Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic

by Darren Main

  In Part Two, we will be exploring the practice of yoga as outlined by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutra. In addition to bringing a greater understanding to the practice of yoga, we will look at ways in which we can apply that practice to life.

  The one thing that is purposely omitted from this book is technique. There are many great books out there that seek to teach proper alignment and poses, breathing techniques, and various forms of seated meditation. It doesn’t matter which style of yoga you practice, be it Ashtanga, Iyengar, Kripalu, or some other form. This book is not a replacement for the style of yoga you feel called to practice. Rather, I hope it will be a complement.

  Yoga as a Mystical Path

  In the past few years, hatha yoga has grown so fast in popularity that many yoga studios are bursting at the seams. By its physical benefits alone, yoga was destined to gain a lot of notoriety, but it would fade into the background if it didn’t evolve with the needs of its students. Yoga mats could find a home in that same closet that stores old aerobics videos and mini trampolines. Yoga is a living practice, and things that live must evolve or they become extinct.

  Yoga is a 4,000-year-old practice that developed in India at around the same time the Hindu faith was forming. It is not a religion, but rather a science. It provides its practitioners with a proven set of techniques for Self-realization, but it doesn’t push a belief. A yogi can be Jewish or Christian, Pagan or Buddhist, agnostic or atheist. Personal beliefs will not change the effectiveness of the yoga practice. In other words, if you practice yoga, you will spiritually open your heart, mind and body. Nothing more is needed than your commitment to the practice.

  The word yoga means ‘union’ in Sanskrit. This union includes a realization of the oneness between the mind and body as well as between them and the soul and Spirit. A yogi seeks a direct experience of oneness with Spirit by letting go of all the things being held between conscious mind and Spirit. Many people associate yoga with the physical poses that make up hatha yoga, but yoga is a more comprehensive practice than simply stretching and breathing. In fact, many styles of yoga pay little attention to the poses and breathing, and focus more on meditation.

  Like many spiritual traditions, yoga was handed down verbally from teacher to student for many generations. It is difficult to pinpoint when or how it all got started, but it began to solidify when a great Indian sage named Patanjali decided to write down the principles of yoga in what is now called The Yoga Sutra, some 1800 years ago.

  The Yoga Sutra is not long, only about 35 pages. It is written in short verses that outline the principles of yoga in a very open and indeterminable way. There is an amazing amount of room in which to interpret these verses, and as a result, there are widely differing styles and traditions of yoga. In addition to the Yoga Sutra, yoga draws on several other texts, including The Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. In this book I will quote passages from all three of these scriptures.

  Modern yoga looks much different than it did when Patanjali was scribing his Yoga Sutra, but the backbone that makes yoga such an effective practice still exists. It is my hope that this book will help you move your experience of yoga off the yoga mat and meditation cushion and into the whole of life. By doing this, the life of the urban mystic comes very much within reach.

  One Last Thought

  Remember that yoga, like all mystical traditions, is a practice, not perfection. It is the process of returning to your yoga practice over and over again that gives you the benefits. Doing the perfect yoga pose or clearing your mind of all thought is well and good, but in the end it is the practice of returning to yoga that allows you to live life to the fullest.

  Car horns will continue to distract you; the drama of your ego and your external environment will pull your mind far from the practice of yoga, but eventually you will return. That is how it works. Try to let go of the idea that you need to do yoga perfectly to see its benefits and learn to enjoy the process of waking to a deeper understanding of who you really are. By doing this, you will know joy, and that joy will be your gift to a world that very much needs our healing.

  Namaste, [Namaste is a Sanskrit word that means, “The light in me acknowledges the light in you.”]

  Darren

  www.darrenmain.com

  The practitioner will succeed; the non-practitioner will not. Success in yoga is not achieved by merely reading books.

  —Hatha Yoga Pradipika 1:65

  Part One

  The entire universe is the creation of thought. The play of the mind is just a creation of thought. Abandon the mind which is only thought. Take refuge in the changeless . . . and surely find peace.

  —Hatha Yoga Pradipika 4:58

  Chapter One

  Atman and The Ego

  Beyond all attributes, the supreme Self is the eternal witness, ever pure, indivisible, and uncompounded. Far beyond the ego. In him conflicts and expectations cease.

  — Atma Upanishad 1:5

  The Self

  The Supreme Self is neither born nor dies. He cannot be burned, moved, pierced, cut nor dried. Beyond all attributes, the supreme Self is eternal witness, ever pure, indivisible and uncompounded, far beyond the senses and the ego.

  —Atma Upanishad

  I was at my brother’s wedding several months ago, and I met a beautiful young lady. Her name is Megan, and she immediately came up to me and asked me to be her boyfriend. She had a radiant spirit, and a smile that was more contagious than chicken pox.

