Wisdom
Meditation
Sutra 1.2Yoga happens when there is stilling (in the sense of continual and vigilant watchfulness) of the movement of thought – without which there is no movement.
Sutra 1.3. Then the Seer abides in Itself, resting in its own True Nature, which is called Self-realization.
Sutra 1.4. At other times, when one is not in Self-realization, the Seer appears to take on the form of the modifications of the mind field, taking on the identity of those thought patterns.
Sutra 1.12. These thought patterns are mastered regulated, coordinated, controlled, stilled, quieted) through practice and non-attachment.
Sutra 1.14. This practice becomes well-grounded when continued with reverent devotion and without interruption over a long period of time.
Sutra 1.41. When the modifications of mind have become weakened, the mind becomes like a transparent crystal, and thus can easily take on the qualities of whatever object observed, whether that object be the observer, the means of observing, or an object observed, in a process of engrossment called samapatti.
Summary
Patanjali’s Eight Limbs of Yoga from the Yoga Sutras
1. Yama- Guidelines
1.Ahimsa- non-harming, kindness to all
2.Satya- truthfulness – the truth of who we are.
3.Asteya- Living for others not taking from others. Seva – Service.
4.Brahmacharya- By remembering the highest energy or force of reality, that energy is then not dissipated. As it is not dissipated, thus we gain strength, vigor, vitality, and courage.
5.Aparigraha- not clutching – trusting that all your needs will be met.
2.Niyama- Observance
1.Saucha- purity
2.Santosha- contentment
3.Tapah- practice
4.Svadhyaya- self-study
5.Ishvara pranidhana- devotion, love.
3.Asana- posture
4.Pranayama-breath control
5.Pratyahara-withdrawal from thoughts
6.Dharana- attention to the present moment
7.Dhyana- meditative absorption
8.Samadhi- pure consciousness
1. Meditation2. Yoga (Asana) Practice, Pranayama, practices related to the Body.
3. Satsang
A. Group study of inspiring writings: yoga sutras of Patanjalis and other yoga texts.
B. Music – Chanting, Bhajans, and Kirtan:Listening to and singing bhajans allows us to access our feelings and places of inspiration within ourselves.
C. Group meditation.
4. Satya – Truthfulness – Our true selves
5. Seva – Selfless Service – Karma yoga – Ahimsa
6. Bhakti Yoga – Love – Devotion
7. Nature
Spontaneity
For the past few decades, we have been trying in all kinds of ways to liberate ourselves simultaneously from our frenetic materialism and our tired religious traditions.
We are still looking for the same thing: how to integrate the experience of life in western society with a deeper consciousness that would bring us bliss and reconcile us with our emotional and sensory natures.
We want a path that would not be opposed to our life; a life that would not be opposed to our path. In short, we want a harmonious integration of the spiritual with the material along an accessible path, one not too estranged from the common culture. We want to attain plentitude without denying life’s marvelous effervescence; we want a light and moving joy that would bring us to a larger, more all-encompassing experience of reality.
If we look around, we can see those people who throw themselves into a hedonistic search for pleasure. They try to live out their passions, and sometimes they succeed. They frantically attach themselves to the material world and end up in a state of chronic dissatisfaction, which pushes them to undertake a more and more neurotic quest. These people are often egoistic; they leave a trail of destruction in their wake.
In opposition to them we find the people who are fascinated by the spiritual search and whose aim is to purify themselves of desires and passions by trying to reduce the impact these have on their daily lives. They are said to be wise of on the path of wisdom. They proudly claim to be of a spiritual school. In observing them we sometimes notice, along with their austerity, signs of coldness and hardness of heart and body; signs of a certain lack of spontaneity. A halo of fear encircles their whole being. They seem to have submitted themselves to overly strong tensions; their virtuousness seems a little artificial. Their tolerance has limits, they are often slightly fanatical – indeed, everything about them leads us to believe that their balance is precarious. It would take just one lovely temptation, it seems, to tip them into the neurotic quest for pleasure that they condemn in others.
