Bhagavad Gita Book Three: Unending responsibilities

Life is unending responsibilities. Life is hard.

That isn’t a harsh teaching. It’s a liberating one. Other spiritualities have said it in other ways, and psychology has a plethora of variants, but the fact is life is hard. First off, we are mortal. Secondly, we are social. And finally, we are complicated individuals with sometimes conflicting needs.

Krishna reminds Arjuna of this in book three, and cautions him not to make life any harder than it has to be. The old saw about there always being some pain, but we do not have to contribute suffering into the deal. Without mortality, other people, and individuality there could be no love. No freedom. No hope.

If we feel life should be other than it is, we’re creating our own suffering. If we want to bend life or other people to our will, we’re authoring hell. If we simply roll over and feel victimized by it all, we’re making the biggest suffering yet: denying the soul and abandoning hope.

Life isn’t ONLY suffering. Love is real, too. Given these two truths, our actions matter. Our orientation makes a difference. We’re either helping or we’re not.

This is largely the teaching of book three. With several philosophically dense forays into psychology and a smattering of poetic stunners.

Karma, SPIRITUALITY, and Dharma: This Sacred Life

In book one, we are given a visceral telling of the suffering heart. We either take too much responsibility, in an enmeshed way, or deny our responsibility in a disengaged way. Either way, we set up an inner conflict and banish our better nature to the wilds. This causes a physical upset and churning. Eventually, the churning confuses our minds and leaves us with delusion. (Ragas (desire) leads to shoka (grief) ends in moha (deluded intellect), in which we confuse right and wrong. Then we are spiritually lost.

In Book Two, thankfully, our delusion recognizes itself and asks for help. And god smiles.

Then basic yoga philosophy/spirituality/psychology is laid down. (Only our most superficial layer is mind, under that a tangled and turbulent ocean of stories and habits, archetypes and beliefs. These are constantly framing our every thought and perception though we’re unaware of this happening. We don’t see what we’re doing but blame outsides. Under even that there is enlightened awareness, and under even that you have a soul. To navigate your way out of worldly suffering, then, you actually have to pause and about face. Rather than staying in the superficial, realize what you are doing to yourself. Go even further and realize you have a soul and this is all a spiritual question.)

Good. But what are we actually supposed to DO? The wave is coming! The world is on fire! I am sad and confused!

Ah, says the teacher. Philosophy by itself is nothing. What you really need is not so much philosophy as yoga. Yoga is philosophy in action. Specifically, skillful action. Not flailing, not giving in, but following some well designed according to human anatomy and perennially proven steps: swimming is one kick and alternate arm stroking, then the other, over and over again. There is a world of difference between pity and compassion. This is obvious if you compare self pity and self compassion. Yoga is the skillful move from futile pity to real and active compassion.

Now here we are in book three. Heart is beginning to swim along, one stroke at a time. Like the karate kid, waxing on and off, he’s doing the thing but can’t help asking: what does this have to do with actual fighting? When do I get to the real thing?

Transmission and Translation

Us modern western folk stumble across yoga and pick it up. Oh! What a pretty thing, we think, holding it like a shiny rock. I want this, we think.

“āchāryāt pādamādatte, pādam śişyah swamedhayā | pādam sabrahmachāribhyah, pādam kālakrameṇa ca”

— A student gleans one part of his learning from a teacher, one quarter from his peers, one part from his own awakening, and one part from time.

Much of my mentorship with Michael Stone boiled down to talking about transmission and translation. Us modern yogis wouldn’t realize these are important things unless we were explicitly told so: after all, this pretty gee-gaw was right here in front of us. It’s human nature to want it for our own. It’s natural to assume, having read a word, that we understood the meaning. Some of us even learn Sanskrit, and then think for sure we know. Others of us ritualize forms to an acuteness, thinking we’re doing the same thing the ancients did.

Transmission is how spiritual teaching and philosophy are done. Yoga, Buddhism, and Vedanta all have a rich lexicon and lineage here, but transmission is part of all spiritualities and philosophies. It’s the socratic method. It’s students and teachers. It’s curricula, time, and pedagogy. It’s sacred texts but also the cultural practices surrounding the texts. It is exegesis of sacred texts, and a community of people who have more information and experience than you do. We can also see the idea of transmission in things like therapy, twelve step programs, and craft or apprenticeship.

Transmission suggests that there is a vastness behind the words and provides access to the vastness. There is an unspoken (but assumed) difference between karma kanda - the bare on the page things - and jñāna kanda, the unexplicit, subtle, symbolic and personally relevant meaning of things.

The synthesis of karma kanda and jñāna kanda unfolds in the context of teachers, having a personal practice that is guided or mentored by those teachers, and ongoing community and experiences that provide us with the good of sangha, mirrors, examples, and support. The unspoken reality of transmission is the fact that no ‘thing’ is actually being handed on at all: this process evokes direct personal insight in the student, rather than handing on a secret wisdom that has been unchanged for millennia and is available only through initiation. The understood consequence is an actual regard for handed on technologies, artifacts, symbols and cultural wealth.

All this is assumed in the context of transmission. But since we are reading in translation, not only across cultures but across time, these things need to be made explicit.

If then, we’re starting to play with transmission, we next have to realize we are dealing with translation. Often, in translation, literalness kills the meaning. We need to develop a dialectical approach, an exploratory and inquisitive open earring. But we also need to understand that translation works in two directions: to merely look for meaning quickly leads to spiritual consumerism and escapism (aka cultural appropriation) or unexamined false equivalency and reductive thought: saying something like the Gita is Vedanta’s ‘bible’, or that śāntiḥ means ‘inner peace’. Coming to understand, through translations, has to do with examining our own projections as it much as it does grasping something outside our current referents.

"Selfless Service”

In all the English translations of the Gita, book three is titled 'karma yoga’ or ‘selfless service’. This is where translation and transmission are important. It isn’t that this translation is wrong, but “selfless service” requires teaching, practice, and self realization to hold up. Without these, it is prone to valorizing meekness. As meekness and self abnegation have been used against people for centuries, this is a real danger.

Karma yoga means much more than selfless service.

Karma means action, and refers to the underlying or background (implicit, not explicit, transmitted not read) philosophy of sankhya. In Sankhya, ‘things’ are not fixed; existence itself is constant change. We too are constantly changing. Life is a verb. Hope is a verb. Suffering is a verb. Self is a verb. Love is a verb. As modern prophet Octavia Butler says, “god is change”.

Change means possibility. Change is not pure chaos. It isn’t moral relativity. Change unfolds according to natural laws. We can influence, but not control. We can participate, but we are not god and cannot save the world. We are not totally free, but we are never absolute victims.

How change unfolds evokes the gunas: rajas is frantic, tamas is thick and clingy or resistant, sattva is a goldilocks just right.

Karma means more than Sankhya-n change, though. Also referent here is the background vision of the Veda and the revelation of the Upanisads.

Both take the bare fact of life and render it sacred. They posit an understanding of religion or spirituality that is ultimate and personal. This is it. Bless. Both the Veda and the Upanisads suggest that a practice of seeing ordinary, often painful life as sacred transforms suffering and liberates the individual. But this requires effort. There are thousands of mantras and teachings here, and it takes a body ten thousand attempts, but the basic idea is that life can become a spiritual journey, the body mind itself can be seen as a temple, ordinary human spirit can overcome all conceivable obstacles.

Given all of that, karma does not mean self-abnegation or saccharine charity. We cannot ever fully believe nor live in any ethos that requires one’s own diminishment.

The vision of the Veda and the unfoldment of the Upanisads posit: every moment as sacred, the mundane as potentially holy, the smallest actions as being the only true path.

Dharma

If we look at the world, or into our hearts, we see: change is real and constant but so too are connections. Every action has consequences.

Trying to control or feeling helpless have consequences.

Doing your best also has consequences.

Dharma - in this context - means recognizing all of that as true and putting your feet on the ground, your shoulder to the dharma wheel, and prayer on your lips. A slight variance between being alive and living our lives: to love what is mortal, to engage with humanity, and to believe in oneself. Dharma also means recognizing we’ll have to keep doing this, over and over again. Every day. For the rest of our lives. It means renouncing fantasy while adhering to hope, realizing this isn’t a contradiction. Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water, goes the saying: after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.

There is something to human mind (sankhya, the Veda, and the Upanishads all have their gems to give narrative and reveal what it is, but I’ll just say that it is) that balks against reality. We aren’t good at it. Dharma is, in a sense, highly unnatural.

Each of us has a life to live, a role to play, and we shimmer all the way into the galaxy. This is one of the ways I was taught dharma is: every individual has both rights and responsibilities/dharma to self, to society, and to the cosmos. These are not opposite pulls. There is only one gravity. None of that, if sincerely done, is a contradiction.

We heal ourselves and the world through small, intimate, personal actions. This can seem impossible or contradictory, but isn’t. Unfortunately it is the grasping or understanding this that stands in the way of experiencing it. This is one step at a time philosophy, or one day at a time or just for today understanding of our human capacities. It baffles, but it also works.

It works because the karmic truth of world suffering is that it happened one moment, one action, one person at a time. Trauma happens relationally, so healing must also be relational. Ideas are not the same as being. We can talk, hope, wish, pray, or debate what needs to be done endlessly, but everything begins with a single immediate step. We do not have to have all the answers or be perfect; we only have to be ourselves and answer the moment best we can.

Two Objections

In good practice, objections are vital. They are wonderful. They are food and safety and lead us somewhere. Let’s consider two big ones.

1) Living my own life and meeting my personal responsibilities isn’t enough (because of suffering in the world).

True. You will never save the world. But it is an underestimation of the world to think you could or should save it. There is no contradiction between your own fulfillment and contributing to the welfare of humanity. Not so long as you see your own fulfillment as inclusive of love.

2) “unending responsibilities” sounds exhausting! Productivity culture is killing us and is oppressive.

True. But conflating karmic responsibilities with some kind of marxist capitalism is the confusion here. Dehumanizing ourselves isn’t the point of karmic responsibilities. This objection isn’t a mistake or a problem; it gives us something to start working with. Everybody’s got some serious prior patterning and unexamined potentials as regards “responsibility”. Unraveling the pattern and realizing the potential - personally - is the way. This ends being an enrichment and truth discovery, rather than a goad over the head.

In the Beginning/In conclusion

Book Three suggests that we challenge the separation between spiritual life and ordinary life. Dharma isn’t something you have to seek; it’s who you already are and the life you have been given.

Our heartfelt and bodied responses to this teaching are not a problem; they are clues. Do you object with number one, “this isn’t enough!” or number two, “it’s all too much!”?

The very first thing Krishna says in this book is that understanding is hard, but doing one right thing is easy. He appears to be contrasting understanding (jñāna) and action (karma). That apparent contradiction will be taken up later. For now, I just say he isn’t contradicting: understanding is not separate from doing, it simply takes a long time and direct experience. Knowing comes from doing, not vice versa.

Two śastras come up in discussion:

Venerable Samu Sunim “The Dharma is intimate, immediate, spontaneous, and obvious”

and poet Mary Oliver’s

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

Why yoga matters now: emotional regulation and resilience. Big picture, and two tools to use today.

The emotional landscape is harsh.

In our fatigue, depression, anxiety, resentment, burn out and insecurity, yoga is more important than ever.

In the upcoming three day workshop, I both want to provide solace and support, and I want to kick some butts (hearts) into gear. We know enough, we’ve got tools, or at least we have suspicions and questions and a longing.

It’s important that we get clear on what we’re doing, what yoga is (and isn’t), so that we can navigate our way through this positively. It’s important that we navigate our way through: our doing so is how we most effectively support others, change the world, make a difference.

And we can make a difference.

One of the key understandings here is that yoga is a toolbox of emotional regulation and personal resilience.

Let’s define those terms. It’s important to know what it is we’re doing.

Emotional regulation, at first blush and in common parlance, is something like ‘calm down’ or ‘feel better’. But that’s not what it really is. Emotional regulation is about connection.

Resilience does not mean unflappability. It is not a holy aloofness or a pasted on smile. It isn’t a Nietzchean what doesn’t kill you or a grin and go on. It is a vivid capacity to do hard things.

Emotional regulation

We have all been socialized to ‘regulate’ in terms of hiding our emotions, staying calm for others, or behaving in accepted or rewarded ways. Some emotions are valued and other’s aren’t. In psychobabble, the emotional toolbox we’ve been given often involves masking, repressing, ableism, and code shifting. In extremis, this might come down to internalized oppression and abuse.

True regulation, though, means:

• feeling your body, including a capacity to navigate unpleasant sensation or discomfort, find resources for pain management, and accurately assess threat and dysmorphia. This gives us compassion and understanding of things like dissociation, numbing, projection, compulsivity. Both acceptance and new choices abound. We can stop hating or trying to control ourselves all the time.

• feeling safe in your body - in at least some aspect of your body. This is something that often has to be learned, and compassionately learned, especially as regards trauma, pain, gender dysmorphia, ablism and ageism, etc.

• emotional literacy: being able to name what’s happening inside

• emotional discovery: human body brains are hardwired to experience an incredible array of emotions. Discovering our emotional capacity opens our world, reveals depths and possibilities we weren’t aware of, and has a real tone of befriending yourself.

• reaching for support instead of shutting down. or running away

• an evolutionary and expansive flexibility to our responses, in an upward and outward spiraling way

• this both implies a reclamation of things that have been neglected, denied, or stuffed so far down they’ve become hell monsters of the truly mythic deeps and darks, AND it means we are able to express the appropriate things at the appropriate times. We know the antisocial edge of expressing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way. But we also have beaucoup ness: physical, artistic, meditative, spiritual and social ways of expressing what needs to be expressed without inflicting harm or building up consequences.

The Yoga tradition is rich with tools for mitigating challenge and resourcing the good, beginning with our sense of agency and capacity.

For the sake of brevity and utility here, it’s most important to say

-emotional regulation is learned. Our plastic brains have a capacity to relearn, and our tissues adapt to input.

-Yoga has a unique understanding of suffering, and an ultimately positivistic and humanistic orientation in the face of suffering. We’re not aiming at neutral, nor a return to before we were broken, but at something good out of intrinsic challenge. There is a yes and an affirmation of will at its source. This doesn’t deny or suppress difficult things. We can feel seen and acknowledged. Painful, ugly, and sad things are validated and realized. But they are not only validated: they are seen as potentially and positively transformative. Healing means moving beyond coping to integration; resolution means uplifting; regulation means hope.

Resilience

I think I was given an image of resilience as grit. As taking another hit. As being like one of those inflatable punching bags, generally posing as a clown and weighted at the bottom such that it kept bouncing back no matter what. Problem with this was, such an idea is secretly resentful and dependent on the damage. It’s a negative definition, and a pretty rough way to relate to either yourself or the world. I thought of resilience as toughness. I’ve always been tough. I’ve been praised for it. But sometimes that toughness was causing harm. I identified with my brokenness.

Yoga insists that people aren’t broken.

Through practice and a lot of training, I’ve come to understand that resilance is

adaptive:

which isn’t the same thing as taking another punch. Resilent folks adjust to difficulty and stressors, finding ways to grow and discover. Their well-being is enhanced. I think ‘wellness’ is a shit word, we should start replacing it with ‘welfare’. I’m going to start a whole holy campaign, a marketing blitz, in which we take on the wellness industry with welfare. It isn’t individual. Health markers are more determined by public health than personal choice; at the same time it is true that exercising choice where we’ve got it makes the difference. We all do better when we all do better (Paul Wellstone).

Resilience is recuperative

which is more than ‘bouncing back’. It is a reorienting and mastery of setbacks and challenges. Resilience demonstrates mental strength and employed emotional regulation. It is vitalizing.

Resilience is resourced

Resilient folks develop and utilize so many tools to manage stress and adversity that they reach a point of instinctive, intuitive, magic seeming knowing how to make anything work. These tools include seeking support, problem solving, maintaining positive attitudes and cognitive savvy.

Resilience is mentally well

there are so many contextual things to be said about mental health; forgive my brevity. Point here is that resilience can help protect us, and it aids in living with mental-health challenges.

Resilience promotes psychological capital/wealth

I have a teacher who frequently says ‘the only real wealth is spiritual wealth’. This involves a heck of a lot of unpacking and teaching and practice, but is ultimately true. Resilience is correlative to the positive psychological resources of hope, optimism, creativity, trust, and self-efficacy, which help in hard times. Us. And others.

Resilience is dynamic and a process. It is fluid.

