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WHAT IS YOGA?
IF THERE IS A SPIRITUAL practice that has been mocked, lampooned, and stereotyped in the West, it’s yoga. And why not? Western yogis are easy to make fun of. With our top-knots, expensive leggings, chia seeds, smoothies, yoga mat bags over our shoulders, extended retreats, crystals, namaste-ing, om-ing, and sitting cross-legged everywhere, if you want to make fun of us, there is plenty of material to pick from. A couple hundred years ago, yogis in India were also mocked and denigrated, during the time of the British occupation and by the early travelers who had never seen anything like them before.1 Accounts as early as the one in 1689 by John Ovington describe the “painful and unnatural postures” of the ash-smeared, philosophical mendicants known as fakirs, a name for the Persian ascetics who were lumped into the same category as the Hindu yogis. The armed and highly organized ascetic order of the Naga Sannyasis2 presented a violent challenge to the hegemony of the East India Company, and from the mid-1700s to the early 1800s the Naga Sannyasis and Muslim fakirs staged uprisings and attacks against the East India Company in Bengal, which eventually led to big crackdowns on all ascetic organizations.3
The fact that Westerners lumped the Nagas, fakirs, and yogis of more gentle orders together into the same category of dangerous and violent ascetics is perhaps one reason that yoga fell out of vogue in India in the 1700s and 1800s. However, even if the yogis were considered to be dangerous, as well as filthy, lying scoundrels (and there are examples of this view even today), the practice and philosophical tenets of yoga somehow made it through this rocky period in India and found a resurgence with Sri Krishnamacharya,4 Swami Sivananda,5 and yoga’s journey to the West in the late 1800s. As of 2014, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an avid promoter and practitioner of yoga, at the helm of India, the birthplace of yoga has certainly begun to pull its own weight in yoga again.6 Modi’s suggestion of an International Yoga Day to foster global harmony and inner and outer peace was sponsored by every country represented at the United Nations, and has helped India reclaim its place of primacy in the world of yoga. Although some may say that India never lost touch with yoga, in the late 1980s I spent a lot of time traveling from North to South India looking for yoga teachers, and found relatively few of them. In 1990 there were only two or three yoga schools in Mysore—at present, there are close to fifty. Mysore is now considered to be one of the yoga capitals of India, and it is largely due to the influence of Pattabhi Jois. The yoga landscape in India has changed dramatically.
Yoga arrived in America in the 1800s and has been largely assimilated into our culture. Though Americans studied yogic texts at the beginning—Ralph Waldo Emerson loved the Bhagavad Gita—few actually practiced yoga. However, in the short span of a little more than two hundred years, millions upon millions of people across all walks of life have begun to practice yoga—in 2017 an estimated 36 million in the United States alone did some form of yoga—and not just by those who are on a spiritual path. It is practiced by children in schools, the elderly in chairs, people who are incarcerated, those who suffer from PTSD, patients in hospitals, and folks who just have a lot of stress in their lives.7 Yoga provides solace, free of discrimination.
And yet it’s also important to acknowledge that in the United States, at present, we find ourselves in the midst of a very real clash of cultures. In the 1960s we had East meets West, and the hippie movement, as a generation of youth tried to free themselves from the shackles of wartime austerity and restrictive nuclear-family ideals. As I have watched the yoga scene grow over the past thirty years, it’s now more like West gobbles up the East, and the free-form embrace of spirituality has veered into a head-on collision with consumerism—exactly the opposite of what yoga was supposed to promise and deliver. India, especially under Prime Minister Modi, has begun to reclaim yoga as part of its cultural heritage, which indeed it is. But in the meantime, the West has adopted yoga as one of its own children, and yoga in the United States has adapted to life here in unusual ways, including the secularization of a contemplative practice.