  Most people dream of marrying a person like Megan – someone who is overflowing with positive energy and enthusiasm. But for as open and sweet as Megan is, there was a little catch. Megan was six years old—much too young to start dating, and by the time she is old enough, the world will have whispered all sorts of misinformation in her ears.

  We all start out with Megan’s joy and enthusiasm for life, but somewhere along the line it all gets muddled, and we forget who we are. We start to see ourselves as needing to fight to get by, and needing to make the grade to establish our worth. As we become adults, we become more and more fixated on the drama of our lives, and we lose sight of our true natures. The simplicity and joy of childhood get stamped out, and we maintain only a vague memory of the innocence and freedom that once characterized us. While we never lose our capacity for joy, we do forget, and it is this forgotten identity that hangs around us like a heavy weight. This is why a person can so often feel like a tiny mouse trapped under a heavy carpet with nowhere to move and nothing left to do except wait to die.

  This forgotten identity stems from the very popular notion that we need to be fixed—that somehow, there is something wrong with us. Perhaps we are told that we are born with ‘original sin’, [The concept of original sin does not appear in the Bible and only showed up in Christian doctrine about 500 CE.] or maybe we are told that we have to fight to succeed in the world. But whatever form this lie takes, most of us live our lives as if this lie were the only thing in this world that is actually true. It seems to be a given that there will be winners and losers and that we will wind up with either the ‘haves’ or the ‘have-nots’.

  At its core, yoga has the sole goal of returning our minds to the state of innocence that we were created with. While many people embark on their yoga journeys for the physical benefits, the real reward comes when we let go of our day-to-day drama, and remember who we are.

  When I first met Megan at my brother’s wedding, I smiled and asked her if she knew that the name Megan meant ‘warrior princess’ in Swahili. Her eyes lit up and she clapped her hands.

  “Does that make me a warrior princess?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. What do you think?” I said. She started laughing and hopping up and down and then ran over to her mom and dad to inform them that they had a warrior princess for a daughter.

  There was a woman next to me who was unimpressed and tried to bait me into an argument; she asked me if I knew how to speak Swahili fluently or if I simply knew a few words. When I admitt
ed that I had no idea what the word ‘Megan’ meant in Swahili and that I was just telling Megan a little story, she gave me a very disgusted look.

  “You need to go over there and tell her the truth. That poor little girl is going to go through life believing that she is a warrior princess,” the woman snapped.

  “But she is a warrior princess,” I replied. “And if I were to tell her anything to the contrary, I would be encouraging her to forget just how wonderful she is.”

  Of course the sacred texts of India don’t use the term ‘warrior princess’ to describe the human soul, but the idea is very present. In the East, the term is Atman and it literally means, “spark of the divine.” Atman is the nature and substance of who we are. Buried beneath baggage from our past and fears about the future is Atman. Atman is far beyond our episodes of sickness and health; it is transcendent of jobs, relationships and social status. It is our true Self, and as the passage from The Upanishads states: it cannot be destroyed, or lost – only forgotten. [Note that when the word Self is capitalized, it represents our eternal divine nature. When it appears in lower case letters, it represents the ego or small self.]

  Paramahansa Yogananda [6] had this to say: “Is a diamond less valuable because it is covered with mud? God sees the changeless beauty of our souls; He knows we are not our mistakes.”

  The whole practice of yoga is the process of removing the mud from our ‘diamond’. This is why a yogi is not trying to get into heaven or find enlightenment. Rather, in yoga, we are trying to realize the peace and contentment that are always present when we gently remove the ‘mud’ that we think we are and begin to recognize the innate value of our Self—Atman.

  This concept is so basic to yoga that to overstate its importance would be impossible. The path of the yogi doesn’t lead to a location, but rather to a realization. As a yogi, one doesn’t achieve Samadhi (ecstasy) by doing good deeds or by perfecting a head stand. He or she finds the peace that is often so elusive by quieting the mind for long enough to realize that what was searched for high and low is right there in front of the eyes.

  The Nature of Atman

  One man believes he is the slayer, another believes he is the slain. Both are ignorant; There is neither slayer nor slain. You were never born; you will never die. You have never changed, you can never change.

  —The Bhagavad Gita 2:19-20

  The Self cannot be changed or lost or corrupted. We are like water, which can take many forms, but will always be water. One can boil it, freeze it, or make it murky with impurities, but its essential nature does not change. Water is H2O regardless of what form it seems to take. We are Atman whether we play the role of saint or sinner, healthy or sick, rich or poor, happy or unhappy. The form we take doesn’t change the nature of who we are.

  Because Atman is the spark of the Divine, it shares the same qualities as the Divine. In much the same way that we can be unique individuals and still hold the same genetic qualities as our biological parents, we share the spiritual equivalent of a genetic likeness with the Divine. I can no more stop being a ‘child of God’ than I can stop being the progeny of my biological parents. The only thing in question is the decision to embrace or deny this spiritual bloodline.

