Mindfulness Yoga

by Frank Jude Boccio

  The paradox is that this happiness is the happiness that can see the impermanence of all states—including a gladdened mind! Joy, happiness, and blissful meditative states are all impermanent. If we cling to them, we will suffer. If by seeing this we can let go of our clinging, we taste a gladdening that comes from seeing things as they are. Mindfulness Yoga practice is not about seeking out and trying to abide in some peaceful, blissful state. That would mean being caught in aversion and clinging. It is about learning to open up and stay open to what actually is.

  In the Sutta on the Establishments of Mindfulness, the Buddha tells us to be aware not only when anger or greed (or any of the unwholesome mental formations) is arising in the mind but also when anger and greed are not arising. And in both cases, we are being asked by the Buddha to simply shine the lamp of awareness on what is present in our mind. We do not repress what we find unpleasant nor do we desperately cling to hold on to what we find pleasant. Opening to what is is itself happiness.

  The third contemplation in the fourth tetrad is the development and maintenance of such a concentrated mind that it is referred to as single-pointedness or ekagatta in Pali (ekagrata in Sanskrit). So while we bring our attention to one object, what is really emphasized is not just the object of concentration so much as the quality or degree of concentration itself. In the Sutta on the Establishments of Mindfulness, the Buddha points this out by telling us that we should be aware of when single-pointedness is there as well as when that level of concentration is not present in the mind. But if we have been truly practicing, then this level of concentration is not all that difficult to cultivate. We have, after all, been cultivating it from the beginning, most notably in the exercises of calming the body and calming the mental formations (the fourth and eighth of the sixteen contemplations of anapanasati). This is the practice of right samadhi.

  Many people make the mistaken assumption that to be “in samadhi” one must be perfectly still and that this means you cannot be in samadhi and also be doing anything. Some think of samadhi as if it were some kind of trance, and that there should be no awareness of sensations. So they assume samadhi cannot really be cultivated while moving—in asana, for instance. While this may be true for some states of samadhi, these states are not necessary for the work of developing insight. In fact, nowhere in either the Anapanasati or the Satipatthana Suttas does the Buddha recommend or suggest that these kinds of states are necessary for liberation.

  As Buddhadasa Bhikkhu points out in Mindfulness with Breathing, if correct samadhi has been developed, three qualities of mind will be present. There will be stability. The mind will be collected, firm, steady, and undistracted. Such a mind will abide in a state of purity, clear of defilement. And a steady, pure mind will be in an alert state of activeness or readiness to perform the work of the mind. And the work of the mind is to “grow in knowledge and understanding from moment to moment.” Obviously, such a mind is a boon for all activities—not just for formal meditation practice.

  When these three qualities are present, the practitioner is said to be samahitata—“one who has samadhi and is able to perform every kind of duty.” It is said that if one is walking while these three qualities are present, then that is “divine walking.” If we can have this kind of a concentrated mind while doing asana, then it will surely be “divine asana.” And the Buddha added, “When the mind is concentrated, it knows all dhammas as they truly are.”

  An experience that often arises during asana practice that single-pointedness of mind helps us learn from is pain or discomfort. Please note this is not to say that you should just grit your teeth through excruciating pain or ignore the signs of injury—but most of the pain that arises in asana practice is intense discomfort and not injurious and thus you can practice with it differently.

  If you thoroughly fix your attention on the pain or discomfort, there is no separation between you and it, and so there is no space for reactivity, judgment, or story lines about it to arise. Very often, the intensity of the pain actually decreases when we practice in this way, but the true lesson we can learn is that even when the pain remains, there is a difference between pain and suffering—the misery or torment that we add to the experience because of our reactivity, aversion, and stories. An old Buddhist saying is that “pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.”

  Jon Kabat-Zinn explores this point in his book Full Catastrophe Living, which is based on the program he founded at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Through research it has been shown that attentional strategies for dealing with pain—what we are doing when we are mindful and moving our attention into the experience nonjudgmentally—work better than distractional strategies such as trying to think of something else when feeling pain.

  One attentional strategy is to embrace pain and unpleasant mental formations such as aversion, anger, clinging, sadness, or fear. Thich Nhat Hanh has suggested we see our discomfort (whether painful physical sensations or the mental formations) as our “crying baby.” I have found this a useful metaphor, as I am a father. When my daughter was an infant, I did not run from her when she cried. I did not push her away. I went right to her and held her in my arms. To do otherwise would have been dysfunctional. When seen in this light, it becomes clear how dysfunctional we have been in trying to push away or ignore our suffering.

  Again, the real benefit of such practice isn’t to grow in stoic forbearance but to see that there is indeed a difference between the pain or discomfort and the anguish we create. The Buddha used the image of a man who is struck by an arrow. This is painful, there is no denying that. But then our reactivity is like another arrow adding still more pain and suffering. Patanjali in his Yoga Sutra says, “Suffering not yet arisen is to be prevented.” The attentional strategy of simply embracing and moving into our experience of pain is one way that we can prevent the arising of suffering not yet arisen.

