Support and Inspiration

I cannot even imagine my early days of practicing yoga without the inspired reading material I was taking in. I read the Bhagavad Gita, The yoga Sutras, Autobiography of a Yogi, Miracle of Love and a large collection of books on the teachings of Ramana Maharshi. Those words filled me with awe and reverence for Presence, Truth and Consciousness. Study of the yogic teachings and scriptures is essential for fueling a practice that will last. Otherwise your life is tugging you in every other possible direction and it is easy to get lost, to forget why you came, to give up the practice in lieu of a dream world of your own making.

The other thing I did a lot was I kept a journal and in it I wrote quotes from the books I was reading, along with questions and epiphanies I had. I also took the liberty to color, draw, scribble or otherwise add design to my journal pages. Today there is no shortage of great yogic writings online and in bookstores and magazines. My favorite website these days is Stillness Speaks. Check it out. There you will find my teacher Francis Lucille along with other great teachers of consciousness. You can see videos and read words of wisdom there. But don’t forget the classic greats like the yoga sutras. Even if you don’t fully understand them, read them. I have read them many times because each time I do, my understanding is entirely different than it had been a year or two prior so I am able to digest and utilize that much more of it. But in order for that to happen, you have to start. Then you can create your own collection of words of wisdom gleaned from books, videos and your own epiphanies.

Emptiness

In the 17 years I’ve been teaching yoga, the most common complaint I’ve heard is that it seems impossible to develop and stick with a yoga practice. The main reason for that is that it seems people have filled their lives to capacity and perhaps a little beyond, to just shy of a breaking point – so that life is lived in a super stressed-out, high anxiety, push and shove sort of way, cramming as much as possible into every day, spreading one life very thinly over as broad an area as possible. It seems there is some kind of nobility or honor in MORE: doing more, having more, taking on more, accomplishing more, knowing more, talking more, collecting more stuff, more friends, more responsibilities, more demands, more problems, more music, more work. What most people seem to crave is more time, more peace and calm, more centering, more relaxing, more joy. But the move to fill every corner of space and time continues. Tapas (austerity, intensity) invites us to empty out. “Austerity”, in this sense, refers not to extreme austerities but of living simply. Clearing out your mind, your heart, your garage, your closets, your clutter, your calendar to make room for yoga – for a more affirming lifestyle, that is the intention behind tapas. If you’ve ever spent a day or even a few hours cleaning an over-stuffed closet or a garage full of junk, you know the wonderful feeling you get when the job is complete. All joking about the backache aside, there is normally a surge of energy that comes after emptying out a space or organizing a room or closet. Everything you have takes energy. Just sitting in a room with your stuff takes energy. You are seeing it. You have to look through it to find the stuff you are looking for. You have to clean around it. It is in your space. Start to discriminate about what you invite into your space. Just because you received it for a gift doesn’t mean you have to look at it for the next 20 years. Sometimes I use things like that (gifts) in a more seasonal way; bringing them out at certain times of the year, in memory of the giver, in celebration. That way I can rotate some of the things I have. If you want to invite yoga into your life, and you find you are struggling to keep your practice, try to clear out a place for it, and I don’t mean a small corner of a table filled with junk. I mean CLEAR OUT the riff raff. Otherwise, you are filling your life with a gesture that essentially says that what you really want to invest in is STUFF, BUSYNESS, WORLDLY PURSUITS.

