I have two stories to share. One is a story of a beginning and the other is a story of an ending. Back when I was living in Beijing, I got into a serious relationship. When friends asked us about how we met, this was the version of the story my boyfriend then would tell. He would say that he was at this party with a lot of people, and from across the room, he saw the most beautiful pair of eyes he's ever seen: Scrappy's. Then I was beside Scrappy. Friends liked this story. It was funny and cute and quite charming. Now this is the story of the ending. We had parted ways at a time where we have already made plans to merge our lives. I had a pending application to move to his country. As a practical matter, I had to withdraw my application. So I had this letter in an envelope that I had to drop off at an embassy, and it felt to me as though I was announcing the end of that relationship not only to family and friends but to a country as well. It felt like closing a loop. There was a finality to dropping off that letter. When we get into romantic and sexual relationships, we often have stories. And we often get caught up in the story. This is how it started, this is how it went wrong, this is how it ended. It becomes an entwinement of love and tragedy. What we tend to forget are those in-between moments where we get glimpses of what it is like to understand another person, to maybe even finish each other's sentences, to know what the other is thinking, to have an experience of oneness or yoga through another person. That oneness we experience came from us, because we are capable of replicating that experience of oneness, though the expressions of it may be different. As yogis, we are practical. We do not think of enlightenment as something we cannot achieve or understand. We look into enlightenment and see if we perhaps have the opportunity to have a taste of it even if we are not yet fully enlightened. Romantic relationships bring us so much joy but also so much pain. It is easy to get caught up in our stories, to dwell in the past, to ask the what-ifs, to get stuck in the issues that we felt were unresolved. But if our interest is in pursuing yoga, then it is necessary that we take on a different perspective. We learn to forgive and let go. We do not wait for the other person to resolve those issues for us. We do not let the stories overpower our capacity to experience that oneness again. Yoga means union, it comes from the word yuj which means to yoke. Yoga is accessible to us regardless of the ebb and flow of love and sex. Yoga is available to us regardless of the stories we tell ourselves. Yoga is available to us and transcends our conventional understanding of beginnings and endings. We have stories we have told ourselves and others. We have stories to share. At the end of it, what do we want to get out of our relationships with love and sex?
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When I asked group after group after group of yogis whether they are afraid to go to sleep or not, there was a consensus. Not only are we not afraid to go to sleep, we all quite enjoy going to sleep. It gives our body time to rest. I asked the same yogis whether they are afraid of death- whether it's his or her own death or the death of another. Again, there was a consensus. Almost everyone- if not everyone- is afraid of death in one way or another. In yoga philosophy, we speak about having different states of consciousness. Jagrat is the waking state, swapna is the dreaming state, sushupti is the deep sleep state, and turiya is the state of being enlightened, awake beyond awake. The first three states of consciousness are something we all have access to. Why is it that we are unafraid to sleep but afraid of death? After all, in deep sleep, we do not really know where the consciousness goes. In the same way, none of us can say with certainty where the consciousness goes after death, not through our own experience anyway. I think it is because we perceive sleep as part of the cycle of life. We wake up, go about our day, go to bed, dream, sleep, and wake up again. We assume that when we go to bed we are going to wake up. And yet we perceive death as a disruption to the cycle of life. When someone dies, no matter the age or circumstance, we often think of how they are "missing out", what it is they can no longer do or experience. We think of their lives as being "cut short" instead of seeing death as part of this cycle. Why then is it important for yogis to contemplate death? To deny the reality of death as part of the cycle of life is to live with false pretenses, and many of us do just that. We live as though we were going to be in this body forever. We accumulate things as though we will have forever to use them. We postpone things as though we were sure we have that much time. We hold back on living life authentically with this false pretense. To accept that death- just like sleep- is part of the process of life is to start to let go of the fear of losing this physical body. To let go of fear is to start focusing on things that matter. I had heard this story told of two raindrops that were about to fall into the ocean. The first raindrop was full of fear, anxious that he will lose who he is when he falls. The second raindrop had a very different take on it. This second raindrop had no fear. He thought, if I fall into the ocean, then I become the ocean. Physics says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it merely changes forms. What was once there will always be there, just in another form. Yoga says the same thing. May we all be like the second raindrop who understands that when we lose this physical body, we go back to our source, whether we call it energy or Earth or God or by other names. We do not lose who we are. We become who we truly are. The headline of a news article caught my attention: Mourning Mother Hugs Her Daughter's Killer in Court. Not surprisingly, it made news because what the mother did seemed uncharacteristic for someone in her situation. To feel anger and want vengeance is expected. To forgive seems almost unthinkable to most of us. We hold so much anger and bitterness, don't we? And we hold it for a lot less. My father did not appreciate me. When I was in 4th grade, I got 97 out of 100 in an exam and it wasn't good enough. My ex-boyfriend said some very harsh things to me. It