It is hard for me to separate the ancient Indian—or Hindu—culture from yoga practice, and I am not sure that turning a contemplative, mystical practice into a completely secular fitness regime is a good idea. Once you remove the contemplative aspect of yoga from its practice, can it truly be called yoga anymore?8 On the other hand, yoga has proven itself to be beyond religions, and beyond religious beliefs, and that is readily seen in the people from a variety of religions and the non-religious who practice yoga because it calms their mind, reduces stress, and makes them more internally clear. A pastor who practices with me uses the time when he does deep breathing at the end of his practice to contemplate his Sunday sermon; a rabbi uses his practice to find a quiet space that his spoken prayer does not give him. The Judeo-Christian traditions all have mystical branches, wherein a direct relationship with the divine is sought, but the mystical branches are often seen as fringe movements. The Eastern traditions made no distinction between the world and the sacred. Yoga, ritual, and the earth were all seen as one; they were mystical to the core. Today we often forget that there is a difference between religion and mysticism, dogma and contemplation. And that is precisely where yoga excels. It is easy-access mysticism. It is instantly contemplative, usually from the first time you lie down and rest deeply after practice.
While some elements of yoga are deeply entwined in the Hindu tradition, others are not. There are hints in the ancient texts that, as a practice, yoga transcends culture, time, place, and what we now call religion.9 While yoga is indeed from India, and rooted in Hindu thought systems, yoga has proven itself to be extremely adaptable, and is practiced on every continent by people from varied backgrounds and different cultural perspectives. The remarkable thing about that is that of the millions who are practicing yoga with regularity, many have very similar results: we feel better, are more clear-headed, are healthier, and in many cases have a deeper sense of purpose. This is a hint to what the basis for the Hindu tradition, called the Eternal Way, or Sanatana Dharma, was before it was called Hinduism. Beyond deities or reincarnation, Hinduism is concerned with the idea that every being has an essential purpose, and that we should strive to live our lives in such a way for that purpose to be fulfilled. It is from this vantage point that I view yoga.
So many things in the world divide us, such as politics, religion, sports teams, and all of our personal opinions, ideas, and judgments. It is rare to find something that connects us. Yoga is one of those things, and it has the ability to help us transcend partisan distinctions because it has clarity of mind, compassion, empathy, kindness, love, and caring as its base—these are all mental states and emotions that transcend religion, distinction, and things that set us apart from each other. They are things that connect us, or remind us of our connectivity, and not the things that divide us. Of course, in the marketplace, we do not always see this reflected, but when it comes to the results that people experience from yoga, the benefits are largely the same. I find that extremely interesting, and it is one of the things that led me to ask, What is the underlying mechanism that makes yoga work for so many different people, almost regardless of the type of yoga that they practice?
THE WORD YOGA
The word yoga has several meanings. Among them are “union,” “concentration,” “a path,” and “relation.” The word itself comes from the verbal root yuj, which means “to yoke or join” and is why the word yoga is most commonly associated with the idea of union. The ancient Sanskrit grammarian Panini wrote that there were two ways of defining the word yoga, depending on usage. The first is yujir yoge, which describes the action of joining or yoking—for example, the joining of an ox to a cart. In the earliest teachings of the ancient Sanatana Dharma canon, called the Vedas, this was the sense in which the word yoga was used. But for yoga practice, which was classified as a spiritual discipline in later years during the Upanishadic age (800–500 B.C.E.), the correct derivation is from yuj samadau, which means, roughly, that yoga is a special type of concentration, called samadhi.10 Samadhi means “absorption,” and it is a natural tendency of the mind to become absorbed in things, whether thoughts, objects, work, ideas, a love interest, or goals. When it comes to absorbing the mind in spiritual pursuits, the mind is said to take on the form of that which we are contemplating, and eventually, that deep level of absorption leads to the insight and experience of our true nature. In the deepest level of samadhi, one gains knowledge of one’s inner being, or self.
