Category Archives: Shinzen Young

The System of Yoga

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Looking back from where I was in December 2009 to now, December 2010, I’m pretty astonished at what a difference a year makes. I have friends who seem to have been in school forever, and there’s a common joke that they’re Professional Grad Students. If being in school forever earns you the title Professional Grad Student, then, I’ll study forever and be a Professional Yoga Student.

In that studying path, this year I finished my 500-hour teacher training in May, and towards the end of the program, my teacher Kathryn Payne had us read an article that shook up everything in my system concerning yoga. It was an interview of yoga teacher Dona Holleman by film director Diana Eichner, taken from the book Eyes of Innocence.

Yoga is a Man-Made Structure

The interview starts out with Diana asking Dona: “Why do you think that human beings need to create systems that explain the world?”

What a way to warm up, right? These women were not messing around, they jumped right into the deep end. As our (Teacher Training) class read the interview out loud, paragraph by paragraph, question by question, and answer by answer, I grew increasingly uncomfortable. Dona seemed to be saying that yoga is just another system, a man-made structure.

How could it be? Dona Holleman is a long time yoga teacher. She dedicated her whole life to it. She clearly believes in it, and I believe in her. I believe in Yoga. What does it mean if a senior teacher that I respect is saying this: “Any time you have a word you have a system, whether the system is an orthodox religion or philosophy or yoga. The moment you have the word ‘yoga’, you have again a box within the box.”?

My world literally fell sideway. But, yoga is a not a system. It can’t be! Yoga gets you out of the system. It gets you out of the Matrix, right?

Yoga is again an egg within the totality of the universe that says: if you do this then you have a certain result, like all the religions, all the philosophies. It is a system, which was meant to help people to get out of the system, let us say. Paradoxically enough all religions and philosophies are systems to help people to jump out of the systems into this mystical experience, but it is a paradox that simply does not work because the system, including yoga, has to do with language, with chronological time, with psychological time.

There is no way to go from a linear, psychological and chronological time pathway into a state of mind where there is no time, no future. It is an either/or situation. You can use a system like yoga to become healthy, to have a better quality of life. It can have a lot of nice side effects. But to use yoga as a system of reaching a state where time has no longer any meaning is not possible.”

No way. No. Way. No. Freaking. Way! I protested in my mind. This woman is wrong, wrong, and more wrong. I don’t care if she’s my teacher’s teacher. Yoga lets you reach samadhi. Bliss. And if not bliss, then maybe a sense of timelessness, spacelessness, or satori. I know it! I’ve experienced it!

Needless to say, the whole interview was very challenging to read and absorb. Dona confronts things that I thought were true or sacred. It didn’t sit well with me, but I hung on to the handouts Kathryn gave us. Time came and went, and before long, class was over, and then the training was over.

But Then Again, So is Everything Else

Spring became Summer, and Summer into Fall, and here we are in the Winter. You may have noticed that I haven’t been writing in this blog as frequently as before. My job has been consuming a lot of my time, and I continue to teach yoga and take workshops and study Sanskrit. Something’s gotta give, and writing time has been reduced. I’ve also stopped engaging so much in the cyberspace Yoga world. I stopped reading blogs and comments and tweets so much.

During that time, I became more engaged in my other world of Technology and Software Interaction Design. I read books and blogs, I go to conferences, I debate, I tweet. I go to dinner with people in the field. We laugh, we bitch, we support one another. It’s just like what I’d do in the Yoga world, really, the topic is just different, but the activities are the same.

One day, while reading comments online about the merits of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS, and that of Google’s, Android, and thinking of the debate in Yoga about this style versus that style, I thought of Dona’s interview.

Oh my god, I thought. Everything *is* a system. My mind was once again, twisted and turned sideway.

Because I oscillate in different social and professional circles, this has turned out to be my testing ground. I dismissed Dona’s idea the first time around, but this time, I’m going to put it to the test. With the idea that it’s all some kind of structure human beings make up to explain and to function in this world, I went about my business.

It is a man-made structure and within that man-made structure we function. This is OK; we need to make a man-made world. We need to have a house, we need to have a car to drive to the office, we need to eat, we also need certain ideas, certain beliefs.

