Recently, we collaborated on a series of classes in creativity and yoga. “Why?” — is the question we are asked frequently. Why creativity and yoga? Why would a yoga teacher and practitioner (Laura) collaborate in a series of classes with an artist and author (David) on creativity and perception? What is the connecting thread? The answer lies embedded in the larger dimensions of both yoga and creativity: both ask for an authentic search into the core of one’s being, to seek and cultivate a broader awareness, and to directly meet the many resistances within oneself.

Cultivating seeing becomes the bridge between yoga and creativity. We are asked to learn to see what is. In the art studio and on the yoga mat, we noticed that the initial steps for most people involve both the excitement of making new discoveries about oneself and a poignant sense of something missing, a kind of remorse over the absence of a durable connection to the sources of creativity and inner attention that are the aims of both art and yoga. We begin with the recognition that something is possible but presently eludes us— awareness, wholeness, and compassion.

When we begin to encounter ourselves, what do we notice? Individuals in the classes observed and admitted a fragmentation of mind and body that brought to the forefront many rapidly changing inner conditions that hindered a creative response.

Every phenomenon arises from a field of energies: every thought, every feeling, every movement of the body is the manifestation of a specific energy, and in the lopsided human being one energy is constantly swelling up to swamp the other. This endless pitching and tossing between mind, feeling, and body produces a fluctuating series of impulses, each of which deceptively asserts itself as ‘me’: as one desire replaces another, there can be no continuity of intention, no true wish, only the chaotic pattern of contradiction in which we all live, in which the ego has the illusion of will power and independence. 

—Peter Brook, Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and his Teaching, Needleman and Baker.

… READ MORE on Parabola.org or pick up a copy at Barnes & Noble or your local newsstand. You can also keep up with David and Laura’s blog at www.theslenderthread.org.

“Meditation does not involve discontinuing one’s relationship with oneself and looking for a better person or searching for possibilities of reforming oneself and becoming a better person. The practice of meditation is a way of continuing one’s confusion, chaos, aggression, and passion—but working with it, seeing it from the enlightened point of view. That is the basic purpose of meditation practice as far as this approach is concerned.”

-Chögyam Trungpa

Never before has something so subversive and antiestablishment as yoga become so mainstream.  It’s ironic that a practice intended to bring us into deep communion with our authentic nature is being represented with images in magazines, clothing brands, and fad foods and diets. Unfortunately, when we do this, the intrinsic value of yoga is stripped away. Much of what draws people to yoga today is based on what-it-looks-like. Now, that’s one of the reasons why teachers like Neem Karoli Baba never hit the mainstream. He’s not very marketable with his large frame and unmanicured feet. Equinox yoga’s new commercial with an attractive woman displaying her acrobatic excellence calls us to do yoga now. We can be beautiful, peaceful, and even rich (implied by her pricey Upper West Side apartment). Or from a marketing perspective, we can infer that the message is that if you are beautiful, peaceful, and rich, then you too should do yoga.

Admittedly, when I first started practicing yoga over a decade ago, these things enticed me. I knew that I wasn’t peaceful. Images of beautiful, flexible men and women in pristine yoga clothing evoked in me a desire to become more than I thought I was. I lacked therefore I wanted more. I began a moderate bi-weekly practice, which then led to a more elaborate daily practice. I bought mala beads, wore the sparkly clothes, and lived on sprouted grains and green juice for a while. When that didn’t work, I transferred my spiritual materialism, as Chögyam Trungpa coined it, towards being more austere. I refused to eat anything 12 hours before my next practice. Practice must be done everyday at 6 am or enlightenment was just a pipe dream. I judged myself, and I judged others, for not stridently following the rules of spiritual attainment.

©Kanani Daley

Every once in a great while, however, I am struck with an experience that undercuts all of the outward actions. Moments arise in practice where there is no agent, no doer, there is only the experience of the breath, the body, and of something greater. I try to pinpoint where this experience arises from. Was it the 12 hour fast? Was it the 28^th repetition of the Gayatri Mantra? Was it the perfect execution of supta kurmasana (the supine tortoise)? Was it everything rolled into one?

To assume that any of our doing brings about deep inner experience is what is referred to as spiritual materialism. Contemporary culture, by reducing yoga down to its most external aspects, ignores a fundamental element – the presence of the eternal. When moments of openness and presence come through us, they are but windows to something higher than our normal state of consciousness.

