The Mirror of Yoga

by Richard Freeman

  An interesting parallel to this experience inspired through a good yoga practice was the squeezing of the divine soma plant for the ancient Vedic sacrifice. The word soma in Sanskrit refers to an elixir or nectar. (Coincidentally, soma in Greek means “body.”) The elixir soma was a drug with a strong psychoactive or hallucinogenic effect. After it was cleaned, cut up, and squeezed for its juice in a precise ritual, the Vedic priests would indulge in the drink. The effect must have been extraordinary. Entire chapters of the Vedic hymns, particularly the ninth chapter of the Ṛg Veda, extol the power and the ecstasy brought on by imbibing the juices of the plant. Today no one is sure of the identity of this sacred plant; that is, which psychoactive plant or mushroom soma is, though it grew at higher elevations. In the Vedic hymns and throughout Indian mythology, soma is considered to be nectar; all the gods, goddesses, and sages praised and sought soma. After drinking the soma (within ritual practice) one would sing the Vedic hymns, exquisite in their psychedelic imagery and their rich, rhythmical poetic form. The compositions were recited in an enchanting, deep, resonant, Vedic Sanskrit. Chanting the hymns is considered by the orthodoxy to be a form of yoga practice in and of itself because the act of chanting leaves the chanter mentally exhilarated, concentrated, and alert. Chanting and focusing on the profound images that arose due to the actual depth of the ideas presented in the hymns, combined with the influence of the elixir, would have given the priests deep insight into the meaning of the texts.

  Within the process of yoga we take the body, just as the Vedic priests took the sacred plant that produced the nectar of soma, and through practicing the āsanas we literally twist the body around and wring it out in order to produce the nectar or the soma of yoga, which dips us directly into an experience of the true nature of our minds, and ultimately into the nature of the universe. The superficial process of the mind is not so difficult to see; it is happening all the time: it is our conclusions, symbols, theories, our ways of understanding and dealing with the world. But in order to extract the juice and find truth, meaning, and happiness, we have to press on, dig deeper, and find the hidden process of mind that exists way down, entwined and intermeshed in the very core of our body. This unfolding of the deeper mind-body connection is precisely what happens as we practice yoga āsana.

  Another important and physical aspect of yoga practice is prāṇāyāma, the breathing exercises that extend the patterns of the breath and then unravel the bonds that restrict the internal breath, the prāṇa. The notion of prāṇa encompasses far more than simply the air we breathe; it is an intelligence that organizes sensations throughout the body into patterns, and then presents those patterns of feeling and sensation to our awareness. Through the practice of bringing attention to this form of the breath known as prāṇa, we are observing the sensations that arise in the body as just vibratory sensation or prāṇa alone. We trace the ends of the breath and observe the transition from inhale to exhale and back again; we become increasingly aware of the internal movements of the patterns of prāṇa within the body. Initially the breath and then feelings and sensations become the object of our meditation. Therefore, whether your yoga practice consists exclusively of sitting meditation, chanting, āsana, or prāṇāyāma, you find that the body itself is the medium through which you can discover interconnected avenues of awareness that lead to a direct experience of insight. Within any form of the practice this insight can happen, even if only for a split second, perhaps during the end of chanting the sound of oṁ, or as we sink our feet into the earth in a yoga posture, or as we relish the end of an exhalation in prāṇāyāma. At any juncture within any of the practices we may experience a sense of resonance within the core of the body that allows the mind to dissolve into its background, ushering us into a direct experience of the here and now. The physical yoga practices, therefore, give us something to observe that is immediately accessible, tangible, broad in scope, seemingly endless, but most important, grounded in the present moment and therefore undeniably impermanent. Letting go into whatever is arising while staying solidly grounded in our body leads us to the experience of insight, and it is for this reason that the yoga traditions cherish and respect practices involving the body. Once we enter into the matrix of yoga in this way through the body, when we have a taste of the direct experience of the nature of reality, then the mind becomes satisfied. As we continue to practice, each time dipping into this immediate starting point, we learn to trust the process of melting into the present moment more and more easily. As the mind becomes more content and increasingly able to relinquish its need to identify as permanent all of the forms we perceive, we start to intuit and actually feel that wherever the mind settles—whether it is a thought, a concept, a feeling, or an emotion—that particular point reflects its entire background. Just as a jewel within the net of Indra reflects the entire interconnected net, so too any point upon which the mind rests is seen as a reflection of all of the body, all of the mind, all of creation. This insight allows us once again to start the practice from where we are.