The problem starts when we create this man-made structure and then we are trapped in it. We forget that there is a whole universe beyond the structure, that the structure is only a very thin film superimposed on the vastness out there and that this film is only for practical purposes. We get trapped in it.

I began to take mental notes of where my trappings are; when I get sucked into a discussion about Design methods, for example. I’m very passionate about it, and when I’m not mindful, I end up so rigid, so stuck in my belief. Or, the other day, when I was reading a reading Carol Horton’s post about a new book, Yoga 2.0, I found myself getting worked up over the premise of the book, that we don’t derive any juice from books like the Yoga Sutras. “Ok, that might be so if we only read the English interpretation, but if we read the Sanskrit and really think about it.” I thought in my little mind. I was waging a war with people I had only heard fleeting mentions of in a blog. How absurd is that?

The Way Out

So if I’ve come to accept that everything is a system, everything is a box, is there any hope of going beyond it?

Dona gives me some hope that it’s possible:

The only way to stop this fragmentation is by attention, by awareness, to be aware of the whole process of compartmentalization, of fragmentation. This does not mean that we have to get ride of the fragmentation. We need the man-made world function as people, but the problem begins when we get caught in it to the point that we believe deeply in it.

It is OK to be an American but if you take the word ‘American’and the concept ‘American’ as a real thing, not as a phantom, arbitrary thing, then it becomes a problem. Therefore the crux of the matter is to learn to be in two places at the same time: on the one hand to function and live as an American in America in a man-made world, but on the other hand to also be perfectly aware that is is a phantom situation, not a real one, and so we do not get caught. We use it, we function it in, but we do not get caught.

When I read this, I immediately think of what Shinzen Young said in The Science of Enlightenment, that we need to be amphibians, we need to be able to function on dry land as well as on water. Similarly, Tias Little, during his last visit to Seattle mentioned that what we do is just techniques. At some point, the techniques no longer serve us and we have to be aware to not hang on to the techniques dogmatically.

Dona continued saying that this idea is not new, it’s not revolutionary, it’s that it has only been around on a small scale. “The interesting thing in our time is that we now have the possibility to make this awareness mainstream.”.

Well, now, there’s a message of hope for what at first seemed like a cynical and skeptical idea. I have to admit, that I did get a little stirred by that simple sentence. And, from the woman who said that it’s not possible to use yoga to reach a state where time has no meaning, came this:

Therefore if you can suspend everything for a moment you might get a glimpse of the fact that there is something out there that we will never understand. That in itself is the revolution, it is the mystical experience in itself.

A glimpse, that is all, she followed up. That’s enough to keep me studying and practicing for a while longer. And so, with 2010 coming to a close, I’ll say that reading these thoughts from Dona is the most valuable lesson I received this year.

"We create these fantasylands in order to make our world but we should never lose sight of the fact that it is like going to Disney Land. It is fun but you have to be aware that it is pretense and not take it too seriously."

"We create these fantasylands in order to make our world but we should never lose sight of the fact that it is like going to Disney Land. It is fun but you have to be aware that it is pretense and not take it too seriously."

A Motivational Tip to Meditate (and Do Other Things in Life)

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“If you can’t be disciplined, be clever.” – Shinzen Young, The Science Of Enlightenment.

Motivation and Discipline are in that category of abstract concepts that sells books, DVDs, and seminars, not to mention hopes and dreams that we will be a better person tomorrow than we are today.

It is also elusive to us at one point or another. For me, it’s daily. Everyday, I keep thinking that I will go to bed earlier tomorrow, that I will read more books, that I will organize my closet. But when tomorrow becomes today, I lack the same motivation or inspiration that I had yesterday.

For the longest time, I struggled with the motivation and/or discipline to meditate daily. Then I discovered Shinzen Young and his Science of Enlightenment lectures where he gave one little tip that rocked my world. He was addressing the typical challenge of finding time to meditate and … well, just doing it. “If you can’t be disciplined, be clever”, advised Shinzen. Sign up for a retreat and send in the full amount of money. Put it on your calendar. Buy the plane ticket. Create the conditions where you can’t easily back out.