  So if we share divine qualities with God, then it would be a good idea to know what those qualities are. First, like God, we are eternal in nature. This is to say that there was never a time when we didn’t exist and there will never be a time when we don’t exist. In other words we did not begin at our physical birth, and we will not end with our physical death. The Atman, our very essence, is timeless.

  Second, we are infinite. Many of us tend to think of infinity as a really big number or a really big space, but like eternity, it is much bigger than our time/space perceptions. Infinity is everywhere—and then some. To say that the Atman is infinite is to say that there is no place where you are not.

  Not only are we eternal and infinite like God, we are unified. This is to say that there is no separation in our true nature. The Atman within me is also the Atman within you and so on. God is not a bunch of little parts, God is one, and therefore so are we. We sense and experience separation as we look at our world, and we even feel it within our own bodies, but when we begin to experience Atman, we will let all this separateness fall away and experience the oneness of Spirit.

  Of course, these three qualities don’t seem to apply to us as human beings. You can easily say, “I am not eternal because I am going to die someday”. You can also put down this book to walk across the room and thus prove that you’re not infinite because you were once there and are now here, and everyone knows that you can’t be in two places at once. We can also easily prove separation because my body is separate from your body, and my thoughts are different from your thoughts.

  Sadly, this is very much what we experience as we walk through the world. By identifying ourselves with our bodies, we ‘prove’ that we are something we are not. Virtually every relationship we have ever had and every act we have ever done has had the deep-rooted purpose of denying who we are and cloaking the Atman from our perception. Why this should be so is discussed in the section on the ego which follows, and also in Chapter 4, “The Yoga of Relationships.”

  When we come to the yoga mat, we remind ourselves that the body is an expression of Atman, but not a replacement for it. This opens up the space where healing can happen on all levels of our being, and we can return to that balanced place where we realize our value, worth and completeness as Atman.

  The Ego

  As long as we think we are the ego, we feel attached and fall into sorrow. But realize you are the Self, the Lord of Life, and you will be freed from sorrow.

  —Mundaka Upanishad

  The word yoga means ‘yoke’ or ‘union’. [The Sanskrit root of the word, yoga, is “yuj.”] It is therefore the practice of bringing together that which is separate, or more accurately, the realization that there is no separation, only oneness and unity. This is no small task, because everything we believe to be true is built on the basic notion of separation. We seem to break things into categories in order to understand them, but really this is the ego making sure that we never see the whole picture. We see our bodies as separate from our minds and emotions, and even our bodies are seen as having separate systems and parts. We see external differences everywhere we look. There are different skin colors and different religions. We see different genders and sexual orientations. There are different classes of people, such as rich and poor, upper class and middle class. Separation abounds in our human experience.

  This goes much deeper than many understand. It has become our entire identity, and while it is a false identity, we cling to it with desperate and clutching hands because it is the only reality we seem to know. Of course this flies in the face of our true nature as Atman, but smallness and separateness seem unavoidable truths in this world.

  This belief in separation has become our new identity or self. [Note that when using a lower case “s” in self, I am referring to the ego.] It is the self that we believe we are rather than the Self that we were created to be. This false self is what is known as the ego or ahamkara. [Ahamkara is the Sanskrit word for ego.] It is the source of all suffering.

  The ego is nothing more than a false belief—the ultimate lie. It is a mistaken identity—the belief that we are something that we are not. It is the denial of our eternal, infinite and unified nature, and it spares no effort to maintain the illusion that we are temporal, finite and separate. It is the core belief that we are not who we were created to be.

  Although we are Atman, and joy is our natural birthright, the ego needs to defend against this experience at all costs. It realizes, however dimly, that it would be out of a job very quickly if we sat still long enough to realize our true identities and the power, freedom and ecstasy that come with them.

  This is why we get so easily distracted from spiritual practice and healthy living. The ego loves it when we do self-destructive and
mindless things; in fact it willfully seeks them out. It wants us to smoke, eat junk food and sit in front of the TV, because as long as we do that, we will surely not remember who we are. This is why living a spiritual and mindful life is so difficult.

  About a year ago, I was walking down the street with my friend Jasper. Within the time it took us to walk two blocks, I bumped into three different yoga students I had not seen in awhile. Each of them peppered me with excuses as to why they had not been in class. Each had all sorts of reasons why life was somehow preventing them from maintaining a regular practice. After the third one left, Jasper looked at me and smiled as he said, “Man, you inspire more guilt than a Catholic nun.”

  It’s not that I try to inspire guilt in my students, of course. That would only fuel the problem, for guilt is the ego’s best friend. But my students, when faced with seeing their teacher, are confronted with the fact that they have chosen to fill their hours and days with things that help them to forget their true nature, rather than things to help them quiet the mind and remember Atman.