Lecture: Dancing Beyond Doership in our Asanas
Dancing Beyond Doership
Rough Transcript of Class (Expect Typos)
Section One • Dancing Beyond Doership: Moving beyond doership in our asana practice
BREAKING NEWS FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE RAMAYANA…A battle broke out between Ravana's demon army and Rama's animal army. Lakshman was so badly wounded in the battle it seemed that he would die before sun-rise. The monkeys and bears decided that Hanuman must leap to the Himalayas and bring back the healing herb from the Medicine Mountain to save Lakshman's life. So Hanuman leapt over the ocean, and across the whole of India to the Himalayas. Arriving in the Himalayas, it took a long time to find the fabled Medicine Mountain. Hanuman found it at last covered with herbs, but he didn't know which was the magic healing herb. So he wrapped his arms around the whole mountain, pulled it out of the ground and lifted it onto the palms of his hand. He then flew with the mountain back to Lanka. We have an image here captured by an onlooker of Hanuman flying across the ocean with the mountain held in one hand! We were informed that the healing herb was picked and given to Lakshman, and that Lakshman has been completely healed and is filled with energy, ready to continue.
Strength of Devotion: As always in the story of Hanuman we see heroic deeds accomplished through service and devotion. There is no way Hanuman could have ever discovered his ability to fly, much less his ability to lift an entire mountain, without serving something bigger than himself. This is the point of our spiritual practice, to connect us to a bigger equation, a vaster universe, so that we can become vaster ourselves.
Mountains of Karma: On a daily basis, we have a mountain of karma in front of us— a task that must be fulfilled, or carried out, just like Hanuman had to carry his task. If we try to accomplish our task from our small self, just trying to get this or that done, we might be able to life the occasional hill, but even then we feel strained and stressed. Because the strength we need isn’t just in our arms, its in our hearts. This isn’t a metaphor, but a reality. If the work of our arms doesn’t relate to the subtle work of our deep core, we accomplish our tasks at a price to our overall health. This results in issues like carpal tunnel, forward head posture, elbow and shoulder impingements, tennis and golf elbow syndromes, and so on. Therefore strain in the arms is not just an issue for the arms, but is an issue for the whole body, which is why its important to see how the arms work as a whole, and to be able to feel their relationship back to the axial skeleton.
As Thomas Meyers writes in Anatomy Trains: “Common postural compensation patterns associated with the Arm Lines lead to all kinds of shoulder problems, as well as arm and hand problems, usually involving the shoulders being protracted, retracted, lifted, or ‘rounded’ (medial rotation and anterior tilt of the scapula). These compensations are often founded in the lack of support from the rib cage, which leads us to look to the cardinal lines as well as the Spiral and Deep Front Lines for a solution. Carpal tunnel, elbow and shoulder impingements, and chronic muscular or trigger-point pain emerge over time from these postural and support faults.”
Devotion to our Growth: In order to avoid this kind of over compensation in our arms, we just need to take a moment to re-focus our awareness inside on our deep core, as we have been working on throughout this training. This momentary pause for support can mean the different between straining to lift a small hill of karma, or rising up to soar with a mountain of karma. In fact, as the Shiva Sutras tell us, it is this pause that actually allows us to achieve our inner and outer goals everyday.
As Shiva Sutra 2.2 teaches: “Here, just begin with some movement, any movement, and stop. Hold the beginning point of that movement with awareness. In Sanskrit, this state is called anusaṁdhitsā. By holding the very beginning of that movement, the goal of uniting the seeker of God consciousness with the God consciousness they seek, the spiritual aspirant with that to which they aspire, the one who recites mantra with [the deity] for whom the mantra is recited, is achieved.”
Water Bottle Example: Let’s take a moment to feel how this plays out in our body on a daily basis
Fill up your water bottle and place it in front of you from a standing position.
Method 1: Turn off any experience of your deep core, or any core at all, and reach out for the water bottle and pick it up. Feel the weight of the bottle and how it affects your posture. Feel the eventual strain that would develop if this is how you held your bottle for 5 minutes, or any object throughout your day.
Method 2: Place the water bottle back on the table, reach out for the bottle, and ‘un-weight it’, don’t lift the bottle but use the weight of it to illuminate your deep core, and from this inward gaze lift the bottle— notice the weight now, the affect it might have on your posture, and the sustainability of this position.
Pausing for support: What we see in this example, is that the weight we carry in our arms, whether we are pushing or pulling, has a direct effect on our posture, and that our posture has a direct effect on our arms. Today we are going to look more deeply at the muscular pathways of support from our arms to our axial skeleton, but the preceding example showed that the source of support we seek is actually very intuitive— it just requires that pause for a moment, feel and move from that space of inner sensation. The support comes naturally if we are willing to feel inside first.
The Dance of Surrender: Understanding the balance of the Front and Back Arm Lines through the yogic tradition’s teaching of the Shiva and Shakti’s Dance
From stillness to movement: Part one of our experience today requires the feeling of this initial moment of sensation. After this moment, though, we have to stay connected to this inward sensation while we move. The yogic tradition has a very specific visualization to describe the movement of the universe, one that is meant to help you feel as you move through life, in order to retain this inner source of our strength. The image we are given is that of a dance, a dance between Shiva and Shakti. Shiva is considered the background of our awareness, and Shakti is the myriad of manifestation that occurs on that substratum. They are two halves of the same whole, eternal and never apart. They exist in a dance, meaning there is constant movement. In our asana practice, whether we are moving through a posture, pulsing in a posture, or even ‘static’ in a posture, this dynamism can be felt as a way of deterring the health of our work. At the subtlest level, this would also be felt as the breath in a posture, but the body is constantly dancing to maintain stability. It is the dance of inner stability to support outer work. Sort of like we did with the water bottle, but on a milli second to milli second basis.
Understanding through dancing: Dancing is a perfect way to understand this description of reality, because when we are dancing we are moving to an external song while feeling our experience of it internally. This is obvious when dancing, we do it without any explanation, but when we are moving through our life its all to easy to just ‘get the job done’ without any internal sensation. On the other hand, some people feel that the external world is somehow less important than their inner world— like meditation is more important than yoga, or how does weeding help me with my spiritual practice?— when in fact it is our external world that helps us discover the vastness of our internal world, as Hanuman’s life story teaches.
Sri ShambhavAnanda Teaches: “Shiva in the form of Nataraja, dancing in a ring of flame with his arms and a leg up symbolizes a balance, a rhythm, and an ability to flow. Some people can go to rock concerts and dance, but they can’t dance with the situations that come up in life. The state of Shiva consciousness allows a person to dance with whatever situation life brings up. That is what Shiva consciousness is about. Shiva is doing one big dance, and we are all a part of it. And then we find out that we are actually the one dancing. That is what having a sadhana and a spiritual practice is all about–to learn how to dance with Shiva–and it is all within the context of your karma.”
As Babaji teaches, when we learn how to feel the sensation of dancing within our postures we are feeling the inner and outer dance take place— stability and mobility co-existing and supporting each other. In our arms, we see this play out not only by accessing our deep core while we move, which has been a focal point throughout the training, but as we will see in the anatomy, the front and back arm lines themselves are meant to dance with support as well.