  We can practice working with the pain that arises while on our yoga mat or our meditation cushion, so that we can remain free from suffering throughout our life. It’s certainly true that if we feel pain in our shoulders in WARRIOR TWO, for instance, all we need do is lower our arms. But if we always do this, what will we do when pain arises that we cannot avoid so simply? What if you are injured in an accident? What if you lose your lover? If someone close to you dies? What about when you yourself must confront your own sickness, old age, and death? Whether emotional or physical, pain is inevitable. You have a body with a complex nervous system, so you will feel pain. But if you practice on the mat or cushion, perhaps when the inevitable losses occur, you can just feel the pain and not add suffering as well.

  My Sanskrit teacher once said that the word drama shares its etymology with the word karma insofar as “drama” in Greek means literally “action,” as does “karma” in Sanskrit. Thinking of this, we can see that when we dramatize our basic sensory experience, we are creating karma. Everyone knows at least one “drama queen” who always seems to be embroiled in complexity and turmoil, but we all do this to some degree. Meditation practice is said to expurgate karma, and this happens when we cease feeding or energizing it with our reactivity. When we let go of our dramatizing, we let go of karma.

  When we look deeply at the nature of our mental formations, we do indeed become liberated from them. This is the untying of the mental knots that takes place during the practice of the last anapanasati exercise of the fourth tetrad. With the observation of mind in all its subtlety, the mind becomes free from the mental formations that create the drama—and the karma of suffering.

  Here is the cusp of wisdom (prajna), because now the Buddha is introducing us explicitly to focusing on liberation, which is the goal of all his teaching. The taste of freedom is the “one taste” that permeates the Buddhadharma, just as the taste of salt permeates the ocean. And once again I want to point out that the taste of liberation has been in your practice from the beginning, even if you haven’t been consciously aware of it. Yet the liberation that the Buddha
is talking about here is still not the liberation that appears at the end of the sutra.

  Actually, liberation or “letting go” is less about you letting go of the unwholesome mental formations than the formations themselves letting go of you. When the mind is concentrated, there is no room for them to grow and develop within. Simply observe the mental formations without reacting, and the mental formations will by themselves fall away. This kind of letting go is cultivated by returning to the breath every time the mind is distracted.

  In the Sutta on the Establishments of Mindfulness, the Buddha tells us to notice the mind when liberation is absent. Really look into what a grasping mind is like. Practicing Mindfulness Yoga is really not an ideology, philosophy, or moral code about the goodness of letting go and the badness of attachment. You cannot “just let go” because you think letting go is a good idea or a better way to live. Remember that the Four Noble Truths serve little good as mere doctrine, but must be engaged with thorough practice.

  But now, really experience attachment. When you see that it is unnecessarily painful, letting go just happens. It’s like picking up that red-hot iron poker. You don’t have to think about letting it go or contemplate the reasons why you might let it go. It is spontaneously released. When the attachment becomes experienced as the suffering it is, it too is released spontaneously.

  Traditionally, the commentaries state that while there are myriad objects to which we can become attached, they fall into four major types. Perhaps the most obvious objects of attachment are material objects or sensory pleasures. This includes possessions (clothes, money, etc.) and sensual and sexual sensations. In asana practice, the attachment can be to particularly strong feelings of enjoyment when we stretch and move the body, or to excitement, pleasure, or bliss. There is nothing inherently wrong with enjoying physical pleasure, but if we are dominated by our attachment to it we are bound to suffer.

  The second category of attachment consists of opinions, beliefs, views, and theories. This is where the “Are You Sure?” practice described in Chapter 3 can be valuable. In observing mental formations while practicing Mindfulness Yoga, we may find that we are attached to ideas about how we should feel, what we should be able to do, and what the correct way to practice an asana is, as well as beliefs that we will never be good enough or that our particular teacher or tradition is the only true and authentic way. Remember, the ideas or opinions themselves are not the problem, but our dogged attachment can certainly create a lot of suffering for ourselves and others. In fact, if we are attached to strong ideas about what we need in order to be happy, the attachment to those ideas can itself become the greatest obstacle to experiencing happiness.

  The third category of attachment actually includes Dharma practice itself. The Buddha warned against getting attached to ritual and traditional practices—secular or religious. This is why I suggest to my students that once they have developed some understanding of their body and their capacities that they take some classes with other teachers in other traditions and practices. There are some practitioners who have grown so attached to a particular form that they remain only in their comfort zone, never letting their edges be burnished. The form has become a trap rather than a tool for liberation. To appreciate and be firm in one’s commitment to a particular practice is one thing, but if we become overly attached and obsessive with the form, we can all too easily lose the liberative spirit of the practice, and it is a small step from there to becoming judgmental of others and their practice.

