Sitting Cat Style

Ask a yogi what the most challenging aspect of their practice and if their answer isn’t meditation then well, I don’t want to say they are lying but they probably are. Meditating is hard. It takes discipline and…well a lot of discipline and patience. To be really plain and kind of brash about it you sitting around waiting for nothing to happen. But really nothing, not a thought! I don’t even not think when I’m sleeping, seriously my dreams have taken a stress turn and I’m planning conversations and making to do lists in my dreams (whatever happen to old naked dreams, I’m leaving that open for your own interpretation). But back to meditation and it’s elusive charm. I want to have a meditation practice so very much badly. And I know that setting a routine would be very good for me and my half vata dosha but I’m having trouble setting one. So in the meantime I’m trying to meditate like a cat. 

Did she just say meditate like a cat? Yes, yes I did. But I don’t mean to purr as some anthropomorphizing chant like exercise, or to practice stillness by stalking small birds and baby rabbits. No, what I really mean is that the other day I practiced meditation like a cat might, in a patch of sun as it shined through the doorway. I didn’t mean to meditate that way, which is to say I didn’t have a plan. I’m still working my morning routine out. What I did was open the door to let the dog out for a pee. But if yoga has taught me anything it’s to appreciate things in the moment; big, little, and all kinds of in between. The light that morning was amazing, it was dappling through the ancient oaks, it was warming off the cold night air of early spring and it was inviting. I put my coffee down and sat in the doorway, eyes closed and taking in the morning. I was meditating like a cat by basking in the sun and letting it wash over me and for a few brief moments my (other) half pitta brain shut down and stopped thinking. I didn’t find nothing; I didn’t get to that ultimate detachment but got to contentment. Which for my life right now that’s pretty darn good. 

I was content, not bursting with joy or giddy with excitement, I was just there. I was in the moment, I was peaceful and I was grateful. One of my favorite yoga sutras is: santosha anuttamah sukha labhah, which translates into, by contentment we gain ultimate joy. So maybe I was bursting with joy and giddy. Maybe that’s what real joy feels like, fleeting and precious and all because I spontaneously meditated like a cat.

my sunny window and meditation mat

and so it begins

1.1 ATHA YOGANUSASANAM
Now the exposition of yoga begins.

I thought this seemed an appropriate way to "re-launch" Sutra Monday. And yes Monday is almost over (at least the working day part) but I’m working on that whole blogger timing thing.

When I prepare for a sutra blog I don’t just read Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, I read several different version and explanations. Some of them written as late as 1951, so there are more modern versions out there which tend to have language easier to get your head wrapped around. But for this sutra it was the last line of Patanjali’s sutras, as translated by Sri Swami Satchidananda that gave me the inspiration for this blog, it reads: Without practice, nothing can be achieved.

I like to write, I like getting into a rhythm, feeling the creative juices flowing, finding the right words to line up in a sentence that relates not only a meaning, but imagery and emotions to. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t usually I just let it happen when it’s happening and don’t push it when it’s not. But that can often lead to a rather empty blog, so I tried to instill a little discipline to my writing via Sutra Friday. Well I didn’t account for how busy my life is right now so I moved it to Monday which didn’t make my life any less busy so I’m not sure why I thought I’d be more prepared to blog a few days later. But not doing something just because time is short isn’t the way to have discipline, so here I am blogging about yoga, how yoga begins. This is me beginning my yoga.

This is my practice. I am transforming my writing from a habit to a practice just like I did with my asana practice. I took my physical yoga from being something I did every now and again to something I did daily (when in yoga school at least) and not only did I start to love my asana (yeah, go ahead and read that pun into it) I began to love all of it, all the yoga, the Sanskrit, the history, the stories. A whole new world opened up to me when I simply had little discipline, a little practice. Now do think writing every week is going to crack open a new world of enlightenment, no. Well, maybe. Maybe this practice of reading sacred text and relaying what I glean from them will help their bigger meanings sink in better for me. Maybe I’ll start reading things I never thought I would and finding new paths along the road to enlightenment. Maybe I’ll start to love writing so much that I start writing letters to my family and friends far away, making their day better and then they call me and make my days better and we all find a little more happiness. So yeah, maybe writing will be a powerful tool for change in my life but I have to do it because just like the Swami says: “Without practice, nothing can be achieved.”

