Tag Archives: meditation

Part 1: The yoga sutras are about life and living

Posted in Uncategorized by

Learn to free your mind and see clearly.

Obviously, yoga is about way more than yoga postures. Yoga is intense study and also — importantly — available and accessible to all of us. Perhaps you have tried “yoga” and maybe you love it and maybe you have decided it’s just not for you. Either way, maybe it is time to look at what yoga is really about. Unfortunately, so many of us really don’t know.

Yoga is a system of discovery, not of belief.
I am doing my best here to simplify and clarify what can be too much, too complicated, and take up too much time and energy for many of us living in this culture. I, (this Patty person) have been seriously studying, practicing, and teaching (to the best of my ability) all aspects of yoga for more than 50 years now.
The great thing about yoga and what I want to share with you is is that yoga is not a belief system. It can be a completely non-dogmatic approach to skillful living and learning to witness all of life more clearly. We all want that. The gift of yoga is that you do it and if the practices work for you then you will likely want to do them Which makes them pleasurable and easy to do. Can you imagine that yoga can be genuinely easy? It can only be easy when it is practiced holistically and with an attitude of curiosity and self-acceptance.

We do need to understand its purpose. To begin to understand we can look at a few of the introductory yoga sutras. The sutras can be obtuse, especially at first. That’s why I am hoping to simplify for all of us.

WHAT IS YOGA?
Written some 2000 years ago, the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali is considered to be the preeminent text on yoga. In its four chapters, the sage Patanjali has brilliantly organized yoga’s teaching into a clear philosophical and practical map. The yoga sutra is a comprehensive guide to the, “what, why, and how” of yoga. 

By far the most well known of its teachings, the eight limbs of yoga, are contained in the second chapter. The eight limbs define the means and methods of practice. They give us the “how to”. The first chapter is where the overall picture of yoga is revealed. Patanjali holds no punches as the text begins immediately with its core teaching.

We will be looking at aspects of the first two chapters. My approach is not to offer an exhaustive commentary on the sutras. (I most certainly wouldn’t even try.) My desire is to share my personal perspective gleaned through over 50 years of continuous and devoted study and practice.

How we interpret this text matters. You can find hundreds of variations, translations, and commentaries for comparison and study. My perspective is slightly different from most in that I am a white, western, woman living in that world, with all that it entails. I have had time and resources to study. I have been privileged to be able to dedicate my life to yoga and meditative inquiry. I have lived and worked in this culture for 72 years, have raised children, trained hundreds of yoga teachers, owned yoga studios, and engaged in all the mundane and challenging parts of daily life that most of you have also experienced. 

How much of daily life is actually yoga? For me, and maybe for you, it has all been yoga. Who are we in this wild and crazy movement of life? First, let’s can clarify what yoga is. 

Yoga is a complex and multifaceted practice for refining consciousness. It is about clarifying our perceptions. It offers means for stepping into a fuller vision and experience of what it is to be alive. Whether or not we are practicing yoga depends on how we perceive and how we attend to what we are doing while we are doing it. Yoga is honing awareness; clarifying the mind. It’s a practice for life. 

The first chapter of the yoga sutra defines yoga and clarifies its aims. Patanjali gives the philosophical context for everything that follows. He explains the overarching picture of universal consciousness, placing individual consciousness within and contained by this vast field of universal awareness. Patanjali offers insight into how much of our mental suffering is due to a lack of direct experience and knowledge of our fundamental universal wholeness. 

The first chapter makes clear how we commonly perceive ourselves to be disassociated from the vast field of universal awareness of which we are made. We neglect to notice who we are at this most fundamental level of connectivity. We are introduced to how — due to a certain kind of ignorance and lacking of perceptual clarity — we inadvertently cause much of our own mental suffering. 

Patanjali acknowledges this to be an inherently painful way to live. He proposes a remedy and the remedy involves practice. Basically, yoga is the process of clarifying this most fundamental of misunderstandings.