Resilience is a learned capacity. It develops over time. Through experiences. It is not a flat line understanding of homeostasis, but an evocative aliveness.

Resilience is connective and social

Resilient people have strong and varied social networks and resources, a fractal like web of bonding, interrelating, learning, reflecting, responsibilities, impact and opportunity.

Two tips or tools for today: #1 resource your feels #2 take a break that isn’t social media

#1 Get down get down

There are enormous healing potentials, rivers of it, veins and jewels of it, waiting beneath the surface. I mean the surface we mostly glide over in looking away. I mean the thing we stand, sit, walk, run, dance, sleep, and eat upon. This stunning green and bluey ball hurtling at a thousand miles an hour around it’s own axis, spinning at 230 kilometers a second through a mind-boggling expanse of void, without seeming to move at all. Earth is the primordial maternal presence. She hushes and cuddles. She lullabies and washes. She feeds and she loves. Her thick web of consciousnesses has possibilities for healing that are - by definition -limitless.

The earth is a recycler. She asks that you pour out your feels to her. Next time you’re watching a sunset, passing a garden, standing by water, seeing the earth’s body from a window in a plane, or glimspe the moon, notice that pull she has. Listen to the ask she’s making of you: She hungers not so much for your guardianship, but for your emotional response. She is begging for your sorrow and rage, confusion and anxiety, darkness or hot piss. She wholly takes it off our hands. Wholly. She wants what we’ve got to offer, and will turn it to nourishment. She leaves us cleared out, like a good belly laugh, hard work out, or ugly cry does. And while those things work too, they might not be easy. It is relatively easy to get down on the ground.

Roll around.

You’ve got eyes ears nose skin and tongue. Spend a minute tapping your sensory perceptions.

Pour your feelings out.

Feel gravity, and its reciprocal support. Feel the - again, literally infinite - possibilities of letting go.

Taste stillness.

Then you can remember who you really are.

Personally, ‘grounding’ requires regular practice. It doesn’t require particular understanding or the right mood. It just takes a surrender of time. It’s less about ‘focus’ than what feels in some ways the opposite: a hugeness of letting go.

Fact: I don’t always know what’s right for myself. I certainly don’t always know what’s right for the world, or the planet. But I’m sure the earth herself does know. If I want to tap into what she knows and get out of my limited knowing, I’ve got to routinely spend time with her.

Fact: the vast healing potential she’s got is always there. It is never not there. It’s just below the surface. It’s deeper than you think. It’s waiting for you.

Advanced practice: you yourself are earth. “Under the surface” is also your innerness.

Super advanced practice: all cultures have some ‘Mother Earth’ teaching, and we can personally and emotionally access it pretty quickly. It’s harder to find that same force in relationships. Relationships feel scary and opposite of unconditional love and truth. But the force is there, too. It is love.

#2 take a break that isn’t social media

The human nervous system toggles. We cycle through attention and distraction, sleep and wake, circadian rhythms and breathing more through the right or left nostril all day long. The most important skill - first skill - that yoga teaches is the pause. This refines forever so it becomes more skillful time management, knowing what sucks our time and being able to redirect ourselves, knowing how to state shift or reframe a thought, making our time meaningful and knowing what a lifetime is, specifically our own. But it starts with the capacity and training of pause and know you are pausing. Work and accomplishment require regular breaks. We eventually learn how to best manage ourselves, down to food and light and boundaries. Social strife and interpersonal healing.

But it starts with the pause.

Thing is, most of us only ever ‘take a break’ by checking in with an electronic screen of some sort. I know how hard this is. I know how easy. I know that every single one of the screens has some benefits to it too. I’m not a luddite. I make my living online.

But I know the difference between taking a break where I grab the phone, lean back into a slouch, munch mindlessly and punch at buttons with my thumb and a different kind of break where I stand up, move my body a little, refresh in some way, refuel in some way, and genuinely set a boundary between work/tasks/news/phone and my mind body.

For now, I’d just suggest brainstorming half a dozen break things that do not involve your phone. Then do one. This is going to take practice. It’ll be hard. At some point you might have to set some rules for yourself around the phone or tablet. But you can’t even get to that until you have some alternatives that aren’t phone based. Don’t be surprised if you go five seconds and then your busy brain says “okay, done! lemme get back to that screen”. Push back on that. Give yourself an honest five minutes to feel your feels, go for a walk around the block, eat your lunch without a screen, spend at least five minutes with a pet or plant, read or listen to a song. The breath is a classic: you can manage four breath. Do a couple yoga poses without the phone in the room. You have to curate this list yourself. It is also limitless. But you need to start with a few clearly defined ideas.

Advanced: get to 10-12 breath. Do it every day.

Super advanced: context is everything. Theoretically, based on the tradition, we’d get so bloody good at our responsible life (I mean work/resources) we have half our time back, plus honest to god retirement. Without being appropriative or exploitative. Possible? Yes. Difficult and long term, for sure.

Gratis #3 do it every day. Personal, self directed, daily practice is the real yoga. There are - ahem, limitless - possibilities for what that can be. We tend to overthink/expect/do and then procrastinate/not do anything at all. I’m saying this to validate your experience and remind you it’s human, you’re not broken. Daily requires a plan, support, and check ins. It happens in tandem with mentorship and community. I don’t recommend you try to reinvent any wheels or self help your way. You’ll just go more crazy.

In closing

Again, these are the exactly the kinda things I wanna lay out and discuss and plot into your brain over the upcoming workshop. Seriously recommended for yoga teachers. Mental health professionals and educators and caregivers can use it. This is vital for human beings. Good stuff, all round. I’ll say it for you in Sanskrit and point out the relevant sūtras if you want.

If you can’t make the workshop, join us on mighty networks for convo, accountability, good people.

I’m always available for a 1:1, if that’s what you need.

Bhagavad Gita Reflections: Initiation and not getting lost

Paradox is everywhere and life is confusing. Sometimes we replace one paradox with another paradox and feel like we’ve grown or changed. We tend to do this all the time: new person, but same relationship dynamics. New diet, but same wrestling with our feelings via food. New job, same attitude.

“What is the difference between going down a rabbit hole and a spiritual journey? ”

When it comes to yoga, the apparent paradoxes are all over the place, and the ability to pick up a new thread or new idea is tempting. But I don’t think yoga is about paradoxes so much as it is about resolving paradox. What’s more important, I think humans are capable of change, rather than merely reshuffling the deck. How now and what?!, you should be wondering.

The Bhagavad Gita can often feel like a mystery: a compendium of paradoxes. How can we do our work but not care about outcome? How can self realization end suffering in the world? How can fighting our fight lead to inner peace? How can there be something eternal and unchanging in us, if everything is literally change? Reading it independently leaves folks - as it left me - with a sense of oh that is so beautiful, but I don’t understand it.

Here is one such paradox: I think it’s enough to think something beautiful and not understand, because beauty itself is healing, AND I think misunderstanding can lead to projection if we’re not careful. This is how religion becomes harmful.

Resolution here is a fine and subtle distinction, mostly in keeping our misunderstanding in front of us and being willing to reduce it.

AKA, ongoing learning.

Here’s the next paradox: the Gita is so rich, there are so many possible discoveries in every tiny passage and backstory, that we could spend years ‘exploring’ but not really learn anything at all.

Resolution is possible there, too. Again, it has something to do with right relationship to beauty and humility. It also has something to do with consistency (accountability? Stability? Growth?) in a student teacher relationship and a consequent personal practice. But the 4 years, then 6 years, then 3 years, then starting all over again method of study I’ve done personally (rabbit hole or spiritual journey, depending on how you look at it) is not something realistic for most folks at this time in this world.

Years and details aren’t required for healing and understanding, either.

I’m trying to present the Gita in a way that meets the great pain and confusion of our current world. Very come as you are, no commitment required, there is something valuable to even a little. To uplift the beauty and keep the humility in front of us, while creating a frame for folks to be consistant in self care and soul work.

My motive is largely to help discern the context so that folks don’t get lost in the details or detours. To point out the big picture that folks often can’t see for the wealth of details.

Book Two, Sankhya Yoga, for example, has a narrative thread:

1. Initiation and asking for help. The beginning of yoga.

2. Presentation of the yoga philosophy: you have a soul. The end.

3. Insistence that philosophy has to be applied in life: Yoga is skill in action.

Which lays the foundation for book three: karma yoga or yoga in action (Monday June 2, join us!).

Of course, each one of my bullet points can be a pandora’s box. It is supposed to raise personal questions and make us think. It’s supposed to prompt furtherness, rather than a final answer.

It’s book three, the introduction to yoga, that drops words and questions about ‘karma yoga’, ‘jñana yoga, ‘bhakti yoga’. At first, this discernment of different ‘kinds’ of yoga feels exhilarating. It affirms different aspects of who we are. But I also think we can miss the point, there: there is only one yoga. Action, knowledge, and devotion are different aspects of the same thing.

What is the difference between going down a rabbit hole and a spiritual journey?

I have some ideas. A rabbit hole is preyas (that which satisfies or relieves immediate need for distraction or numbs us out) while a spiritual journey is shreyas (that which might be uncomfortable or difficult in the moment but inclines us toward truth, like doing ten minutes of studying a language is tedious but required for mastery, or doing the dishes is unpleasant but leaves a clean feeling and us better prepared for the next meal or day).

But I think it’s just a useful question to ask yourself: is this a rabbit hole? Ask today, but ask yourself tomorrow too. Thus: learning rather than mere distraction. Self as the common denominator.

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You can, if you like, catch up on the first three videos. But you don’t have to ‘catch up’. You are welcome to join us at any time, and I will catch you up in real time. That’s my job, not yours.

All the recordings and info are here.

Bhū

Yoga is often appealing because it’s spirituality celebrates nature and we live in a world that has very nearly destroyed the planet. Rather than creating a duality between the secular and the divine, in which ‘the world’, ‘the body’, and the experience of being human are rendered taboo, yoga validates earth, and water, fire, and the flesh.

The Bhū Süktam or hymn to Mother Earth of the Taitirriya Saṃhita, Kriṣṇa Yajur Veda is one of the oldest songs of humanity. It brilliantly speaks to this reverence for the planet as divine. It’s also one of the first Vedic mantraḥ-s a student should learn, as it lays out a narrative of the entire spiritual journey while providing the literal bricks and tools for our own unfoldment.

More, this song does what all Vedic mantra does, what I’d argue all yogic techniques do: it has a surface or superficial meaning, but if we are given this mantra through lineaged oral tradition we are also re-enacting, incorpoating, or discovering within ourselves a truth that goes down so deep the superficial meaning blanches. There is a process involved in studentship, in other words, that takes you from one kind of understanding to something completely other. This process is lost if folks google their way to enlightenment.

This set of mantraḥ-s is practical. They are also initiatory: their beauty and promise calls us in. Past being practical and pretty, they create a context of learning; like a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, or a brilliant teacher can provide examples, stories, and experiences in which a student can do the thing themselves (discovering in the end not just the thing but themselves), the Bhū Sūktam gives us the seeds of yoga, enlightenment, transformation, spirituality, Vedanta, sacred ecology, rest and comfort, support, promise, and Truth. The mantraḥ-s are also exquisite, revelatory, emotive and refined: this isn’t simply a poem, and the poet is not just any poet: the rishi is a brahmarishi and the mantras are the earth herself, singing. All of this cycles and churns and develops in us until we ‘get it’. I haven’t time or patience here to go into what that means, other than to say it’s important. Come to study the Bhū Sūktam and I’ll tell you all about it.

All Vedic Mantra teaching happens on our social network, Yoga Club. This involves an extra step on your part, you have to click and agree to some basic humanistic respect. It’s worth it. It takes us past the googling toward enlightenment stage of our practice.

Vīrabhadrāsana

Today/Tonight is Mahasivaratri, the great night of Siva. It’s when your consciousness explodes, and you realize you’ve been in a fog all winter. Or that ‘this too shall pass’ is, actually, true. It might have grief in it. Or joy. Or relief. Feelings being varied, it might have some of all of that.

Sivaratri is when the God Siva comes down from his mountaintop meditation and joins the world. Consciousness comes to being. Or Consciousness marries power and action (siva, pavarti).

Sivaratri is when Siva did his cosmic dance, thrumming the cycle of reality into being with beginning, happening, and destruction.

Sivaratri is celebrated as the return of the light, the victory of light over darkness, and/or inner awakening.

It’s a good time to pray or reflect.

It’s a wonderful time observance.

I wanted to make a video for someone, and that turned into a bit of a tutorial on āsana in general. Enjoy!

Personal Practice: Finding yourself

Unpacking what yoga is, what it means, takes years and years. Maybe lifetimes and lifetimes.

“Now, personal practice tends to start as all or nothing, a big mess, once in a while, binge and purge cycles. Once a person has the desire or willingness for it, they tend to get overwhelmed and confused, thrown around by all the possibilities. ”

But I will assume - since you are here - that you know “yoga” does not mean postures. Postures are one of the tools of yoga. But just like a fork is not food, and you can have food without a fork and eat without a fork and sometimes forks are used not for eating and etiquitte but as weapons, the tools of yoga (here, poses) are not ‘yoga’: you can do yoga without the poses fork, and just because someone is wielding the poses-fork does not mean that they understand anything.

Okay, so we know that yoga does not equal poses, but poses are a tool. Next thing to learn is that yoga is about the self. Maybe not at the beginning. But if you want understanding, learning, and something that actually changes the way your body mind functions rather than a stop gap, yoga is a self thing.

I mean that yoga begins and really starts to take off only once a person begins a home, personal, self guided practice.

Discerning the difference between yoga classes and home practice is hard. Most of us have enough experience with classes (or, increasingly in our internet based world, a video) that we now have certain expectations of what ‘practice’ should look and feel like.

But your home practice tends not to look or feel like a class. In a home practice, you aren’t trying to replicate the experience of class on your own, you’re letting go of that and just meeting yourself. I repeat: home practice isn’t supposed to look, feel, or be the same as what happens in a yoga studio.

A home yoga practice: no video, no teacher guiding you, no fancy studio with pretty smells and a lovely distance from your home responsibilities. Please note that there is nothing wrong with going to a yoga class. But home practice is different, and more important.

A person who practices at home is discovering themselves. They are listening to themselves, meeting themselves, starting to work with the delicate questions of self-discipline and taking responsibility, self guidance, and meditation. This also means facing and undoing perfectionism, procrastination, waiting for the right mood or moment, and unrealistic or irrational thought patterns and goals. Home practice is where you truly learn to support and be with yourself. It also involves sitting in the midst of your actual life - your living room, your stuff, your schedule, your thoughts, your feelings. It is an incredible journey of self-discovery. It’s the beginning of integrity. It’s a process of developing somatic and emotional literacy, which is also somatic and emotional discovery. It’s becoming your own healer, friend, I can be so bold as to say ‘destiny’. After all, that’s what the ancient texts say. I’m not making this shit up.

I suppose that is exactly why most people have a hard time doing it. The old quip about most unhappiness being an inability to sit in a room with oneself.

Home practice is sitting in a room with oneself.

It is only here that you start to actually learn yoga. You learn how much you know and what you would like to learn more about. You learn what you can do and you learn what your excuses are. You learn to be self-motivated, and you really start to discover your emotions, your patterns, your beliefs, and your needs.

If you explore the source texts or listen to good teachers, they will tell you over and over again: yoga is self discovery. Yoga is self-realization. Yoga is self discipline. Yoga is self-liberation.

Which has to mean, if you take it seriously, that yoga is something YOU. DO. YOURSELF.

Teaching people that yoga practice is yoga class (and this is sometimes extended to teacher training, or retreat, or a renunciate life, or an influencer persona, a monk, a perfect handstand), is often doing a disservice to students. They are not being given tools, but following the leader and building deep subliminal patterns of DEPENDENCE, not independence and self exploration. They develop attachments and all sorts of projections around and at the teacher, other students, or the various environmental and time things of a studio. They aren’t learning consistency or discipline so much as expression and exploration (good things, but consistency and discipline are more important if we want healing and liberation). They aren’t learning presence and self determination, but escapism.

Escapism is a very hard pattern to unlearn.

Something happens when you try to practice in your own space. Without a video or music (there are times music can be part of the practice, depending, but if we’re listening to music we tend to be zoning out and listening to the music, not listening to the breath, our own mind, or our body). Something happens when you try to recall what you have learned, what you know, how to do, on your own. Something - all sorts of realizations about your mind, your motivations, your habits - comes crystal clear when we start to choose/think/do “I can do this for myself. I can handle this. I will.”