Following this advice, I went on a 10-day Vipassana retreat to kick off my sitting practice. I figured if I could survive that, I just might pick up the habit. This worked, to some extent. After sitting for 14 hours a day, sitting for 10 or 15 minutes doesn’t seem so bad any more. However, I’ve had much more time to practice *not* meditating daily. 10 days is nothing compared to two decades plus. And because the habit of not meditating is that much more ingrained than the habit of meditating, it’s still a daily conscious act of telling myself: I will meditate today.

Telling myself that I will do something doesn’t always mean that I do do it. More often than not, I find an excuse not to follow through. Having an intention is well and good, but without execution, it’s moot. So, I’ve  devised some clever means to “trick” myself into doing my meditation.

  • First, I put my cushion right by  the side bottom of my bed . I see it every day, and if I don’t do my sitting, it’s there to remind me, or actually, to make me feel guilty. I don’t do well with guilt trips, and I’m using that to my advantage.
  • Second, I have a meditation clock (from Now & Zen) which I place right in the center by my bed. I can’t get in bed without stepping over it. Sometimes I put the clock on my bed before I leave my room in the morning. I can’t get under my covers without touching the clock and putting it elsewhere. That extra little bit also reminds me to do my sitting.
  • Third, I put my yoga mat next to my bed as well, not rolled up, but spread out, basically to block the entrance into my bed. I put it there because I know that I would make excuses that I’m feeling “too tight” to meditate, and that I just need to stretch out a bit, maybe do a down dog or two. If my mat is elsewhere, there’s no chance that I would make the extra effort to go get it, especially if it’s night time and I’ve already changed in my PJs. Since my mat is right there, I have one less excuse.
  • Fourth,  I decided that I would meditate before I go to sleep every day. So, the only time that I don’t meditate would be when I don’t go to sleep. This makes it so that I have to do it every single day, save a few exceptions. Night time also works because, again, I have less excuses. In the morning, I might be running late, I might need to do this and that, etc.

The success of building a habit, any habit, depends on the consistent timing. I know many teachers would tell you to meditate whenever you can. The idea is to just do it, regardless of when. I understand this philosophy. Instead of enforcing a time, which can be rigid, giving yourself the permission to do it any time can increase the probability that you’ll do it. However, for someone like me, who can come up with a really good excuse *not* to do it virtually any time of day, this doesn’t work so well.

In yoga, and in life, having a will, determination, goal, or purpose is often the first step to making some sort of desirable changes. I don’t usually lack motivation. Staying focused on what I’ve resolved to do, though, takes more work, since I’m not always focused :) . To make up for that, I try to be clever and trick myself into doing the things I know I want to do, if only my will weren’t so weak and I had more discipline.

Does my cleverness work perfectly all the time? Not even close. There are times when I’m so tired that I trip over my meditation clock and don’t even think twice about meditation. There are times when I don’t spend the night at home with my clever arrangements. But, most of the time is better than none of the time. As Shinzen Young said, “any number of time is infinitely more than zero.”

I write this post in hope of giving you one way to kick your meditation practice in gear. If it works for other things, so much the better. If you have any tips, for meditation or otherwise, please let me know.

Sexy Yoga and Meditation

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Okay, I admit it, the word “sexy” didn’t need to be in the title of this post. I literally spent at least five minutes trying to figure out how to work the words “sexy” or “hot” in with the words “meditation”, to no avail.

I suppose that’s why meditation, or Patanjali’s Dhyāna, gets nowhere near the attention that Asana gets. It just doesn’t go with hot or sexy. I mean, when was the last time you saw a magazine headline with tips to “Last Longer Tonight”, and they’re talking about sitting on your cushion, closing your eyes, and concentrating on your breath? Yup, I thought so.

What’s funny is *both* Dhyāna and Asana are branches of the 8 Limbs of Yoga. What’s funny is we now have to say Yoga *and* Meditation. Oh well, that’s the all verbiage, I guess. And really, it’s better to just do it. Talking about swimming does not get you wet. (Like sexy… or… unlike sexy… or… oh, never mind.)

