I wanted to write today, on October 4th, because today is the day devoted to St. Francis of Assisi. He is the Catholic saint who renounced his wealth, devoted himself to poverty and service, and found incredible spiritual connection to the natural world, animals and especially the birds. Instead of searching for the Divine, he vowed…
Read moreYoga Nidra: Learning To See Self
How does yoga, Yoga Nidra, and meditation help us learn to see and understand ourselves?
Master teacher and author Donna Farhi wrote in her book, Bringing Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living
One of the most devastating consequences of skewed perception is the longing that grows in us for someone to see us as we really are. We long to have someone, somewhere, even for a moment, really see us. When someone sees the “us” that is our essence, we say that we feel loved. My teacher taught that the primary thing to learn is how to be this loving, accepting presence. . . . When this longing to be seen by another is great, we become susceptible to chronic manipulation of our image. We may continually rearrange and reinvent ourselves in the hope that this new rendition will please our audience. Instead of being present, we perform. (pp. 179–80)
In Clear Mind, Wild Heart Poet David Whyte says, “To be constantly explaining who you are is a gospel of despair.” He further invites us to simply be ourselves and in so doing give permission to all around us to do likewise.
In yoga, Yoga Nidra , and meditation we practice self-witnessing as we breathe, move through poses, and become mindful. Without this self-witness you can’t understand the real you. No amount of exposure or popularity, no amount of others seeing or perceiving you will compensate for the lack of knowing yourself. It’s the paradox of rock stars: so popular but often feeling so lonely. A friend once told me, “ It’s as if in our quest to experience and really discover/remember who we are, we feel like being seen by others is synonymous to being. There must be something there to see, right?”
But being witnessed isn’t witnessing. Yoga philosophy suggests that who we are fundamentally is the ability to truly witness ourselves.
Yoga Nidra is perhaps my favorite way of seeing the part of me that never changes, the part that just is. Yoga Nidra is one of my favorite ways of practicing just BEING. Yoga Nidra is a method of self-inquiry that helps you to practice simply witnessing all the things that you are aware of as the first step to learning to illuminate Awareness itself. In Yoga Nidra philosophy (tantra) you’re true being is Awareness.
“Thanks, Mr. Oblique Yoga Philosophy Guy. That’s some awesome yoga thought but give me some real-life ways to relate that to getting up in the morning and facing another day of work and family and the every-day.”
Well, the easiest way to apply this is to just pay attention to your life. What does it feel like to sit in a warm shower and let the water flow over your skin? What do the blossoms smell like when you walk down the sidewalk? What does your breakfast taste like? What does it feel like when your boss walks by? Yoga practice is simply a condensed and refined way of paying close attention.
Besides yoga makes us feel great, helps us have a healthy body, calm mind, and open heart. Here’s the deal: once we start practicing this self-witnessing business in yoga, we won’t stop at Namaste. We’ll be feeling our hamstrings in practice one night, and wake up extremely aware of the way the shower feels or maybe start to see the deep feelings in your heart. These are the most real ways of just being. The deeper we pay attention, the more we notice what’s behind the surface, what’s animating the outer form, what’s sensing, what’s seeing. Eventually, with practice, we become more and more familiar with this Inner Self. What’s amazing is how this knowledge of our inner-self gives us amazing confidence to just be. We stop trying to produce the image of ourselves, and we just be ourselves.
It reminds me of tales of Mark Twain. Often when he delivered lectures, like one would expect he would walk out on stage the crowd would applaud and then quiet down listening intently for what he would say. But what people didn’t expect is that often, Mark Twain wouldn’t start talking right away. He’d stand there in front of a packed auditorium and stare down the audience. Each second that passed wound the tension tighter and tighter. One man looking at thousands. He didn’t have to perform. He didn’t have to say anything. He was Mark-Freegin’-Twain! Finally, when the tension became almost unbearable, he would say but one word and have the entire audience in his hands. Now that’s presence!
Writers and poets, yogis and meditators all have one crucial thing in common: they’ve developed a keen attention to themselves and the world around them.
May you practice some of this self-witnessing in whatever form you love to be present.
Maybe this is what John Lennon meant when he sang ,“Let it be.”
What To Remember When Waking
Awakening With Yoga Nidra, the “Yoga of Sleep”
I love Yoga Nidra. Yoga Nidra uses the “technology” of the Nidra state, that hypnotic state between waking and dreaming, to enter into an experience of being that isn’t available to us in our regular waking life. Shamanic, religious, and even psychological methods use this state as a way of discovering deeper truths about ourselves. Yoga Nidra is a beautiful and relaxing pathway toward awakening.
I love this poem by David Whyte because like many good poems it can speak to many different things at once. When read from the context of awakening through Yoga Nidra or any other meditative practice, it has a particular poignance.
Enjoy!
What to Remember When Waking
by David Whyte
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.
Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?
from The House of Belonging, Many Rivers Press
Valuing Perplexity
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We all have problems. We all grapple with the unknown, about the big things like the origin of the Universe, sure, but more specifically about our own complicated life. We all want to solve our problems as quickly and painlessly as possible.