The question arises: why engage in a spiritual practice? Any ritual practice can be performed with the intent of somehow procuring enlightenment—the thought is that yoga, meditation, and prayer can be done to achieve a certain state of being. However, if we wish to cultivate the realization of who we are and a real connection to the divine, we see that these rituals are the fertilizer for the seeds of our awakening. Anyone can perform an asana, or sit for several hours, or say a million mantras, but if the seeds of consciousness are not cultivated, then nothing will grow.

“Although Logos [divine reason] is common to all, most people live as if they had a wisdom all their own.”

-Heraclitus

Yet, how is it possible to cultivate awareness of something so alien to our normal, unrefined selves? We can only start the process through the fragmented lenses of our egos. With disciplined practice, we may begin to develop compassion rather than criticism of who and where we are. We make the best efforts to unite our disciplined efforts with our sincere intentions towards wholeness. Weeks, months, and maybe years later this combination of effort and compassionate seeing may open us to moments of insight and to a deeper awareness that is not influenced by our ego’s self involvement. Ego and conscious initiative begin to find their place as servants of a greater whole.

Please join me at 5:30 PM on Sunday, February 5 at Purple Yoga for our monthly satsang. Satsang is free. Donations are greatly appreciated.

(Note to attendees: We will be revisiting sutras I.1-I.5 of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. You are welcome and encouraged to bring your questions and thoughts regarding the readings.)

A sudden answer to a long perplexing problem, a burst of insight that deeply informs your creative work, a moment of wisdom that changes the shape of your life forever or even the fabric of society; these moments are highly inspiring. As artists and creative individuals, we seek to know—and come to rely upon—these stunning moments of epiphany and insight.

It is said that Beethoven could “hear” the music, and Einstein “saw” the theory of relativity in his mind’s eye before going to sleep one night. History teaches that Martin Luther King heard a voice answering his uncertainty, whole and complete, that impelled him to “stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth.” In that moment, he knew the direction his life must take. Many creative individuals report great discoveries made from the deeper, non-rational mind. The Greeks called it the muses; Carl Jung—and other psychologist—know it as the depth consciousness; others know it as the voice of the gods.

We have many words for its different flavors: inspiration, intuition, insight. Where does it come from? How do we touch this state of grace, this inner knowing?

There are many answers, though all of them seem incomplete. The sources of creative inspiration remain an unknowable mystery, yet anecdotal information from many artists and scientists, as well as contemporary brain science, offers the outline of a way of working towards epiphany and deep insight:

•  Inspiration often comes as a result of past work on a topic and arises in the alternation, the space between activity and rest. We need to make our best efforts, then stand back and allow for gestation and the ultimate blooming of an answer or insight that comes from the depths of the mind. The fire of inspiration needs a branch to light on, which usually means that we need to work hard, sometimes for hours, days, or weeks of dry, unproductive efforts, before our insights can be realized or our forms can be harvested.

• The messy enjoyment of experimentation, wild, even unfocused, exploration, and earnest expansion of our ideas and unformed questions will, over time, lead us to potent discoveries and spontaneous insight. Just begin, even if you do not yet know where you are going. Rationality alone does not engender creativity. Non-rationality and play can open us to the right side of the brain, where myth, metaphor, symbol—and deeper forms of knowing—reside.

• In dialogue with others, when we remain open and allow the viewpoints of others to influence our own, creative discoveries can build. We say that something is “in the air.” A collective wisdom between people in a well-functioning group or relationship can bring insights to the forefront that we could never come to on our own. When two or more are gathered together, creatively, epiphanies take place, problems can be solved in ways that we could never envision alone. Collaboration yields power and grace—and greater understanding . . . but only when we yield our own staunch agendas and learn to listen and think and build together. Wasn’t this once the ideal of democracy?

• The unconscious is a powerful source of knowledge and insight. Many consider it to be our “real” mind. Forms of access are: dreams, waking visions, creative activity, stillness of the surface mind, and struggle. Yes, we must let go. Meditation, yoga, contemplative disciplines, mindfulness can serve to spark our natural wisdom.

• Striving towards a centered presence in the body can bring us closer to a potential unification of body and mind. Inspiration seems to partake of a centeredness in the body, a clear, still surface mind, and from the buoyancy of uplifting, positive emotion. The first step towards the inner search for inspiration is entering the body and maintaining an awareness of our physical states.