  Many beginning yoga practices reveal this profound process of yoga, and it is not uncommon for someone brand-new to yoga to have a flash of insight into reality during one of their first classes. Then, of course, the insight ends as quickly and as spontaneously as it arrived, and we return to the class for years longing for that same great feeling to present itself. But like so much in yoga—and in life, for that matter—experiencing the present moment is not something you do; it is something that just happens. You “do” the practices so that when the flash of insight arises, you are awake enough to notice it. So again and again we begin the practices from precisely where we are. For example, samasthitiḥ is a yoga pose in which you simply stand with your feet together and tune into the central axis of the body. It may not even seem like a yoga pose to an outside observer, but samasthitiḥ is actually a very difficult posture to do well. Sama means “equal,” and sthitiḥ means “standing.” In the pose eventually we end up standing with equality, with the weight distributed evenly side to side and front to back and with the center of gravity falling as on a plumb line between the front edges of the heels. The roots of the toes are spread open, the eyes find a steady, soft gaze so that the attention is stable and spread evenly around the central, vertical axis. It is very much like standing on top of a flagpole—an actual (and not recommended) yoga practice. To maintain samasthitiḥ you have to pay very close attention to what you are doing. Your awareness must be intelligent and flexible, because within the pose as you naturally start to sway off of the plumb line within your body, you automatically begin to create compensatory muscular patterns of movement that bring you back to center. Most of the time we overcompensate; we sway in one direction and then correct with an opposite swing that requires another countercorrection, and so on. We end up oscillating around the central axis in the same way a bean plant bends side to side, spiraling around a string as it grows. The yoga postures provide a field for our attention so that we recognize and respond intelligently to the patterns that are arising. In samasthitiḥ we might observe our tendency to overcompensate, or the inability of our mind to stay focused on the posture, or the tendency of our breath to become shallow or disconnected. The specifics of our observation are less important than the fact that we learn to stay on task; observing—correcting, observing—correcting, using technique and countertechnique, and then letting them go to be there for whatever is presenting itself without the distractions of concluding, projecting, accepting, or rejecting. Observing our body as the field of the practice, we gradually begin to see interrelated processes and patterns within the mind, the body, and the breath as they occur, and this allows us to fall into a very deep state of meditation. The physical practice, whether it is something simple like samasthitiḥ, a more complex pose like an advanced back bend, or a complex breathing exercise, provides an experience through which we can recognize the body as a veritable jewel within the vast net of the entire experience of the world.
The physical practices become our means of watching the process of our own natural intelligence interfacing with reality; it drifts off one way before spiraling back and curling the other way, always orbiting, circling, coming closer and closer to the ideal of uniting opposite patterns within the field of our awareness. This form of intelligence lies at the heart of all of the different yoga traditions and yoga practices, and it is reflected as a fundamental process of the body and as a basic process of life itself.

  The mind also offers a vast field of experience upon which the focus of attention can rest as part of the process of gaining insight into the nature of pure being. But because we must observe our own thoughts with the mind itself, watching this particular field of experience can be quite challenging. The function of mind is to represent things, to organize, to make symbols, to put things into words and categories, and then to re-sort and reorganize. In fact, the mind lives to arrange everything noteworthy, both inside and outside of the categories it creates, and to “make sense” of it all. No matter what our thoughts, doubts, fears, theories, or images of reality might be within the endless stream of observable material, it can be a difficult task to objectively observe the field of our own mind. It is with the very mind that created the patterns, the same mind that is generally unaware of its background field of assumptions, that we must observe the patterns, the field, and the assumptions. It is like the eye trying to see itself. The ego is born from and adores this conundrum, and it thrives in the process of mind. This is because, essentially, the ego is the confusion or the knotting together that occurs between pure consciousness (which could metaphorically be considered pure, open sky) and the content of consciousness (a cloud or anything that appears in the sky). The ego is referred to as the cit-acit granthi. Granthi means a “knot,” and cit means “pure consciousness, pure awareness.” Acit means “that which is unconscious” or the raw material that springs up in the present moment—that which we are aware of. In our minds knots are created when we confuse pure consciousness with the products of our mind, and this confusion is the source of the ego, which within the yogic tradition is considered to be an imaginary sense of our separation from the fabric of the universe. On a more personal level, when we imagine ourselves to be something that has been torn away from the structure of our body or from the perceptions of our mind, when we perceive ourselves as separate from the rest of creation, then the ego eagerly pops into existence.

  The ego manifests when the mind identifies our own experience as having a center or self that is unique and separate from the experienced object bur related to as subject. This mentally contsructed self is felt to be the standard of true value and happiness of our being. We find that the elusive ego is fed by a need for certainty; thus even within a well-intentioned yoga practice the ego can easily surface if we transform any aspect of the practice into a formula we know. The ego desperately wants to do this because its entire function is to reduce everything, including the whole yoga tradition, to a formula that it can grasp and know definitively in order to say, “I know it! That way I don’t have to do it. I’ve been there, done that. What’s next?” It wants to reduce the truth; it even wants to diminish God to a simple idol in order to be able to say, “I got it!” In this way the ego can reign supreme over all creation. This, of course, is a perverse extension of what the healthy, beneficial process of ego actually is, which is to give us a reference point from which to begin observation and to maintain the health of the body and mind in relationship with the environment. But with the blink of an eye, the distorted ego is ready to lord over the body, the mind, all others, and eventually all of creation, which is the ultimate goal of every ego run amuck and which, as history has shown us time and again, can become a bit of a problem.

