable way of
staying." Staying means staying put long enough - and firmly enough -
to be fully present to myself: aware of my mind, my emotions, and
sensations. Yet the point is to go beyond these thoughts and sensations to
find and express the essential "me" through the asana.
Asana is a comfortable way of staying,
not in the sense of physical comfort, but in the sense of freedom from
inner restlessness. When I can be in the midst of my surroundings, inner
and outer, I find that my comfort there depends entirely upon my comfort
with myself, with how close I am to the feeling of my own being.
Discrimination is the awareness that recognizes and resonates with my own
inner Self. With that resonance comes the steadiness that is my very
nature.
The steadiness of a hatha yoga posture is
a taste of this inner freedom, a doorway to that most profound sense of
inner truth. I know this moment in myself well enough to recognize it in
others too, I see it happen in students whom I assist in hatha yoga
classes: all it takes is a subtle shift in the shoulder or a turning and
firming of the thigh, and what seemed difficult and perplexing is suddenly
light and easy. The students' breath releases and deepens, and the pose
seems to shine from the heart with a blossoming of almost primordial joy.
I see in the faces of my students my own experience, which says, "I
can stay here - I want to stay here" - even if the body is not quite
up to keeping me there for long. Like them, I come back to the practice
again and again to find once more, and to deepen, that feeling of
openness, steadiness, and ease.
The reason why a hatha yoga practice is
so refreshing is that it does connect us with our inner purity. In this
respect hatha yoga is like other practices such as meditation, though the
outer form and the kind of effort required is evidently different. The
point is to learn discrimination through the practice, to go beyond the
world of sensation and appearances and to feel completely, if only for a
moment, the purity of the presence of our innermost Self. There is a
divine alchemy in that, inasmuch as that experience begins to permeate all
other moments of our lives.
The classic symbol of discrimination in
yogic tradition is the swan, which as it drinks is able to separate milk
from water through its beak. The point is clear: the milk of the presence
of the divine cannot be hidden or unseen - only unrecognized. It is as
fully manifest and all-pervasive as the water with which it is mixed.
Discrimination is attending to the presence of the divine Being - our own
inner Self - and drinking it in, feeling it fully and profoundly within
ourselves, while leaving the water of ordinary sensation and experience
aside. Thus nourished, we can truly be in this world, because we know its
innermost sweetness as our own Self.
Doug is a celebrated
teacher and author whose works include: Anusara Yoga and Refining the
Breath: Pranayama in the Anusara Style of Yoga, The Heart of the
Yogi - all available to purchase on his website: www.doyoga.com.
Doug teaches in classes and workshops at his home base in Herndon,
Virginia and also travels both nationally and internationally offering
advanced workshops and teacher trainings.
Please visit his website at:
www.doyoga.com
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