The search for inspiration represents one of our most human characteristics. One of the most beautiful titles for a book that has ever crossed my path is The Joy of Man’s Desiring, by Jean Giono. Say these words out loud. Feel their clarity as they roll off your tongue, feel their sheer poetry, their resonate meaning, and what these words evoke. The sharp poignancy of our passion and longing. The beauty of human striving. The impeccable ardor of knowing what we truly want, what we aim for, arising from deep within. The force of our wish. Our wish can move mountains.

We must take the risk of not-knowing, standing in front of the unknown in order for something higher and finer—wherever it comes from—to appear. The way towards knowing is through staying in front of not-knowing. Facing the unknown is the first step towards inspired thought. We need to stay in a state of questioning for inspiration to appear. We also need to place our conscious assumptions and beliefs under the lamp of scrutiny. When we are no longer invested in being “right”, we leave room for flashes of insight to reveal themselves on the horizon of the mind.

“Consciousness precedes being, not the other way around.” –Vaclav Havel

Rationality alone does not engender creativity. We need something else. But what? From where does deep insight arise? We must take risks, open to the mystery, and learn to stand in front of something greater than our ego with humility and an attitude of open acceptance. Learning to live with ambiguity and an experiential awareness of our ignorance is often uncomfortable, but there is no other way.

Photographer Minor White writes: “In the silence of a blank mind, [I] raise the intuitive antenna, become the instrument, the messenger . . . Finally only meditation seems to generate input worth tapping. Hypnosis, drugs … all appear to be skeleton keys to the locked rooms of my house I have never entered. Skeleton keys that open dead rooms.

When I make keys for these doors by being still with my Self, the room, opened, is full of flowers, furniture, friends.”

Inspiration visits. We receive. It is the yoga of creativity. In a still, quiet state, open to life within and without, we may be privileged to experience those rarified, refined, yet very ordinary moments, where everything becomes clear, where inspiration descends in a crystalline fashion, revealing sharp clarity to our questions and the shock of recognition of what is right or true. Something is given. Yes! This is what we seek, This is what we have been asking for. We can create the conditions for its appearance yet inspiration is not governable by our rational mind.

“Ah but when, in which of all of all our lives, shall we at last be open and receivers???”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

Please join Laura and I in our workshop on The Search for Inspiration as part of ourupcoming classes in creativity, where we offer simple, yet challenging exercises and instructive material, designed to open the door to inspiration, stimulate creativity, and gain a broader understanding of your own creative process. And join Laura in her eight week Art of Yoga class designed for creative individuals. Please check out Laura’s new blog post on“Why I love Yoga.”

First, yoga has given me the gift of health and vitality. I was never a very athletic or healthy child. I was always in the nurse’s office for one reason or another. I was always the last picked person for volleyball in elementary school. I did gymnastics and dance in school, but generally felt awkward and disconnected from my body. In my late teens and early twenties, I started a gentle practice of Integral yoga, which led to ashtanga yoga soon thereafter. Very quickly I became stronger, more flexible, with a noticeable improvement in my immunity to sickness. In addition to the physical changes, I noticed increased ability to focus, which improved my performance in school. My relationships, perhaps due the simple fact that I felt better, also started to improve. I didn’t loose my temper so easily. And my long-standing problems with anxiety and shyness started to incrementally improve.

Me and Nicole

Secondly, and of greater importance, yoga has gifted me with the potential toward inner awakening. In fact, inner awakening might be the real reason behind all of the benefits previously listed. My mind and emotions, once so easily wrought to and fro, were (and are) slowly starting to settle down. I started a meditation practice in my late teens, and yoga deepened and enhanced the benefits of sitting. My hardness and aversion towards the world began to dissipate, and I began to feel an inner opening that I can’t yet fully explain. Rather than just being able to see a select few aspects of my life, I began to see more elements of my life equally. It was as if someone had widened my frame of reference, and instead of just seeing a leaf, I could see the shape of the branches, the tree, the forest, and the sky above it all. My inner world also started to expand, and I slowly began to notice things about myself that I hadn’t before—some good and some not so good.

Teaching was and is merely a way to explore this whole process of inner awakening and outer awareness. It’s interesting to see how similar we all are as we embark on this path. Sure, we all have different personal histories, bodies, and minds, but all in all, we wrestle with very similar emotions. Through watching people practice yoga, I have seen yoga’s transformative power. For some that power is purely physical, and for others it’s an abstract psychological and emotional transformation, and for others it’s both. In any case, yoga has shown me a hint of what it means to find a home within myself and within the universe. I am beginning to learn what it means to empathize, be compassionate, and what it means to truly connect with myself, the world around me, and a greater power that I do not yet know.