Our cultural and religious heritage seems to tell us that we must choose: the spiritual against the body or the body against the spiritual.
It is rare that either the hedonistic quest or the spiritual quest, with its rejection of the body, brings us happiness, harmony, or joy.
So are we condemned to oscillate unceasingly between these two paths? In just about every person I meet there is a deep intuitive knowledge that a third path does indeed exist. We have suffered too much from fanaticism, violence, and exclusion; we have progressively opened ourselves to the world and its diversity. What men and women seek today is a path that reintegrates these opposites with genuine love and acceptance of all the richness that each human being carries within, a way of total love, which leads to the freedom to be.
Desire, Daniel Odier
Wise guide writing
Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the mind, busy, demanding, calculating; the other is the heart, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to. As you listen more and more, and integrate your heart into your life, your inner voice, your innate wisdom of discernment, what we call in Buddhism “discriminating awareness guided by the heart,” is awakened and strengthened, and you start to begin to distinguish between its guidance and the various clamorous and enthralling voices of mind. The memory of your real nature, with all its splendor and confidence, begins to return to you.
You will find, in fact, that you have uncovered in yourself your own wise guide. Because he or she knows you through and through, since he or she is you, your guide can help you, with increasing clarity and humor, negotiate all the difficulties of your thoughts and emotions. Your guide can also be a continual, joyful, tender, sometimes teasing presence, who knows always what is best for you and will help you find more and more ways out of your obsession with your habitual responses and confused emotions. As the voice of your heart awareness grows stronger and clearer, you will start to distinguish between its truth and the various deceptions of the mind, and you will be able to listen to it with discernment and confidence.
The more often you listen to this wise guide, the more easily you will be able to change your negative moods yourself, see through them, and even laugh at them for the absurd dramas and illusions that they are. Gradually you will find yourself able to free yourself more and more quickly from the dark emotions that may sometimes ruled your life, and this ability to do so is the greatest miracle of all. Terton Sogyal, the Tibetan mystic, said that he was not really impressed by someone who could turn the floor into the ceiling or fire into water. A real miracle, he said, was if someone could liberate just one negative emotion.
It has never been more difficult to hear the unflattering voice of the truth, and never more difficult, once having heard it, to follow it: because there is nothing in the world around us that supports our choice, and the entire society in which we live seems to negate every idea of sacredness or eternal meaning. So at the time of our most acute danger, when our very future is in doubt, we as human beings find ourselves at our most bewildered, and trapped in a trauma of our own creation. Yet there is one significant source of hope in this tragic situation, and that is that the spiritual teachings of all the great mystical traditions are still available.
So long as we haven’t unmasked the mind it continues to hoodwink us, keeping up a stream of suave and emptily convincing chatter, which actually says nothing at all.
Lifetimes of ignorance have brought us to identify the whole of our being with mind. Its greatest triumph is to convince us into believing its best interests are our best interests, and even into identifying our very survival with its own. This is a savage irony, considering that mind and its thought activities are at the root of suffering. Yet mind is so convincing, and we have been its dupe for so long, that the thought that we might ever become mindless terrifies us. To be mindless, mind whispers to us, is to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable.
Mind plays brilliantly on our fundamental fear of losing control, and of the unknown. We might say to ourselves: “I should really let go of mind, I’m in such pain; but if I do, what’s going to happen to me?”
Mind will chime in, sweetly. “I know I’m sometimes a nuisance, and believe me, I quite understand if you want me to leave. But is that really what you want? Think: If I do go, what’s going to happen to you? Who will look after you? Who will protect and care for you like I’ve done all these years?”
And even if we were to see through mind’s lies, we are just too scared to abandon it; for without any true knowledge of the nature of our heart, or true identity, we simply have no other alternative. Again and again we cave in to its demands with the same sad self-hatred as the alcoholic feels reaching for the drink that he knows is destroying him, or the drug addict groping for the drug that she knows after a brief high will only leave her flat and desperate.
