Sankalpa for the Witness Practice: Movie Yoga
NOTE for REFLECTION: This portion of the process is here to help you generate an experience of the witness state in your life, to bridge the gap between our experience of the witness on our cushion and our experience of the witness in our daily life.
This is just one way of bringing this practice into your daily life, of course there are many others, and if you are really reaching inside you will find numerous examples. Feel free to share a different example of bringing the witness state into your daily life, or to comment on your experience of this one.
Movie Yoga: A Witness State Sankalpa
As Sri Shambhavananda writes,
“We should step back from that movie in our minds that has nothing to do with growing, and is only trying to kick in and take over our minds. We must learn how to untangle ourselves from such movies. Then we are able to gain the realization of what’s illusion and what’s real”(SP,143).
It’s no coincidence that Sri ShambhavAnanda uses movies as a metaphor for Witnessing the mind— his teacher, Swami Rudrananda, used to actually have his students do the Witness practice while watching literal movies, and Sri ShambhavAnanda does the same with his students. It’s called ‘Movie Yoga’, and is a really practical and amazing experiment that you can and should try soon. It’s a way of training our ability to work with our minds while remaining detached from them, to bring the fullest light of our awareness to the small screen of our lives.
Here’s some tips on how to try it. After you’ve picked out the movie, you can start your movie-yoga practice by actually sitting up in a meditation posture on the floor if possible— or with a pillow behind your back on the couch. The posture can really help you gain traction in the practice. Get your practice going before you press play, and try to use the natural pauses in the movie or show to check back in with your practice. You can use a mala and do mantra, or you can simply try to follow your breath. As you watch the movie, try to feel your seat, see the room you’re in, feel your breath. Occasionally look away from the screen or soften your gaze to blur the picture a little. When you notice your heart beating fast, just work with it as you would in real life- breathe a little deeper, pull yourself into the present. Overall, you just have to keep zooming out on an internal level, feeling your breath and trying not to engage too much with your thoughts as you watch. Just let the images of the screen pass over you, pass through you, without attaching to them.
You don’t have to think too much to understand most movies, they’ll spell it out for you over and over again. Try giving the movie about 1/3 of your focus, and let the other 2/3 of your focus feel inside. This is the ratio that Rudi used to describe to his students, saying that we only need a small percentage of our energy to actually understand and navigate our outer reality, while we should have a larger percentage on our internal experience.
“Then why watch the movie?”, your mind might say. Because this is the same scenario we find ourselves every day of our life— we are in the movie whether we like it or not. Our only choice it to learn to reframe our awareness to the big screen of our heart, or to keep getting sucked into the small screen of our mind. Movie yoga can actually help you cultivate the tools you need to rise to the next level of the witness practice in your life.
As Sri Shambhavananda concludes for us,
“We have a constant commercial running in our heads about who we are, what we want, and what we need, what is going to happen tomorrow and what happened yesterday. This movie is constantly playing, and we are caught up in it. That is really not who we are. Being able to witness the comings and goings of all our mental activity is a very desirable state to achieve. Everyone has good thoughts, bad thoughts, and indifferent thoughts. We are each like actors playing a role in a movie, and we forget we are actors playing a part. Being in the meditative witness state allows us to see the movie for what it is, and to touch a much deeper sense of who we are and what is possible” (SP, 12).