The Shadow of Anusara?

Whew!  The following post has certainly caused a stir -- not just here but on Facebook! Considering that most of my posts garner no comments, and the most any ever did get were something like six, I got to kind of assuming no one was reading!

After reading through some comments on Christina Folosono Sell's Facebook page, I thought I would do a bit of a re-edit, both because I can see some further clarification may help, AND because I do agree that I used some terms that do not reflect "Right Speech." Worse, those terms seem to have derailed the more important point that I still heartily endorse: contemporary hatha-yoga, and Anusara in particular tend to foster a denial of duhkha and at times an almost aggressively "feel good" Pollyanna-like myopia.

For the record: I acknowledge John Friend as one of my teachers publicly, even mentioning him in the Acknowledgement section of my book, and indeed he has been an inspiring and influential teacher for me. I was a participant of one of his first Teacher Trainings as well as one of his first Yoga Therapy trainings. I attended workshops with him for several years after that and I've taken Immersions with Amy Ippolliti in New York, and with Darren Rhodes at Yoga Oasis in Tucson (where I also teach meditation).

Oh, and perhaps it is relevant to know that I am not a Buddhist.

Recently, the "exodus" of several senior Anusara Yoga teachers (including the two above-mentioned) has caused a bit of a ruffle among the wider yoga "community" (if one can even be said to exist). I am not interested in speculation nor in what it may or may not mean for John Friend or the "Anusara Kula."

What I would like to respond to is the following comments made by Elena Brower, one of those who have recently left the Anusara fold, the "defectors," as it points to something I have long felt to be a "shadow" of the contemporary hatha-yoga world, and in particular of Anusara culture -- and perhaps one that merely reflects John Friend's own shadow. Elena writes:

"What I found is that I wanted more, I wanted to know how to feel as amazing in my house as I’d felt on my mat. As expansive, as calm, as beautiful, as connected, as real. I couldn’t link my behavior at home to my composure in my practice, and I needed other ways to learn how to be more remarkable as a Mama, an ex-wife, a girlfriend, and most importantly these days, a daughter. My practice was giving me feelings of fulfillment but they didn’t last, and I was still going home and acting out of alignment with my yoga, which was getting painful."

I recognize this pattern! That disconnect between "practice" and "daily life;"  the lack of integration of practice and the rest of life. Here is what I wrote in my book, Mindfulness Yoga almost ten years ago, about something I experienced back in 1976:

"I began to notice that while I left the yoga class feeling the divine bliss of heaven, by the time I got off the train in Flushing, I was back in my own private hell. In fact, the bliss I was feeling in yoga class seemed ever more remote and alien to the rest of my life. Even after I had started to practice the postures and breathing exercises at home, I continued to find that whenever I wasn't "doing yoga," the peacefulness I felt while practicing continued to elude me."

What brought me to a deeper understanding was the following passage where the Buddha himself describes a similar experience he had with his yoga teachers:

"Though one may momentarily be secluded from the cycle of suffering, the watcher remains as a seed of rebirth. As soon as the situation changes, rebirth easily takes place again. This is just what happens now when I get up from meditating. No matter how profound my absorption, after a short time I get caught up again in the world of the senses. The basic causes and conditions for rebirth have not been extinguished. Complete liberation has not been achieved."

When I first read about the Buddha's dissatisfaction with the failure of his practice to fundamentally change his experience of daily life, I instantly recognized the similarity to my own experience -- how wonderfully calm and peaceful I felt after yoga practice, and yet how all too soon I fell back into the suffering of craving and aversion. And when I became a yoga teacher, I saw how many students seemed to have similar experiences. They would leave class blissed out, but as soon as they got "caught up in the world of their senses" they found themselves back amid their anxious lives -- from blissed out to stressed out. This is the "rebirth" the Buddha was talking about. The question became how do we stop this apparently ceaseless cycle, this endless emotional and psychological roller coaster? In our very lives generally, and in our own practice of yoga specifically, we can see the process of samsara, the cyclic process of "birth and death" over and over, moment by moment!

In my experience, contemporary hatha-yoga in general, and Anusara Yoga in particular, are permeated by a willful denial and ignor-ance of the reality of duhkha. I've had this "argument" with John Friend twice. Once, after I had lectured a group of Moksha-Yoga Teacher Trainees for over a week on mindfulness, buddhist meditation, and the philosophy and history of the Yoga Tradition, John Friend came to give a talk, and the very first thing he said was, "I know you've just had a Buddhist scholar here, and they are always talking about duhkha. But I come from a place of bliss." His talk degenerated from there! I was happy to hear one of the students respond to him, saying: "Frank spoke a lot about joy, but also made the point that the way to joy was through nobly facing and engaging with duhkha, not denying it or turning away from it."

Afterward, John actually did acknowledge to me that he had overstated his case, had gotten carried away, and had reduced Buddhism into a caricature. This did not stop him from, only a few years later, in my presence at one of his workshops, stooping to the same caricature.

And this is the shadow I have long seen in Anusara. Everyone is exhorted to aggressively "shine out with Shri" and it's all about bliss -- poorly understood as a super "feeling good" when the Tantric understanding of bliss is so much more subtle than that, and ultimately not reliant on feeling good at all! The bliss of the tantrika transcends the polarities of pleasure and pain. The Rainbow Body of Peace needn't be pain free. By definition, if it needs to be pain free, it is bound by those conditions and is therefore NOT freedom!

The "culture" of Anusara (echoing the culture of contemporary mainstream hatha-yoga) is fearful of the "noble truth of duhkha." A kind of hiding one's head in the sand is encouraged with lots of feel-good, empowerment/motivational speaker kind of new agey pablum designed to soothe and pamper egos so often desperate for validation. I've heard more applause at some Anusara workshops than I might hear at a concert! I've been invited to teach at ashrams where the brittleness of forced happiness, the plastered on smiles and the shying away of any discord is truly suffocating. 