If you are curious about what you might learn through a yoga practice, you are welcome to join me this spring at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for the Art of Yoga, a series of classes beginning on February 12. For more information and to register visit http://outreach.hawaii.edu/noncredit/courses/programdetail/1660 or call (808) 956-8400.

If you are interested in the contemplative value of yoga as it relates to the creative process, join David Ulrich and I for our creativity series at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Classes start February 11. For more information and to register, visit http://outreach.hawaii.edu/noncredit/courses/programdetail/1656 or call (808) 956-8400. You can also read more about our collective and individual work on our blog, The Slender Thread.

Why do you stay in prison

When the door is so wide open?

-Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Waking up and seeing for the first time, again.

I am trapped.

Sitting in meditation.

Moving through asana.

Watching. What is seen?

The realization that indeed I am trapped. Trapped in thinking. Trapped in doing. Trapped in the habitual, mechanistic way of being. Some days, practice is mechanical.

Ekam—one. Inhaling. Upward moving.

Dwi—two. Exhaling. Downward moving. The mind moves in and out of attention.

Trini—three. Inhaling. Upward moving. Judging self.

Chaturi—four. Exhaling. Backward moving. Judging self for being a judging inattentive self.

What brings us to yoga practice? Is it the promise of a better body? A better mind? A better soul? At the mall, in magazines, looking at ads of rail thin models in supplex tights – is that what stillness looks like? If I look like stillness, will I feel like stillness? I ask myself, I ask my teachers, I ask my fellow practitioners – what does stillness look like? Does it look like ekapada shirsasana (one leg behind the head)? No? Then what about dwipada shirsasana (two legs behind the head)? No. Not that either. Then what?

Every question asked has no answer and only more questions. I imitate what I see. I (finally) look like stillness. I (still) feel like chaos. Who knows the answers to the questions the soul asks? Does the soul know? Then how do we ask the soul? How do we touch it, or at least, make a plea?

The thing that asks is the thing that knows. Yet it is from no-thing and no-one that this longing comes. The heart is struck. There is the pain of separation. And a pining to become one again.

Surya Namaskara, sun salutations, sometimes brings great freedom. Other times, freedom is cloaked beneath the noisy movements of the mind. In a whole practice, like breathing, waves of attention move inward and outward, backwards and forwards. How quickly the mind moves from here to there in place and time. A practice in many ways is just a reflection of daily life. One day steady and shaky the next.

Inhaling. Starting the journey, we look upward towards the sky, hopeful and imaginative. Ascent forward. The heart quickens. The blood pumps. The breath expands. Exhaling. Downward moving. Small weaknesses emerge. But we are still strong. We persist. Inhaling. Upward moving. The blood pumps. Muscles fatigue. The breath shortens. Exhaling. Downward moving. Who am I? Why did I start this? The further we go, the more we see. I am tired and need to rest. I fall back. Inhaling. Upward moving. There is no turning back.

Our vision has changed ever so slightly since the first inhale. And still, we keep on. How do we understand ourselves throughout the lifetime of our practice? How do we understand ourselves as extrinsic beings, full of personality, drive and ambition? And how do we know ourselves intrinsically, receptive, compassionate, and still? What do these different facets of self look like and feel like? How do we understand our yoga practice as a bridge to our daily lives? More importantly, how can practice become support for our lives rather than an escape or an indulgence?

Yoga is the stilling of the turning of thought. (Sutra 1.2)

Then the Seer resides in its own true nature. (Sutra 1.3)

Yoga is the stilling of the vacillations of the mind. Yoga’s aim is to see who we really are. When we practice asana, meditation, or when we are walking through the outer world how do we understand the nature of our true selves? From what place are we practicing and living? It is a confusing world we live in, abundant in advertisements selling Samadhi. This is why it is ever more important to understand who we are apart from what we see around us. Hopefully who we are is deeper than the latest trends in enlightenment, yoga, clothing, and food.

For the New Year, we attempt to practice in such a way that brings the multifaceted nature of ourselves into clearer view. We come together to contemplate, listen, and speak the truth of our looking inward and our looking outward. Looking ahead to the future, it may be true that the way forward is the way back – back to the fundamental teachings of yoga – learning what it means to still the mind and to really see ourselves, others, and all the spaces in between.

