Keep the back lengthened and don’t worry about getting your head to your leg, but stay at your edge and allow the stretch to come from the back of your legs and your hips.
Coming out of this forward bend, inhale as you lift the heart up and out and then exhale as you release to the starting position.
Modification:
We want to initiate this posture from being firmly grounded at the sitting bones and folding forward from the hips. If in
STAFF POSTURE you cannot maintain the natural curvature of your lower back and feel it rounding out, then sit up on a blanket or two.
*25. Reverse Plank
4-8 BREATHS
From STAFF POSE, place your hands on the floor behind your hips with the fingers pointing toward or away from your toes (you may want to alternate, as both positions have their merits). Inhaling, lift the pelvis up toward the ceiling as you point the toes toward the floor. Keep the tailbone reaching toward your feet. Make sure your wrists are directly below your shoulders with your arms straight. Either keep your chin on your chest, or let the head release all the way back, supported by your upper back muscles. This posture can often be the cause of much resistance because of its unusual demands. Also, as it exposes the whole front of the body which we tend to protect, many people find themselves feeling vulnerable in this posture. Keep your focus on the breath, and when you’re ready, exhale back down into the starting position.
26. Knees-to-Chest Pose
6-12 BREATHS
Slide both heels in toward your hips and then take the knees into your chest as you wrap your arms around your shins or behind the knees on the thighs. As you hug the knees into your chest, gently press the lower back and sacrum into the ground.
This can be a relaxing posture to release any tension that may be in the lower back. As you breath here, notice how orru buttocks, hip width apart.
2 7 . Reclined Spinal Twist
10-20 BREATHS EACH SIDE
Lie on your back with your legs bent and the soles of your feet on the ground. Cross your left thigh over the right thigh snugly. Shift your hips about 4-5 inches to the left. As you exhale, release your knees to the right. Move to being fully on your outside right hip. Your pelvis and shoulders will be at right angles to each other, and your spine is twisting fully but effortlessly along its entire length. You can weigh your legs down with your right hand and reach out to the left with your left hand. Keep your left shoulder blade flat on the floor, and let your chest be broad and expansive. As you rest here, you may take your right arm out to the right also, as you gaze either straight up or to your left.
Notice how the twist affects your breath and where in the body you feel the sensations of the twist. Be alert to the subtle (and not-so-subtle) reactions you may have to these sensations, some of which may be unfamiliar deep body sensations. When you’re ready to come out of the posture, roll onto your back, uncross your legs, and repeat on the other side. Center yourself and then don’t forget to shift your hips over to the right.
28. Corpse Pose
5-15 MINUTES
Lie on your back, with your legs about 12-18 inches apart and your toes turned out. Your arms are at your sides, at least a few inches from the torso with your palms turned upward. First, just let your awareness rest wherever in your body you experience the breath. This may o r may not be where you felt the breath when you began to practice. Remember, let go of the tendency to control or manipulate and just see for yourself what is happening now.
Stay with the sensations of the breath, the subtle increase of tension as you inhale, and then the release of the exhale. After awhile, let your awareness expand to include your whole body. Let yourself open to and embrace all the sensations that may arise as you lie here. Look to see if the feeling tone is pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Notice any tendency to hold on to pleasant experience, reject what may be unpleasant, or “zone out” in the absence of any particularly strong sensations.
29. Seated Meditation
5-40 MINUTES
Sit in any of the crossed-leg asanas. Find your center by rocking side to side briefly, and lengthen the sides of your body from your hips up into your armpits. Make sure your shoulder blades are firmly supporting your upper back and that your lower back has its natural lumbar curve.
When the yogini breathes in or out aware of joy or happiness, of the mental formations, or to make the mental formations peaceful, she abides peacefully in the observations of the feelings in the feelings, persevering, fully awake, clearly understanding her state, gone beyond all attachment and aversion to this life. These exercises of breathing with Full Awareness belong to the second establishment of Mindfulness, the feelings.
INTERLUDE
STANDING LIKE A MOUNTAIN
MOUNTAIN POSE is often said to be the fundamental and foundational posture for all standing postures. Mr. Iyengar is quoted as saying, “What is the point of standing on your head if you cannot stand on your own two feet?” We could do worse than simply practice standing in MOUNTAIN for ten to twenty minutes. It can be an amazing posture to explore:
Where is the weight distributed in your feet?
Can you feel the midline of your body as you stand still?
Are you able to feel the connection between your legs, pelvis, and spine?
Can you feel the spine ascend upward from the pelvis as the legs remain grounded?
Do your shoulders and arms aid in keeping the heart open and lifted?
Is the head free to rest upon the neck without causing any tension?
Can you find stability and ease in this posture?
