Teaching Moments: Flowing through Resistance

“When that flash of awareness arises, when I can say “aha” this is just a feeling and not who I am, then I can move into a place of gentle action…I can’t just jump form a force field of resistance to my cushion and find meditation. I have to take baby steps putting one foot in front of the other and walk myself to my inner seat, to my Self.  I have to practice Pratyahara, and for me the most successful way I have been able to find this is to lean into my hatha yoga practice.” (Text continues below).

One of my favorite moments in Anju’s presentation was how she described moving through resistance with “gentle action”— this seems like a great way to understand surrender, both at the level of the body, but also the breath and beyond. Gentle action means taking action while remaining gently receptive. 

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water.”

We tend to think of gentle as weak, but gentle means receptive, sensitive. If you were trying to massage soreness out of a muscle, you would need to do it gently in order to find the source of the soreness and move through it consciously. And as we know with muscles, sometimes you have to apply more force, but even that must be gentle and gradual as too much too soon has the opposite effect— causing the muscle to recoil and double down on its contracted state. This is perhaps why Babaji has been so adamant the last couple years about the contradictory effects of doership in our meditation practice— and has placed so much emphasis instead on natural calm breaths. 

“Think of the breath as a vehicle rather than a jackhammer. Often students use the breath too strongly... You will not be using the breath to cut the rock open. Instead, the breath is a vehicle that you are riding on, and you are consciously feeling it move through the chakras, or at least to experience where they are. For example, when you take a breath in, you can feel the heart chakra. You do not try to tear and rip it open with willfulness. The breath is like a massage, and as you exhale you surrender all the negativity that gets kicked up. When students are able to be open and simple with their breath, they realize that watching the breath is not the same as trying to control it. The pranayama within the breath is simply flowing with the breath.”

We see at the beginning of the quote that there is a tendency in all of us to use the breath too strongly, like a jackhammer attempting to simply cut our resistance in half. In our meditation practice this would look like taking deep strong breaths with the intention of opening our heart and getting past this tension. In everyday life this is when we might grit our teeth and work faster, only to burn out and drop the whole thing when we run out os steam. 

Babaji teaches here that its actually more effective to not treat the breath as an external tool that cuts through our resistance, but rather we should try to merge with it internally and let the flow of the breath itself dissolve our tensions. When we are experieinceing resistance and tension this can be one of the hardest things to do, because it requires us to begin to loosen up, soften our clenched jaw for example, relax our tense fore head, release the grip we have on ourselves trying to hold it all together— when we do that we might feel like we start to fall apart, but when done consciously, we actually fall into place. THis is the purpose of a Hatha yoga class, to guide students down teh path of surrender at th level of the physical body, so they can access deeper layers of surrender in the breath, mind, and heart. 

Patanjali’s eight limbs of yoga establish a clear trajectory for the practice of surrender— surrender at the level of the body in the form of asana practice is a stepping stone to surrender at the level of the breath in the form of pranayama, which guides us naturally to surrender at the level of the mind and heart in meditation. Effortless effort is a teaching for the body, breath, mind and heart. This means that when we are really experienceing a strong tension or resistance, we must be willing to step back and apply our practice to the physical Kosha in order to really get our practice moving in the right direction. 

As we know about surrender in our practice, it does not mean becoming a doormat— just lying down, waving a white flag and saying ‘i give up’. If it were that easy I don’t think we would have to practice it so much. Instead, we know that surrender is the process of consciously releasing a tension from the inside out. Surrender in the physical body is taught on the yoga mat through asana practice, and Patanjali’s maxim to describe the work is “effortless effort, perseverance without tension”, which calls back to Anju’s adept description of ‘gentle action’. 

So working with surrender in the physical body doesn’t mean lying down in shavasana, although eventually we do apply it there, but rather physical surrender in the form of asana practice is learning to move the body in a way that helps you flow with it, not against it. Surrender isn’t cutting anything into pieces, it’s harmonizing and getting in the flow. As Babaji says, surrendering with the breath is different than controlling the breath, and the same goes with the body. Surrender in the body doesn’t mean controlling the body by putting it into this or that shape and expecting some external result, but rather surrender on our mats means we are guiding our body towards a certain shape in order to get into the flow with it.

And when done well, this gives us a very tactile experience of how to breathe with the flow, we literally can move with our breath like we move with our body. The breath becomes a bridge from the physical to the subtle experience of surrender.