If you are interested in exploring these questions and more, please join us Sunday, January 8, at 5:30 PM at Purple Yoga for our first monthly satsang of 2012.

“Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep; but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.” —Walt Whitman

A list compiled from our own thought and experience. This is not meant to be objective or universal, but merely the books that we perceive as being useful and important. With the holidays around the corner, the list might be useful for those of you still seeking gifts for the seekers on your lists.
 

adapted from The Slender Thread, by David Ulrich & Laura Dunn

Jñana Mudra © Naomi Olson

My body feels good. My body does not feel good. My body looks good. My body does not look good. Why all the fuss? We don’t realize this most of the time, but what is real in us is our awareness, which resides behind, above, and within the body. It is paradoxical. The body is our field of activity; everything we experience takes place in and through our bodies. Even our mind and feelings are within the body. Our attention, our awareness can be found within the body, yet is not from the body or of the body. It comes from somewhere else—where, we do not know, a mysterious deeper or higher region.

After a recent yoga class, I felt the existence of subtle inner energies which formed a pervading warmth in the solar plexus, an opening of the heart, clarity of mind, and the exquisite lightness of being that, for me, only arises through some form of intensive inner work. In this case, the efforts and work of attention took place on the yoga mat. And, interesting to note, this awareness was found in spite of, or even perhaps assisted by, the presence of sharp pain and tension in my lower back and hips.

From the Series Samsara © David Ulrich 2011

Before the class, I was browsing a Yoga Journal and was struck by one indisputable fact: everyone portrayed in the magazine looked so beautiful, so relaxed, and so very young and vital. I thought: is this what yoga offers, an overemphasis on the fitness and beauty of the body? Most of the people in my class were not particularly beautiful; they were in fact awkward, sweaty, gruntingly striving, and full of odd bodily tensions and idiosyncratic reactions. Yet, I was quite touched by their efforts and their genuine strivings towards alignment and inner opening. This class, all classes in fact, contain a kind of collective energy that transcends each individual. Attention begets attention and genuine striving begets genuine striving. In a class, the whole is always greater than the sum of the individuals. My effort helps you and visa versa. In this case, I felt a growing awareness that permeated myself and the atmosphere at once, that was technically in my body. It filled my body and the space around it—but was clearly not from my body. From this fleeting awareness—which felt in moments like the sun—I could see within and without impartially, regarding all things equally with equanimity and dispassion. What is the relationship between this form of awareness and our bodies? This question has haunted me for years.

In a long-term yoga practice, the process of self-inquiry begins in the body. As we work with unfamiliar asanas, the body speaks loudly. It compels our attention through pain, tension, and the sheer awkwardness of the effort. This so-called awareness is still partial and still automatic, not steady or governed by our conscious intent. Yet we can watch the pain come and go. As we start to relax into the body, the pain generally starts to dissolve. More precisely, our identification with the pain starts to dissipate, and what we once considered to be a good sensation or bad sensation becomes merely sensation. We begin to be able to exist more completely in the moment of what is happening.

The initial purpose of yoga is stated as stilling the mind. We can come into the body and experience/observe its manifestations—it is tangible and stable. But it is much more difficult to observe the thoughts and feelings. They tend to capture our attention and take us far away from the present moment. As time goes on, our practice can be more fully linked to breathing. As we watch the breathing, we begin to see that my body is not me. It is not mybreath. I am being breathed. From this standpoint of cultivating a separation of the observer with the observed, we can begin to see, in the moment, the nature of our thoughts and feelings. We watch ourselves from the inside out. Seeing without seeing. Seeing not with the eyes.

What is observable is therefore not me, but still me at the same time. We strive to come into the body, yet at the same time, we recognize that an over-identification with the body—or with such ego-investments as fitness or attractiveness—impedes our true estate, our real attention from which genuine individuality may grow.

 “The body is necessary, but it is not the most important thing. It must obey something else. In fact, the body wants and likes the contact with energy that comes from above… One must liberate the subtle body from the prison of the habits of the ordinary body. The important thing is the real I, which is independent of the physical body. But the body is very necessary because the higher energy needs the body in order to manifest itself. … The conscious response or attention, which arises from the me, which is personal, serves as a thread for connecting the I and the me. The I is not personal.”
—Jeanne de Salzmann

Over the course of our lives, we learn many useful and valuable lessons. We learn to read and write, to cook, to drive, to participate in the complex demands of our occupations, to make love, and to raise our children. We may learn to play the cello or the guitar, and we participate in sports and recreational activities. Many of us study diet, nutrition, traditional and alternative methods of healing, and techniques for achieving a state of glowing health and maximum well-being.