In the exercise of swaying from side to side and back and forth, we can see in our own body the literalization of the Buddha’s teaching on dukkha and sukha. Whenever we are not aligned with the vertical pull of gravity, we are offering a larger object for gravity to pull on. To keep from falling, we have to work harder, tensing muscles, deforming our body in order to compensate for the imbalance in our posture. This tension in our body causes a further tensing of the mind and breath, both of which seem to grow constricted and tight. This is the “bad space” of dukkha—the axle misaligned with its hole.
By simply focusing on, and really tuning into the sensations of the body, the body can lead us to the ease and stability of sukha—the good space where the axle is in its proper place and all spins round harmoniously. When aligned with gravity, it feels as if we are supported in standing straight and tall. The major muscle groups can relax and the breath grows calm and deep. The mind opens, becoming expansive and free.
And then everything changes again as some subtle shift is noticed, and even subtler adjustments are made. Nowhere is there stasis. MOUNTAIN may look like a static posture, but with the deeper seeing of practice, we come to see that it is extremely dynamic. Practicing not holding and continuing to let go, we see the truth that we are one with the life force—prana—and not at all separate from it.
Can we find Mountain in other postures such as WARRIOR, TRIANGLE, STAFF POSE, and even in the LUNGE? Can we come down to the ground (or take a chair) and sit like a mountain? The same principles are constantly being addressed in all yoga practice. This is why I sometimes say that perhaps the most “advanced” practice would be to do a thirty-minute MOUNTAIN, thirty minutes in CORPSE, and end with another thirty minutes in a seated posture such as BURMESE or LOTUS (see Appendix C). Try that sequence sometime for yourself.
CHAPTER NINE
MINDFULLY AWARE OF THE MIND
Breathing in, I am aware of my mind. Breathing out, I am aware of my mind.
Breathing in, gladdening the mind. Breathing out, gladdening the mind.
Breathing in, concentrating the mind. Breathing out, concentrating the mind.
Breathing in, liberating the mind. Breathing out, liberating the mind.
WITH THIS THIRD GROUP of four contemplations, our practice of fully aware breathing leads us into the realm of the many activities of the mind. Some teachers stress that at this stage
of practice, we begin “real vipassana meditation.” And while this is true in some sense, it overstates the picture and lends a reading that places all that we have been practicing as merely preliminary.
But as I have been saying, the practice of anapanasati is a fully integrated one, which involves concentration and insight (shamatha and vipassana) at every moment along the way. It is just that at this level, the objects of our observation are perhaps even subtler than the body or feelings.
Above, I use the phrase “the many activities of the mind” because the word we translate as “mind” is the Sanskrit word chitta, which means more than the mind as we normally think of it. In fact, some teachers have said that “mindfulness” may as well be called “heartfulness,” because chitta does indeed mean something more like “mind/heart.”
The Dhammapada begins with the twin verses that epitomize the importance of mind in creating our world:Our life is shaped by our mind; all actions are led by mind, created by mind.
Dukkha follows an unskillful thought as the wheels of a cart follow the oxen that draw it.
Our life is shaped by our mind; all actions are led by mind, created by mind.
Happiness follows a skillful thought as surely as one’s shadow.
We in the West tend to focus on action and think that thoughts somehow don’t really matter as much as action. Yet the Buddha pointed out that our actions are preceded by volitions, and the volition itself can create wholesome or unwholesome consequences.
Looking deeply into the activity of the mind can be said to be the real heart of the practice. To look deeply at the mind, we need at least a modicum of mental calm, stability, and concentration. And this is what has been developing throughout the practice of the previous eight contemplations. Yet, we have been observing the mind all along. From the first contemplation of just observing the breath, we have become intimately aware of how active the mind is. We have seen for ourselves that the mind leans away from as simple an operation as watching the breath.
When we broadened our observation to include the whole body and feelings, we saw how the body and feelings condition the mind and how, in turn, the mind conditions the body and feelings. Most notably, we saw our conditioned reactivity. When we turn our attention to focus specifically on the mind, we include all psychological phenomena including feelings, perceptions, thoughts, reasoning, discriminating, and imagining—the chittasamskara , or mental contents and activities, conscious as well as subconscious. Keep in mind that chitta is itself the totality of these psychological phenomena and is not a single unchanging subject. To observe chitta is to observe the mental formations that are arising in the present moment. It is to observe the variety of mind states as they arise, linger, and then pass away.
This group of contemplations helps us to cultivate the seeds of wholesome, skillful mental formations such as love, compassion, joy, happiness, mindfulness, and the energy and willingness to overcome craving, aversion, and ignorance. It also helps us to practice full attention of the unwholesome, unskillful mental formations such as aversion, craving, ignorance, despair, forgetfulness, and pride, and transform them with the power of mindfulness. This is itself the embodiment of right effort. To do this we need to identify and embrace the mental formations as they arise and develop throughout their duration, clearly seeing their impermanence in their cessation.