Now, personal practice tends to start as all or nothing, a big mess, once in a while, binge and purge cycles. Once a person has the desire or willingness for it, they tend to get overwhelmed and confused, thrown around by all the possibilities. I have heard five hundred stories about how a person ‘committed’ to peloton or meditation for two weeks, and then went nine months without. A thousand stories of how someone went to teacher training and then felt more lost and imposter syndromey than before they started. I’ve heard so many people say they wish they could meditate, or had a spiritual practice, etc etc etc.

Hence: working with a mentor or time honored thing is helpful.

A mentor can make suggestions, validate your experiences, help you focus, give you ideas and resources, keep you accountable while also challenging your perfectionism or unrealistic, irrational thoughts and behaviors.

Just a couple things to keep in mind:

• five minutes, one pose, a few breath, two minutes of meditation IS YOGA. Your home practice may not involve a yoga mat, a change of clothes, forty five minutes, savasana, or sweat.

• At first, people start with something like ‘one yoga pose’ or ‘I’m going to meditate’ every day, and it is often the last thing they get to in the day. That’s okay! It’s a great start.

• At the most true and basic level, it doesn’t matter what you do. Something is 100% better than nothing. Doing anything that gets you into the body and the present moment, brings awareness to breath, makes a choice is good enough. Anything that soothes your soul and reminds you you have one works (prayer, meditation, gratitude practices, devotional reading, mantra recitation, sacred objects like an altar, candle, worry stone, murti). Dance for a minute. Take a couple of big stretches. Get into your five senses. Tap, massage, or stroke your own body. Focus the eyes on the horizon if you’ve been staring at the computer screen or indoors all day long; focus the eyes on an object close to hand if you’ve been running around all day. Sigh out loud for five breath, blow through your lips like a horse to relieve facial and jaw holding, stand in mountain pose to feel present and grounded, warrior to feel your strength and courage, or tree to find equanimity. Lie down and progressively relax for a few minutes. It is all, all, good and you do actually know enough. For some people, setting a timer for 5, 10, or 15 minutes and scrolling through this stuff is a great beginning. For others, setting a once a day reminder. For some, connecting it to something like your morning coffee, leaving the office end of day, brushing your teeth, or a ‘trigger’ like noticing tight shoulders or held breath. All golden.

• Next, finding a consistant time in your schedule is the deal breaker. This is entirely dependent upon your all ready happening life: kids, family, work, time management basics. For many, morning practice is easiest. But for some, work and family make this difficult. After work or evening makes more sense and should be embraced.

• Having a plan, an outline, something you have previously memorized or are currently working on is how you break through the ‘what on earth, out of all the possible things I could do, should I do?!’ This doesn’t mean that you’ll do the same thing for the next seven years or forever: it means this is what you are doing now. Repetition and mastery and process, actually addressing your goals and needs, your personal situation, starts to come into focus here. It’s not just ‘yoga’, at that point, but personal revolution. It is growth. It is learning. It is overcoming your personal likes and dislikes or moods and dependency on the situation or time or convenience. But that does require perseverance, commitment, dedication, and lots of repetition.

• Consistency does not mean every single day, but generally over the big picture course of time. We kill ourselves with the ‘I missed a day, I have to start all over at the beginning’ mentality. The more consistent you are over several months, there will be a great scattering of days you didn’t practice but a general trend toward progress. This, too, is very basic human psychology stuff. It’s the difference between ideals/perfection/someday and actual practice.

My main point here: you have all the tools you need. I will probably draw out each of the bulleted points in future, but for now it’s important people hear and have reflected back to them: you have the tools, you have the capacity, you know enough and are enough. Once we start a personal practice, studio or classes become a wonderful supplement. They can be for fun.

If you want to chat as a way to hone in on your own personal practice, I’m around. If you want to bring some traditional yoga and the implicit self practice that happens in mantra recitation, two new classes are beginning in May. (Bhū Sūktam Tuesdays, Nārāyaṇa Sūktam Thursdays).

Whatever you do, please remember that you have enough, you know enough, you can take care of your mind body today. Given the external stressors these days, your own wellbeing is vital. It may feel frivolous or self-indulgent: this isn’t true.

Why it's harder to practice when the world is on fire

Funny thing. We know that yoga helps us manage stress. We know it sometimes inclines us toward feeling pretty good. But when we are stressed and feel like crap, getting to the mat is harder than at any other time.

Why?

Don’t beat yourself up about it and don’t think you’re crazy. What’s actually happening is that our nervous systems are dealing with more allostatic load. We’re hyped up and exhausted and scared. A nervous system that is overwhelmed, under resourced, and scared does not want to practice yoga. It wants to run around and be busy. It’s looking for activity and double checking the phone. We want to look at the news. And sometimes we’re avoiding the news but compelled to vacuum, go for a run, or scroll through happy puppy videos. We might be craving a bit of physical, but it’s unlikely to be yoga. We’re craving distraction so deeply the crave is instinctive. Things that numb will take the edge off and our body mind knows this, privileging things like the phone, Netflix, alcohol, bingey food. But taking the edge off is not a good strategy in the long run.

“Stress isn’t necessarily bad, and our bodies respond to stress positively. However, if the body’s stress responses are turned on too frequently, for too long a period of time, a kind of wear and tear begins to happen. The response systems become disregualted. ”

So what do we do?

1. Know you’re not crazy. This is what a nervous system does when the pressure is high. Know, too, that you (and your students) will come back. Trust me. I’ve seen this happen to me personally and in the yoga world over decades. During extremity (like Covid, and now this) people can’t do yoga. In a month or so, they will come flooding back as their system realizes it needs yoga. In a while, you yourself will come back.

2. Set the bar as low as you can. One pose*. Promise yourself to do one pose, every single day. If you can do it at the same time every day, even better.*

One Pose wonder

When I say ‘one pose’, I mean moving in and out of one shape, on the breath, for 8-10 breath.

I have three that I use for myself and have used for students with incredible success.

Cakravakrasana (all fours with an upper back backbend on inhale, child’s pose on exhale). Truly follow the breath and slow the breath down a little bit each time. Move forward slowly on the inhale, and slowly move backward with every exhale. This tends to be langhana, bringing us closer to the parasympathetic state.

Bhujangasana (cobra to forehead to the floor). Lie face down on the floor. With every (slow!) inhale, lift and reach your heart area forward and upward away from the floor. With every exhale, rest your forehead or one cheek back on the floor. Don’t use your arms to push up; look for movement in your spine. This is slightly more brahmana (uplifting, toward engagement in our system), but will still work like magic.

Balance one one leg choose a ‘pose’ if you like, but this is kinda fun in that it doesn’t even have to be a ‘pose’. You can play tilt a whirl if you want, challenge your balance, or look for the big beautiful poses so famous in yoga magazines and social media. Try to stick with the principle of engaging with the breath in a long, slow way for 8-10 breath then repeat on the other side. Maybe you find tree pose on exhales, and something weird on the inbreath. Or just move your arms to a wide stretch and back to a prayer. The big muscles engaged will harness your nervous system’s and chemical metabolism’s attention, the balance aspect will steady your mind, the stabilization will get to core/belly/spinal movements that encourage nervous system regulation, and the realization that one thing makes a difference will leave you in a better place.

Why does this work?

Inevitably, people tend to feel a craving in the body mind for more, or at least a flush of competency. We immediately feel better. You can do more if you want, but hold to your simple commitment of one is enough. It’s more important that you repeat this tomorrow, and if you overdo today you are less likely to come back tomorrow. If you have a memorized sequence, it’s easy to roll into it. Consistency is better than intensity. Intensity has to be built up over time.

With one pose, you have hooked behavioral attention to the breath.

You’ve deepened that mind-breath connection to include some movement.

And you have meet your own needs, honored your commitment to yourself, shifted gears completely.

If, just if, you can hook this one pose to the same time each day you’ll be harmonizing with all sorts of neuroscience about time, stress, and agency.

Dork stuff: what is allostatic load?

It helps to recognize that there are diffrent kinds of stress. Some is personal (work, family trouble, disease, job loss, moving, grief) and some is impersonal (social strain, uncertainty, pervasive fear).

Beyond even that, there is something known as allostatic load. Allostatic load is a concept articulated by neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen and psychologist Eliot Steller in 1993. It's the price the body pays for adapting to stress, the biological consequences of prolonged stress responses.  Stress isn’t necessarily bad, and our bodies respond to stress positively. However, if the body’s stress responses are turned on too frequently, for too long a period of time, a kind of wear and tear begins to happen. The response systems become disregualted. Depending on who we are and what we’re starting from, allostatic load may effect blood pressure and cardiovascular mechanisms in the body, cholesterol levels, blood sugar, cortisol levels, and a whole litany of inflammatory markers. Mood, concentration, sleep, and appetite bear the consequences.

Rebuilding our resilience - aka our capacity to do hard things - is vital for long term outcomes, but it’s also a way to immediately feel better.

Try it. As always, if you want support and guidance, I’m here.

Bhagavad Gita Reflections: Bhisma

I’m hosting a sangha contemplating the Bhagavad Gita the first Monday of each month, one book at a time. Yesterday I provided some of the context and background of the first book, Arjuna’s sorrow.

One of the difficulties of texts like the Gita is the slippery bluntness of mythology. Mythology is absurd. It’s raises more questions than it answers. No matter how you look at some of the stories, you can’t make them resolve to fairness, right, or even a very pretty picture. Why is it okay for some humans to consort (that’s a euphemism: I mean love and have sex with) gods, but other people are karmically punished for it? I don’t know. Why does a mother need to drown her infant children to absolve past karma? I don’t know. How can a person be both an animal, a god, and a person?

I simply don’t know.

Some of the stories upset me. They hurt. Whatever little sense I can pull out of them doesn’t feel edifying. I can’t find virtue in it. It doesn’t feel right. I don’t understand the myths, but I feel them. I feel them as an actual clenching in my body and tightness in my throat. Why are such upsetting things passed on as spiritual wisdom? Why on earth would a person assent to these stories, let alone glorify what they do to your blood pressure?

Myths raise so many questions. Maybe that is their point.

As always happens after teaching, some of the topics stay with me for several days. The thing lingers like the smell of a dead person you loved hangs out in their jacket for awhile, and you know it will disperse, and you are both saddened and gladdened by the fact. Influence is a little bit cognizant, but mostly not. Influence is emotive and atmospheric, more of the instinctive than of the intellectual.

Bhisma! I keep thinking today. Bhisma is the grandfather of the entire war. He loves and advises both sides, though he sticks to his responsibilities and the Kuru kingdom. He sticks with the bad guys even when everybody knows they are the bad guys. He sticks to his responsibilities of state, but he also allows the Pandavas to win by telling them exactly what they need to do to kill him and thus shift the balance of power; he bows out to let the younger generation ascend to the throne. He bows out, but on his deathbed he passes on all the wisdom of statecraft, ethics, spirituality, and dharma to the incoming regime. Bhisma is, the tradition holds, a good man. He is the epitome of a good man. He is the root source of ancestor reverence. But how is this possible? How can a good person be on the wrong side of history?

I remembered a conversation with a friend in which we discussed our remaining, ouchy love for people who hurt us. We all have some people we needed to break with for our own sanity if not survival. In quiet voices, we talked about how difficult it is to sever when you hoped that the break, if nothing else, would cause them to change their ways. But we did the right thing. We took care of ourselves and moved on. We set boundaries. We went on to live a better life.

We talked of how much we still love them, though we wish things were different.

After about sixteen years of a contemplative life, a thing happens. We start to feel compassion, - even, sometimes, a mournful kind of gratitude - for the folks who raised us. We become much more honest and aware of our own imperfections. Done right, this widens into a more cogent self.

I also thought, smelling Bhisma in the spring dirt, of the perennial question of historic wrongs. Our ancestors were assholes. The founding fathers were slaveholding misogynists. Old literature and history baffle us with their antiquated standards. We don’t know how to appreciate the past, love what we love, and similtaneously know the wrongs within it. Our ancestors also suffered. The founding fathers did, actually, wrest out one of the most noble projects of human history. I personally will always have a soft spot for William Faulkner.

“Mythology helps us mold coherent narratives that help us - surrounded as we are by the cacophony of the daily - grasp the dramas and changes we ourselves go though.”

One of the things that kicks me into bafflement and wonder every time history and patrimony comes up is the fact that Toni Morrison read - I mean contemplatively and compulsively reread - the King James Bible. I mull this endlessly. Most of us dismiss such a text. But I dare not say we are smarter than Toni Morrison was.

The religious answer I’ve been given regarding Bhisma holds that somebody had to play that role so that we could learn the lesson and restore things to right. In his heart, Bhisma knew god wanted him to play this role, so he was willing to be the bad guy in his actions. You can’t know other people’s hearts, the teaching says. Search your own.

Religious answers don’t help me much. Not if I take them as religion. I mean rules to follow. It’s like the story of Abraham in the Bible, willing to sacrifice his own son: the only possible moral here is taking the intervening Angel as as aspect of Abraham’s absolute love for his own kid, while the dictate of the previous angel presses Abraham to stay open to the will of god. An allegory, in other words, of the scary asks devotion requires and the building of trust that comes when we’re willing to consider the asks.

I thought of bell hooks, too. Her own childhood was a violent and morally disappointing one. She left this world with a desire that her family know she still loved them.

Bhisma! He is the story of love being messy, and the shortcoming of passing judgement lest we be judged (our age will also appear barbaric), and the ultimate fact that people are more than one thing. This doesn’t absolve, but opens to both forgiveness and accountability.

Stories like the Gita and the Bible aren’t rules to follow. In the conversation (not recorded, but the best part of these Mondays), we talked about the danger of moving through the world with the lens of good versus evil. If we do that, it’s too easy to believe god is on our side. It’s easy to forget that god is on the other guy’s side, too.

The only slightly less dangerous way of moving through this world is to constantly reexamine your own heart.

Rather than being ‘lessons’, mythology (literature, history, the contemplative life) hit us with feelings, regurgitating themes we recognize in ourselves. Sometimes they give us new ways to think about the stories we tell ourselves. Maybe - and I think this is valuable - they make us realize we’re telling stories, pause for a second, and gaze into the screaming silence behind the stories.

There is a clash and constant, ongoing flood of events, individual wills, and circumstances in this life. Mythology helps us mold coherent narratives that help us - surrounded as we are by the cacophony of the daily - grasp the dramas and changes we ourselves go though. I think they do this more by emotion than reason. Funny thing is, the process doesn’t berate reason. It elevates reason.

Laying Sūtras on your Body: Integrating Yoga Postures and Yoga Philosophy

This June, over the summer solstice, I’ll be leading a workshop from Yess Yoga in Minneapolis. I want yoga teachers, long term yogis, and those interested in finding their own feet in a yoga practice to come.

There has been a little bit of an awakening in yoga land. Ten years ago, most people in our culture assumed that yoga meant postures. This is still heavily believed, but studios and pop culture generally are a little bit aware now that yoga is not limited to poses. We know there’s a philosophy. We sorta get the impression it’s a sprirituality or has something to do with mindful, purposeful living. We understand that it is ancient but know very little of the actual details.

I’m proud of us for the little bit of awakening we’ve had. I’m glad that students suspect there is more to it than poses. I thrill every time someone reaches out with curiosity, confusion, a mystified what in the heck is this magic kinda question.

The picture above basically captures our reality. We start with the first circle, in which yoga mostly equals poses, but has a tiny little bit of philosophy in it.

Then, we start to understand that yoga poses are actually the tiny part. They are only a part. They are minor. They may not even be ancient, and might have more to do with European caletsthenics than Indian philosophy.

I think we need one more model. Something that can bridge or resolve these two circles.

Otherwise, we’re still just as stuck as we were.

Come spend three days learning about yoga bodies, yoga anatomy, and yoga posture from a lineaged standpoint. I think it’s exciting. It’s also affirming, reassuring, clarifying. Expect lots of movement exploration, lots of discussion, and lots to move forward with.

Registration is here.

Avatar: the divine in humanity

Yoga philosophy and spirituality is so tricky precisely because it isn’t exactly ‘god’, or ‘religion’, as we understand those things in English. One of my teachers says “God” is not an Indian concept, and it doesn’t occur anywhere in this practice. But there is something…and the process of discovering what that something is is largely what the practice involves.