Texting

Ok, the times they are a changing or rather the schedules they are a shifting. Sutra Friday has proven to be a little trying not because the sutras themselves are difficult but because my schedule gets a bit hairy towards the weekends. So altering this plan, Sutra Fridays will now become Sutra Mondays! Because Monday needs to be a little heavier for most folks, yes? No. Oh well, something to distract you then form the return to the grind of a 5 day work week.

In addition to the Sutras I’ll be diving into The Bagavad Gita, yet again. I’ve tried to read this book before (see, Reading the Gita), I even traveled to Brussels last year to study it. However, this is no easy book, the language is dense and the story is epic (and I mean epic in the tradition sense of the word not the trendy bastardization to mean basically, cool) and the concepts are big. So this time I am employing one of the oldest tools of book learning, the book club. The Sacred Text Reading Group in fact, an idea I wish I would have come up with but am so happy to be involved with. As a group we are diving into the Gita with the objective to relate the experiences of Arjuna to surviving the Holidays? Hmmmm, a little dramatic? A warrior melts down in fear as he stares out upon his enemy as compared to the gathering of family and the pressures of gift giving? Actually not so much, because the opposing army that our hero stares out at is his family, he cousins, uncles, teachers and fellow Community members and he must discover what he’s duty is to himself and his family and the best action to take and at what cost? Sound familiar or maybe familial? We meet again in January to discuss our experiences with the Gita and the Holidays and hopefully there will be mini-meetings along the way to help the process along. You shall be kept posted (blog posted that is) to all progress made.

The Gita re-visited, the Sutras Rescheduled, could be fun.

Sutra Friday: a yogi looks at violence and sees her life.

II-35 Aminsa Pratisthayam Tat Samnidhau Vaira Tyagah: In the presence of one firmly established in non-violence all hostilities cease.

One might think that being a yogi would make the practice of non-violence fairly easy, well that would be wrong. Oh so very wrong. In order to elaborate on this wrongness I’ll start with the word ahimsa. The root himsa means ‘injustice’ or ‘cruelty’ so by the addition of a that would suggest the opposite of injustice and cruelty, so already delving far beyond the depths of simple violence. By abstaining (which the yamas, the first step on the 8 limbed path of yoga, are all practices of abstinence) from these qualities a yogi tries to counter them by cultivating traits of kindness and consideration and even friendliness.

For me this yama really brought to light not just the ways in which I have violence in my life but more the way I practice all yoga in my life. But first the ahimsa stuff, which goes far beyond on day one when I looked up to see a mosquito (yep, a mosquito in November) on my window and out of pure reflex squashed him. Not very cruelty free. And that’s just the outward violence the place where I noticed the largest amount of violence was internally. Literally, the things I put into my body as well as the way I treat my body. When I think about the things that can harm a body internally like alcohol, overly processed food, sugar then I have some major work to do. I work part-time in environments that are crawling with sweets and good wine and not having the best will power in the world I tend to indulge a little. Especially now with the winter sunset of 4:30 in the afternoon my SAD (seasonal affective disorder) really works me into a funk, so often I self medicate, or rather anesthetize, myself in the evenings and wind up in bed by 8 o’clock. Not the nicest thing I could be doing to my body, in fact a very harmful thing to be doing. So how do I change this, this is where I stopped seeing this week’s sutra practice as an individual practice and a great introspective to my entire yoga practice.

When you get down to it it’s is a sort of half full half empty thing, people are usually one or the other. For some the idea of practice abstaining or doing without works and they can start to trim away the unwanted behaviors, sort of a spiritual, diet. For me that doesn’t work, the best way to get me to do something is to tell me I can’t, I don’t work well with restrictions. So instead I think of adding instead of eliminating. I think ‘I want to add these behaviors to myself’ and the result of this addition is a decrease in the opposite behaviors. For instance instead of telling myself; no more wheat and refined sugars, I say; I really want more rice and yummy fruit sugar in my life, so by adding these more ahimsa types of foods there is less room for the himsa type foods. That’s it. That’s my practice, my yoga, my life.

I don’t want to be keeping things out, I want to be gathering in; always growing, always learning, always experiencing. By bringing in the positive attributes of life I crowed out the negative; if my heart if full of compassion I have no room for jealousy, if my mind is full of kindness I have no room for judgment, if my body is full of nutrients and flexibility I have no room for disease and pain. Two thousand pounds of poo and two thousand pounds of gold both weight a ton, but which would you rather spread around your life.