If I haven’t lost you yet, this post is intended for two things: 1) As a response to yet another exciting development in the world of Yoga and Polititics, and 2) To point out a couple of meditation trainings and resources if that strike your fancy.

Can Yoga be, uh… Sexy? What is Yogic, Really?

If you’re keeping track with the exciting world of Yoga and Business, Business and Yoga, recently, Judith Hanson Lasater wrote a letter to Yoga Journal expressing her confusion and sadness with the gratuitous nudity in the magazine’s ads. She said: “These pictures do not teach the viewer about yoga practice or themselves. They aren’t even about the celebration of the beauty of the human body or the beauty of the poses, which I support. These ads are just about selling a product. This approach is something I though belonged (unfortunately) to the larger culture, but not in Yoga Journal.”

Judith Hanson Lasater is not just any ol’ disgruntled YJ reader. She is one of the magazine’s original founders. And then Roseanne Harvey, who runs It’s All Yoga, Baby wrote about The Letter, and followed it up with an interview with Judith. Even Yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein came out of his semi retirement to write several blog posts about this.

Yeah, it’s gotten pretty, uh, exciting?

Amidst the noise, if you are new, or newish, or even oldish to yoga, you might be challenged with questions such as “What is yoga”? Or, “Is nudity yoga?” Or, “Can Capitalism and Yoga co-exist peacefully?”

I’m sorry to say that I don’t have the answer to any of these questions. (And I’m not sure that anyone really does.) Besides, defining what Yoga is is like defining what Love is, or Compassion is. As Judith said recently in a workshop: “Have you noticed how we can’t really define the things that are most important in life?”

So, like I said, you’re on your own with those inquiries. What I *can* tell you, however, that if you like yoga, you might also like meditation. Yoga is about learning about your Self. Self-inquiry requires meditation. Meditation is hard, it’s frustrating, it’s juicy, every once in a while you get it right. Yes, I’m describing meditation. And hey, if people can call web sites or iPhone apps sexy, I’m gonna call meditation sexy. And you, too, can do it.

Some Meditation Trainings and Resources

Recently my student Marco (hi Marco!) asked if I teach meditation. The short answer is no. The convoluted answer is yes and no. I teach primarily hatha yoga: the techniques of asana and pranayama. I sprinkle in stories, info, lores from historical texts, the other branches of Classical Yoga. In the poses I talk about things like observing where your body is in space, listening to the body’s feedback, focusing in something, stability, ease, etc. Those are things that Patanjali described as the ingredients leading to Samadhi, let’s call it Happy Place (that doesn’t involve roller coasters) for now. In my class, I prepare people for meditation.

However, I do not currently teach meditation. In my mind, one must meditate for a very long time to teach it, like, 10 years, 20 years, 40 years.

So, here are some great trainings that I personally do:

Shinzen Young’s Basic Mindfulness Home Retreat

This is a monthly home retreat usually lead by meditation teacher Shinzen Young on the second weekend of every month. I recommend you follow the Prerequisites, or that you have listened to his lectures The Science of Enlightenment first. Shinzen’s teaching is methodical. His techniques and vocabulary are highly developed, and quite frankly not for the faint of heart. If you are determined to learn meditation, however, I can’t recommend him more. Check out his CD: The Beginner’s Guide to Meditation.

The next dates for the home retreat are:

  • August 13-15, 2010
  • September 10-12, 2010
  • October 8-10, 2010
  • November 12-14, 2010
  • December 10-12, 2010

Beyond Sequencing: The Art of Meditation with Chase Bossart

Yoga teacher Chase Bossart will be doing a workshop at Shala Yoga of Portland in 2 weeks on August 20-22, 2010. From the website:

Meditation is one of the most important and potent tools in yoga. In many ways, it is the crown jewel of all yoga practices. Yet many people experience it as one of yoga’s most difficult and confusing tools. These difficulties, however, can be greatly reduced through proper sequencing of the meditation practice.

When properly constructed, a meditation practice gradually develops the attention and mental stability required to stay with the focus. This happens naturally as the practitioner moves through the different steps of the meditation. Learn the principles of proper sequencing of meditation practices and develop these skills through numerous practical examples. This practical ‘how to’ workshop will be useful for practitioners and teachers of all levels.