  So within our yoga practice, again and again we have to make a compassionate offering into the intelligence of our very own ego. We have to practice in such a way that we allow insight into the union of the body and mind, the inhale and the exhale, the twist and the countertwist, so that we experience our own merging into what we naturally perceive as our background—all that we see as separate from ourselves. Our ego exists because we can separate from our background, and our practice becomes a constant offering of the sacred knot of the ego back into its root within the body and mind so that it can relax, calm down, and allow our natural intelligence to surface. The knot that ties selfhood to what has no selfhood, the bond that confounds pure consciousness with the unconscious, begins to unravel. But this is a very complex and slippery aspect of the practice to maintain because the mind and the ego are both so eager and endlessly willing to jump in, organize, categorize, and to “know” in order to move on. For example, the body is much, much more than the theories and maps that the mind and ego are prone to make about it. Our theories, the patterns we know as the body, are helpful to a point, but they must be released lest they turn into knots and we become stuck in the ways that we move, think, or interact with the world. It is important to understand and categorize, but it is equally important to let go of these organizational tools at the right moment. Just as we all know when we look at a map that it is not actually the territory it represents, so too we know the work of our mind and ego is not the whole picture. Maps are extremely helpful; without them you could be lost, but no map can describe the entire territory. Imagine that you were able to create the perfect map. If you had such a map it would contain everything; all of the roads, the streets, the hills, and the valleys. In fact, the perfect map would not only be a street map, but it would also be topological and would eventually be as detailed and as mysterious as the configurations of the grains of sand within the territory itself. You would have the world’s perfect map, but you would not be able to fold it up and put it in your glove box, so it would be very difficult to use. That is the inherent problem with maps—they are wonderful and useful, but no map is the territory it represents. By the same token, yoga is not a quest for omnipotence as the ego would have us believe. Rather it is freedom from this never-ending, forever incomplete mission of the ego in search of omnipotence. Paradoxically, the path to this freedom lies in being able to map out a theoretical route to knowledge, power, and interrelationship with our environement, which is then dissolved before creating another map again and again, on to ever-more subtle levels of understanding.

  The nature of all practice—āsana, prāṇāyāma, meditation, or the study of philosophy—is that of framing and reframing. It is a dialectical process that enables us to experience the universal nature or the meta-pattern of whatever we are observing through the practice. Stepping back we can see that the practice is both an observation of what is arising and then a letting go of the frame we were looking through. This way practice takes us deeper as we stick with it down into a closer and closer look at the basic nature of what the object is. That basic nature is one of an interconnected fullness, an openness that is the nature of pure awareness itself. Ultimately this is what all of the yoga practices do; they open up the core of our body and our heart, the roots of our navel, and the inner workings of our mind, to that which is hidden deep down inside, the true inner soma, which gives insight into the true nature of being. That insight comes about by drawing a circle and erasing a circle, by framing the object for observation then stepping back and reframing it. This is similar to what anyone does when just mulling over a problem, but it is more penetrating and focused. At some point we drop the making of a frame of any kind, and the object itself just shines out as it is, without any conceptual covers or practices involved. Whenever we practice yoga we quickly run into a paradox. This is that our mantra, our idea of God, our sacred space, our complete system, our one-pointed devotion to or concentration on anything cannot contain itself. The method, the object, the frame is useful for concentration; it is contingent, a temporary tool of convenience, but it cannot frame itself and so becomes an obstacle, like a little ego or idol that in turn needs to be seen through. Imagine you were plagued by plastic bags (symbolic of too m
any concepts, categories, and techniques) littering your house, so you decided to pick them up by stuffing them all into one large plastic bag. Then you still have a plastic bag. What do you do with it? Ask yourself these questions the next time you are stuffing plastic bags into a plastic bag: “Is this plastic bag the bag of all plastic bags? How do I stuff it into itself? Can it contain itself?”

  We encounter this kind of self-reference paradox whenever we start to cling to any one formula within our mind, or if we hold on to any single technique within our practice (allowing the ego a special relationship to it). Paradox presents itself because eventually we discover that our idea or the technique is not complete, and that another viewpoint is arising in the background. There is great opportunity for insight whenever paradox arises; encountering one is considered to be a very auspicious, though not always comfortable, sign. Through a consistent yoga practice, you eventually discover that there is a mystery beneath the practice that may be heralded in your awareness by the trumpets of a dilemma; however it is all too often exactly at that point—when we run into a paradox—that we pull back from our practice. We divert our attention away from the feelings, thoughts, and sensations that arise in the face of a dilemma, or we seek a different practice in which we will not have to confront the wonder of the paradox. Patterns of avoidance and attachment to certain aspects of the yoga practice naturally arise, and they usually reflect similar patterns that manifest in other facets of our lives; avoidance and attachment to our relationships with other people, to food, our job, money, society, politics, philosophies, and even to our aesthetic tastes. One of the values of a yoga practice is that it teaches us the skill of observing the core patterns of thought, feeling, and sensation that arise within the body as we practice. Gradually this observational skill generalizes into other areas of our life and we become adept at simply observing things as they change. Eventually we can notice core patterns of avoidance and attachment that cause confusion and suffering in all aspects of what we do without reacting to them—without grasping onto them or pushing them away. Slowly the yoga practice exposes root patterns that underlie the complex tapestry of our existence so that the way we approach everything we do and how we relate to the world are influenced by the practice.