CONCENTRATION
Around twelve hundred to two thousand years ago, a sage (rishi) named Patanjali collected the existing teachings on yoga and systematized them in a form known as sutras. The sutra form of authorship means that the author did not create a system and write an original work, but compiled the teachings, practices, and methods that already existed, collecting or codifying them under one heading. There are six philosophical schools in Hinduism, and each has sutras that contain their teachings.11 For yoga, the text is called Patanjali Yoga Sutras, and it contains 196 sutras. A sutra is a short sentence, the few words of which have a much larger meaning. Commentaries given on the short forms by other sages and saints fill in the details and elaborate on the finer points of what the sutra is actually saying, because more often than not, they are quite hard to understand at face value.
Patanjali explained in his Yoga Sutras that samadhi, the highest state of concentration, is a technical term for the mind’s innate ability to become absorbed in its object of contemplation. Patanjali’s is not the only presentation of yoga, but it is indeed one of the most complete. Other presentations of yoga that came after Patanjali have different end goals, but all of them have one thing in common, namely, the idea that in order to achieve your goals, you need to be able to focus your mind. Therefore, Patanjali defines yoga in the second sutra of his book as the ability to selectively eliminate all extemporaneous thoughts or movements that occur in the mind and to choose where you want your mind to be, or where you want to focus it.12 As my Sanskrit teacher Vyaas Houston has said, the Yoga Sutras serve as a road map for inner consciousness. These short, concise aphorisms, which are packed with meaning, lead us through deeper and deeper levels of our mind, consciousness, and reality. Many of the teachings contained within the sutras—several of which will be discussed in this book—are amazingly relevant to us even today. Why is this so? It’s because, I think, that the mind we have today is no different from the minds that people had two thousand, or even five thousand, years ago. We suffer, we struggle, we experience joy and desire, and we question, we investigate. The quest to know ourselves, to question who we are and what we are doing here is not new to us; it is in fact a part of us to question like this, and it is this impulse that drove people to create systems of yoga thousands of years ago, and is the same impulse that drives so many to practice it today.
The earliest commentary on the Yoga Sutras was written by the ancient sage Vyaas (a different Vyaas than my Sanskrit teacher). In his commentary, he discusses how the mind has five basic patterns, or states.13 We can clearly see that these five patterns have not really changed at all in two thousand years. The first two states are not conducive to yoga practice, but the last three are. However, it is only the last two states that are conducive to samadhi, or complete absorption. The states are:
1. Restless
2. Stupefied
3. Distracted
4. One-pointed
5. Completely restrained
A person with a restless mind will never want to practice yoga, because he or she cannot remain focused for any length of time. The mind jumps from here to there, never staying fixed for even a moment, like having attention deficit disorder. I know plenty of people with ADD who are very productive and successful people, but they struggle to do yoga consistently, and sometimes find that meditation practices like Transcendental Meditation (TM) are easier for them. A person with a stupefied mind is obsessed with their problems, and ruminates, turns, and dwells on them. We’ve all had the experience of a problem, conflict, heartbreak, or disappointment becoming the only thing that we can think or talk about, sometimes to the point where our family or friends will want to shake us and yell “Get over it!” The stupefied mind has a hard time doing any type of contemplative practice, or doing anything at all, for that matter, except obsess about its own problems. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is an extreme example of a problem of the stupefied mind.
The distracted mind, as odd a description of a spiritual practitioner’s mind as it may be, is the state of mind of most of us who come to learn yoga. We are able to concentrate for short periods of time, but then we revert back into distraction. This is a state of mind that almost all yoga practitioners are familiar with: we can stay focused for a bit, but then our mind wanders off. The act of catching the mind after it has wandered off, and returning it to the place of our choosing, is one of the basic activities that we are training ourselves to do in yoga practice, and this is doable even with a mind prone to distraction. This is because one of the hallmarks of the distracted mind is that it can be calm at one moment, and then restless at another moment. The state of change that occurs in distraction is also the state that teaches us how to begin harnessing the power of attention—we get the opportunity to work on catching the mind when it becomes restless. People with this type of mind know that they need to do yoga or meditation because they have experienced both calmness and distraction, and would like to strengthen their ability to be in a calmer, more relaxed state. That is why it is said that the mind of the person who comes to yoga is predominantly in this third state, the distracted state. If you identify yourself as a person whose mind easily gives in to distraction, then I have some good news: you’re the perfect candidate for yoga!