In Veda, for example, “the Deva-s” are not exactly “gods” or “goddesses”. They are forces of nature, laws of the universe, given a name so that we can identify and relate to them. Gravity, light, and change are forces of nature. Gravity exists whether you ‘believe’ in it or not, and worshipping gravity is just a little strange. These forces, then, are something that we can begin to recognize. What’s more, these forces exist not just ‘out there’ in the world, but within us. As we start to understand how-reality-works, we’re starting to discover those same powers (and where they have been misused, hijacked, resisted or conflicted) within ourselves.

My teacher, again: when you gesture toward the deva, don’t point outward. Touch your own chest.

This all gets more complicated as we realize the problems of both translation (even Indians will now say gods and goddesses all the time, because we simply lack a vocabulary to point to this other thing), personal and cultural baggage or wounds around religion and spirituality, and the tender work of discerning divine power in the world from the purely material aspects of the world. Non-dualism, incarnation, and transcendence in other words.

One way of experiencing non-dualism is through avatars - or times in the world in which the divine ‘descends’ into materiality in order to help us in our ascent or spiritual growth. The tradition holds that there are literally countless avatars - there is divinity in all humans. This is the root or base teaching of “I see the divine light in you” or the practice of trying to do so, all the self-checking of our assumptions and exclusions and othering. to say nothing of the radical and difficult work of coming-to-know the divine light inside ourselves and the pandora’s box of questions that opens up. But most of us are a deeply complicated mixture of divine and misused divine, the ‘demons’ of greed, fear, self-interest, me-and-mine thinking, avoidance, etc.

There have been, in mythological or spiritual time, 9 full incarnations of the divine come to visit humanity. They come when dharma - or eternal law, the spiritual path that supports self, others, and cosmos - has been threatened by the demonic forces. Avatars might appear to be ‘saviors’, but they aren’t, really. They are teachers, friends, co-conspirators in restoration. They mostly come to remind us to do our job.

Krishna - Viṣṇu’s eighth incarnation - is the most relevant to us. For a myriad of reasons: he is the most widely known and hence we have access to the teachings, practices, images. There is music, literature, community we can tap into. We can read the Gita. More importantly, perhaps, are his characteristics and role. Krishna is loving and sweet, familial and flirty. He’s much more human than others. But he also teaches: he will call you out, give you reminders and ways to understand, things to do.

I recently taught the Viṣṇu sūktam and gave this presentation after we’d learned some of the how to sound. The lecture and ideas might be helpful to others - particularly those who are beginning to work with the Gita as a spiritual practice.

Bhagavad Gita conversation begins next Monday!

The invite:

Just a quick moment to remind you that I will be hosting an exploration of the Bhagavad Gita on the first Monday of the month, beginning next Monday March 3, running for some 19 months. All the details are available here.

Also beginning next week, but every single Monday rather than once a month, I’ll be doing Gayatri Japa. The two offerings are distinct. The Gita involves philosophy and discussion with both me and peers. I hope to create a container in which we can explore our own discipline of hope, svadhyaya, or whatever spirituality or devotional you’ve got in these incredibly stressful times. Chanting japa doesn’t involve conversation or ‘teaching’: I’m just going to get online and do the prayer, no conversation. Thus I’ll be guiding a practice for anybody who is struggling right now to guide themselves.

Come to either, come to both, or whatever.

I don’t really teach anything these days unless I’m directly told to do so by my own mentors. From a western hustle culture perspective, it’s a decidedly odd arrangement. It might seem abject to some, as though I’ve given away my autonomy. From my perspective, it feels as though I’ve reclaimed autonomy.

*

Here’s some collected writing on the Gita, for dorky folks like me:

Amit Majmudar

“The Gita is a scripture without an outgroup—that is, even though it takes place on a literal battlefield, there is no rant against the opposing side; nor are there rants against unbelievers or heathen or infidels or whatnot. So anyone can approach the Gita without feeling their particular religious background or faith affiliation is under attack.

Its message of the underlying unity of all living things—the unity of the self and Brahman—and its exhortation to take part in the struggle of life, however painful, is pertinent to everyone, whether you apply it to environmentalism or social justice or to personal struggles in your everyday life.

And oh yeah—it’s one of the finest poems ever written, complete with a vision of the universal form of the divine.”

Henry David Thoreau

“In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.”

“‘Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who practice the yoga gather in Brahma the certain fruits of their works.’

”Depend upon it that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully.

“’The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter.’

”To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.” ”

— Henry David Thoreau, in a letter to his friend

Thomas Merton

The Significance of the Bhagavad-Gita
THOMAS MERTON (1968)

“If, in the West, God can no longer be experienced as other than “dead,” it is because of an inner split and self-alienation which have characterized the Western mind in its single-minded dedication to only half of life: that which is exterior, objective, and quantitative. The “death of God” and the consequent death of genuine moral sense, respect for life, for humanity, for value, has expressed the death of an inner subjective quality of life: a quality which in the traditional religions was experienced in terms of God-consciousness. ”

— Thomas Merton

The word Gita means “Song.” Just as in the Bible the Song of Solomon has traditionally been known as “The Song of Songs” because it was interpreted to symbolize the ultimate union of Israel with God (in terms of human married love), so The Bhagavad Gita is, for Hinduism, the great and unsurpassed Song that finds the secret of human life in the unquestioning surrender to and awareness of Krishna.

While The Vedas provide Hinduism with its basic ideas of cult and sacrifice and The Upanishads develop its metaphysic of contemplation, The Bhagavad Gita can be seen as the great treatise on the “Active Life.” But it is really something more, for it tends to fuse worship, action and contemplation in a fulfillment of daily duty which transcends all three by virtue of a higher consciousness: a consciousness of acting passively, of being an obedient instrument of a transcendent will. The Vedas, The Upanishads, and The Gita can be seen as the main literary supports for the great religious civilization of India, the oldest surviving culture in the world. The fact that The Gita remains utterly vital today can be judged by the way such great reformers as Mohandas Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave both spontaneously based their lives and actions on it, and indeed commented on it in detail for their disciples.

The present translation and commentary is another manifestation of the permanent living importance of The Gita. Swami Bhaktivedanta brings to the West a salutary reminder that our highly activistic and one-sided culture is faced with a crisis that may end in self-destruction because it lacks the inner depth of an authentic metaphysical consciousness. Without such depth, our moral and political protestations are just so much verbiage. If, in the West, God can no longer be experienced as other than “dead,” it is because of an inner split and self-alienation which have characterized the Western mind in its single-minded dedication to only half of life: that which is exterior, objective, and quantitative. The “death of God” and the consequent death of genuine moral sense, respect for life, for humanity, for value, has expressed the death of an inner subjective quality of life: a quality which in the traditional religions was experienced in terms of God-consciousness. Not concentration on an idea or concept of God, still less on an image of God, but a sense of presence, of an ultimate ground of reality and meaning, from which life and love could spontaneously flower.

Realization of the Supreme “Player” whose “Play” (Lila) is manifested in the million-formed, inexhaustible richness of beings and events, is what gives us the key to the meaning of life. Once we live in awareness of the cosmic dance and move in time with the Dancer, our life attains its true dimension. It is at once more serious and less serious than the life of one who does not sense this inner cosmic dynamism. To live without this illuminated consciousness is to live as a beast of burden, carrying one’s life with tragic seriousness as a huge, incomprehensible weight (see Camus’ interpretation of the Myth of Sisyphus). The weight of the burden is the seriousness with which one takes one’s own individual and separate self. To live with the true consciousness of life centered in Another is to lose one’s self-important seriousness and thus to live life as “play” in union with a Cosmic Player. It is He alone that one takes seriously. But to take Him seriously is to find joy and spontaneity in everything, for everything is gift and grace. In other words, to live selfishly is to bear life as an intolerable burden. To live selflessly is to live in joy, realizing by experience that life itself is love and gift. To be a lover and a giver is to be a channel through which the Supreme Giver manifests His love in the world.

But The Gita presents a problem to some who read it in the present context of violence and war which mark the crisis of the West. The Gita appears to accept and to justify war. Arjuna is exhorted to submit his will to Krishna by going to war against his enemies, who are also his own kin, because war is his duty as a Prince and warrior. Here we are uneasily reminded of the fact that in Hinduism as well as in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, there is a concept of a “Holy War” which is “willed by God” and we are furthermore reminded of the fact that, historically, this concept has been secularized and inflated beyond measure. It has now “escalated” to the point where slaughter, violence, revolution, the annihilation of enemies, the extermination of entire populations and even genocide have become a way of life. There is hardly a nation on earth today that is not to some extent committed to a philosophy or to a mystique of violence. One way or other, whether on the left or on the right, whether in defense of a bloated establishment or of an improvised guerrilla government in the jungle, whether in terms of a police state or in terms of a ghetto revolution, the human race is polarizing itself into camps armed with everything from Molotov cocktails to the most sophisticated technological instruments of death. At such a time, the doctrine that “war is the will of God” can be disastrous if it is not handled with extreme care. For everyone seems in practice to be thinking along some such lines, with the exception of a few sensitive and well-meaning souls (mostly the kind of people who will read this book).

The Gita is not a justification of war, nor does it propound a war-making mystique. War is accepted in the context of a particular kind of ancient culture in which it could be and was subject to all kinds of limitations. (It is instructive to compare the severe religious limitations on war in the Christian Middle Ages with the subsequent development of war by nation states in modern times-backed of course by the religious establishment. ) Arjuna has an instinctive repugnance for war, and that is the chief reason why war is chosen as the example of the most repellent kind of duty. The Gita is saying that even in what appears to be most “unspiritual” one can act with pure intentions and thus be guided by Krishna consciousness. This consciousness itself will impose the most strict limitations on one’s use of violence because that use will not be directed by one’s own selfish interests, still less by cruelty, sadism, and mere blood lust.

The discoveries of Freud and others in modern times have, of course, alerted us to the fact that there are certain imperatives of culture and of conscience which appear pure on the surface and are in fact bestial in their roots. The greatest inhumanities have been perpetrated in the name of “humanity,” “civilization,” “progress,” “freedom,” “my country,” and of course “God.” This reminds us that in the cultivation of an inner spiritual consciousness there is a perpetual danger of self-deception, narcissism, self-righteous evasion of truth. In other words the standard temptation of religious and spiritually minded people is to cultivate an inner sense of rightness or of peace, and make this subjective feeling the final test of everything. As long as this feeling of rightness remains with them, they will do anything under the sun. But this inner feeling (as Auschwitz and the Eichmann case have shown) can coexist with the ultimate in human corruption.

The hazard of the spiritual quest is of course that its genuineness cannot be left to our own isolated subjective judgment alone. The fact that I am turned on doesn’t prove anything whatever. (Nor does the fact that I am turned off.) We do not simply create our own lives on our own terms. Any attempt to do so is ultimately an affirmation of our individual self as ultimate and supreme. This is a self-idolatry which is diametrically opposed to “Krishna consciousness” or to any other authentic form of religious or metaphysical consciousness.

The Gita sees that the basic problem of man is his endemic refusal to live by a will other than his own. For in striving to live entirely by his own individual will, instead of becoming free, man is enslaved by forces even more exterior and more delusory than his own transient fancies. He projects himself out of the present into the future. He tries to make for himself a future that accords with his own fantasy, and thereby escape from a present reality which he does not fully accept. And yet, when he moves into the future he wanted to create for himself, it becomes a present that is once again repugnant to him. And yet this is precisely what he has “made” for himself-it is his own karma. In accepting the present in all its reality as something to be dealt with precisely as it is, man comes to grips at once with his karma and with a providential will which, ultimately, is more his own than what he currently experiences, on a superficial level, as “his own will.” It is in surrendering a false and illusory liberty on the superficial level that man unites himself with the inner ground of reality and freedom in himself which is the will of God, of Krishna, of Providence, of Tao. These concepts do not all exactly coincide, but they have much in common. It is by remaining open to an infinite number of unexpected possibilities which transcend his own imagination and capacity to plan that man really fulfills his own need for freedom. The Gita, like the Gospels, teaches us to live in awareness of an inner truth that exceeds the grasp of our thought and cannot be subject to our own control. In following mere appetite for power, we are slaves of our own appetite. In obedience to that inner truth we are at last free.

Faith?

The word śraddhā is all over the yogic literature. It is the first step on the yogic path according to Patañjali. In the Bhagavad Gita, śraddhā is foundational to one’s search for truth and meaning: one’s śraddhā is the basis of their actions and the consequent unfolding direction in life. In the Veda, śraddhā is what lights the inner fires of metabolism, wisdom, and being.

It’s unfortunate - or at the very least misleading - that this concept is translated to “faith” or “belief” in English. Because of our spiritual wounds, the thing comes across as confusing, offensive, dogmatic, religious, bypassing, ignorant, avoidant, oppressive, judgmental, archaic, submissive, unscientific, stupid, brutal, and provocative. We bristle, even though the lived experience of empowerment and curiosity are the most true things we can say of our personal yoga experience.

Let’s throw out ‘faith’. It would be better to understand śraddhā as conviction or dedication. The word in and of itself breaks down to a unity of truth (śhrat) and hold (dhā to hold, to support, specifically support the mind and functions of mind, an attentional stability). Thus śraddhā means “holder of truth” or '“adherence to truth” or “in the pursuit of truth”. Which is lovely.

““Śraddhā is essential for progress,
whether in Yoga or any other endeavour.
It is a feeling that cannot be expressed or intellectually discussed.
It, however, is a feeling that is not always uncovered in every person.
When absent or weak,
it is evident through the lack of stability and focus in a person.
Where present and strong,
it is evident through the commitment, perseverance
and enthusiasm the person exhibits.
For such a person, life is meaningful.”

”

— TKV Desikachar

In the oldest texts, words are constructed in verb forms. In later commentaries, the same words are constructed from nouns, prefixes and suffixes. Thus in the oldest and original sense, śraddhā is an action: it is a grasping of or holding to, a moving toward truth. In that understanding, śraddhā is no different than science, logic, good relationship, the effort to do the right thing.

Wellbeing depends upon a sense that what we do matters. Sanity demands it. It’s vital that we believe in ourselves, crucial to feel we can make a difference. śraddhā affirms this wellness, sanity, and life force. Depending on the moment, the importance of our actions and thoughts either feels like being called out or like an invitation. In all moments, it is validating. Even being called out is, at root, validation.

In the fourth chapter of the Gita, Krishna says shraddhavan labhate jnanam: the one who adheres to truth arrives at knowing.

Desikachar said that śraddhā is the resolution or resolve, despite obstacles and uncertainty, to move in the right direction. I’ve heard other teachers say “urgent curiosity”, “unwavering discipline”, “vigilance”, “attentiveness”, “hope”, “source of motivation”, “longing”, “open mind”, “prudence”, “conviction”, “trust”, “heart’s desire”, “optimism”, and “hopefulness”.

“Faith” doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with truth, which is why it’s a crappy translation for śraddhā.

"The truth will set you free,” we’re told. The quip is a borrowing of a central tenet to intellectual freedom and the power of learning: Cognoscetis Veritatem et Veritas Liberabit Vos. There are versions of this statement in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and ancient philosophies. In social terms, “the truth will set you free” examines history and social conditions with clean honesty, as the related quip “truth to power” illustrates. In personal and intimate relationship, it addresses the harm of secrecy, denial, and dishonesty with the power of vulnerability, care, trust and respect.

The most lovely aspect of śraddhā is its opening. It’s spaciousness. While ‘freedom’ has meant different things in different cultural contexts, ‘truth’ always speaks to the possibility of growth, healing, understanding and change. śraddhā includes limitations and doubt as a part of the movement. We might be wrong or make mistakes along the way, but with śraddhā failure becomes less a personal failing and more a clarification. We may not have answers or enough information. We may not feel competent.

We don’t know, but we can want to know. śraddhā is the feeling tone of ‘you have everything you need’ and ‘more will be revealed’. It is the premise of enlightenment, wisdom, and liberation.

The health and hopefulness of such a starting point is clarifying and uplifting. In wisdom traditions, śraddhā takes on the flavor of trust and confidence. These often direct or connect us to trying, seeking out guidance and expertise, counter ill-will and short term fixes in our mind heart. śraddhā is the basis of right understanding, right relationship, and perfect resolve. It fosters both respect and self-understanding. It takes a hammer to selfishness, all the fleeting and fickleness of mood and circumstance and excuses. śraddhā, to my experience, dignifies everything.