The second chapter is about practice. We will be looking at that in the next piece. How to do we accomplish this clarification? What can we do and how do we do it? In chapter two, Patanjali lays out the means for practice. When condensed into an outline he is presenting what is called, the eight limbs of yoga. There are two more chapters that continue to deepen practice and awareness. We will be focusing on certain aspects of the first and second chapters.

In the piece below we look at the beginning of the first chapter.
This is where Patanjali puts things into perspective and forms the philosophical framework of yoga practice.

THE FIRST THREE SUTRAS OF THE FIRST CHAPTER 
Let’s begin with my notes on the first three sutras of the first chapter. I have chosen these introductory sutras because this is where Patanjali encapsulates the context and purpose of practice. He speaks to where we are and what needs to happen if we want to explore a larger picture. 

If the first three sutras are intriguing enough, one will practice. If they are not, there will be little motivation to continue.

Sutra 1:1
atha yoganuśhāsanam
now begins instruction on the practice of yoga

Atha communicates the auspicious nature of the teachings that are about to begin. Most commonly translated as now, atha is also the expression of the self-luminous universal intelligence that resides within every human being. By using the term atha to initiate his treatise on yoga, Patanjali sets the stage for the comprehensive message that will follow. 

Now is the present moment, the place of no future, no past, only this exact, unmoving presence and radiance. Now describes the unified state of mind. In the first sutra, Patanjali has created an inclusive container for all the teachings that are to come.

Now…finally, after an exhaustive search for sustained satisfaction that can never be achieved  in the outer world — perhaps you may be open to undertaking the inquiry that will reveal the core of being to your conscious awareness. 

The implication is that now one may actually be ready to practice yoga. One has tried everything else, and finally understands the futility of looking for satisfaction within the arena of the solely personal field of ones individual mind. Having seen and tried every machination of effort to gain contentment in a life perceived through the most superficial layers of consciousness, one is now ready to seriously embark on the study of yoga.

With the term anuśhāsanam, Patanjali is stating emphatically that yoga means practice. Patanjali lets us know right away that the yoga sutra is not simply a philosophical text. Patanjali states right at the start that yoga requires practice, and the strong implication is that practice will require commitment and fortitude. 

Sutra 1:2
yogash chitta vritti nirodhah
yoga is the mastery of the fluctuations and roaming tendencies of the mind

In this sutra, Patanjali states the problem: vrittis
Vrittis are the fluctuations of activity that are constantly rising and falling in the mind. They are the ceaseless movements of individual consciousness. Vrittis are swirling thoughts and feelings, usually associated with personal desires and attachments that pull individual consciousness into vortexes of self-involvement, effectively obscuring the field of awareness in which they are functioning. 

The effect of being caught in the pull of the vrittis is that the individual is drawn into the mistaken belief that the vrittis themselves define an ultimate reality. The individual ego-mind, the personal concept of self, adopts the erroneous belief that it is the ultimate observer, when in reality it is simply another construct of thoughts and self-definitions. When left unchecked, vrittis have the power to keep us locked into the smallness of self-consciousness and obscure the larger framework of universal awareness. 

Patanjali lets us know that the vrittis are the problem. They need to be resolved and recognized for what they are: thoughts, not core. Patanjali informs us that the lack of resolution of the vrittis is obscuring our direct perception of their own source—universal awareness. We are told that we need to gain mastery over our mind’s incessant movement in order to see our thought processes and uncover the nature of individuality if we are to accomplish the goals of yoga.

Unchecked movement in the mind is often the result of an egoic construct of self-identity asserting its importance. Like a wild two year old, ego-mind really does want to be in charge. Often…okay usually, the egoic sense of self usurps the role of the ultimate seer and thinks that it is the who that is perceiving all of life. It believes itself to be the center and the arbiter of all things. This mistaken identity needs to be cleared up in order to be able to see life as it actually is.