There you are. Go sit down and shut up. (Though, if your mind is anything like mine, it will be anything but quiet.)

Do you know of any meditation trainings or events? Do you have any personal favorite resources? Please let me know.

David Tolmie gave me this CD as a gift. This rivals any nude + yoga photography I've ever seen.

David Tolmie gave me this CD as a gift. This rivals any nude + yoga photography I've ever seen.

A Moment of Living in the Moment

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I am writing this post with fast and furious fingers and sweaty palms, quite possibly from my morning coffee or the bright spring sunshine walloping all of Seattle right now. I am also experiencing a ginormous sense of overwhelm. Not overwhelm in the common sense of being eaten alive by to-do lists, but overwhelm in the sense of the feeling you get while standing in front of a vast blue ocean or a tall green mountain, and witnessing something very big and powerful.

Those of you that know me know that I am into this “sitting thing”. I usually say that “I sit”, and not “I meditate”, because sitting is a more accurate description of what really happens. I sit. And then I think about a hundred and one things that I should be doing, or the things I did and all the things I will do or want to do. It’s elusive, that quiet meditative mind.

And yet. And yet. Something interesting happened to me this morning. Shinzen Young talks about this phenomenon in his lectures The Science of Enlightenment. You do this thing called meditation. You *try* desperately to meditate. You pay good money to go on meditation retreats. When you come back and tell your friends what happen, they wonder if you’ve lost your mind for paying good money to go somewhere to “sit around all day”.

You might start to wonder the same thing. You might blow off sitting once, or twice, or altogether. Or you put it off, thinking, “I’ll do it tomorrow”.

But, by hooks or by crooks, by some miracle, or by some clever tricks, as Shinzen said, “if you can’t be disciplined, be clever.”, you sit, and you sit regularly, day after day, month after month. You start to see glimpses of what it means to live in the moment. You look at the world like a goldfish with that proverbial 3-second memory, or the proverbial curious cat that acts like it’s seeing everything for the first time, sniffing it, exploring it.

And boy, is it grand when it happens. It happens very fast, and it does not last.

But, no matter how fleeting, no matter how swift that moment comes and goes, it blows you away. All of the sudden, you start to understand that big word impermanence. You start to see the joys and the sorrows. I’m not even talking theory and hypotheses here. Those things happen right in front of your eyes, as if on cue. It’s very creepy.

(No, the irony does not escape me to reminisce the moment of “living in the moment”, but it must be captured and recorded somehow :D )

What am I trying to say? If you are engaged in this practice, this yoga thing, this meditation thing, this, dare I say it, getting in touch with your spirit thing. Trust the process. Really. Trust it even when you are weary and full of doubt. And get clever. Trick yourself into practicing when you least feel like it, on the cushion, on the mat, in the grocery line, or in traffic jam.

It will not give you a mountain of gold, it will not instantly make all your troubles go away. It will not automatically rid you of your destructive habits and general life shenanigans. It will not make you taller and turn you into a baller and give you a girl that you could call her.

I honestly can’t even tell you exactly what it will bring to you, because it would be arrogant of me to claim to know what *you* personally experience. What I can arrogantly claim, however, is that life is always coming together and falling apart at the same time. There will be so much joy, and so much sorrow. And there are no words to describe what it’s like, when you are in what they call the Witness state. Something this morning put me in an incredibly clear mind to see both, like a jolt of lighting or a flash of shooting star. To put it plainly, it scared me, it overwhelmed and amazed me, and it humbles me like nothing ever before.

I will say this, admittedly with a lot of caution and hesitation. I am beginning to see what Vyaas Houston talks about in The Certainty of Freedom.

In the meantime, I hope you dance.

Feel All Emotions

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I have been reading A Year of Living Your Yoga: Daily Practices to Shape Your Life by Judith Lasater since December 2007 (thank you, Amazon Orders History). Every time I read the daily entry, I get a new perspective and insight.

Today, February 27, the entry reads:

If you want to embrace the light, you must also embrace the darkness.