You always start where you are. Look around. You can start anywhere – any little gesture of releasing, of clearing, will have its affect on you. Go ahead and try it. You will start to enjoy it so much you will want to keep going. That’s a good thing because tapas is not something you just do once and it is done. Like every aspect of yoga practice, it will become an ongoing part of your life – looking around to see what needs your attention. Shoveling STUFF out the back door as fast as you can, watching in amazement as it continues its march into your life, right through the front door! We live in the land of abundance – the land of plenty. There is no shortage of STUFF. Actually, some of the poorest people I’ve known in the USA have the largest piles of stuff. So if you want to make room for true prosperity and wealth of the most lasting kind, simplify your life. Start now and continue regularly to observe everything, including the flow of thought and feeling. What you take in, not only food and beverages, but also ideas, images, books and magazines, movies, videos, TV programs, it all becomes a part of you. And just like everything else, it can move you in the direction of peace and truth, of awareness and understanding or away from it. It can help you to understand and thrive, or it can add to the proverbial clutter of mind, emotion, and environment. Learn to discriminate. Learn to listen quietly, to watch, to see, and to say no thank you. This is not selfishness. This is managing your energy so you are not drained or distracted. It carves you out so you can be more fully alive, more fully present, much more available than ever before. It carves you out so, like a fine violin, you will resonate with beautiful vibrations.

Mindful Speaking

“There is only one decision you need to make: either you are working at your freedom or you are accepting your bondage.”
Robert Adams

Some of the habitual actions and thoughts you have each day are only adding to the coat of illusion you are wearing. How do you start your day? What are your activities and what are your thoughts and what are the first words to come from your mouth? Make them beautiful. Make your morning ritual beautiful by listening to something inspirational or something beautiful, or by simply moving into a meditative mind set whereby you observe your thoughts and feelings in an objective fashion and choose your first words with care. Say something loving and beautiful to someone. Or if you find yourself alone when you arise, then let your internal dialog be one of encouragement and support. Even if you have an inner (or outer) critic who abuses you first thing, still, find some goodness to comment on as well. At Kripalu, where I took my first yoga teacher training, that practice was built into the programs. Each time we had our practice teach, before we received any comments from our peers, we were to share our own experience with the group. First, we shared what we felt our strengths were in the practice teach, then we shared where we saw our teaching “edge”, or where we felt most challenged. It was a great feature of their program and it taught me to be able to find good even when things might seem to have turned out disastrous. It also helped me to recognize my inner critic’s voice in a more objective light, become my own best advocate and to see myself with a more balanced eye. It is a practice that helps to keep me grounded in reality, as opposed to being lost and confused in self-criticism and judgments.

So when you start your day, start it out by aligning with the way you want to feel. If you have a habit of grumbling first thing about what’s wrong, change your habit to one of offering words of love and praise, and give voice to what’s RIGHT, regardless of what others around you are saying. That way you set the stage for a day of beauty and joy. Then, at day’s end, you might decide to try a Kripalu-style evaluation where you first go over your day with an eye for what went right, where your strengths lie, and any little ways you made the world a better place. Then you might also notice, with the same objective mind, areas where you will want to practice being more mindful and aware of your words, actions, and intentions. I enjoy ending my day with a note of gratitude. No matter what your circumstance, there is always something to give thanks for: possessions, friendships, opportunities, skills, experiences, and even hardships (they, too, have their gifts).

Happiness

When you take the time to settle into the silence regularly, and listen deeply, you will begin to realize that your happiness is not dependent on outside forces. You will begin to develop a relationship with Life as it unfolds, a relationship firmly grounded in reality (as opposed to fantasy created in the mind about the way you think it should be or the way you want it to be or even the way you perceive it to be). You will no longer feel that you can be happy only when everyone around you acts the way you want them to, or only when the weather is just so and all your planets line up perfectly. Ramana Maharshi once put it this way: “Trying to change the world without first changing yourself is like trying to cover the whole world with leather to avoid walking on stones and thorns. It is much easier to wear sandals.”
In your meditation, accept all things: thoughts, feelings, memories; all things with equanimity. This is the practice of vairagya. Abhyasa and vairagya – practice and equanimity - work together to keep your sails moving with the wind in a way that moves you effortlessly toward freedom. To practice equanimity is to see the world without opinion and preference. Whether the room is too hot or too cold, too noisy or too stuffy, practice sitting quietly without needing to change everything to suit your needs. Increase your comfort level by accepting life, and all of its ups and downs, with equanimity. Soon you will discover that you feel more content with the world, with yourself and with others. You will expand your awareness and acceptance of other ideas, and other ways of seeing things. From that place of real understanding you can make a difference in the world. You can act from a place of clarity and wisdom instead of reacting out of habit or fear.