The ninth contemplation is the practice of coming back to our lived experience, again and again, not rejecting any aspect of it, and not clinging to any part of it, but staying open and honest to experiencing. We observe in the spirit of nonduality, “mind in the mind.” Otherwise, we set up our mental formations, our feelings, emotions, thoughts, and perceptions as “other,” and if we find them unpleasant, we seek to annihilate them, and so cause ever more struggle and suffering. We have both the pain of the unwholesome formation and the pain of our aversion. If we find the formations pleasant, we tend to cling to them and try to make them last. But since they are all ephemeral, ceaselessly changing, we create suffering through our very clinging and grasping. Finally, if we find our experience relatively neutral—neither pleasant nor unpleasant—the mind tends to wander in forgetfulness. Since so much of our experience is actually of this neutral quality, we end up missing our life.
Many students fear that they will drown in strong mental formations or be swept away by them. But in truth it is their very attempt to escape from the mental formations that sweeps them away. When we embrace and recognize that we are not separate from the formations, what is “doing” the recognizing and embracing is the very energy of mindfulness. When mindfulness is present, at one with the mental formation, the mental formation has already been transformed. The situation is already changed as soon as we are mindful of it, no longer lost in forgetfulness.
In Mindfulness Yoga, we have a wonderful opportunity to observe and recognize our mental formations and how they condition our habits and tendencies. We all have our favorite asanas as well as those we would really rather not attempt. Of course, as every yoga teacher will tell you, it’s those very asanas you find yourself avoiding that can often be your greatest teachers. While practicing, notice which asanas create tension in your mind just by thinking about doing them. This aversive constriction of the mind is not merely a cause of suffering but is itself a form of suffering.
Conversely, when you move into a posture that feels good, observe the quality of mind that is present. Do you crave to keep that good feeling in your mind? If so, look deeper. You may be surprised to find that the very clinging to the pleasant experience is a mental formation that doesn’t feel so good! The clinging itself is painful, and so conditions even your enjoyment of what feels good. If we remain unaware of this fact, then we cannot fully enjoy what is pleasant. It remains tainted by the pain of craving. When this is really experienced—not just intellectually—the clinging is released and you can enjoy the whole of the experiencing, including its changing and fading away.
Our nervous system is hardwired to notice only what is intensely pleasant or unpleasant. What is neither pleasant nor unpleasant is simply ignored. When only neutral experience is present, we tend to get bored and look for stimulation. Yet with mindfulness we can remain present with neutral experiences, and perhaps find that mindfulness of the neutral brings us more calm and happiness. Remember Thich Nhat Hanh’s example of the happiness of a nontoothache. Ease, joy, and happiness are all part of the Path. I believe Mindfulness Yoga is about preventing suffering that has not yet arisen and ending suffering that has arisen. Becoming aware of the conditions for happiness that are already present is just a part of it all. Attachment is another mental formation added on to the experiencing.
In Mindfulness Yoga, if you find your mind wandering or if you feel bored, remind yourself to pay attention. One of my earliest meditation teachers pointed out that if you are ever bored, it is actually a sign that you are not really paying attention. This bit of wisdom has transformed my life. In high school, my friends and I discussed making T-shirts that identified us as “Bored Teenagers” (the name of our band) and “Bored and Aimless” (the title of one of our songs), but we were too aimless to actually do so. Since practicing seriously, I cannot remember the last time I have felt bored. Life is just too interesting to be bored. This breath moving in and out of this body is too interesting to ever become boring. Please, take this to heart. Just pay attention.
This leads us right into the second exercise of the third tetrad, in which we practice gladdening the mind. The Buddha is telling us that we need to nourish ourselves with the joy, happiness, and bliss of meditative concentration. “To suffer is not enough,” says Thich Nhat Hanh. We gladden the mind by dwelling upon beneficial mental formations. For instance, to have faith in our practice, and in our ability to practice, is very helpful. Noticing our increased ability to be mindful nourishes and gladdens the mind.
In fact, we can gladden our mind with Dharma, the Buddha’s teachings. The Buddha said that Dharma is the greatest ha
ppiness, if also the subtlest. Through our practice of Dharma, our heart/mind is gladdened. Early in my practice, I was envious of the bhakti yogis and of their experience of love and devotion. I didn’t relate to deities and worship of them or of a guru, but the palpable sense of love and devotion the bhakti yogis experienced seemed wonderful. But as I continued to practice, a real love, devotion, and gratitude arose in me at the wonderful good fortune to have come to practice Dharma. Over time, continuing in the practice, many people report this growing sense of happiness, which has nothing to do with external conditions. It is the joy of Dharma.
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