LIVING YOUR YOGA: We all long for love, peace, and ease. But in order to fully experience them, we must also be willing to embrace our hatred, anger, and agitation. Today when you feel any strong negative emotions, really feel them. Cutting off negative feelings cuts off our ability to feel all emotions.

I especially enjoy this, because reading it feels like a long relieved exhalation. It’s given me permission to acknowledge emotions that I once thought were “off-limit”.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

One thing about the yoga and meditation world that I think “hooks” people in is the promise of bliss, and not just any kind of bliss, eternal bliss, ecstatic bliss, (uh, not to mention, yoga bliss hips). If you’re not happy, practice it. If you’re currently happy, you could be happier, all the time. My god, even the mat wash oughta be happy.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for happy, love, bliss, and more happy. Nope, nothing against that at all.

What I’ve learned though, that when we talk about abstract concepts like love, compassion, happy, spiritual, bliss, without setting any context, without any preconditions, we can run into all sorts of troubles when we’re not experiencing any of those emotions.

For example, let’s say something has gone very wrong, everything has hit the fan. My uncensored reaction might go something like this, “I’m so pissed! No, I’m fucking pissed! I HATE HATE HATE.” Or, perhaps something milder happened. Maybe I’m slightly offended by something. I might run off, get on my high horse and judge, roll my eyes and get all worked up. You know the drill.

Uh oh, but, I’m a yoga teacher! I’m not supposed to get upset! I’m not supposed to get livid! Quelle horreur! Seeing this, I might tell myself, “Oh, it’s okay. I’m fine. I’m supposed to be happy, and loving. Yes, I love everyone. And we’re all one. Ommm.”

If this is my approach to every crummy moment in life, I’ll end up with a lot of repression, won’t I?

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

I’m learning that in the context of yoga, things like love and happiness aren’t what we think they are. They’re not the–”I’m so happy it’s sunny out”, or, “I love this present you gave me”–kind of emotions.

Once, when my boyfriend was waiting to hear back from a prospective employer and getting worried and anxious, I told him to be happy and just enjoy the moment. He looked at me like I was out of my mind. “Be happy? How could I be happy when I may not get the job?”. “Is everybody who has a job happy? And all the unemployed people are swimming in giant seas of unhappiness?” I asked him. “Well, yeah. How could you be happy if you don’t make any money?”

I knew then that we weren’t talking about the same kind of happiness. My teacher Shinzen Young often talks about a kind of happiness that’s independent of any conditions. That’s probably the happiness and bliss that yoga teachers and magazines often talk about. But I’m not convinced that it’s clearly explained enough, especially in mainstream yoga. Or, perhaps the ambiguity is intentional. After all, my guess is “Practice Feeling Completely Rotten” doesn’t sell as many magazine copies.

All Fall Down

I’m finding out that taking the role of the Witness, the Observer (or Ishvara) means that I’ve got to call an Ace an Ace. Whatever emotion that’s passing by, no matter how dark, should be recognized. Oh look, there’s anxiety. There’s jealousy. There’s selfishness. There’s self-righteousness.

And the trick is to do so with a kind of tenderness, a kind of… well, love; love for my humanness. How human of me to be scared, to be hurt, to project. Practicing this way, for me, creates a kind of happiness that’s really sweet, and so hard to describe. “I’m happy that I can see how awful this experience is.” I know, it doesn’t make any friggin’ sense, does it?

Well, I can say more, but Pema Chodron has eloquently and concisely put it in one sentence as she talked about Maitri, the practice of loving-kindness.

“Maitri is not about feeling good, it’s about feeling whatever you feel with a compassionate attitude and with extreme honesty” – Pema Chodron, Awakening Compassion Lectures.

Have you ever felt like you were “supposed” to feel anything different than what you’re currently feeling? How do you work with that?

Perhaps you need a copy of Yoga Journal, kitteh?

Perhaps you need a copy of Yoga Journal, kitteh?

The Seed of Yoga

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This past weekend during my 500-hour teacher training, Denise Carrico came to talk to us about teaching yoga for people with cancer. Denise is a yoga teacher in the Integral tradition who has been teaching yoga for 20+ years and for people with cancer for 12 years at Seattle Cancer Lifeline in Phinney Ridge and 8 Limbs Yoga in West Seattle. She also leads free retreats for cancer patients at Harmony Hill in Western Washington’s Hood Canal.

