Play of Consciousness: Philosophy, Yoga & Meditation
“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.” (Text continues below).
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 with a deep breath. Instead, we are taught to put our conscious energy and will into relaxing enough to feel the breath flowing within us— and when we do that our tension falls away, revealing a lighter state that is already within us.
The practice of pranayama, or a breath based meditation, can sometimes be challenging to access when we are experiencing a strong tension, as Anju referred to last week in her presentation. Trying to go right from a tough day into your meditation practice can sometimes not feel productive—like trying to climb a ten foot wall— but should remember that the yogic tradition has given us a stair case to walk up whenever we need it. From the general arc of the Uppays themselves, to the Koshas, to Patanjali’s 8 limbs of yoga, and so on— everywhere we look we see a step by step approach to getting our mechanism moving from the physical to the subtle and beyond. Learning to surrender at the physical level through hatha yoga and Seva guide us to work with more surrender at the level of the breath, which also guides us to profound stillness of the mind and opening of the heart. Step by step is how we arrive at our destination in the yogic tradition, and the first step is learning how to work with surrender at the level of the physical body.
Similar to the practice of pranayama, which begins by shaping the breath, Hatha yoga begins by shaping the body. But like pranayama, the shapes are not the goal— the shapes exist to generate inner sensation and awareness. As Shiva says in the introduction to the Vijnana bhairava, the flame is there to put the kettle on it, the techniques are there to heat and grow our inner awareness. This is crucial both for using our asana practice to grow, but also avoiding injury. Because without inner awareness, the postures are just exercise, or worse injurious— as injuries such as hamstring tendonitis and hip labral impingements in the overly physical yoga community have shown us. As the Shiva Sutras teach, the body, mind and senses can be the source of our growth— or they can be the very things that bind and limit us, depending on the fullness of our awareness.
Hatha yoga helps us surrender tightness in our body in the same way a mantra helps us surrender tightness in our mind. Each posture is like a mantra, in that you put your awareness into it, feeling it effect you, and you keep coming back to it as the mind wanders. The tightness we feel in our bodies are what we work with— we don’t push the tightness away, or become obsessed with changing it, we simply apply our awareness to the posture and our breath and allow the contracted states to fall away. Just like Babaji said about the breath— controlling it is not the same as watching it and flowing with it. We aren’t here to control our body with hatha yoga, we are here to get in the flow of our body, to move more naturally, and this is accomplished with the tools of the asanas and the elixir of inner awareness.
The experience of surrender we seek in our postures, as Patanjali taught it, is a feeling of effortless effort, of perseverance without tension. In this way, he wrote, the practitioner transcends the duality of physical existence, and experiences the infinite. This is how yoga guides us towards a more surrendered experience of our breath, mind and heart— one step at a time.