The final two states of mind—one-pointed and completely restrained—are the states that samadhi can occur in. “We should bear in mind,” said Swami Hariharananda, “that our mental weakness is only our inability to retain our good intentions fixed in the mind; but if the fluctuations of the mind are overcome, we shall be able to remain fixed in our good intentions and thus be endowed with mental power. As the calmness [of mind] would increase, that power shall also increase. The acme of such calmness is Samadhi.”14 I particularly like this quotation, because this idea is clear: yoga is not about screwing the mind into a fixed state of focus, or the body into a complicated pose; it is about calmness and filling the mind with a natural state of goodness. It is a natural, underlying characteristic that has been covered up by too much thinking. Sometimes when I sit and meditate, I don’t do anything but sense or feel for that natural state of goodness within me. Like many people, I judge myself pretty harshly; I prefer criticism over compliments because I would rather improve myself to the point of perfection, and hearing what was good just gets in the way of what needs to be fixed. But not everything needs to be fixed; it’s okay to sometimes just let things be. So when I sit and feel the natural goodness that is inside of me, a feeling of calm does indeed automatically come to me. It’s soothing because, from this point of view, goodness is not something that we strive to be or become; it is something that is already there. We just have to allow it to be a little more present.
In the last two states of mind on Vyaas’s list, the one-pointed and completely restrained states, the deepest experience of samadhi occurs, also known as the “state of yoga.” In the one-pointed state of mind, you can rest your attention on any object that you choose to contemplate—whether it be your breath, a mantra, or something else—for as long as you wish. That is no easy feat. It is hard to keep the mind resting on one thing for literally even a few seconds. In the completely restrained, or arrested, state of mind, there are no thoughts, no fluctuations, and no object separate from yourself to hold your mind to. Subject and object cease to exist, leaving non-localized consciousness as your only experience. Everywhere you look, listen, hear, smell, or touch, there is only consciousness. In the deepest states of samadhi, there are no longer any objects; only the subject remains. It is called vishesha, or that which is left over, after all the changing objects of the world no longer color our experience. This is sometimes referred to as “unity consciousness.”
YOGA AS A PATH
The South Indian yoga master Sri K. Pattabhi Jois wrote that the word yoga has several meanings. Among them are “relation,” “a means,” “union,” “knowledge,” “matter,” and “logic.”15 He was unique in defining the practice of yoga according to one of Patanjali’s sutras, 2.26, which states that yoga is an upaya, a path.16 What kind of a path is it? One that brings to an end the confusion of the mind, via a special type of mental discrimination that leads toward self-knowledge, a discrimination that allows us to distinguish awareness from the movies of our lives, thoughts and desires that are projected onto its screen. Yoga practice, therefore, is the means of liberation from conditioned thinking.
Jois writes:
For now, let us say that the meaning of the word yoga is upaya, which means a path, or way which we follow or by means of which we can attain something. What then is the path we should follow? What or whom should we seek to attain? The mind should seek to attain what is best … the way of establishing the mind in the Self should be known as yoga.17
The idea of upaya is intricately linked with the sense of relation that Jois lists first in his definition of yoga. For, by doing the yoga practice, and the related contemplative practices, we gain an intimate relationship with our body, breath, mind, emotions, and sense of purpose. It is this intimacy with ourselves that leads toward self-confidence and comfort with who we are and what we are doing here. This naturally leads to the deeper and most important question that we eventually end up asking ourselves: Who am I beyond the idea that the sum total of who I am is my body, my emotions, thoughts, or memories? These are our main questions in life: Who am I? What am I doing here? My ninth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Jane Bendetson, posed these questions to our class as the most important questions that we could ever ask ourselves, and added to them, What should I do next? These questions are, in fact, the only thing I remember having learned in high school.