“Write one true sentence,” said Hemingway. “Write the truest sentence that you know. Once you write one true sentence, you can write another, then the next, and so on.” This tends to both cut through my writer’s block and my life generally confusions. It’s how I practice āsana, too. It’s also, if I’m keen and balanced enough, the way I navigate tricky things like relationships, disappointment, and moral quandary. śraddhā is the heart of good teaching: “start where you are,” a great teacher says, knowing full well that such a start leads to places the student can’t yet fathom and wouldn’t believe.

Truth matters. It also shows up all over the place. The weather, the news, my family, my body. I know that when I stay close to it, when I keep coming back and touching it like a rosary or a prayer mat, śraddhā takes on the quality of a pulse. It keeps me from the thinness and ungraspability of things. It’s thick and warm and hearty, as in of heart. It flows and circulates, undercurrents and swells. It is essential aliveness. When I’m anchored in śraddhā, my fears get small or at the very least unimportant. Urgency deflates. Whims - which I tend to have like a rash - pass without my having to worry about them. I don’t hate myself when I rest in śraddhā. I don’t have to fight with everybody all the time. I’m not so scared. I’m not so lonely. Life is hard, still, but I both know this and it’s okay. In inversion - which is basically what the yoga path is - the hardness of life actually becomes good.

śraddhā is gumption. Audacity. It’s even anger and fear. It’s what happens when a student shows up, or wrinkles their forehead, or asks a question. It’s the smile a good teacher gets, every single time.

**

I’ll be teaching the śraddhā sūktam Tuesday mornings in March and April. It’s (appropriately) a beginner level mantra. Come. Sing.

Times are tough. Yoga can help.

A long time ago, I was lost. I was facing crisis. I was hurting. Yoga helped.

These days, everyone is hurting. The crisis is ubiquitous. Everything feels like loss. We are scared. We are angry. We are tired.

Yoga can help us. I desperately want people to have these tools. I want people to use them.

Yoga is not the solution to our life problems. It is a way to help us address our problems.

The most important thing I can teach right now are the skills of self practice. Yoga is ultimately about taking care of yourself. Not needing a studio, a video, a lot of time, fancy gear, to be ‘ready’, but the radically effective practices of taking a little bit of time, every single day, to be self-aware and caring, honest and hopeful, dedicated and supported. I want you to do what you can, today. I want you to know how important it is.

I don’t exactly know how to best do this, best support personal practice. I’m mulling ideas and will keep telling you: take care, today. I’m here if you need. Just take care today. The glory of this is everyone already has the pre-requitisites; everybody should do their own practice according to their needs, capacity, and experience.

If you have questions (and you should have questions: questions are good! Teaching can only begin once you have a question. If you don’t have questions, you’re probably in a practice of avoidance rather than a practice of yoga), reach out.

If you want a tool of community, prompts, info, join Yoga Club on Mighty Networks. It’s like social media in being connective, you can chat and post and ask and message. But it is unlike social media in being a gated community, without any algorithm, less the toxic of meta and the manipulation of communication.

But please just start, today, for yourself.

It’s immediate and simple: how are you right now? Ask your body mind to show you.

Then stand up or change your position somehow (lay on the floor, cross your legs the other way, hold your arms over head, push your hand into something. Doesn’t matter.). From this changed position, explore the feelings/thoughts/mood you first identified. How does it look from here? How does it feel? What else do you feel?

Now take several slow, attentive breath.

That’s it, y’all.

A personal yoga practice takes that basic idea and makes it exquisite, evolutionary, consistant, affirmative and growthful. It should be supported by on-going learning, a teacher, some personal reflection. But it’s really as simple as what you just did.

Here’s what I suggest, what I can offer, right now:

• I am going to leave the zoom mentorship at $50 for the time being. It is very important. Please take advantage of this. It works best if you schedule several sessions, not one. It’s like therapy that way. I’ll give some suggestions and ideas, you run with them, but then it’s important that you come back and we process. Then I can give you more. This is how you magically accomplish personal practice: you do your practice, but you do it within the context of mentorship, accountability and support.

• I’m going to hold space every Monday at 7 am for Gayatri japa starting March 3. The tiniest bit of movement, pranayama, and meditation. The most essential and elegant of prayers. The a-priori, first, most exquisite of practices. I’ll tell you more every Monday. But you just show up Monday. Come once and get the feel. Come twice and get into the momentum. Come for several months and you’ve got stitha-prajña (established in your wisdom.). You can do this on your own, once you know how. But if I’m holding space consistently, your personal work with it will have a stronger support.

• I’m going to start a once a month sangha on the Bhagavad Gita (also starting March 3). There is no better spiritual teaching for our time. I want this to be rolling admission, begin whenever, come as you are.

Intro to Vedic Chanting

It’s said that music is good for us.

Mind body art science. That intersection is where mantra lives.

Listen: it’ll rewire you. It’ll move you. It has the capacity to soothe, to carry, to stabilize, to rock, to break you. It can show you god.

Funny thing: the ancient seers knew all of this. They knew what brains are. What humaning is. How difficult. They also knew how prone we are to disaster and suffering and causing trouble and pain. They knew how likely we are to feeling trapped and lost.

And these guys knew how simple practices can be liberation.

The oldest and I think most direct practice was/is chanting. I mean the real, true ‘authentic’ yoga. Thousands of years ago, some folks figured out how to harmonize what feel like the tensions of life. All this other stuff - poses and philosophy, fasts and art, mindfulness and life hacking - is really just a later attempt to repackage or over simplify something that has been true and proven and practicable for millennia.

I can’t possibly tell you how true this is in my body. It’s down in my cells. It’s in my sleep and dream cycles. It seems to have tipped my dangerous tending toward addictive and depressive and hot bio cycles to a roaring symphony.

It tickles my intellectual brain, starts to make all the apparent contradictory things you hear in yoga spaces and life spaces all start to fit. It all starts to fall together.

And I feel like a riptide.

This art science of chanting is vast. There’s a lot of crap out there to wade through. I’ve put together a ‘intro to Vedic chant’ course that will run Tuesday mornings 7 am CST on zoom beginning in September. 6 weeks.

Vedic chant is THE way to take yoga past poses. It is ancient. It is now. It is recognized as a world treasure by UNESCO. It is available to anyone, with the little caveat that you need to be taught how to navigate it. You need a teacher to initiate you. Once that’s done, the doors are wide open.

Anyone can chant. You don’t need musical ability or Sanskrit philosophy or a spoonful of religious dogma. The only ask is commitment, and knowing that I will ask you to unmute yourself and sing on mic and expect you to figure out how to practice for yourself for ten minutes at a time, several times a week.

Quick overview:

Week One invocation and Ganesh start where all things should start, with an invocation to the god who removes obstacles. Discuss what invocation and prayer are in this tradition and for you personally, with a nod to cultural apporpraiton, modernity, post-religious lostness and spiritual longing. We’ll get a crash course on the six (main) rules of Vedic chanting and a primer on how a music practice sparks up the human system in terms of cognitive function, emotional balance, optimism and spirituality, physical balance and capacity, intellect and soul.

Week Two the power and beauty of Saraswati with Ganesha on board, we’ll now learn the invocation to Saraswati, she goddess of the power (I mean force) of learning, beauty, wisdom, creativity, and music. Keep learning some basics about chanting as you start to root around in the basement of your subliminal through a personalized practice. There is so much power and grace and flow and growth to harnessing our learning power and becoming a student. There is so much loveliness and beauty and compelling, attractive power to this whole show. We invoke her, next.

Week Three Initiation exploring THE Gayatri mantra The Gayatri mantra is like the top of the charts mantra for all of human history. It is so popular, has been for so very long, that there is richness and electricity just in the thought of it’s continuity throughout human history. All great teachers will say this is the greatest yoga thing, the only one you need, the start and the source and the heart of all teachings. Yet, partially because it is the one, it has been pop cultured, watered down, misused, abused, and infinitely mistaught. We’ll do some unpacking of harms and restoring of things to their place as you both learn how to do it right (yes, there is a right and a wrong here) respecting the lineage and at the same time plug it in to your individuality, your possibility, your contemporary thoroughly modernized humanity. Bonus: how and what oṃ is and how to hold it right.

Week Four The art of listening. Adhyayanam is the traditional method of transition, or handing on the teaching, or methodology of learning. This is so fundamental to ALL of Yoga that it will unlock doors for you, including the deepest and heaviest ones of your heart. And oddly, it is misunderstanding Adhyayanam that has so mixed up yoga in contemporary spaces and the spiritual marketplace.

Week Five the art and science of personal practice. There is a tensioning at the heart of being human, and of this path that is essentially a question of how to human a little more gracefully. How do we handle the firehose of information and stimulation and overwhelm that is life without drowning? But at the same time, how do we keep ourselves alive and not die of lack? Personal practice is the way. Let’s unpack all that.

Week Six: Unshakeable. Moving on, letting go, stepping forward. There is an art to letting go. And we’re all, every last one of us, control freaks. We’re fortunate and half way there if we are savvy to our personal brand of control freakiness already. As we wrap up this course, we’re both finishing and beginning. Whether you are moving on to study a new thing with me or others, or are simply taking what you’ve learned here home to mull over on you own, it’s important that we close right. Let’s look at closing mantras and the concept of offering, surrender, and freedom in Yoga philosophy and practice. We’ll touch on the imporance and pre-req of inner safety and the safety nets built into the tradition (and ways they have been neglected or ignored in your past or the industry.). We’ll discuss the discovery of safety in sensation, in lived experience, in practices as provided by yoga (in asana, in meditation, in daily ritual or special ritual, in Ayurveda, in sangha, and in your body and breath). We’ll look at the role of all techniques leading to meditation techniques, and how this deep neural plasticity work curates an inner resilience and resolve without you needing to cognitively do it. Let’s not forget to unpack community (healthy, unhealthy, but ultimately the most important thing) and general mindfulness (it’s all yoga!….but don’t forget to practice). We’ll dive a little, little bit into the mental game in the physical body, what’s happening in present moment awareness, letting go of future worries and healing ancient wounds. And letting go wouldn’t be complete unless we also explore the challenges of aging, an unfair world, physical and personal limitations.

FAQ stuff

This is a weighty course so far as impact goes. It will give you the foundation to study and learn forever. It will clarify and answer the super messy confusions out there. It will orient you, initiate you, and begin you. Yet its a relatively light class from your end:

• six weeks, a tiny personal daily practice.

• Live class Tuesday mornings 7 am CST via zoom for 6 weeks beginning September 3.

• Recordings.

• Audio and text tools to support your personal practice.

• Humongous workbook for your forever.

• send 3 recordings of your practice for personalized feedback and support.

• $250 bucks.

• Get $50 off for you and your friend if you sign up together. Everything is better together. Both of you will need to ask Karin for the discount code to do this.

• Sign up on Mighty Networks.

Teeth full of Ash: śivarātri

Shiva began walking to his wedding on the full moon of February 27. He started coming down, out of the mountains, out of the cold. The marriage of Shiva and Pavarti will happen March 11th, the night of Mahasivaratri or the great night of Shiva. A day or two after that we’ll shift with the light, springing forward into something that feels like mud and fresh earth. The spring equinox happens on March 20th. Lent and Easter, Passover, and Ramadan are all bunched up like gathering spring rain.

I’ve been sneezing a lot. The days feel smeary: opaque and piss colored, always a scrim and never blue, never gold. Every now and then, once in a while, the sun cuts through. The sun comes through like music, it’s like honey, people turn to it like plants but as they turn its gone. Things drip. There is a river running the alleyway where the banked snow is melting. Today I saw buds on a neighbor’s magnolia: tight and prim, like a flirtatious tongue. Nights, on the other hand, feel clear and electric. I taste mineral, everywhere, as if I stored pennies in my mouth. Everyone I know is pent, exhausted, waiting for something called new normal. The effort is showing. Fuses are short and quality is low. The exhaustion is obvious.

We’re just now learning which people we knew have died. Others are doing the grief work of packing up no longer necessary shit though the shit isn’t a persons, but a job, a community, or a relationship. Some of us are being pushed back into scenarios that don’t feel safe. The trial of Derek Chauvin is about to begin. I clear my throat. I’ve been watching other people clearing their throats: we haven’t used them in the way we used to use them in so long. Our social clothes haven’t been touched in a year. Our faces are hollowed. Our bodies feel sour.

Vigil, I said to the Gita study. We’re in vigil.

I understand what happens to the earth in spring. The opposite - sour, flaccid, dirty - is how I feel.

Getty image - Sivaratri 2019 Varanasi

“But I’m going to say it again: when I hear spiritual-but-not-religious a little ping goes off in my brain; I suspect the person wants the flavor of spirituality without any of the responsibilities.”

I’ve been cocking my chin to follow the moon the last several nights, watching it catch and hide in the bared branches, wander the mid sky like she dropped something and is looking for it, then veer toward the horizon night by night by night. I’m waiting: vigilant, longing. Pavarti is earth, love and lovely, green and red, moist and libidanous. Without her, Shiva is pointless. Aloof.

Without love, practice is sterile. Worse: it’s alienating. Mindfulness - the most direct way I know to characterize Shiva - without hope is painful and cruel. It’s ascetic.

The complex relationship between Yoga and Hinduism have been much on my mind. The Gita class is talking about it. Faith. Doubt. Spirituality. Spiritual wounds. Prayer.

American culture is so vapid of meaning makers it’s prone to theft and frivolity; it conflates spin classes and ‘soul cycling’ with spiritual practices. Churches are empty, with a few old ones sitting in the pews. While distance running is a thing world wide, I don’t know of any culture other than our own that takes it to such obsessive, self-flaggelating extremes. Binge and purge. So many people own gym memberships and yoga pants that have never been used as intended, I mean. Others don’t know how to regulate stress without a few miles on the pavement. Some people collect things; some hoard. I’m not quite sure what, exactly, I’m trying to point at here, but I suspect boredom and distraction, our entertainments and purchases, are related to our anxiety and our grief. We tend not to know how to be anxious or grieve in any but in clumsy, mawkish ways. DIY projects and retail therapy. Lurches toward commitment. Repression with the occasional burp of nonsense.

We’ve become culturally sensitive in this last year. And this is good. This is better. This is honest, finally.

But in the wake, we’re lost. What now? What else? How? Most of the white folks I know are seriously engaged in realizing that they don’t actually have a culture, that ‘white’ isn’t a thing. Our family histories go back three or four generations and then disappear. They disappear in a mist of immigration and bootstraps that denies language, ceremony, and the communion of the year. We don’t know who we are.

Our nonsense - that which previously kept us spinning and aloof - doesn’t hold us up any longer. We’re left with a question of our repression.

I often talk about my yoga practice as having proved to me I have a soul.

The thing we’re facing now, though, isn’t merely a question of individual soul, although it is that too: this is a question about soul itself, everybody’s; the soul of a country, the values of a culture, the dying of a planet and the soul of democracy.

I have always been taught that Yoga isn’t Hindu. I wasn’t taught this in an off-hand way, but insistent ones. I’ve been told Yoga is practical, which can’t mean dogmatic. Yoga isn’t a religion, doesn’t belong to any people, the whole point is to question and hone your own meaning of these things. ‘If it works’ is basic yoga pedagogy. Yoga gives us psycho-somatic tools that do in fact work, regardless of who you are or what you believe. I’ve been told.

And I think that this is true.

But I also think that a white person talking about how non-sectarian Yoga is is troublesome. Its troublesome precisely because it downplays the fact that most of Yoga’s history emerges out of a Hindu context. To make the non-religious argument is to obscure - if not deny - things like white supremacy and colonialism and entitlement. White people in the west have done something to Yoga, much like they’ve done something to Buddhism, precisely in their desire to make it spiritual-but-not-religious.

I’ve said this before. Forgive me.

But I’m going to say it again: when I hear spiritual-but-not-religious a little ping goes off in my brain; I suspect the person wants the flavor of spirituality without any of the responsibilities. To tithe. To confess. To commune. Spiritual-but-not-religious avoids gratitude in any but a lip-service way, as though you were tipping the nice Vietnamese woman for your pedicure.

Spiritual-but-not-religious veers toward a fetishizing of other culture’s sacred things. It’s a smorgasbord approach that leads directly to - I’ve seen this, you’ve seen it too - using crystals, cacao-ceremony, tarot cards and sweat lodges like accessories. It allows us to call ourselves initiated or masters (Reiki drives me nuts, not because I doubt ancient Japanese understandings but because white folks call themselves level one two three masters after weekend courses and a home-printed certificate). (Yes, I do feel the same way about Registered Yoga Teachers).