  The last, and by far the trickiest category we can attach to, includes everything that we identify as “I,” “me,” and “mine.” Even becoming attached to our identity as a yogi or yogini can become a source of suffering. We can develop a holier-than-thou attitude and see ourselves as separate from the rest of the world. The organization Alcoholics Anonymous teaches of a condition they call “terminal uniqueness,” in which one feels so special in one’s experience of life that no one else could possibly understand one’s pain. When people suffer from this malady, they feel acutely alone and separate. This loneliness feeds their addiction. Along with finally recognizing that we have a problem with addiction to our sense of “self,” seeing that we are not so unique creates a softening and a letting go of some of the strategies and belief patterns that keep us locked in our addiction. This is the ultimate human existential addiction.

  When practicing asana, we can see for ourselves how we create this sense of self and how we use our reactivity, our belief patterns, and our dramatizing story lines to reinforce the cage of self. The more we harden this sense of self, the more tension and suffering we create, but it is not until we really see this for ourselves that any opening can occur.

  In mindfulness practice, look into the mental tendencies that arise throughout your practice. See the pattern of the story lines and the beliefs they embody. What are the strategies that arise to deal with what is happening? Over time you can learn to clearly see how dominated your whole life may have been by beliefs you didn’t even know you had—or were only dimly aware of while creating strategies to deal with them. Notice how quickly the mind looks to categorize and compartmentalize your experience and how it judges ever so swiftly and cruelly. And in seeing this, can you not give in to “believing your own press release” about what’s going on? Notice too if you begin to judge the judging. These patterns can be so ingrained that they find apparently endless ways to replicate themselves. This is why practice must be continuous and patiently practiced over a long time.

  Because so many asanas are asymmetrical, what often happens is that you will find one side easier or more flexible than the other. Whenever this happens, notice how without fail the mind will not just stop at seeing the difference. It will almost immediately move on to judging that difference, making one side bad and the other good.

  One of my students once had a great deal of tightness and discomfort on one side and joked that this was the “evil twin” of the other side! Her ability to laugh at this pattern points out the importance of humor in the practice. One of my teachers said that to grow enlightened was to quite literally “lighten up.” The ability to smile and even laugh at the mental gymnastics we uncover is an important element of letting go. I find that the classes I lead in which we focus on the mental formations—and even when we focus on pain and our mental reactivity to pain—are often the classes where my students and I share the most laughter and lightness of spirit.

  Many people come to find that they react in the same way in their daily life as they react on the mat, and in seeing this, they have noticed a loosening of the habit energy. One student found that the image of embracing her mental formations like they were her crying infants helped her to see how dysfunctionally she was relating to many aspects of life. One longtime student said that she has grown in her capacity to really see how she leans away from what’s happening as she continually “grasps after the next thing.” And yet, a relative beginner in her first class with me said that she found herself able to distinguish between the unpleasant sensations that arose in a particular asana and the suffering she was adding to it through her dramatizing of the situation.

  INTERLUDE

  WORKING WITH DIFFICULT EMOTIONS

  In the Introduction, I mentioned how it was the disintegration of my first marriage that first brought me to Dharma-yoga practice, and how it was the devastating breakup of another relationship that brought me to recommit to practice many years later. In between I had been involved in several relationships that ended in a lot of pain, bitterness, and even despair. During the breakup that brought me back to practice, I went through an especially difficult time. After entering therapy, I was diagnosed as clinically depressed, with “free-floating anxiety” that led to periodic panic attacks.

  My behavior pattern in response to broken relationships had been to go through periods of feeling utterly betrayed and alienated from everyone and everything around me. I struggled and fought against what was happening, refusing to
accept the situation. I would hound my expartners with accusations of betrayal and deceit. I was not a very pleasant person to be around.

  After years of practice—and therapy with a woman who offered a model of mindfulness—I became involved in another relationship, which led to an engagement to marry. I remember telling a friend that if things didn’t work out, I hoped that I could “just feel sad, and not like the world was ending.” Within a year, my partner started to have her own intimacy issues and broke off the engagement. The old and familiar sense of betrayal arose within me.

  This time, though, I was determined not to act out my frustration and anger and so I sat down on my zafu with the resolve not to get up until I had penetrated to the base of the anguish I was feeling. As I sat with my anger, I noticed that I felt a heavy knot in my chest. As I stayed with this sensation and my breath, my mind offered up strategies to “get her back.” Discursive arguments to get her to “see my way” played like a running film loop. But I stayed with the breath and the knot began to untie.

  I felt a dizzying kind of vertigo and the twisting knot moved into my solar plexus. The sensation was of cold fear and panic. My mind started to generate stories of how I was right back where I started, and my anxiety about that would spin into a panic attack. I was seeing how fear was arising around my fear. “All your time in therapy was wasted. You didn’t change,” the voices in my mind taunted. Images of me dying alone, undiscovered until some neighbor smelled my decomposing corpse floated up into my mind’s eye. This is how crazy the mind can be. All I wanted to do was to spring up from the zafu and do whatever it took to get away from this anxiety. I really felt I couldn’t take it. I wanted to run away, go out to a club or bar, get drunk, pick someone up and get laid, do anything but continue to feel this twisting-in-my-guts anxiety.