Yoga first and foremost is a practice. The yogis considered that we should practice yoga in the same way, or with the same importance, that we brush our teeth each day. Through practicing yoga asanas (postures) and breathing, as will be discussed in each chapter of this book, we clean our body internally, and strengthen the muscles, bones, internal organs, nervous system, mind, and emotions. A little bit of practice goes a long way; we don’t have to practice for hours on end every day, to the point of exhaustion. All we have to do is make sure that doing a little bit of practice each day becomes a priority in our lives, and that we do so until practice becomes a habit, a regular part of our daily routine, or a part of the ritual that makes up the rhythm of our life. Any practice, whether spiritual, physical, or artistic, only begins to pay off when it is done with regularity and sincerity. One of Patanjali’s most quoted sutras, 1.13, is on this very point:
Sa tu dirgha kala nairantarya satkara sevito drdha bhumih.
We become grounded in practice when it is done uninterruptedly, for a long time, with devotion.
Perhaps more important than the idea of discipline is what discipline is creating. The neuroscientist and psychologist Rick Hanson has written about this at length in his book Hardwiring Happiness, where he describes the difference between mental states and mental traits. We are often the victims of our mental states: anger, jealousy, judgment, revenge, laziness, apathy, boredom, desire; and at times we act on these states, and identify with them. But these states are transient; they come and go. Still, they are liable to repeat themselves more often when we act upon them. By doing a regular practice, we begin to create an underlying mental trait of awareness, which is more dependable and more open than the changing states. Through our practice we develop within us a trait of awareness that is calm, has perspective, and can help us to pause so that we do not get swept away by overwhelming emotions.
Developing strong mental traits, then, is the true goal of a dedicated practice. Patanjali does not define practice as being really great at doing yoga postures; he defines it as a means to creating an underlying mental trait of awareness that leads toward insight. The changing states are what Vyaas was referring to when he spoke about the distracted mind, and one of the first things that yoga gives is the ability to observe the changing states without getting lost in them. Many have experienced that after practicing yoga for even a short time, they get angry less often, or catch themselves before speaking without thinking of the repercussions of their words. This is because the underlying trait of awareness is starting to become as pronounced, if not more so, than the changing states.
SADHANA, THE MEANS
As with many of the yogic ideas, and many Sanskrit words, one word will lead to another word that fleshes out even more subtleties of meaning. Yoga practice has a special word associated with it, sadhana, which describes the techniques or practices that we use to move toward self-knowledge, awareness, or liberation. Sadhana is often translated as “spiritual practice,” and the purpose behind spiritual practice, usually, is liberation from suffering—which is liberation from identification with everything that is other than awareness. Sadhanas are the means that we use to identify with a sense of awareness within, and to remove the coverings of confusion, narratives, and longings that prevent us from being who we truly are.
A. G. Mohan, an influential yoga teacher from Chennai, said a wonderful thing about the different layers of meaning and experience that in the Hindu tradition have been compared to the peeling of an onion. This analogy is very often used to describe the layers of spiritual practice: you keep peeling and peeling the layers of identification away until there is nothing left but consciousness. “But,” Mohan points out, “who is the one who has peeled the onion? The one who peeled the onion does not disappear as well.” Sadhana is the peeling of the onion; the one who has peeled the onion is the impulse within us to know.
Sadhana is a commitment to making our spiritual goals, in particular, a priority, and making time for them. A spiritual goal can be:
• Practicing yoga
• Practicing meditation
• Practicing kindness, gratitude, or forgiveness
• Living a balanced life
• Keeping our minds calm and accepting
• Serving those in need
• Living a contemplative, thoughtful life
• Practicing patience
• Becoming a better listener
If we say we want any of these things but are not taking active steps to actually do them, then we can’t really say that we want them. If I say that I want to be more meditative in my life, but I don’t make the time to practice meditation every day, then perhaps I do not really want to be meditative. The things that we actually spend time doing are the things that we want, and sometimes the goals or ideas we have are not real—they are just ideas that sound pretty good to us. In sadhana, it’s important to figure out, What is it that I really want? And if I do really want that thing, then I’ll spend time doing it. It’s as easy as that.