But when do we learn to listen to our bodies?

We exercise, do yoga, jog, and engage in varied physical activities, mostly for the purposes of enjoyment, physical fitness, and to release pent-up energies. We study the body and the means toward increasing our vitality, longevity, and level of fitness. We view physical pursuits as beneficial to our bodies and minds. To some degree, we value ourselves and others based on one’s overall health and attractiveness, and we often equate athletic prowess, endurance, and sheer physical ability with the body’s intelligence.

But when do we learn to inhabit our bodies?

A true connection with the energies of the body is not necessarily causally related to ability in athletics, physical fitness, grace in movement, or freedom from medical conditions. While these factors may result as a by-product of a greater organic awareness and a deepening attention to the body, they are not the desired goal of our strivings. The ultimate aim of engaging and turning toward the energies of the body is growth of being and understanding. We talk about a moment of awareness as a “coming to our senses.” The literal meaning of this phrase, as I understand it, is the coming home, returning to our field of being, and the moments of widened perception that arise from this action.

Inhabiting the body brings a greater sense of presence, unmistakable in one’s experience of self and inwardly recognizable in others.

Laura remembers a Sanskrit phrase, that translated means, “not this body, not this mind.” I am not this and not that, so then what am I? I need to bring the mind and body together, experience the resonance of the body’s sensation, and witness the ranging thoughts and associations with the mind. But what is my standpoint? Who is the seer?

We have an awareness, a perception of the silence behind sound, behind manifestation, that can be found, sensed in a distant way amidst our noisy mind. A finer vibration. Can we seek to find it… ?

 “I begin to see what I habitually call “I” and to recognize that by myself I am nothing. At the heart of this humility there is a feeling that comes from the higher parts of myself and appears like a light, an intelligence, and with it confidence. … I no longer intervene and a silence comes by itself. In this silence, an unknown energy is revealed and acts on me. Consciousness is here. It does not need to have an object. Although it makes me aware of my body, in these impressions it is not my body, but the light of consciousness that is perceived. It reveals what I am and what the things around me are.”
—Jeanne de Salzmann

From The Slender Thread, by David Ulrich & Laura Dunn

Then I never leave Him and He never leaves me.

And He, who in this Oneness of Love

Loves me in whatever he sees,

Wherever He may live,

In truth, He lives in me.”

-The Bhagavad Gita

In a recent dialogue with a friend I asked, “Who teaches the yoga of letting go?” It seems that for many years, lifetimes perhaps, we work arduously to understand who we are. We go through various incarnations in a single lifetime: child, student, parent, yogi, lover. Each time we become attached to one modality, we are inevitably forced to release such a singular way of being. It remains, however, that in order to understand who we are, we must first explore who we are not. In the end it’s possible that we are all these things, and our attention must widen to accept all modalities: good and bad, light and dark.

Some of us have explored the extreme poles of who we thought we were. And now, again, we must let go of the identification with the minutia of our conceptual selves. Patanjali asserts that, thankfully, we aren’t expected to let go into the vast expanses of nothingness. We are to let go to something greater – to Isvara, or Lord. It is love and devotion to our higher possibilities that helps us surrender. How do we surrender ourselves in the service of something higher?

The yoga sutras are filled with dichotomies: purusha/prakriti, The Seer/the seen, attachment/aversion, atman/Brahman. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the mark of true intelligence is the ability to entertain two opposing thoughts at the same time. Perhaps this is similar to what Patanjali is describing. His prescription for overcoming our fractured nature is through the practice of devotion to our potential with the aim of developing a symbiotic relationship between the opposing forces of our own being.