You begin to see also just how all-encompassing the sway of the mind has been over you, and in the space of freedom opened up by meditation, when you are momentarily released from grasping, you glimpse the exhilarating spaciousness of your true nature. You realize that for years, your mind, like a crazy con artist, has been swindling you with schemes and plans and promises that have never been real and have only brought you to un-fulfillment. When, in the equanimity of this present moment, you see this, without any consolation or desire to cover up what you’ve discovered, all the plans and schemes reveal themselves as hollow and start to crumble.
Because you have learned through discipline to simplify -your life, and so reduced the opportunities for mind to seduce you; and because you have practiced the mindfulness of heart, and through it loosened the hold of aggression, clinging, and negativity on your whole being, the wisdom of insight can slowly dawn. And in the all-revealing clarity of its sunlight this insight can show you, distinctly and directly, both the subtlest workings of your own heart and the nature of reality.
by Sogyal Rimpoche
svadhyaya
In life, we inevitably come across situations, experiences, and interactions that cause an uncomfortable sensation in the body. Sometimes it may show as a clenching in the throat when someone is talking to us, or a churning in the stomach when we see someone else receiving praise or recognition, or a burning heat in the chest when we hear of unfortunate news. These sensations show up for us in unique ways and we each have our equally unique and different triggers. When the sensation occurs, we have two choices: figure out some way to get rid of it or figure out a way to go into it. The former is the way that we’ve traditionally been taught in the western world to go about solving our problems—the uncomfortable sensation, in this case posing as the problem or even worse, the person or situation that triggered the sensation posing as the problem. We’ll come up with just about anything to place blame externally for causing ourself that suffering. The latter—figuring out a way to get in to it—is a discipline, or practice, in yoga commonly referred to as svadhyaya, or self study. Its the practice of going deep within and studying the self to really see what is going on internally. Its here that we can begin to confront what is causing us to believe in the blame, believe that we are separate from each other, and slowly release that belief, liberating the soul to open up to the love and connection always available. Patanjali refers to this practice in Sadhana Pada of the Yoga Sutras, II.44. It states: ”svadhyaya-ista-devata-samprayogah”, translated by Georg Feurstein as, through self study the yogin establishes contact with the divine. The beautiful thing about this “education of the self”, a phrase referred to by Iyengar, is that it can come from virtually any and every activity in our lives. If we can be open to the idea that every action, every interaction, everything is an inspirational teaching or invitation for us to look deeper within ourselves to make peace with what’s there, we can see that our lives are the classroom for svadhyaya.
Traditionally, inspirational teachings come from a spiritual teacher or guru. In his book Self-Knowledge, Sivananda says a guru is “absolutely free from passion, anger, selfishness, greed, hatred and egoism….He is able to remove the ignorance of people. He can clear any kind of doubt. He can give practical, easy lessons to control the mind and the senses. He can remove the obstacles, pitfalls and snares on the path.” The guru knows the inner workings of the human ego. He or she knows and can remind us that the only direction to go in times of suffering is in. Its clear to them, the ways in which we create all these “blame games” to take the attention off our inner suffering; how we dictate how everyone else should change so we can finally have some peace around here. He or she knows that its when peace is made within the self through deep introspection, through svadhyaya, peace can be made with our external world. The teacher reminds us of who we are, who we’re not, and gives us a moment (or many moments) of peace from our daily suffering. However, he or she cannot do all the work for us. They can show us the path inward, almost like a signpost pointing the way when we’re feeling lost or we’ve made a wrong turn, but its up to us to place one foot in front of the other (or I like to think of it as one breath in front of the other) once the way has been illumined.
Once we have been made aware of the human tendencies then we can begin to apply them in our everyday lives. We can allow each moment and interaction to serve as an inspirational teaching, wherein each relationship becomes an instance of teacher/student. The classical teacher or guru can show us the reflective quality of unconditional love and universal awareness that we all share. But this is not necessarily the same reflection we’ll see when we look at our partner, or co-worker, or parent. These relationships are usually the ones that show us what patterns and defenses we uphold to keep us from living in that state of shared love and awareness. They are the relationships that “push our buttons” and bring up feelings of tension, heart break, anger, resentment. Here is where we can apply the lessons learned from our sat guru. We can remember what’s available all the time to us—this state of being in constant universal connectedness with one another. We can remember the method of operation of the human ego—to create a separate sense of “I-ness”. And through our everyday relationships study how our ego is keeping us from that state of connectedness.