Don’t worry about not doing things you don’t really want to do. If you say that you want to meditate but you never do it, then you probably don’t want to meditate. If you accept that you don’t want to meditate, then you won’t feel bad about not doing it, and you can cross it off your list of things that you think you want to do—stuff that other people do that sounds like a good idea but, when push comes to shove, is not for you. Then you can replace it with something that you really do want to do. Sometimes we do actually want to learn or practice something, but we find it hard to make time for it—if that is the case, then you need to learn to be more disciplined, and to put up with a little hardship. In Sanskrit, this is called tapas. That is where satisfaction, success, and even excellence come from: overcoming the obstacle of either getting started or finishing something to completion. Knowing what you want is sadhya, or the goal; the path we travel to get there, the upaya, is sadhana.
As Timothy Ferriss says in his book Tribe of Mentors, “Life punishes the vague wish and rewards the specific ask. After all, conscious thinking is largely asking and answering questions in your own head. If you want confusion and heartache, ask vague questions. If you want uncommon clarity and results, ask uncommonly clear questions.” These following three words lay out the concrete plan, or road map, of spiritual practice:
1. sadhya: forming our goal
2. sadhana: our practice, which is the means of accomplishing it
3. upaya: sticking to the path
The goal that we choose does not necessarily need to be liberation. The goal could simply be to move our bodies for thirty minutes a day for health reasons; it could be to meditate for seven minutes a day to calm our minds; it could be to chant a mantra 108 times to express devotion. The goal we choose should be attainable; otherwise we will get discouraged. If you can pick a small, attainable goal and reach it, then little by little your goals can become more subtle. For example, a goal of getting less angry, or not getting annoyed by small things. This will begin to happen naturally when you establish yourself in a daily discipline.
There is another definition of upaya that I quite like, and that is the one that is used in Jyotish, or Vedic astrology. An upaya in astrology is a remedy that the astrologer gives to someone who has a dosha, or defect, somewhere in their chart, that is causing them trouble or creating an obstacle in their lives. The astrologer may suggest to them that they repeat a particular mantra, wear a certain color, feed a particular type of animal, all on a specific day of the week, for a certain period of time, in order to remove this defect. Such an upaya is a remedy as ritual to remove an obstacle. In yoga, the biggest obstacle we have is an undisciplined mind that is attached to thinking about stuff all the time, that is attached to our opinions, judgments, and ideas, which lead us to create false identifications: I’m a Democrat, I’m a Republican, I’m a vegan, I’m an Ashtanga yogi, I’m an Iyengar yogi, I’m a bad person, I’m a great person. All of these are just thought patterns that we, for some reason, have chosen to believe. The practices of yoga, specifically the eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga, are the remedies that we use to remove the defect of these created perceptions that bind us to a false sense of self, a sense of self that does not bring satisfaction or happiness, or fulfill our inner purpose as individual human beings. Yoga removes the defect of a mind that is attached to its own rightness.
So, to sum up our exploration of the word yoga:
• Yoga comes from the verbal root yuj, which means “to yoke, or to join.”
• It indicates a special type of concentration, where our minds become completely absorbed in the object we are focusing on.
• Yoga is an upaya, a remedy for alleviating identification with ideas and objects other than our inner awareness.
• Relation in yoga refers to the relationships we have with our bodies, emotions, thoughts, memories, and inner sense of self and purpose.
• The meditative practices of yoga reveal our innate goodness.
• Yoga addresses the three most important questions that we can ask ourselves in our lives: Who am I? What am I doing here? What should I do next?
Copyright © 2019 by Edwin Stern
Foreword copyright © 2019 by Deepak Chopra