Don’t worry that you will turn into a door mat with this practice. Quite the contrary. If you are acting on auto-pilot, and auto-reactions, then you are already more of a door mat than you might realize. Without the practice of vairagya, you are at the mercy of your desires, you are being held prisoner by your own opinions and preferences, so that if things aren’t exactly comfortable, you aren’t exactly happy or content. If you merely change your surroundings to suit your preferences, it is like being in prison and putting up a picture of beauty. Nice, but the prison is still there. So it is with your judgments, preferences, desires, criticisms and opinions; unless you are able to observe yourself beyond them, you will always be held captive by them. The stronger you hold on to them, the more intense they get and the more you suffer. Learn to find beauty everywhere... at least, practice being neutral in difficult situations. When you aren’t wasting energy spouting off, complaining, blaming or otherwise expressing your opinions, you are able to see more, hear more, observe more (in yourself and your surroundings). You are also more likely to move through the situation in a logical, systematic way, one obvious step at a time. Less flailing about, less damage done. Listen to yourself. Be willing to lay aside all your preferences, opinions and ideas of how things SHOULD be in lieu of being present in the world AS IT IS. This is vairagya, the practice of equanimity. It can be practiced continually and it won’t take away your preferences or your ability to change things for the better in the world. It will merely be freeing you from the bondage of your unconscious thought patterns. It will be freeing up more of your energy to do your work in a more efficient manner. In other words you will not be all wrapped up in angst when things don’t go the way you desire them to go. For you, happiness will be a steady state of consciousness free from the events around you. You will feel a deeper, fuller quality of grief, of joy, of richness in your life, because you will always be grounded in reality, in truth, in light and in love.

Remembering

If yoga is to settle the mind into silence – to still the busyness of the mind so that you can know your true nature, then to practice yoga, in any form, is to remember that and return to the stillness, the interior silence moment to moment. The Sanskrit word Abhyasa means practice, and the practice is to renew your commitment many times each day. How will you remember to do this? When we had the yoga studio, just walking into the space was enough to put you into a very peaceful, quiet interior space. You walked in and you could feel all the jumbled up tensions, thoughts and feelings of the day dropping away as you prepared your space. Maybe you perched yourself near some plants or flowers and settled in to the relaxed atmosphere there. If you participated in classes at the yoga studio, at any of the three studios we had in that 15 year span, then you have a piece of the studio inside you. You participated in creating the amazing sense of expansion and peace that was so easily felt in that space. Let your life be an expression of what you care about and what you love. Let yourself be surrounded by the things that inspire and support your highest aspirations. You may keep an object in your car, to remind you each time you enter it, of your commitment to Presence. Some people like to begin their meditation with japa; the repetition of a mantra, usually with the use of mala beads. Having the beads to carry with you throughout the day can be a lovely tactile reminder to remain steady in awareness and not get caught in the dramas within or around you.

Create altars, and spaces of beauty to remind you and support you in your new commitment. You can use anything that reminds you to keep your mind and heart open: a picture of your teacher or loved ones, a picture of a person in meditation or in a yoga posture, or objects from nature. A simple, clean and serene setting in a corner of your living room might do it for you. You might begin by de-cluttering a space you see daily. And while you’re at it, you could also set up a little space for meditation. I have often marveled at how here in the US, most people have their living room furniture arranged around a TV set, as if it were some holy altar that they must pay homage to daily – many times each day, or even continuously. Is that the altar you want to invest in? Make little statements all over in your life that will remind you, the way the studio did, that there is, in addition to all the outer disciplines and responsibilities and enjoyments, an inner life that is waiting with nourishment for your soul and when you give it your attention, it will change the way you enjoy and appreciate the life you live.

Meditation: Take an active role in your awakening. Rather than passively sitting and absorbing information, filling your brain with stuff, take some time to empty out, to listen deeply to yourself, to begin to allow the chitta vritti (mind stuff) to settle. Sit quietly and allow summer to enter you deeply. You will not regret it.