In his book, Light on Yoga, Iyengar states that there are two things that make up this reality: truth and love. When we are in a state of feeling these uncomfortable feelings, usually its because we want things to be different. Common thoughts could be: “They shouldn’t have done that to me.”, “He or she should do it this way.”, “I deserve that more than he or she does.”, etc. So, lets look back at that Iyengar statement. Is there truth or love in any of those statements? Not love, because we’re not accepting the other person for who they are. And certainly your ego thinks those things are true, but in reality its not the case and the following is why. Life happens as it happens in each moment and it absolutely can not be any different then that. By going through in our head how people should be different, or even how we should be different is an argument against reality. An argument that we can keep up forever and never win. It causes great internal suffering that keeps us out of the present moment. If we’re constantly thinking about what could or should have happened in the past or what we wish could or should happen in the future, that means that we’re actually never allowing ourselves to open up to what’s available in each present moment. When we look at those triggers, those “button pushers”, and go into the sensations and thoughts of “shoulds” and “wants”, we can clearly see that the only reason for those painful thoughts and sensations is our own argument against reality—the truth of what’s in front of us.
Svadhyaya gives us the opportunity to go into the sensation and learn how we react, why we react, and take ownership over our sensations rather than pointing the finger at someone else. It teaches us that those buttons of ours that are being pushed are actually the right ones that need some pushing to show us where we need to let go in order to free ourselves from suffering. Once that state of suffering in separateness dissolves it allows us to open up to Iyengar’s second ingredient to reality: love. Love to see that another individual is standing in front of you trying to figure out how to get through this whole thing the best way they know how given their life’s experiences, just like you. We’re all doing the best we can to our ability and we can always love each other for that.
So where can you find support? Remember the words of those who inspire you in this path. Haven’t found a teacher in your area that connects to you where you live? Look no further then the internet. Dharma talks, meditations, and other spiritual discourses are vastly available now on websites and iTunes. Start with Dharmaseed.org and see where things branch off from there. Read texts that support you in remembering who you are. The Yoga Sutras, The Bhagavad Gita, and Hatha Yoga Pradapika are commonly known as bedrock or tri-pillar for yogic studies and always a good place to start. Overwhelmed by sanskrit terms? No problem! Ekhart Tolle, Wayne Dyer, Dan Siegel, Adyashanti, and David Frawley are just the start of a long list of amazing authors to check out. Like poetry? There’s Rumi, Hafiz, Mary Oliver, Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, really just so many poets that illuminate the way. And remember there’s always yourself. The biggest support you’ll ever have that we spend a lifetime trying to realize.
An Introduction To Yoga Life
Yandara Yoga Institute
AN INTRODUCTION TO YOGA LIFE
Compiled and edited by Craig Perkins
Yoga Sutra 1.1 : Now, after having done prior preparation through life and other practices, the study and practice of Yoga begins.
Yoga is a system of integral education, education not only of the body and the mind or the intellect, but also of the inner spirit. Yoga is a science perfected by ancient seers of India, not of India-merely, but of humanity as a whole. It is an exact science. It is a perfect, practical system of self-culture.
Yoga brings in perfection, peace, and lasting happiness. You can have calmness of mind by the practice of Yoga. You can have increased energy, vitality, longevity, and a high standard of health. Yoga will infuse in you new strength, confidence, and self-reliance. Yoga brings your emotions under control. Yoga discipline gives poise, tranquility and rebuilds one’s life.
Yoga is an aid to the practice of the basic spiritual truths in all religions. To be a Yogi means to abide continuously in Divine Love and to live at peace with all. Yoga is union with Divine Love. Yoga is union with all. Divine Love dwells in all.
Bliss Divine, Swami Sivananda