But sometimes it is only by questioning or struggling that we are driven to earnestly understand an otherwise hidden part of ourselves. Sometimes it is working through our struggles that we truly come to understand our full potential. Our questions fuel us to open our hearts, to seek for inspiration, to perform the necessary work, and more profoundly, to abandon our will to the grander wisdom of the Divine, whatever your concept of that is.
We must at once be willing to seek and do. What's most difficult is that we must also be willing to sit comfortably and simply be with what we don't know or understand. And sometimes to get real answers we must be willing to sit in our own darkness for a while.
This human tendency for control occurs regularly in our yoga practice as many of us strive to either know everything there is to know about yoga or try to perfect our poses.
Instead, let us practice this week the yoga principle of Santosha, or contentment, by learning to sit with and even value perplexity, to sit in the not knowing. There is a practice of allowing things to be just the way they are, perfect with our problems, as unseen forces that are working in mysterious ways to evolve your body, mind, and heart.
The following poem by David Whyte seems to speak directly to learning from the not knowing and leaning into the darkness rather than running from it.
Sweet Darkness
by David Whyte
20-Hr. Yoga Nidra Training
Virtual or in-Person
September 28–30 2018
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
Mastery
“In order to gain mastery, you must dismantle as much as you build.”
What is mastery?
Author and poet David Whyte illustrates mastery with a great story about an old welsh sheepdog named Kumro. According to David Whyte, Kumro was “the Joe Montana of the canine cosmos,” despite the fact that he was ancient in dog years, limped on a gimpy leg, and was missing key visual and hearing functions.
David Whyte describes seeing the younger, spry dogs trying fruitlessly to direct the sheep by spending enormous amounts of energy all the while Kumro stood back and simply watched (with his good eye).
Finally, Kumro decided something needed to be done. He took merely two or three steps in one direction, slightly turned his body a few degrees in the direction of the sheep, and almost like magic the entire flock funneled obediently into the narrow opening in the wall where he had wanted them to go.
Kumro’s edge, his mastery, was his radical simplicity—minimal effort for maximum benefit.
In decades past, the mantra for mastery was “Mind Over Matter.” As I’m writing this, I’m conjuring visions of high-waisted leotards, leg warmers, and headbands. It was conquer and conquest of body and nature. But to mistake body and nature as our foes unfortunately results in broken and bodies and annihilated environments.
Today we live in the Information Age. By applying correct information, we can achieve and practice mastery by doing less to get exponentially more and without the high cost of conquering ourselves. Instead of “Mind Over Matter,” the new mantra is “Mindfulness With Matter.” The information we gain for mastery doesn’t come from the internet, a course, or a book (remember those, or did they go out with the leg-warmers?). The profound and life-changing information I’m talking about comes only by learning to listen to the master within, like your own personal Yoda, the quiet and wise whispering of body, mind, and spirit. While a teacher can help, they can never substitute for that inner master. Mastery, therefore, involves learning to listen to the wisdom already inside of you.
John Coltrane had mastery. He had teachers, yes, but who taught Coltrane to be Coltrane? Coltrane did.
Learn to listen. Listen to learn.
Of course, this applies directly to our yoga practice. In my mind, there is no “achievement” by putting your foot behind your head. That mentality is so “Mind Over Matter.” In class I like joke that if there is a pose I can’t do, that pose is overrated. Sure, I’ll keep practicing it because of what I can learn in the listening, but I have no delusions that by putting my foot behind my head will make me more spiritual, more valuable, or a better person.
Instead, the achievement is all internal and mind-bogglingly more expansive than flexible hamstrings. It’s the invisible flexibility of my constant growth into Awareness, a mastery which is facilitated by the tools of my body, mind, and breath but which fundamentally isn’t body, mind, and breath. And this expansiveness can only come from a mastery of what is most subtle.
“Perfection is not when there is no more to add, but no more to take away. ”
“One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.”
So, if mastery is minimalism, what do we need to cut in order to practice it? Start by cutting everything that isn’t absolutely necessary. Start by radically cutting everything but the breath.
Try this experiment:
Sit. Close your eyes. Breathe slowly in and out. Listen and feel. Visualize your breath as a color or texture and localize your breath to any place on your body you choose. You’ll soon feel a tingle, a heaviness, a lightness, or something else. If you chose a hand, it might feel as if that hand is larger or lighter than the other. This kind of attention and focus on the breath will localize Prana, the yogic term meaning life-force energy. You can feel Prana. Also, this focus brings Awareness. Now what if you could breathe this Prana, this life-force energy and Awareness in into your mind, your emotions, or hell, your finances or love life? That’s mastery.
“Dude, how did you finally let go of all of your anxiety?”
“I found my breath.”
I invite you to practice and cultivate mastery by cutting everything but the essentials. Practice breathing and meditation. Practice styles of yoga like yin, restore, and pranayama that celebrate getting much more by doing much less. There’s nothing wrong with vigorous yoga. And as you approach whatever poses or life situation, try simplifying down to the essence. Learn to breathe life into whatever you are experiencing at the moment.
Next week I’ll continue on this theme of mastery with even more practical ways of using our breath, and Prana to develop mastery in our yoga and meditation practice, our love life, and our work.