It also leads directly to feeling we get to choose which facts we want to be true. If we’re ‘spiritual’, we can argue that news - or rape culture, or racism - is fake, or at the very least exaggerated. Spiritual-but-not-religious leads directly to bulldozing cultural realities and then claiming white men have it hard.

Spirituality makes me uncomfortable.

This is all true. It’s always been true.

But I have a thing for Shiva.

I love his ruthlessness. His ferocity. His teeth full of ash. I don’t ‘believe’ in Shiva any more than I ‘believe’ in Jesus, but it feels like I’m in a relationship with him I can’t deny. He haunts me. He seems to understand the relationship between howling and poetry, and in the end this seems a relationship I myself have to grapple with.

In ways that aren’t quite rational, Shiva has been a part of my yoga practice from the very beginning. He has shown up over and over again like a swollen chorus, and at this point seems eminent.

He stood like a demon at the start, skulls and asceticism, threatening, demanding. He was there even though I didn’t want him to be. Despite my refusal to be ‘spiritual’, the practical and cognitive work of my early practice dealt with final things: death, grieving, surrender, and finding rest. Breath and bones as holy spittle. By the time I’d gotten through, survived, I knew the Shiva chants by heart in spite of the fact I’d refused to ever sing them. I’d just memorized them through association, osmosis, or affiliation. They were just there, coming up in my sleep and on the tip of my tongue whenever my mind began to wander.

Once I knew they were there, I needed to attend them. It was clear that these songs weren’t just music, that they had actually played a role in the re-wiring of my brain and the way my tongue worked now. They burned, like spells. And as this seemed both uncanny in a huh, that’s interesting kind of way and dangerous in a what is happening to my mind one, I needed to attend to them. By attend I mean turn to, admit. I mean study but I also mean incorporate. By incorporate I mean lay into my hours and knit to my breath and hold in my hand. So ShivA became a bridge, a pilgrimage I had to take to understand how wrestling with my own bones made any philosophical or rational or cultural sense.

Sivaratri in Allabhad, 2016 by Tahiat Mahboob

He continued to show up. Eat this, too, he’d holler. His hollering is never vocal, always existential. He hits my chest like a freight train. Bow. And oh you stupid, stupid girl.

And the thing is, whenever I’d hear, whenever I’d bow, miracles happened. Things I couldn’t claim responsibility for. Grace I couldn’t deny. I think of him as mangey, feral, hard. But I also know - from experience - that what they say of him in the texts and stories is true: he is quick, so quick to love. He responds to any little attention. You think you can’t go on and then you go on. You think you can’t handle it and then it’s handled. You think this much, no further, this is insane and then the bottom drops out and you fall, under the petty and into something more quiet.

At this point, I trust him. I trust it, maybe. I can’t explain and wouldn’t dare proselytize and I can’t really say I ‘believe’.

But I do trust.

I couldn’t get out of this if I tried.

I don’t think religion is the answer to the spiritual-but-not-religious Problem.

Religion has caused more problems in human history than any other thing I can think of, including plagues and viruses. Religion tends to absorb abuse of power, mutate it a bit, and spin it out as acceptable and normative. Religion upholds tradition to the point of suppression. It deflects concern with group think. While I am uncomfortable with the way yoga and wellness have alternately ignored and fetishized Eastern religions, I am not trying to suggest we convert.

But I do feel we’re on an important question: what do we value? what can we trust and where should we lay our hands? how do we tend to things like love and grief?

Suddenly, questions that have been hidden under the rug are worth people’s time. Suddenly, folks who practice yoga are either buckling down into the physical, macerating their bodies in an attempt to cope, or they’re opening up like flowers to the more poetic, gentling, artistic aspects of the practice. I’m not the only one who has noticed this. Yoga programming is more likely to involve philosophy and meditation than anything you’d find a year ago. Debates about what we should and shouldn’t do and what does it all mean have boiled to the surface. Individual students talk of the exhaustion and resistance to getting on a mat, and lay on the floor trying to breathe.

After a year of hell, the problems we’re facing are spiritual ones.

I’m not trying to make an argument for god. I’m saying our culture has lost its soul.

And this is interesting: if we see the soulless nature of something, it must be soul that made seeing possible. Confusion and bewilderment prove soul, rather than disparage it.

Mystery, Consolation, and Faith

Maybe this is the difficulty, the mystery: we assume things like soul and faith and religion are the opposite of tender, antithetical to openness, and absent doubt. To my understanding, faith is defined by these very things.

What I know is this: we can face loss and find love in it. Consolation and wonder are not separate from difficulty, precisely because hope is not separate from truth.

Shiva is the overcoming of ignorance and, right here right now as spring springs, a turning toward the light. Traditionally, Mahasivaratri is celebrated by a day and night of fasting, fire burning, carnival like dancing in the streets. I’m not suggesting you do any of that; I would question it if taken out of context. But I am suggesting you notice what happens the first time you get a nose full of green. Notice the biochemistry, the madness of love and renewal, the shock of hope. Tell me your feet don’t want to be in the grass, and your blood isn’t musky with the accumulation of winter starting to unclog. Listen to what birdsong is doing.

Go with it.

We’ve been taught so many things that are now proving to be irrelevant, if not harmful. We’ve been taught that love is fragile and life is hard. But I’d argue at this point we can see, we have to see, that everything’s been upside down. Life is infinitely more fragile than we’ve been told; and love is all that lasts.

A/Loneliness

There is a small cohort of folks who gather every Tuesday evening to slow-study the Bhagavad Gita. They gather like the moon pulls on tides. They are salty. They are sweet and rhythmic. We’re slowly discovering what things like trust and practice mean.

Traditionally, the shastras were studied line by line, slowly in a cohort, with a teacher who had previously studied in the same way. These days, we just ‘read’ the book. But most of the actual content of the stories is not written in the book: it’s back stories, context, yoga philosophy that makes very little sense unless it’s studied in this way. You can’t read it alone, in other words. The book is not the book. Next summer we’ll begin the Yoga Sutras book one, if you’re interested.

It has become so sacred. And yet it’s completely ordinary, cussy, tech glitchy and as-best-we-can.

Last night I was tech glitchy, lost my presentation slides, and generally frazzled from the world already. So I had lots of my teaching points come out after the conversation while I lay wide awake way past bedtime.

This morning I sent the group my additional, middle of the night revelations. It occurs to me the conversation about loneliness and action might be of general use. Use it. This is a conversation around the Gita’s book six, verses 1-19.

Hi everyone,

thank you so much for your patience with my technology glitches and subsequent frazzled teaching.

I had all my brilliant thoughts come back to me after the class:

Can you direct your mind?  

“Only the Citta is the cause for Bandhana or Mokṣa.”

— Desikachar

Patanjali gives a number of ‘effects’ of yoga, including a body that feels ease and steadiness, breath that is soft and extensive, and the predominant emotion being peace.  But the one he lists first and chooses to focus the whole teaching on is directablity of mind.  Remember the sutras are genius in that they both describe what ultimately happens (the mind becomes more and more direct able) and prescriptive (focus your mind on THIS.  NOW.)

“The mind is the friend of the Mind or mind is the enemy'“; “the self is the friend of the Self or will destroy you” are riddles trying to point out that our actions are the determinants of our experience.  They either lead us upward or downward.  And our actions aren’t ghosts or surprises or out of the blue: actions are related to our beliefs, our stories, our moods and feelings, and our physiology.  So, to influence actions, and therefore the quality of life, we need a practice that gets into physiology, emotion, mind, etc.  

This practice should not become the focus of your life.  But it will change the quality of your life.

Mountains:

“For a sage desiring-to-ascend to the heights of Yoga, action is the means. For him who has ascended, staying is the work...
He should raise the self by the Self; he should not let the self sink; for as the self is indeed the friend of the Self, so also is the self Self’s enemy.”

— BG 6.3, 6.5

The mountain metaphor is intended to deflate, destroy, or right size the expectations of a yoga practice.  We often get hooked into thinking it’s a rinse and repeat cycle.  We do some stuff, we do savasana, and ahhhh we feel better for a moment.  And then we go back to normal.  Rinse and repeat.  

The argument here is that rinse and repeat is not enough.  There are summits to be climbed.  There is an up.  You have to go somewhere with the insights, steadiness, or release you glean from your practices.  

What is the point of ’the already enlightened’ being brought up so frequently?  I think it’s to point to people who have or are actually changing the world. I think it’s using the example of the people writing the books, running for office, changing systems rather than moaning about them.  I think it’s pointing to people who are living, embodying, Yoga. When you look to great figures, you will always find they have some practice for body, mind, stress management, and accountability in their private hours. Don’t just do your yoga. Change the world.

The other expectation is instant enlightenment or healing.  That we’ll magically heal, escape, or reach the heights in a single experience.

Both are flawed expectations.  Both are control mechanisms we impose on reality.

A/loneliness

“6.10 The yogin should consistently yoke himself, while remaining in privacy, alone.”

— Bhagavad Gita

This is such a difficult one.  It’s so hard.  It’s so important.  

On the one hand, we’ve gone through a whole process of discovering we aren’t an egg with an impenetrable boundary.  People matter to us.  What has happened in our lives has left traces. Much healing is healing together and vulnerability turns out to be a strength.  But at some point we realize all this is true AND there are some things we have to do ourselves.  No one is coming to save you.  No one can do the yoga for you.  No one else is going to save the world either.  This is the same push Krishna gave earlier on (stand up, Arjuna.  You were born for this.) but now even more bluntly.

A few years ago, Gunnar and I went to see a couple’s therapist.  Things just weren’t going well.  We both wanted things and weren’t getting them.  At one point, I said I felt alone in the marriage.  And rather than taking my side like I wanted her to, the therapist answered that we’re all, ultimately, alone.  Even inside things like marriages.  Happy healthy marriage does not mean independence goes away.  It means you’re alone together. Maybe authentic, or sincere, or true Self together.  But not melded.  No outside person is your salvation.

Another way I’ve heard marriage talked about in this context: you don’t really need to know all the details to do the right thing.  When your neighbor is getting divorced, you may want to know in order to be supportive, be aware of people moving, etc.  But you don’t need to hear all of the details.  Current politics are like a neighbor’s divorce.  How informed do you really need to be to ‘be informed’?  So much of it is repetition and hyperbole and memes.  So much of it is just vengeance speak and outrage.  I’d argue that you can in fact be very informed and very involved and not participate in much doom scrolling.

It’s interesting to bring a/loneliness to the direct understanding that the first steps are Yama/niyama.  How can you bring deep, sincere aloneness to relationships?  I think this echos the vowing: practical things done as sacred work.  If you haven’t read Deborah Adele’s book, now is a good time.  Susanna Barkataki was recently talking about how she still dedicates one day a week to each Yama/niyama.  These things aren’t once and done.  They are both preliminary and ever growing.

Ultimately, we have a choice to take this yoga path or not.  But the temptation to ask a guru for the answers or get strangely cultishly attached to a group, or alternately to defiantly refuse relationships is strong.  A good teacher will point this out.  Another example of not doing yoga is the incredibly common phenomena of becoming a yoga teacher, leading other people through asana, talking about all the things but not having a personal practice.  

We need a teacher and a cohort to do things like read the Gita: we can’t do that alone.  But, to live the Gita is something only you can do.

When I finally got sober, and when I’ve watched other people recover from trauma, it often has something of this a/loneliness in it as well.  Of course there were supports, and those supports often define who can recover and who slips through the cracks.  But there was also an aspect of it’s up to me, now.  Yes or no.  Die or get humble.

Humble, surrender, and the faith bit

There is so much to talk about here.  But I just want to point out one thing: we often don’t do the Yoga and surrender because we are attached to our rage (or helplessness, or whiteness).  It makes us feel righteous (I’m an ally!).  Or its a familiar, in our hands, kinda homy hell that we prefer to the vulnerability of surrendering.  

But what does your rage or anxiety really bring to the table?  How much does mulling and procrastination contribute to the world? What role is social media really going to play in the revolution or your own funeral?

Practical things, laid with a sacred cloth.

A home practice space or altar is not something I’ve personally ever been able to fully have.  Altars are a big practice for some (Michelle Johnson and Octavia Raheem have beautiful altar practices).  

It isn’t a ‘place’ for me, it is a clean and distraction less bit of time.  It is prior to every other thing on my calendar.  Both dog and husband respect it because I have asked for it.  I don’t wait for a free afternoon or day off.  I get up earlier in order to get it done.

Maybe you want your practice to be a Nidra, or a meditation, or a morning contemplation of the morning.  Great. But what do you need to set up for this to realistically happen?  Be realistic. Be practical.  And then make it sacred with a little baptism, incense, blessing or flowers.

One of the things loneliness/personal practice highlights is the way practice gets less important to showcase, talk about, or think about during the rest of your life.  It becomes as essential as tooth brushing.  But no one spends the day fetishizing their tooth brushing, or posting on social media about it, or google holing different brush strokes.  If you have a practical, sacred practice, you show up for real life a little ‘purified’.  You get more real life, not more yoga.

Back to directing your mind:

Do commit to a practice.  It can be small (the heart of yoga sequences are great templates. I can do them in 15 minutes and some days they stretch out because I can do or I want more.  If you don’t have 15 minutes in which you can choose to direct your mind to yoga, we might need an intervention of some sort. (I’m not trying to shame you into asana.  Your practice can certainly be a walk with a moment of prayer or mindfulness.  Or journaling.  Or lifting weights. But I’m aiming for clarity.  If a regular practice isn’t possible for you, we might need to look at anxiety and depression or trauma intervention.  Be very careful and honest around this if you are a teacher, too: that teaching others but not practicing yourself is a very real phenomena.  It’s not your fault, it’s part of the sham of the ryt model and the diet/fitness industry that encourages everyone to look at fake things rather than real things. I’d argue it’s dangerous to everyone involved.) Do them as a priority to your day.  They do tend to lead to a savansana or meditation experience, a just siting.  Just sit. And then be done with it for the day.  Do them ten or twenty times a month.  Do them more days than not.)

I’m happy to make a practice for/with you if you like.

You need the little immediate mind direction if you ever want the cumulative, mountain impressive experiences.  Nirodha is both prescriptive (pay attention to one thing for fifteen minutes) and descriptive of the higher stages.  Mind becomes more direct able over time because of earlier directed attention.

Chitta and action are either 1) playing out old programs or 2) sourced out of authenticity, not pattern. Be honest and surrender around what’s really happening in your chitta.  If you are okay, do something to help.  If you aren’t okay, ask for help.

Big love and forehead scraping bows,

K

“Before I inquire into who am I (soul),
I must first look at who I am (in action).”

— Desikachar

Svādhyāya: I dissent

How are you? How are you? How are you?

I always start like this. I am always aware that people come to yoga with a mass of unresolved things: things happening in their lives, questions in their hearts. They have children, and jobs; they live with bodies that sometimes fall sick and are always getting older.

But it’s different now. The grief. The anxiety. The anger.

People look stunned, ghosty, blank. It’s not just zoom fatigue; it’s that we’re gathering for meetings-school-and-social life while people continue to die, are abused by the state, are told the kids are alright and won’t be affected by the virus when they aren’t alright. Not all the kids.

It’s been suggested that yoga should avoid politics. (There has also been a rash of QAnon propaganda in the yoga and wellness worlds. Don’t buy it and don’t tolerate it.) But yoga - mine or yours - should never squash conversation about human rights. Or social dissolution. Or a hurting, burning, flooding planet.

On Monday, my husband trigger warned me about the forced sterilization of women in ICE detention centers. We tend to tag team our social outrage; one of us can break down while the other takes care of meals and walks the dog. One of us will be getting the usual - now highly unusual - career work done while the other mourns. Then we switch roles. But it isn’t often he warns me of what I’ll see when I look at my phone. I don’t think he’s ever done that before.

I didn’t look Monday night. I didn’t have to. It was not really news. Sterilization has happened to Black and brown women before, and it’s not like ICE detention centers are places of regard for rule of law.

It wasn’t news. I knew it was true without needing to read anything. But it was heartbreaking.

“Most of us were encouraged to think of self reflection in terms of aspirations and goals, vision boards and four hour work day schemes. We were never really taught to think of self-awareness in anything but the most comfortable of terms.”

I vomited. Then I spent much of Wednesday in bed, exhausted but unable to sleep. Unable to read. Unable to work.

The new cohort began Monday. I felt a release and crash after months of buildup. Tuesdays the Gita class is trying to discuss engaged action. We’re so lucky to have such a conversation already established, like a weekly support group. And it’s exhausting; by Wednesday I was shot.