Denise stressed the importance of empowering people who have been diagnosed with cancer who may have felt betrayed by their bodies and perhaps even other things, tangible and non-tangible. She then read a poem to us to demonstrate how to use imagery and poetry to do so.

I will not live an unlived life.
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,

to make me less afraid, more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;

to live,
so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
—Dawna Markova

The next morning, on Sunday, our class read the Bhagavad Gita, and in chapter 10 of the translation by Eknath Easwarn, verse 39 read:

“I am the seed that can be found in every creature, Arjuna; for without me nothing can exist, neither animate for inanimate.” BG 10:39

This then reminded me of what Shinzen Young said in the very last minutes of his lectures in The Science of Enlightenment:

“When you let go of the need to know, then you will be able to see how space is produced from the activity of nothingness, and you’ll be able to also see how the activity of the pine tree arises as none other than yourself” – Sasaki Roshi, as quoted by Shinzen Young, chapter 12, the Science of Enlightenment

The image of the seed seems to be coming up a lot everywhere I look recently. How about you? What image do you find consistent in literature, yoga and otherwise?

Patience, grasshoppers, a seed will soon grow into a tree.

Patience, grasshoppers, a seed will soon grow into a tree.

Why I Do Yoga

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I am often asked why I do yoga, and I often say, “so I can sit”, an answer that often elicits laughter, the kind that you would get when you give a smart-ass answer to a serious question.

Admittedly, it’s a bit of a smart-ass answer, and on the surface, it might look like one of those cop-out answers one may say when one doesn’t feel like saying much, but in fact, there’s nothing lazy or facetious about it.

If you’ve ever tried sitting down to meditate for any length of time, you might find that there are all sorts of agitations going on, not just in the mind but also in the body. If my hips and shoulders are tight, and my back and knees hurt, there is little chance that I will be able to quiet down the mind. Yoga is a tool for me to condition my body for sitting.

Okay, great, so you do yoga so you can sit. But why sit?

Why I sit is a topic worth another blog post altogether, but I want to quote here my teacher Shinzen Young in the Science of Enlightenment. And for an impeccable CD by CD review of The Science of Enlightenment, check out my friend’s C4Chaos’ post: The Science of Enlightenment is Paving the Way for the Enlightenment of Science.

If you follow a path that doesn’t involve sitting still on a regular basis, you run the danger that you might be fooling yourself. You might think that your transcending of conditions is a lot more than it actually is.

Sitting still and not moving is a special activity. It’s the zero activity. It’s the activity of no activity. And against that milieu, you can really see to what extent you have transcended conditions. So it becomes a sort of barometer or gold standard that you can use to measure the degree to which your practice is allowing you to become a free person.

Because if you think that your practice is bringing you freedom, which is to say that it is showing you a happiness independent of conditions, then you can most clearly see that in the situation where all conditions have been taken away.

And you’re just sitting absolutely still with nothing, nothing going on, and how do you relate to that nothing, if you’re really becoming free, it’s gonna be heaven.

But, if after half an hour, an hour, or two hours, or four or five hours of just sitting still, you find yourself in hell, you can’t do it, you find a reason to rationalize the fact that you need to get up, then obviously you haven’t transcended conditions yet.

Nothing wrong with that. You’ve gotten a reflection, you’ve gotten some feedback, a real objective barometer of how free you are. And so, okay, you go back to your practice, and maybe six months later, maybe a couple years later, try it again. See if you can sit there, five hours, six hours, without having to move, without having to change conditions, and once again, you’ll get a real clear picture to what extent are you free from the the thoughts and feelings that come up as you sit there, and to what extent you’re not free, you’re identified with the thoughts and feelings.

A person doesn’t have to sit, I would never say that a person has to do a sitting practice to become liberated, but I would strongly suggest that sitting still and doing absolutely nothing is the quick and dirty easy test to see to what extent is the practice that you *do* do taking you to unconditional freedom.

I don't need no yoga to do this. Clearly much more enlightened than humans.

I don't need no yoga to do this. Clearly much more enlightened than humans.