Sutra 1:3
tada drashtuh svarupe vasthanam
then the Seer becomes established in its essential nature

The third sutra tells us what happens when we gain resolution and calm the vrittis in the mind. Seer is the term Patanjali uses to denote the unmanifest layer of existence, life’s source. It is what we might call the field of creative intelligence. It is the potentiality of all that comes into form and yet, it has no form, no structure, no object of perception. 

It is pure capacity, potentiality, and the ability to see and create. Alone it perceives only itself, empty and radiant. When engaged in life it perceives itself and the life that it contains. When engaged in life, this field of nearly infinite creativity and intelligence is witnessing itself as well as everything that it contains. That is why we refer to it as the ultimate seer. Each of us is a part of it. It is the universal power of perceiving and it is the root of our individual power of perceiving. Patanjali tells us in no uncertain terms that the Seer is the primary observer, and that the egoic thinking mind is sorely deluded with its own self-importance. When vrittis are allowed to run rampant, the radiance of universal awareness barely shines through the confusion and clutter in the mind. The field of individual consciousness is clouded with thoughts and feelings, and the person is thoroughly distracted from noticing the deeper aspects of existence. When the vrittis are clarified — not necessarily obliterated, but seen for what they are — they no longer cloud our individual consciousness. 

Correct understanding and embodied knowledge of who we are in relationship to the whole paves the way for ending the mental suffering caused by excessive self-involvement. It is a matter of putting things in their rightful place; living from the perspective and direct recognition of who we are personally and in relationship to the larger whole.

Patanjali is offering a most basic understanding of how the human mind becomes ensnared in delusion, how we may proceed to clear up the confusion, and finally how we might allow our human consciousness to witness directly—and live with—the fundamental knowledge of the fullness of who we are, personal and universal consciousness. Patanjali is letting us know that, as we practice, we will become increasingly able to choose to perceive life from the vantage point of the bounty of vastness, rather than from the limited and small personal.

I CAN’T LIVE FROM THERE!
What about getting the kids to school, going to work, doing the shopping, the cleaning, getting some sleep…let alone enjoying myself from time to time? I don’t have time for this.

It’s important to note that Patanjali is not identifying individuality and living life as the problem. He is emphatically stating that if we — as individuals — don’t want to suffer endlessly we need to resolve this fundamental confusion. He is saying that without a resolution, without direct knowledge of this truth we will always suffer. It is about clearing up the misperception, not about retreat from life. The challenge is to live life in fullness. In other words, to learn to see the whole picture in everything you do. You can do this!

The second chapter methodically lays out the means for clarifying our minds. This is where we find the eight limbs of yoga, the map for practice. In the next post of this series we will look at the crux of the second chapter, the eight limbs of yoga.

Thank you for reading!!

Check out my Substack!
https://pattytownsend.substack.com/
Many articles, videos, and audios for you. All newer stuff, like this one.

Thank you for reading!
Patty

How Meditation Works—Thinking is Not a Problem

Posted in Philosophical Inquiry, Practice, Rest and Meditation by

ShivaDevi

Meditation is directed toward seeing life as it is. Regular practice can help us to experience directly the fundamental nature of life. It is about developing choice; choice to see and experience all the layers of our personal and universal existence. It is about seeing the fullness. Becoming able to witness the underlying support of the divine along with the beauty and richness of our human form.

Meditation effectively clears the obstacles to our accurate perception of the nature of life. The obstacles are the habitual patterns of perception and response that we explored in the previous article. (See Meditation is Natural). When we are locked into these habitual patterns our vision of life is basically limited to continually viewing our own thoughts and feelings – over and over again. When we become curious about the nature of our perceptions, question whether we can trust them fully, and what is actually going on – we are ready to meditate.