I turned onto my side and buried my head in the duvet. I tossed again and threw the thing off. It occurred to me in my unable to sleep, unable to eat, unable to work state that Wednesdays may need to be blank for the next several months. Maybe Wednesdays and Thursdays too, I thought, poking a fork at food I could not eat. Maybe I’m going to have to get good at showing up heartbroken.

And then Justice Ginsberg died. My husband’s face did something like water: movement on the surface, movement under the surface. He retreated. I grabbed a can of tomatoes and started chopping onions. He’s grieving. I’ll make lasagna.

**

Maybe the answer to heartbreak is to ask a better question: not how to fix or sooth your heart in times of world sorrow, but how to really let it break. I mean really really. Like let it crack open and then show up with your dirty clothes and your blotchy face and your bitten nails. Then how are you? how are you? how are you? Look for the relationships, I tell people.

The answer is almost always to ask a better question, I realize, sliding garlic into olive oil. What happens next - next week, next election, next stage of history - is in part out of our hands. And - this is important - what happens next is in part dependent on what we do now. This is where questions should be. What part are you dealing with?

Everyone is feeling both an awful lot of responsibility and helpless. Hands seem inadequate and confusing.

Either you turn away from the question, knowing in a clumsy way that this choice will contribute to fifty years or more - a generation plus - of a judiciary concerned less with the rule of law then with white male power, a society that will murder some while coddling others, and preference a story that will lie to you about where you sit when it comes to safety and dreams. Or you acknowledge how hard the process of change is going to be.

This will also be clumsy, but in a different way. It will be enormously inconvenient. It will piss people off. It will change your life.

Look at who you are. You’re faced with a choice.

“तपःस्वाध्यायेश्वरप्रणिधानानि क्रियायोगः॥१॥
Effective yoga is a balance of effort, study of the self, and letting go.
”

— Yoga Sutras II.1

***

Do you want to hear about yoga?

Here is a Sanskrit word: Svādhyāya. Svādhyāya is generally translated to self study. Most of us were taught svādhyāya to mean self-reflection and/or personalized study of traditional texts. More literally, svā + dhyāya means meditating on the nature of the self. Generally speaking, most of us were encouraged to think of self reflection aspirationally, as vision boards and entrepreneurial schemes, better worlds for our children. We were taught to think this way as if it were not only realistic but something we are absolutely entitled to.

We were never taught self-awareness in anything but the most comfortable of terms.

But we know now the oppressive nature of that thinking. Self interest closes itself off from reality, from others, and from truth.

I think svādhyāya is the thing that happens when repressed truths surface. We’re familiar with this at the personal level: the way you know the lies you tell yourself and you go on both knowing and lying. We already know that transformation invokes the very things you’ve been avoiding. Not the things you want: the things you’ve been avoiding. What if svādhyāya means not-news-but-heartbreak?

It’s one thing to lie to yourself. It’s another to lie to yourself in ways that keep other human beings vulnerable.

I think this word, vulnerability, is an important one to look at right now. I want to take it seriously.

People know the word. The fear you will be hurt. A fear related to dying. Some of us experience it as nausea while others experience it as trembling. Sweat, faintness. A failing trail of words and a stupid mouth. Perhaps a recoil. Perhaps a desire to comply, make the moment pass. I feel a bracing in the chest and down the arms, a curl into fists, the entire muscular body preparing to revolt. I feel my eyes narrow. This may be imagined, but I feel my thoughts condense away from nuance and into hate. Prior hate. No matter hate. To the whole as unacceptable hate.

But here is where it gets serious: many of us feel viscerally vulnerable when examining our privilege or social positioning. Or we do whatever we can possibly do to avoid feeling it. We see an honest and integral conversation about social inequity is a direct and personal threat. We feel attacked. We get defensive. We reject. We argue something, but the subtext of the argument is that other people’s lives are not as important as our feelings.

Svādhyāya is understanding that self interest alone is socially harmful, and therefore we must get better at vulnerabilities.

***

Svādhāya is not an isolated thing. It has a context. It’s part of the triune definition of Yoga given by Patañjali in the second book of the Sutras: tapas, svādhyāya, īśvarapraṇidhāna (effort, self study, and surrender).

That is, svādhyāya mitigates the space between what we do and what we don’t, what we can and what we cannot.

Perhaps it’s even more critical to the equation: perhaps svādhāya is the very thing that helps us discern which is which and what is what. Svādhāya tells us exactly what to do with our hands.

***

I had a poetry teacher decades ago who scared the shit out of me.

She started the semester saying ‘I expect you to be working all the time, you know’. She had interrupted her own sentence to say it and left it hanging there for much longer than was comfortable. We were reading modern poets, including Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez and Joy Harjo. And while I loved their words, I myself wasn’t ready. To work constantly would have been too demanding. I was scared of what would happen if I were actually to take my work seriously.

english isn’t a good language/to expression through/mostly i imagine because people/try to speak English instead/of trying to speak through it said Nikki and I couldn’t speak through anything. I knew what she meant. But I didn’t answer.

Perhaps the world ends here, Joy said and then kept going and going. I found all such irreverences soothing.

Picture this woman/ saying no to the constant/ yes of slavery  sang Sonia and I did, I pictured it and it broke my heart, but I was still too goddamned quiet.

Decades ago. At the time, I took myself too seriously and my work not seriously enough. This was not a happy arrangement. I was - I made myself - miserable. I made other people miserable too. It would take me a long while to sober up, grow up, get responsible and in getting responsible to realize that I had taken myself seriously in the wrong way.

Just as vulnerability can either mean I’m scared I’m going to die or I’m uncomfortable in this conversation, seriousness can either mean a stupefying arrogance or an open and willing humility.

What if svādhyāya - all of this yogic stuff, all of these words, any words, Jewish ones or Jesus ones, Allah or Please or American, I don’t care so long as you speak through it- really meant a qualitatively different kind of seriousness? A kind of vulnerability we don’t yet know? A serious vulnerability? Vulnerable seriousness?

Can we take what is precious and in danger seriously?

What could we not be then? and is that not the only thing that could possibly make this better? Isn’t it time? Invert the questions and all the languages you’ve known this far. Ask better.

Look at yourself. Looking at yourself is the only way you’ll know what to do with your useless hands. If you are okay, help somehow. If you aren’t, ask for help. I’m not really talking about poetry, but teaching, democracy, friendship, love. I expect you to be working constantly. I will not let you go.

Cities on Fire

““The energy that was buried with the rise of the Christian nations must come back into the world; nothing can prevent it. Many of us, I think, both long to see this happen and are terrified of it, for though the transformation contains the hope for liberation, it also imposes a necessity for great change.” ”

— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

Photo: Zach Boyden-Holmes—The Register/USA TODAY Network/Sipa. Protesters set the 3rd Precinct on fire Thursday, May 28 2020

We humans have a trembling relationship with fire. The blossom of a flame is both terrifying and awesome. Fire is symbolic, destructive, redemptive, urgent, ultimate, angry, violent, dynamic and beautiful. At a Minneapolis protest on Friday, Philando Castile’s mother referred to the burning and looting of the city as an outward expression of what has been happening in Black bodies for generations. The fire has been inside us, she said. It’s been kindled every time a Black man is murdered by the police. It keeps getting lit, year after year and generation after generation.

The solidarity expressed by the owners of burned businesses - their unrelenting support for the protest - should be a full stop for any feelings of qualified support of Black lives. Theft of Black resources and capitalism - built on slave labor after all, source of white privilege, all the ways in which we are taught racism and then taught not to see it- are foundational to white supremacy.

My eyes sting from the acrid smoke of burning rubber and buildings. The air is greasy and has a grained, metallic nature to it. There is an eerie silence as neighborhoods stand watch: it has a lack of traffic and then sudden rushing vehicles, it has gun shots and smoke, and there is a constant but faint hum of helicopters overhead. The fires have gone on for days. Some of the fires were started not by protestors but by white supremacists and hate groups. They fly through our neighborhoods in vehicles whose license plates have been removed, passing over and over again as though surveying. The protectors of the neighborhoods shift their stance a little each time they pass by. When these vehicles are stopped by police or the national guard, the passangers flee on foot. Baseball bats and accelerants are found in the vehicles. White kids drive in from out of town to participate - not in solidarity - but in the looting.

These people have stolen the narrative - or attempted to. I don’t think they know that’s what they are doing. But they won’t abide successful protest. They can’t make space for power in black communities. And so they change the story to center themselves. Thus the pain of Black communities is co-opted and silenced to a premeditated narrative of riots and looting.

Last night I listened to my husband check in with his friends and organize community protection shifts. They are creating neighborhood fire fighting call lines since the actual Fire Department can’t go to a site until the police have been able to verify the control of the site. Many, many friends from around the world have been calling to check on us. He was quiet as the person on the other end of the line spoke. He cleared his throat. He was quiet for a moment. Two. Then he said ‘my city is burning’. Then he cried.

Photo by my husband, Gunnar Carlson

There is a sense that this time may be different. The officer who murdered George Floyd has been arrested. Solidarity protests have spread - licks of flame - across the country. They’ve spread to Europe. Lagos, Nigeria has a solidarity march planned. Support for the protests and wider acknowledgement of the systemic nature of harm have traveled like forest fire far beyond urban, politically engaged dialogue. An understanding of how sick the Minneapolis Police force is - from its white supremacist Union leader to the fact that 94% of the force are do not live in Minneapolis but police a people who are not themselves- has been part of the conversation. The conversation has taken up the militarization of the police in general. Connecting dots between our President’s chronically inflammatory behavior and our systemic racism have been clearly drawn. There is a theme of gun violence across America, so much so that incidents barely register in the news cycles of other countries. It’s hard to keep up with our chronicle of blood.

Let me clarify: it is white people who are discovering this narrative. It is Black and brown voices who have taught us. There is an outrage amongst those not directly imperiled or affected by racist policing, a dawning understanding that this burn is hundreds of years old. We know that the cycle of violence will not end without a decisive break. It’s time for change, we’ve been whispering. About school shootings. About income disparity. About polarized hatred and delusional attempts to manipulate facts. When George Floyd’s murder went viral, white America was traumatized. And, in significant ways, she saw this underlying, inarguable, unhalfassable need for change.

I want to caution us as we read, as we protest, and as we pull back layers and layers of mistaught history and personal feelings. I will not use shoulds or make ultimate statements about what solidarity looks like because it doesn’t work like that. In some cases it is safe to show up at protests or call out a family member, but not in all. Protest is not the only form of solidarity. In fact in some ways you can argue protests are easy: they make us feel better, and they satisfy and emergent need. But systemic change demands economic change, policy change, voting change, educational reform.

Systemic change asks for a deep change of heart, probably a much deeper change than we feel we are ready for. What is coming is going to be hard.

Don’t be complacent, I’m saying. But don’t be overwhelmed, either. We are going to recognize our own complicity and stumble awkwardly with own choices and the mundane facts of our lives. Shame and our own trauma are going to come up. I am asking you to be willing to set fire to that shit and eat your own ashes. As we wake up to the fact that we are living on the crux of a historical moment, we have to also realize that Black people have been living with this in a daily way. Black people have been living this all their lives. Black folks have been living with this for hundreds of years. Keep the shaky feeling of the last few days in perspective.

This is a crisis that is not a crisis. It is neither surprising nor is it new. What we are living with is the inevitable outcome of the underlying patterns in our society. And as Baldwin said, many of us both want change to come and are terrified once we start to examine what change must mean. This is yoga philosophy 101: human beings, families, communities and societies function on patterns, most of them subliminal. These patterns course through the body mind and play out in what looks like destiny. It spills and it soaks like fuel. No cycle of abuse or oppression or self delusion will end unless there is a decisive break.

Disruption of patterns is what yoga is all about. Disruption burns. It is the smoldering frictional heat of discomfort, humility, and bitter shame. It’s like the flush of embarrassment, but this is much older and essential.

Burning heat and sacrificial fire are central to spiritual transformation You’ve heard this before. You know this. You heal in a small way and suddenly you realize a deeper pattern in yourself, one you couldn’t see before. You hit a point, somewhere, where you don’t know what change means but you’re willing to do anything you have to do to to get it. Perhaps you’ve been to the place where you are both terrified, because you don’t know who’ll you’ll be on the other side, and willing. Willing even if what comes next is painful.

I am a yoga teacher and so I will use the words I know from the yogic tradition, but the principle is elementary to spiritual truths. This psychological burning is tapas. Tapas is usually translated as effort. It gets watered down to the physical efforts made in an asana practice but I think of it as the writhing of the soul. Tapas is soulful, terrified, heart tender, hands to the work of the day effort. The teaching goes that when balanced with self-study (svadhyaya) and acceptance (ishvara pranidhana) catabolism happens. Change happens. Freedom suddenly is. This change happens in your heart. It spreads like wildfire through your personality in such a way that it leaves nothing standing. If and only if we can see that tapas is psychological or soulful effort will we understand healing and that healing is never merely personal. It can’t be personal because when our hearts change our relationships change. When our relationships change, our worlds get bigger. When our worlds get bigger communities heal.

I want you to think of tapas not as physical effort, only, but as the discomfort that washes over us when we intentionally interrupt a pattern. Tapas is also our ability to handle this process, or what in psychological circles is called resilience or tolerance. Tapas is those surges of grief, remorse, pain, and clarity. Tapas is shame and the intense personal work of healing shame. I insist: you can handle it. I insist further: your own healing, the getting over your oldest wounds, the breaking of chains so your kids don’t have to suffer in the same way you did, isn’t going to happen unless your healing is also social. Race savvy. Intersectional.

Your anger is sacred precisely because it connects you to the suffering of others. And your grief is holy in that it shows you exactly - but exactly - where it is you need to work. It is critical that you learn to take care of yourself. Do the personal healing you need to do.

But this story is not ultimately or even marginally about your feelings. Real as they are, your feelings are not more important than the truth. You’ve probably discovered, somewhere along the way, that your feelings aren’t facts.

And if your feelings aren’t facts, then centering your feelings is a theft of the narrative. It is the covert version of driving an unlicensed vehicle through a traumatized neighborhood.

Michael Brown, Sr at a memorial for George Floyd at 38th and Chicago, Minneapolis. On August 9, 2014 Michael Brown Jr was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. Photo: Gunnar Carlson

Philando Castile’s mother, fallen into the arms of another woman who lost her son to white police, after speaking at a peaceful protest May 28th. Photo: Gunnar Carlson

Baldwin speaks of an energy buried by the rise of the Christian nations. He’s talking of the rise of the United States and American Slavery. I want you to think, long and hard and deeply, about that first part of the sentence. I want you to pray with it, even if like Baldwin and myself you are a stark atheist. What is that energy that has been oppressed now for hundreds of years? What would it mean to see that energy come back into the world?

I’d like to suggest it is the power of Black and brown and indigenous peoples. It is their wisdom, their passion, their love, their medicine. It is their songs, their literature, their dance, their food and their sciences. I think it may be the potency and power of their experience when that energy is not co-opted for white consumption and plagiarism. I’d argue that most white spirituality is both void of the ethics it claims as its justification and composed of the traditions of non-white peoples. I think it is what Black joy can teach us of white women’s shame and learned helplessness, the very fact that most white women do not know how to feel joy without a sense of guilt and breaking rank. Our shame silence has been key to white supremacy all along. The heart of our wounds are not separate from anti-Blackness. This is the meaning of intersectionality.

It is right at the heart of why we’re conflicted. Unlearning racism brings the most personal things into question. Things we’ve come to depend on for our own survival. Precisely what we call holy or sacred. I mean our careers, our parenting, our rituals whether they be shared or private, meaningful or hidden in denial. I mean our friendships and family.

I think we’ll survive such a reckoning. This is hard for me to explain precisely because it isn’t the kind of knowing that comes from anything but direct experience, but I’ve fallen apart and felt better afterwards. I’ve lost my entire world and through a process of healing came to be living a life far better than anything I could have believed possible. So I know that sometimes what looks like loss is actually enrichment. Like down to the very marrow and fretted cells. Before you drop a mask you’ll think you’ll die if you lose the mask. But having set it aside, having known the suddenness and gladness and tumbling soulfulness of being imperfect and vulnerable and finally real, you do come to value sincerity over perfection. You begin to see the preciousness of imperfection. You begin to trust in such processes. You know you’ll be just fine.

I also happen to know that my own experience of being a woman - privately often a shameful, wounded, and comparison riddled thing - has never felt so unconflicted and brave as when I have worked and laughed and grieved with other women.