brought me down. My boss spread lies about me. It was very unprofessional. We go on and on about the stories of how others have wronged us. And we seek vengeance thinking they have to right this wrong. Or we are consumed with thoughts that they have to- they absolutely must- get what they deserve. How is it that the mourning mother from the news can do something so extraordinary? Magic, according to my teacher Sharon Gannon, is a shift in perception. It is to look at things from another angle. As yogis who are interested in liberation, we choose the thoughts, words, and actions that will free us. When we direct our anger towards someone because we are convinced they caused our suffering, we are denying ourselves the opportunity to heal ourselves. We are stuck in thinking that they owe us something, that they are indebted to us, and in that sense we put ourselves in a karmic entrapment. We choose to imprison ourselves. And whether the hurt and pain another one caused us is real or perceived, by continuing to blame this person, we strengthen our karmic relationship with them. And that relationship is a negative one if vengeance, anger, and pain are the roots. A meditation teacher, Tara Brach, said that vengeance is a lazy form of grief. She explained that when we remove the blame in this equation, what is left is hurt. We feel unloved. We feel unworthy. We feel disrespected. And in the case of the mourning mother, when we take away the killer as the doer of the action, what is left is loss, a massive loss. We can only start to heal when we acknowledge losses, when we muster up the courage to admit that we are hurt, when we realize our healing must come from us and not the person who hurt us. To continue to feel anger towards another person is easy, because it spares us the hard work of reflecting upon ourselves the ways in which we feel broken. But the anger consumes us little by little and all at once at the same time, and it makes us forget that we are bigger than our hurts. Tara Brach suggested using this as a mantra: No one is to blame. Five powerful words that can shift our perception. Let the weight of the words sink in. No one is to blame. Let the lightness of the intention lift you up. No one is to blame. Let the concept of freeing others from us and freeing us from them take root. No one is to blame. Yoga is a practice. Start small. Let us take non-blaming into our day-to-day lives. The morning traffic is bad. No one is to blame. The internet repair man did not do what he came here for. No one is to blame. The cab driver had no change and we have to drive an extra five minutes to break a bill. No one is to blame. Try it for a day. See how it works for you. We can go on an endless tirade of why and how our anger is justified, and we could be right. But that means choosing negativity to consume our precious lives. Or we can let go of the buts (but his intentions were malicious, but she cheated me out of my business, but they were corrupt), and instead see our liberation as an inside job. If we want to be free, no one can do it for us, and most certainly continuing to blame others cannot do it for us. Magic, a shift in perception, is to turn all of the hurt others have caused us into these spaces we create in order to heal and liberate ourselves. Namaste. Pratyahara is one of the limbs of the yoga practice. This Sanskrit term is made of two components. Prati is a preposition that means away, and ahara refers to that external thing that we consume. Pratyahara is often translated as control of the senses or withdrawal from the senses. In our contemporary lives, we seem to practice the complete opposite of pratyahara. We look at our phones while spending time with our friends, we watch TV while writing our grocery lists, and even when we practice yoga asana we look around and observe what other practitioners are doing. We are so used to multi-tasking that the idea of a single focus seems alien and makes us feel uncomfortable. To practice pratyahara is to control what we take in. It could mean selectively watching TV shows to include only those that inspire us and inform us. It could mean we hide the feeds in Facebook that tend to gossip and put down others. It could mean we spend a few minutes each morning in silent meditation. In yoga asana practice, we can be more conscious of our breath, using the sound to guide us through the movements. We can cultivate focus by the use of dristi or fixing our gaze. We could even close our eyes at appropriate times. We could use silence instead of music. Here are some exercises that we can try to consciously incorporate the practice of pratyahara: - In one round of surya namaskar, close your eyes and let your internal consciousness guide your movements. - Use sounds of nature such as cricket sounds as a constant background while practicing asana. - In seated poses, close your eyes when the body has folded forward to the fullest extent of the stretch. - In karnapidasana or ear pressure pose, notice what happens when you tune out external sounds. After a yoga asana practice of tuning inwards, we may feel the benefits of having more peace and steadiness. We may notice that as the world outside turns and remains chaotic, there is that part of us that stays the same. We may experience that our reactions can be observed and controlled, and they do not have to run the show and make us fall victim to self-inflicted suffering. If we find that the short period of practicing pratyahara in yoga class has helped us quiet down, we can consider prolonging this sense of peace by not speaking for a while and not rushing unnecessarily, making all of our movements slow and conscious. We can also look into forming a habit of practicing pratyahara through meditation, mindful walking exercises, or eating in silence a few times a week. Pratyahara is control of the senses, to be selective in what we put into our consciousness. Just as we have a choice in the food that we eat, we also have a choice in the external reality that we consume. If our motivation is to be liberated from suffering, then we do not purposely inflict negativity into our lives. If our interest is in our freedom, then we do not enslave ourselves by preoccupation with mundane things. If our goal is yoga, then we do not try to "do things", we just let ourselves be. |
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