Meditation works because Awareness itself is already clear and Awareness itself is the foundation of the thinking mind. Follow any thought to its source and you find Awareness – Awareness without a thought, just Pure Awareness. Awareness is intelligence itself and nearly infinite potential. The natural movement of this Self-Aware-Intelligence is to express and create. The natural expression of Creative Intelligence through the human mind is to think.

Thinking is the healthy and automatic expression of intelligent and creative life force in our human form. Thinking is the wholesome function of the mind. It would be futile to try to stop the mind from thinking for more than a brief time. As long as we are alive our mind will be churning out thoughts, like our body will be churning out feelings. There is no problem in this! It is part of our design. We do, however, want to be able to put our thoughts into the perspective of their source. This will spontaneously support the most effective and useful action in the world.

Harnessing the Mind’s Inherent Curiosity and Intelligence.

Since the mind is highly intelligent at its source and is always thinking, skillful practice would be to harness the mind’s natural curiosity to experience its own nature. Since the subtle levels of our individual awareness are tinged with the qualities of the subtle nature of who and what we are all made of – sat-chit-ananda – awareness-consciousness-bliss, when we begin to follow any thought or feeling to its source we get closer to experiencing the deep comfort that is always emanating from our core. Bliss is the subtle nature of thought and feeling. Because this level of bliss – ananda – is so comfortable, when we use skillful means in meditation we are naturally drawn in to this deep feeling of comfort.

This is a completely natural and automatic movement of the mind because the mind does seek greater happiness and comfort. When left to its natural function the mind will turn toward what it prefers. Often the mind gets caught on the surface levels of awareness and doesn’t remember its source.

When the body-mind system is tense the mind tends to get caught on the surface. The mind literally ruminates over the stresses and strains of experience. The superficial layers of thought are just not as satisfying, or deeply comfortable, as the deeper layers. And when our mind is restricted to the surface layers of experience, through tension and repetitive thought patterns, it becomes dissatisfied. It’s own intuition tells it that there must be something more than this.

Often the mind needs a little help to start the journey inward and let go of the tension that is holding it on the surface.

INNER GRAVITY OF TRUTH – THE INWARD AND THE OUTWARD STROKES OF MEDITATION

Pure Awareness has an inner gravity – a strong force – that pulls our individual consciousness to it. A good technique will allow us to become swept up in the pull toward the comfortable emanations of Pure Awareness. It is pleasurable. We like it. We release into it and saturate in the healing qualities of clarity, rest, and rejuvenation. Intuitively, we all know this is our source, and yet we often can’t even imagine that it can be touched, experienced, and that it can be expanded into our conscious awareness.

It is actually easy once you know how to do it! It’s easy because it is satisfying… it feels good and it is the natural direction of the evolution of consciousness. All we have to do is get out of our own way! In order to get out of our own way we use skillfully chosen techniques that assist the mind in relaxing for a moment, so that the deeper fields of Pure Being can draw it in. As the mind moves effortlessly inward it enjoys the release and thereby finds it easier to relax. The process continues based on the increased comfort and relaxation and the mind dives deeper. Eventually it forgets itself, even if just for a moment. This process is extremely healing and restful for the entire body-mind-nervous system complex. This is the inward stroke of meditation.

The inward stroke – the diving in through the layers of consciousness to the deepest experiences of comfort and even bliss – creates profound rest in all layers of our being. It has the effect of releasing deep stress from the system. Interestingly, the release of stress causes an upward flowing of the mind, back toward the surface layers, in the form of thinking. In the process of stress releasing, thinking increases. This is the outward stroke of meditation.

Together, the inward and the outward strokes, provide a process of healing that is resonant with all of nature’s healing rhythms. Nature evolves in cycles of rest and activity. We see this in so many areas of life: life and death, day and night, summer and winter, spring and fall. We live by cycles of rest and activity. We sleep every night and we are active during the day.  We are born and we are young and we cycle into old age and we die. We inhale…and then we exhale.