As much as our world has felt shattered and obscene in the last few news cycles - and it has been both shattered and obscene - I think that energy is emerging. I think we have seen more love in these century long days and generational nights than we’ve been able to acknowledge because on the surface it looks like pain and grief. What we’ve seen is non-violence and compassion. What is it but love that could call a community out of its fear to protect Black owned businesses with their own bodies? What is it but non-violence and compassion that could survive mid-wifing and nursing the babies of your own oppressors? For generations? As tired as I get, I am never not moved and consoled by the voices of Black feminists. I have turned to them over and over again in my own darkest nights. And it’s time for me to ask: if they have done so much to save my life, what exactly is it I have shared with them in return?

I referred, earlier, to the process of fire as catabolic. Not transformational, merely. Catabolism is a process that not only burns and creates energy by its burning but destroys something along the way. You can’t both change and get to keep things as they are. This is the scary part. This is why it’s so hard to do the work of unlearning racism. This is why our white relatives and neighbors and selves are so inclined to counter by saying all lives matter, white lives matter, we’re fine with the idea of the thing but what about me? We’re scared that parity will cost us something. We’re scared that this will hurt. I think we’re scared of Black people and Black communities but we won’t say it. And even if we can get that clear, we’ll have to go further and realize our fear of Black people is just a way of avoiding how scared we are of ourselves if the familiar falls away.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say yes, change will hurt. It will cost us. This is not to say that affording Black people the same rights and privileges as our own will somehow diminish our lives; we’re not talking about pie, as the saying goes; there is enough here to go around. But I think the depth to which we need to change will be hard on us. It won’t be easy. Many, many people are going to resist it.

We should believe in it anyway. We should fight for it even as we don’t quite understand. It’s okay to not understand. But let yourself burn.

Body of Water

Perhaps the universe is a body. An organism. A network of - somehow - intellect, resilience, perfectly orchestrated rhythms and apparently spontaneous phenomena. Within that universe the planet Earth can also be seen as a body - a living breathing thing. If we can’t quite call it sentient - though many would - we can still marvel at its intricacies. The body has power, has micro and macro systems that function far beyond anything our brains could manufacture or comprehend. To study the world is to be both humbled and soothed. Terrified and aesthetically pleased. Nature’s forms are harmony, crash, deadly, crushing, and in the end vulnerable. It rights us to see and to feel this. Awe is a kind of medicine. Perhaps the original one.

I am not a scientist, and much of this goes over my head, but I understand that the Earth is unique because it has water. Indeed, it is more water than it is the earth of rock and dirt and salt and soil. The planet is a bubble of liquid with an oceanic heart. It has glaciers and cloud forests that function much like organs, absorbing, distilling, and releasing in an alchemic homeostasis. It involves delicate sighs of glassy ice and susurrations of gasses into mist. Earth has arterial rivers, veins of springs, capillaries of moss and lichen. In fact these rivers and cloud formations and tides do functionally serve as a heartbeat, a circulatory system of the planet. It all pulses and squeezes, pours and circulates.

Biological life was born in the ocean as each individual was born in a waterlike womb. Consciousness - whatever that is - evolved in a watered environment. Each of our cells swim between a watery environment outside the cell membrane and a delicate fluid enviornment interior to the cell membrane.

Life is both a surge and a tidewater. Flow and ebb and stream are part of both social and individual being ness. Water is both terrifying and soothing, elemental and existential. We know more about the surface of the moon than we do of the ocean’s floor. We’re prone to know and think more about our own surfaces then we are to plumb the depths of our hearts.

A human being is mostly water. In fact our composition is strikingly similar to the planet’s, more than 70% some form of liquidity. We tend to think of ourselves as solids, and as permanent, but both are illusions. We are water. 

“There is a mystery about rivers that draws us to them, for they rise from hidden places and travel by routes that are not always tomorrow where they might be today,” Olivia Laing wrote in her stunning meditation on life, loss, and the meaning of rivers (To The River: A Journey Beneath the Surface). Change, impermanence, and time are strangely embroiled in water’s curls; alluded to, a metaphor of sorts, but understood in a more-than-intellectual way. Felt.

To open ourselves to the experience of water - to listen to the water’s teachings, if you’ll go there - has something to do with the river of life, our tumbledness, our sources, and the rites of letting go. It has everything to do with power, rejuvenation, supplication, and baptism. Water is emotive. Or emotions are water like. And there is some kind of relationship between water and the moon (one teacher told me our fascination with the moon comes from the way it changes, as we do. We are mirrors).

I introduced Yoga Darsana students to ancient, ancient Indian history in recent weeks. I told them the story of the Indus River Valley Civilization and the Saraswati River. Once upon a time, the story goes, there was a vital and flourishing culture on the banks of the rivers of Northern India. We know very little about these people - a ghost culture - other than that they existed. They seem to have had a highly developed ascetic, ritual, and cultural sense; very little evidence of war or weaponry. We know they danced and carved sculpture in bronze and clay. But we do not know the language, the meaning, the stories out of which the art came. Like the ghosted handprints in the caves of Lascaux, the cities of the Saraswati are elusively haunting.

Then the environment changed, tectonic plates shifted, and the great river disappeared. The entire area became more like a desert than an alluvial plane. The culture vanished.

But not entirely. Somehow, rumor and stories of the place and the time remained. Later Vedic culture referred to that earlier time. The ‘mythic’ river Saraswati became symbolic of higher purposes, knowledge, arts and language, music. Eventually the river personified as a goddess: mother of song, great nurturer of culture, birth and source of wisdom teachings, singer and harmonizer. Saraswati became the Milky Way, dropping to the Himalayas on the winter solstice, seeping a kind of knowing into the Indian subcontinent. It’s a knowing both humbling and gratifying, water knowing is. 

Ayurvedically speaking, water is the fourth element, more dense than air or space or fire but slightly less dense than earth. It precedes earth. It births it. It contains those more subtle elements within it; it is source and the coming to be of materiality, abundance, potential. Although its qualities of ‘flow’ and transformation are most obvious - now dew and now mist, now ripple than riptide - water is also cohesive, strong, and form making. It eats through stone, after all. The power of steam can crack through the earth’s surface. Water is a liquid structure, a fluid matrix, a building block that somehow changes shape. It has sweetness. It has bonding. It underlies and it soothes. Water is the protector of the body. Water protects against the dissolution of ether, the roughness and motion of air, the heat of fire. Water soothes all pain and inflammation in the body and provides the body with its most basic nourishmnet.

The origin of the water element is taste, rasa. Rasa provides the potential for the experience of taste to occur, not any particular taste itself. Take this literally, and let it expand: without water, sophistication and pleasure are impossible. Growth is impossible. Individuation never begins. 

 The tongue is the sense organ of water. Through the tongue we taste the world around us. The taste buds only work when water or saliva is present. No water, no taste. Water - as saliva - lubricates the mouth against the actions of chewing and against the burn of the enzymes that begin the process of digestion (salivary amylase). The mucous of the lips, cheeks, and pharynx protect and give right direction to our digestive processes. Different muscuosal substances protect the stomach against digestive acids. Water substances protect and lubricate the joints - the liquid crystals of the fascial network of the body are both the form and the changing of all movement. The synovial fluids and bursae that allow tendons to glide smoothly are waterlike. And there is a water form that stabilizes the flow of neurological impulses and protects the nerves of the brain and peripheral nervous system. The lungs are mostly water: that water base protects lung tissues from the movement (drying) of breath, the mucous membranes of the bronchi and lungs also provides the fluids that support the pleura and pericardium. And shall we speak of blood?

Water is cool, stable, heavy, moist, smooth, actual (as opposed to abstract) flowing, cloudy, and soft. Hence it is the antidote to symptoms that have any of the opposite qualities in the body mind. Water is medicine when you are too warm, ungrounded, emaciated, dehydrated, rough, lacking in self esteem, obstructed and immobile, irritable with a sharp tongue and judgey mind, transparent or vulnerable. Water helps when your heart has become hard or your scars have ossified.

I encouraged the students to spend time considering water: to listen to water sounds, sit near rivers or oceans. Few things can so directly hook your body mind back into something larger than yourself, counter the effects of stress and technology, remind us of tears and oceans and ultimate things. I think this is both abstract and physiological: our biorhythms respond, or could. If they don’t, we’ve at least gathered some useful information about our biorhythms. Water is sacred and reminds us of the ordinary sacred: there is a reason for babtism and holy water and you can touch it, you can bathe, you can actually drink.

I asked them to reflect on culture’s relationship to water, the way we rise and fall on it. Our dependence and our blindness to that dependence. If the delicate alchemy of the earth’s waters shifts in small degrees, life on earth will end. Before that happens, of course, drought will kill millions, pollution will poison our children, cities will fall off of the continents and superstorms will eat away our coasts. Species will die. Our greed and our ignorance has destruction in it. Water is politic, just as land and bodies are: 80% of the world’s natural resources are protected by indigenous peoples. Raping their land, their autonomy, or their influence directly threatens the eco-system. Think of the pipelines in North America. Think of Flint.

None of this, that is to say, is mere mythology. Or perhaps myths are more important than we think. To study yoga - in depth, over a long course of time - should start to hit home not so much in the accomplishment of asana but in a depth perception, glinting on the surface and dark at the center.

WORKING WITH WATER:

Saraswati by raja rami Varma

Goddess of higher learning and the fine arts, Saraswati is related to holy waters, music, and considered speech. She is often depicted with the Vahana - a syntagmatic creature - of either a swan or a peacock, both related to splendor, beauty, and grace. Saraswati dresses in white as a symbol of purity, and the song of water and the power of flowing speech and time are hers.

• simply be in the presence of water. Regardless of where you are in the world, local bodies of water can’t be far. And they play significant roles in the way towns are built, traffic flows, weather moves. Get intimate with local bodies of water. Live on water’s time for a few minutes every day. A very traditional Ayurvedic remedy for anxiety is to spend time near a body of water. Another is to bathe before sleep (preferably with an oil massage).

• awe is a medicine

• Listen to water: get a sound machine or an app and try different tracks as you prepare for or go to sleep.

• Relate to the earth’s water: give money, time, or some of your platform to environmental issues. Clean a beach. Come to understand what plastics are doing to the oceans in more than a theoretical way. Look at what desertification does to countries and economies. Save a glacier. Protect a cloud forest.

• Move like water: I’m cautious of ‘flow’ classes and their vinyasas these days, but there is something to flowing movements, gliding movements, rolling and sliding movements. Invite a mind of water, a gratitude for water, a remembrance of water into your movement practices. Swim. Few things teach ‘flow’ like martial arts and yogic movements: channel Bruce Lee and Be Water my Friend.

• Study the flow and the stream of the breath, the mind, and the course of a lifetime. Any meditation on impermanence does the trick.

• Invite Saraswati into your practice. Respect her. Honor the sources of your knowledge and come to appreciate the ways in which you relate to bodies of knowledge. Take care of your learning, your books, your instruments. Reflect on how lived reality - experience- influences our frame of reference, becomes an abstraction or an ideal and flows back into creativity. Saraswati is the Milky Way, she rolls out of the Himalayas, she sings in the waters of poetry, music, and art. Protect and invest in humanity’s cultural wealth. Mother Saraswati is heralded as Vag or Vac Devi (goddess of speech), and there is allusion to both the power of words and the harmony of good speech- as opposed to harmful, uncaring, brutal speech or repressed speech. She is said to be seated in the tongue of/consort or feminine aspect of Brahma, who is the master of all universal knowledge and wisdom.

• Source: begin to understand origins and where things come from, whether that be your groceries, the practices you use, the stories you tell, or your own experiences.

• Release: begin to study and appreciate the way all things change and leave. The long hard study of letting go and un-ownership is both culturally and psychologically urgent. It is hard. And it is urgent.

• Boundaries and transformation. It’s all about boundaries, really. Money is just money. Time is just time. And people are just people. It isn’t a question of those things, but of your relationship to them. Where are you leaky? Where are you frozen? Where are you resistant? Yoga Sutra 4.3 teaches that it - transformation - happens when natural forces overflow. That is, it’s all about the efficacy of our actions and the removal of obstacles. Our main work is to lay the ground and prepare the field. What appears as a breakthrough - if not inexplicable miracle - is really just a long previous subterranean process of removing the obstacles which made a thing hard. If we do our work, transformation is nigh inevitable. Of course this is tricky; our tendency will be to make things happen, control outcomes, favor a particular kind of transformation while avoiding some other. Transformation isn’t like that. Transformation is not something you do and its form is not a thing you choose. It’s bigger than you are. But if you take care of your boundaries (cue Yama Niyama teachings), it just happens.

• To build on this boundaries thing: one of the poems Yoga Darsana students are using is from Sheng-Yen, a Chinese Buddhist Monk who founded the Dharma Drum School in Taiwan: Be soft in your practice. Think of the method as a fine silvery stream, not a raging waterfall. Follow the stream, have faith in its course. It will go on its own way, meandering here, trickling there. It will find the grooves, the cracks, the crevices. Just follow it. Never let it out of your sight. It will take you there.

• Or this one, from Ganga White:

  What if our religion was each other

  if our practice was our life

  if prayer, our words.

  What if the temple was the earth

  if forests were our church

  if holy water the rivers, lakes, and oceans.

  What if meditation was our relationships

  If the Teacher was life

  If wisdom was self-knowledge

  If love was the center of our being.

Yoga, Inner Peace, and Social Illness

Yoga has been sold as a cure to personal suffering and a path to inner peace. That sales model - and that is what it is, a marketing ploy, not an eternal truth - puts price tags on dubious ‘healing techniques’ and sells you momentary feel goods. Momentary: built into this model is the idea that you’re always going to have to buy or do more. It implies that there is something wrong with you, while hinting that if you work out enough or release your trauma or channel a crystal you’ll feel better. The idea that there is something wrong with you sends you down a rabbit hole of shame and perfectionism, projection and disempowerment. It turns our gaze away from the big picture, encouraging quiescence and denial and collusion. It makes us drones who buy stuff in order to feel real. Quiescence and denial are the very mechanisms of white supremacy, environmental extortion, and status quo hatred.

This model isolates suffering - creating a whole phantasmal world of inner demons and lost children, true selves and false selves, traumas and soul journeys. It’s a great infantilizer. And the genius of it lies in its mysticism: how will you ever know if you’ve found your ‘true self’?

As a sales model, it tends to work. It positions us as consumers and creates its own need. It makes us complicit in a social reality rather than questioning, participating, actionable players within it.

It does not work as a healing modality.

It doesn’t work as a healing modality because our suffering is not personal. No one is wounded or traumatized independently. Why then would healing be? The injunction to heal ourselves - especially amongst us white folks - is a slip of the tongue and the attention span. It conveniently positions us as victims, powerless, and dealing with our own wounds while deflecting our attention away from very real and institutionalized privileges. It’s past time that we within the yoga community stop this myopic quest to live authentically. It’s not important that we speak ‘our truth’. It’s time we start to listen.

It is a myth that we can stop global warming by individually recycling and lowering our carbon footprint; the only thing that will save the planet at this point is organized, systemic, collective change. Change on the governmental level. Legislative change. Cultural change. Economic change. And yet we’re told even within eco-conscious circles how important personal decisions and actions are.

The same is true of white supremacy, gun violence, and systemic oppression. No amount of individual action is going to right these wrongs. And hear me clearly: these are wrongs. This is not normal. This level of human suffering and mass violence is not merely the turning of some ancient wheel. This world could be different. It should be. We can make that happen.

I am not saying you shouldn’t look at your own pain. You can and should examine the ways shared traumas are personally playing themselves out in your body and your life. Nor am I displacing or disparaging grief. But unless you also recognize healing happens in the collective, in relationship, with systemic change, no amount of personal trauma resilience is going to matter.

At what point are we going to recognize that anxiety and trauma are social illnesses? At what point are we going to reckon with the social problems - not the mental health issues - that cause mass shootings? And when exactly are we going to see the hypocrisy in calling refugees invaders, black bodies criminal, and white boys with semi automatics lone wolves?

Go ahead and rest. Weep. Retreat from social media and take a break from the news. Move your body to get in touch with your body and burn off the biochemical wastes of sadness and tension.

But then come back. Take action. Listen. Inner peace doesn’t really exist. Peace in our world is a more important goal. Serenity, which is the closest thing I know to inner peace, depends on meaningful action in the real world.

Do whatever you can do, as often as you can, and take care of yourself so that skillful action remains a possibility.