As modern yoga practitioners, we intently look at ourselves, our motivations, behaviors, and actions. In many ways, our practice can be very self-centered.  Yoga sutras 1.23-1.26 start to pull us out of our self-centeredness and ask us to give up the selves we have worked so hard to know and understand for something greater. In the case of Patanjali, the teaching is to surrender to God. Since we often work with these ideas within the framework of relationships, the concept of surrender to another entity fits perfectly. Both Sufi and Christian mystics refer to this relationship as the one between the Lover and the Beloved. Yoga philosophy looks at this as a relationship between the Atman and Brahman, or the The Seer and the seen. The larger question here is how do we let go of the identification and attachment to the selves we have worked so hard to become? Can we stand outside of the play of opposites, as F. Scott Fitzgerald suggests, and entertain two dichotomous thoughts, or even selves, simultaneously? What would this look like and how would it be achieved?

The simplest way to find this is through a daily sitting practice, where we start to look at and observe thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Some waves are quite captivating and carry us away, sometimes without our even knowing it. Each time, we bring ourselves back to the body, grounding ourselves in ever-elusive present moment. Patanjali gives us several practices (1.23-1.39) through which we can begin understand the relationship between the higher and lower and the Seer and the seen:

Devotion to the Lord – Sutra 1.23 states that Samadhi is attainable “through devotion to the Lord.” In my research on addiction and Buddhism, I found that most addicts on the 12-step path to recovery generally had the most difficulty surmounting the first 3 steps that unsurprisingly all have to do with the concept of faith and devotion: (1) relinquishing control, (2) admission of the existence of a higher power, and (3) surrender to God. Most of us are at some level addicted to our thoughts, feelings, and ways of being. We see that difficulty surrendering is not just a problem for the alcoholic as it is for all of us. This raises the larger question of how are we to surrender when we lack faith, and do not believe in anything other than ourselves when we see that the collective and individual selves we have constructed are inherently flawed or subject to change? Most of what we consider to be “right” or “correct” thinking are merely collections of past impressions and experiences that reflect the views and values of our parents, culture, dogma, and, more recently, mass media. If we look at the state of the economy, environment, and the individual it’s difficult to believe that popularly held beliefs about what an ideal modern life entails is indeed “right” or “correct.” What can we trust in ourselves? Yoga practice can bring us to the realization that there is a nascent self that can be trusted, that is in touch with our higher nature, yet that is elusive and easily lost.

Devotion to God, or Isvara, is important even for those who consider themselves to be non-religious or secular people. One of the higher functions of religion is that it provides people with, not faith per se, but something or someone to have faith in. We see that as we embark on a path of self-inquiry, we are constantly putting ourselves into question. Some may say “I have faith in myself.” Yet, through self-examination, we start to see that the concept of self is rather slippery in nature. Which self do we have faith in if the self is constantly changing? Religion and spirituality, on the other hand, provide us with a constant-Self, a higher-Self, or an eternal divine in which to place our faith in. What Jesus, Isvara, and Krishna all have in common is that they are entities who are like us, but not like us in that they have attained perfection. Jesus was a divinely human, as was Krishna, and Isvara is an aspect of the self, but not the self.

Cultivation of the positive – If one cannot or will not surrender to a higher power, Patanjali uses other people as a focus for our attention. We have practiced this before, when we thought of those in our lives we had conflicted relationships with. Sutra 1.33 states that “By cultivating an attitude of friendship towards those who are happy, compassion toward those in distress, joy toward those who are virtuous, and equanimity toward those who are non-virtuous, lucidity arises in the mind.”

Focus on the body – if even this isn’t possible for the practitioners, Patanjali says that attention should be placed in the body. Sutra 1.34-1.35 say that, “Stability is gained by exhaling and retaining the breath,” and “focus on a sense object arises, and this causes steadiness of the mind.”

The above exercises are really very similar to the previous month’s discussion on the different exercises we used when we found ourselves at different points in our practice. Again, when agitated, there a gross awareness of the self must be established. Once the physical body and identity are formed, we look deeper into our thoughts and our emotions in an effort to cultivate higher thoughts and feelings.

“Every hunting, hungering lover is half of a knucklebone, wooer of a meaning that is inseparable from its absence. The moment when we understand these things—when we see what we are projected on a screen of what we could be—is invariably the moment of wrench and arrest. We love that moment, and we hate it. We have to keep going back to it, after all, if we wish to maintain contact with the possible…Only a god’s word has no beginning or end. Only a god’s desire can reach without lack.”  –Ann Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

Even Plato comments in his Symposium on the condition of the human being and on the search for who we really are. He says, “Each one of us is but the symbolon, half of a knucklebone, of a human being—sliced in half like a flatfish, two instead of one—and each pursues the a never ending search for the other half of himself.” All eras, cultures and religions share this common thread. Our practices are attempts to not only know who we are, but to also begin to find unity and peace between the fragments of ourselves.