Stress that is wound up inside cannot be released without an action. The action is a kind of unwinding of nervous system tension that has wrapped around itself and created a kind of knot. As the knot releases, it is expressed in thought. It can be a single thought, or a long dreamy series of thoughts. Thinking is an integral and important part of meditation! It is the outward stroke, so to speak. It is the result of deep experience and it clears the field of personal consciousness from the very stresses that block our clear vision of life as it is.

It is the nature of intelligence to be clear. It is the nature of your very essence to not be deceived by the convoluted workings of your mind. We sometimes think of the thinking mind as a young child, busy with the task of individuating from its parents and arguing for its separate existence. As the good parent we respect this process of individuation and enjoy it as a natural part of development but also know that the child is not in charge. The parent is the container for the child, keeping it safe. Left to its own devices a young child would have no frame of reference, no container for its development. Children need loving parents. Let the deepest layers of awareness become your container, your frame of reference for all that you perceive.

Meditate.

If You Can Think, You Can Meditate

Posted in Philosophical Inquiry, Practice, Rest and Meditation by

pic for meditation -blog

Meditation is a completely natural function of the human mind. We are inherently intelligent and curious beings. It is part of being human to wonder about ourselves and about life. All cultures have engaged in meditation and there are many methods of practice. Some are very precise and technique oriented and others are intentionally less precise. So many of the techniques are excellent. Different techniques resonate with different people. In this piece, I am writing more about the dynamics of meditation than about any specific technique. Meditations of all kinds work because they all arise out of the same body-mind-spirit system. They all need to rely on the natural tendencies of the body and mind to experience deeper comfort, happiness, and joy.

The secret of meditation is that when we can get out of our own way we can allow the deepest inner comfort to simply pull us in. It is natural. It is actually harder to resist than it is to do, but we have to understand the situation in order to free ourselves from our own crippling restrictions and inhibitions. Comfort is waiting, even bliss. There is nothing to believe in this at all – no belief is necessary. The only thing necessary is the burning desire to know. It has to be a burning desire because if it isn’t strong enough you simply won’t do it. For most of us, meditation is not effective when not done regularly. And regularly means every day… for many years. You probably do have plenty of time so now is a good time to start.

DEVELOPING CLARITY OF MIND AND GAINING CHOICE IN HOW WE PERCEIVE
Our minds have two basic directions available for movement at all times. We can look outward and focus on the outer environment, or we can move our awareness inwardly and focus on our inner environment. As we explore these realms, we learn more about them. Our experiences of the outer world build impressions, concepts, and ideas that we store within. These perceptions are colored by our inherent personality. Our personality is an intermingling of our genetic and karmic makeup, and the stored impressions of our life experiences. The blending of perception and judgments that we make about perception, creates another level of inner consciousness. We think about things. We feel things. We make decisions – consciously or not – and we act. We perform functions in the world. We relate, interact, learn more, store more, and color it with more of our own story. We build a life based upon our interactions and perceptions, the decisions we have made about them, and our ongoing experiences and relationships.

The key to successfully navigating this process is cultivating choice about how we perceive. We develop choice through inquiry into our perceptual faculties and discovering how they are informing all that we think and feel. Without choice we are simply at the mercy of our personality and our environment. Left unchecked, our stored impressions will color our experiences so thoroughly that we cannot differentiate what is actually present in any immediate event from the qualities and feelings that we are essentially applying to the experience from our own storehouse of impressions, images, and held-to-be-true concepts about life and self.

Worse, we don’t even recognize that it is actually our own impressions and previously made decisions that we are witnessing when we think we are experiencing something new! We tend to believe our perceptions without too much attention to whether they are accurate or not, when often what we are perceiving says a lot more about our inner state than it does about our environment, and importantly, about our relationships with others. This limited and usually inaccurate method of perceiving breeds suffering and confusion.