Sutra Friday, Truthfulness.

Sutra II-36: To one established in truthfulness, actions and their results become subservient.

7 days living in truth, how did I do. Well not great and also not terrible. I think the best way to examine truthfulness is to examine what keeps us from truthfulness; telling the truth, not lying. Well it took about 2 days into the week of living this sutra to know my answer; ego! Yep, simple as that, my big ol’ ego keeps me spinning exaggerations of the truth so that I can avoid that most dreaded emotion: embarrassment. Ego and embarrassment, maybe it’s the letter E that’s out get me. Hmmm, excuses much? Another E!

Ok all silliness aside being truthful is very important to any yogic path. Why? Because living in truth means you are living with integrity. For me the hardest time to keep my integrity was when I was in the wrong, even about little things. It was so easy for me to bend the actual facts or stretch them just enough so that no one would know I was at fault, “instead of saying, hey I mis-scheduled I’m really sorry but I can’t keep our appointment.” I spun a version of the truth that got me out of trouble but really actually put someone else in a bind, and boy does that work on you. You tell a simple lie to make yourself feel better only to feel even worse; a classic definition of a loose loose situation. And really, who hasn’t doubled booked themselves, I’m sure the person would have understood and don’t I as a yoga teacher tell my students over and over that “when we fall is when we learn.” So I am literally keeping myself from learning a lesson!

Very often for me these little “mind slips” that lead to my ego saving untruthfulness come up around work, I do a lot of odd jobs. I’m trying to figure out what my next sort of full-ish time job will be that allows me to keep the studio running and enough time off to have a life. But the problem is I’ve taken on to many things, I over book myself, I don’t allow time for me to nurture my own needs. This is where the bigger version of truthfulness comes in, being truthful with yourself. I am just now admitting to myself that I have gone from over working myself with 1 full time and 1 part time job plus running the studio, to working 3 part time jobs. I’m not sure how this situation came about but after this week of immersion into sutra II-36 I know it is because I was not being honest with myself. I’ve become a little more fragile of the years and I need to really make tome for my yoga practice and meditation but I was functioning under the disillusionment that I still have the energy and, frankly, bull headedness that I did when I was 19. When what I really need to do is admit to myself and the people I have wrongfully committed to that I can’t do it all, I need to scale back my obligations to others and for a while cultivate myself. That is a decision made form a place of integrity and honesty and that is the way to please all those around me.

So what does Patanjali mean by "actions and their results become subservient"? Well for me after this week what I think it means is that as long as you are acting from truth than no matter what the outcome will be good. Will it be pleasant, maybe not, or what your want, not always but it will the the "right" thing. You may even find that when you don't have to question your own decisions that situations just sort of unfold without you having to worry about them. It's like being on a roller coaster of honesty, once you start the ride it just goes and when you really let go even the parts that seemed scary turn out to be kind of fun, entertaining non the less.

Next week: Sutra II-35, non-violence.

Sutra Friday!

Welcome to the first edition of Sutra Friday! From now until...well until I get tired of this project, I'll be posting an entry about one of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are one of the most important texts in yoga's history; just about every teacher training program requires students to read it. And once you have read it you find that some of the sutras stick a little more in your day to day life than others but that they all have a special place in yoga.

So the problem of starting this whole project is that there are 196 sutras! Where does one start? Well when starting a journey I like to (at least) start on the path (divergences may occur) so what better path to walk than the 8 limbed path of yoga; first step the yamas and niyamas. What are the yamas and niyamas? Well, they are a sort of “life’s guidelines” for yogis, strictly speaking they are restraints (yamas) and observances (niyamas), there are a total of ten. In the sutra II-30 (book 2, sutra 30) the yamas are described as things that seem “so elementary, but at the same time ‘elephantary.’” They are little things that may seem like mild decisions in one’s life but are very hard to abide by and live by; things like: non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, continence (celibacy), and non-greed. Sure, right we all do those things…or do we? Or at least, do we do them fully.

In this entry I won’t go into the full break down of each yama and niyama, that’s what this whole ‘Friday Sutra’ project is all about, but I hope this entry has illuminated just a tiny bit of the subtlety and profundity of one of the greatest sacred texts of yoga; The Yoga Sutra’s of Patanjali.

Next week’s sutra II-36, truthfulness. A yama we think we all know…