Please join Yoko Fujiwara and I at Purple Yoga this coming Sunday, December 4, 2011, from 5:30 – 6:30 PM to explore these questions and more. Donations gratefully accepted.

Poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes: “Try to love the questions themselves. … Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

To question is life itself. I wrote this ten years ago. And understand it more clearly now, as I likely will find greater clarity ten years from now. Our insights are evolving—always—if we seek to enlarge the question. Keeping a question alive means a continuous striving towards understanding and realization.

Many questions have vibrated in me over the years. In a previous post, I raised the question that Dorothea Dooling asked frequently: What serves what? This single question began a path of discovery that has served to enlarge my understanding and open me to many new insights. We are always serving something, related to forces that originate in either the higher or the lower realms. The mechanical flow of life is powerful and compelling, pulling us into its currents from life to death. In other words, in the vast majority of moments in our lives, we serve life itself.

However, another possibility emerges in our most present and aware moments: of consciously serving something higher. Our bodies can be receptacles for finer energies; our feelings can open to the transformative influence of faith hope and love; and our minds can be attuned to the currents of a deeper intelligence. In these rare and refined moments, we can be conduits for something finer, higher, deeper, to pass into the world through our very being.

So many discoveries for me, in different areas of life, have arisen from this simple yet profound question. Gurdjieff said that all things have at least seven different aspects, often on differing levels. And my first photography teacher, Nicholas Hlobeczy, would open us frequently to new discovery by asking the question: And what else? As soon as we thought we knew or understood, he would simply ask: And what else?

Even concise, declarative statements can form a question, a quest towards exploration, experience, and inquiry. Patanjali, complier of the Yoga Sutras, engages in a platonic form of dialogue through simple, evocative statements that open to deep questioning and discoveryover time. There are 195 Sutras, divided between four books. Patanjali begins with the most general and moves through the Sutras to the most specific. He reconstructs a progressive process of inquiry, of questioning that demands time, practice, and seeking understanding before clarity can emerge.

Quite early in the book, Sutra 1:3 states: The seer resides in its own splendor. Pure awareness perhaps? Freedom from the tyranny of our fragmentation and self-occupied inner conditions? The statement is a distant aim, a target to aim for. The Yoga Sutras offer a progressive unfolding of practice and experience.

Yoga helps to continue the germination of the seeds of self-questioning. The early stages of an asana practice ask the question “what is the body?” as different poses evoke different sensations. Moving forward in practice we move through layers of understanding of who we are. We understand ourselves to be external, material beings at the onset of a practice, preoccupied with external reality – our relationships, our physical sensations and attachments. Over time, we understand ourselves to be less physical in nature and more cerebral. We may question our thinking more than our doing.

 All of these questions seem to link to the eternal question of who am I? At each stage of practice, we move through layers, asking “Is this who I am?” At each step we find something deeper. In my own experience, pitfalls arise when I stop asking, thinking “Aha! This is it. This is who I am.” Inevitably, at this point some other experience crops up that breaks the fragility of these small self realizations, telling me “No, not that.”

Thus far, each stage is integrative in that it is part of a greater whole. To take one piece and call it completely “I” is indeed a misidentification.  Each question points to another question. The Chandogya Upanisad’s statement Tat tvam asi, or “Thou are that” poses a different answer to the question of Who am I? Perhaps instead of rejecting the outer manifestations of the self as being false – “No, not that” – we can see each part as one element of a greater whole, saying “Yes. Thou art that… and what else?” Yoga becomes a form of creative inquiry.

Approaching a question is at the heart of both creativity and yoga. We work from questions… not from answers. In the creative act, we actively inquire into the nature of a new idea, a potentially broader way of seeing, or a particular region of exploration that lies yet unformed. Further, this quest is sensed, felt, and known simultaneously, through the head, heart, and body. Exploration of our potential wholeness lies at the core of the creative process.

“So if we dare to use the word ‘creative’, we must see that its possibility lies in that mysterious human property of attention: not a mere mental attention, but an attention which relates and mobilizes the sensitive attention of the body, the affective intelligence of the feeling, and the ordering attention of the mind toward a more total openness to what is… and the real life, the living energy which that contains.”  —Dorothea Dooling, A Way of Working

By David Ulrich & Laura Dunn, adapted from The Slender Thread