So often we essentially affirm our previous perceptions and decisions, in order to make quick sense of whatever is happening at the moment. This is an important agility that our mind has. It helps us to respond quickly to danger and ensures that we can take care of ourselves in urgent situations. But in terms of seeing the world as it actually is, making rapid decisions about each experience can block our access to some of the deeper gifts that our awareness offers. When we are so immediately sure that our perceptions and decisions about them are correct – and just in case they are not – we become locked into a response pattern that may or may not be the most useful for us anymore.

Often these immediate responses were important and useful when they first manifested. They were a function of health in that they likely did protect us from an emotional or physical danger. Our immediate reactions to danger can keep us alive through extremely difficult situations. Some of these very difficult situations can continue to persist for years and we need to remain vigilant in our own defense. But later on, in times of safety, our ways of managing these painful situations can actually be inhibiting our active involvement and enjoyment of our lives.

Again, the question is of choice. Do we have “choice” about how we perceive and how we respond to our perceptions? How fully can we trust our perceptions? Can we be sure that we are accurately recognizing what is being presented in a current situation? Or, are we coloring it so quickly with our own expectations that we are actually experiencing our own feelings about the event more fully that the truth of what is happening?

FINDING DEEP COMFORT AND SUPPORT—AWARENESS AND ANANDA
This can be so very tricky to navigate. We need a frame of reference and philosophy in which to contain this investigation. We also need inner comfort and support to nurture us through the process of determining what is true from what is not. Without an inkling that increasing levels of inner comfort may be the fruit of this endeavor, we would certainly not embark on it.

The very reason that this process of investigation ultimately bears fruit is that deep comfort is the nature of the “stuff” that supports the mind. The support of the mind – its True Nature – like the nature of absolutely everything else, is Awareness; Awareness without any object of perception – just vibrating Creative Intelligence.
Pure Awareness manifests. It joins with the stuff – the nature of things – and infuses it fully with its intelligence.

Awareness manifests constantly into the field of manifestation (us) — in waves of bliss. Bliss, or ananda – as the yogis call it – needs some serious definition. Ananda can all too easily be misunderstood to mean some sort of happiness as we normally think of “happiness”. Ananda really has nothing particular to do with happiness. Ananda is better understood as complete and total comfort. There are many ways to expand upon this definition of ananda as comfort but it is important to realize that it is very different from what most of us imagine when we think of “bliss”.  Ananda is the deepest embodied experience of profound contentment, the sense of being completely at home.

Using the meditative techniques of serious inquiry, unwavering self-acceptance, and keen discrimination (embodied-inquiry, santosha, and viveka) we begin to recognize for ourselves the subtlest levels of who we are. We come into direct contact with the process of Pure Awareness moving into form… through waves of tangible bliss.

The ancient yogic texts have provided a powerful and all-inclusive statement about the nature of life. They tell us that the nature of the mind is bliss: sat-chit-ananda or truth-consciousness-bliss. It is very important to note that there is no denial of human suffering in this statement. The statement does say that even the worst suffering has the same nature, because all of creation emanates from the same Source – sat-chit-ananda. The implication is actually profoundly inclusive in that it does not hold bliss to be an experience reserved for the lucky. Rather it is saying that no matter who you are, or what your experience has been, there is hope for finding deep inner comfort because it is who you actually are.

Ananda is underneath and supportive of our entire body-mind-spirit system. Ananda and awareness are woven into varying densities and vibrating at various speeds to create our energetic, mental, emotional and physical selves. Awareness and ananda are often veiled at the surface levels of our consciousness. It isn’t that ananda and awareness aren’t present in our structural selves. They are! It is that we have a strong tendency to perceive our thinking processes, our feelings, and all of the matter and the structural stuff of life to be the whole story.
If we were to inquire more thoroughly we would soon notice the underlying nature of all that we are. We would see, touch, taste, and feel, the Essential Blissful Awareness that is constantly present. Honestly, it is a simple matter of attention. Pay attention. No really…pay close attention.

Meditate.