So, I am glad that Elena seems to have broken free from the forced glee-club of Stepford Wife yogis from a culture that seems to have demanded of her this kind of consensus myopia, and found a way to integrate the freedom and peace found in yoga into her life, learning, as she says, "that I can finally look at my behaviors head-on, and not flinch, but instead, HANDLE them. Talk about them. Apologize for them instead of being too proud to address them. And then – most importantly – SHIFT THEM."

It is noble and ennobling to face duhkha, to awaken from avidya (ignore-ance) and denial. A greater ease with life, the "full catastrophe," arises when one no longer HAS to feel all "shri" and happy-faced! The radical acceptance and unconditional regard we seek cannot come from denying such a fundamental aspect of life as duhkha! This is not to say that that is all there is to life! What I am saying is that in turning away from duhkha, one turns away from the path leading out of duhkha. To deny duhkha IS duhkha!

And, to rectify mis-understandings, duhkha is NOT "suffering" and the Buddha did not say "Life is suffering." He said "there is duhkha." Face it! Though mental anguish is duhkha, that is not all it is! Duhkha is the fact that sometimes you lose what you like; you get what you don't like. Duhkha is the simply fact that happiness is not to be found in circumstances!

Now, some Buddhists seem to forget that there are Four Realities for the Noble, and that acknowledging and facing duhkha is only the first. Kind of like the first step of the 12 Step Programs, it's merely the beginning! Joy and Happiness are two of the Seven Factors of Awakening. Make no mistake: the Buddha was no kill-joy! He just wanted us to understand where happiness was truly to be found.

metta
frank jude

Book Club: "Mindfulness Yoga" by Frank Jude Boccio

Well, it had to happen sooner or later! We’re up to Chapter 11 in Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind and that means we’re up to my contribution to the anthology. Rather than any comment I make now being merely a reiteration of what I’ve written in the essay, I thought I’d fill in a bit  of the ‘back-story’ here and leave it to you, my dear readers (there are some of you, yes?) to respond with any comments or questions. I’d be especially interested in hearing from any of you who have practiced the Four Foundations of Mindfulness through your asana practice. How has it been for you? Do you feel it has made a difference in your practice? Have you had any insights you’d like to share?

Opening Introduction:

It should be obvious that I take the position of Georg Feuerstein, that Buddhism sits firmly within the wider Yoga Tradition he speaks of in his tome entitled, simply enough, The Yoga Tradition. To my mind, it is obvious. But what you may want to know is that I came to this understanding through my own ‘self-study’ of both texts (practice-oriented, history and philosophy texts as well as my own practice and experience) before I had come across Georg’s work. In fact, it was reading his work and finding a wonderfully clear enunciation of my understanding that drew me to study with him at the first and only YREC (Yoga Research and Education Center) Yoga Teacher Training.

It should also be obvious that perhaps it’s a bit of a bête noir of mine, but it really irks me when people talk about “yoga and meditation” as if they were two things, or even “Buddhism and yoga” as if they were two completely different things! To my mind, it only makes sense to differentiate between “Buddhism and Classical Yoga” which is to say, the specific darshana or philosophical viewpoint espoused by Patanjali in the Yoga-Sutra. But buddhadharma, the teachings and practiced taught by the Buddha is nothing if not a fully realized, comprehensive, coherent model of yoga. His Nobel Eightfold Path is as much a yogic path as the Eightfold Path or the Kriya Yoga model found in the Yoga-Sutra.

This is essentially the jist of my opening paragraphs. The other main point I make there is that one of the fundamental principles of all forms of yoga shared by all is the concept of duhkha. Sadly, this concept is badly mis-understood by many in the hatha-yoga camp and has led to much confusion and straw-man parrying. All yoga arises as a response to the existential human situation – impermanence and the mortality that implies. And, all yoga postulates that we – and all phenomena – are not what we, or they, appear to be. Through this mis-perception of how things really are, we fall into duhkha.

I’ve even had a bit of a discussion with John Friend over this, as he has a tendency to put-down Buddhism’s emphasis on duhkha, saying how his path celebrates life and is about sri and “bliss.” To me, he has admitted to over-stating this, and in fact distorting the truth, because he does understand that duhkha is the First Noble Truth. If you stop at that, you are NOT talking buddhadharma, which is nirodha, the cessation of duhkha (the Third Noble Truth).

One other point I express in the essay, I wish to emphasize here, is that “yoga” means “yoking” as much as it does “union.” Those yogis who only talk about yoga as “union,” I believe both distort and miss an essential aspect of yoga as practice, for much of actual practice is the yoking, the restraining or containing of our conditioned reactivity. It is this restraint (a form of tapas) that allows for the freedom to choose a more skillful way to respond to life’s challenging situations.

In fact, neuro-science shows us that the impulse to act precedes our consciousness of the impulse to act by around 0.3 seconds! That means, action is conditioned, and we are unaware of our first beginnings of the impulse to act. There is no absolute, acausal free-will! However, with mindfulness, we create a bit more ‘temporal space,’ about a half second, and in that ‘gap,’ we can inhibit our action. Thus, our free-will is the ability to restrain our conditioned reactivity. This is the yoking of yoga.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Metta

Poep sa frank jude

Book Club: A Twisted Story by Jill Satterfield

Obviously, as the nature of this chapter is so personal, and simply put, one person’s story of her yogic path, I am not about to address it as I have the other chapters. There is no ‘agreement’ or ‘disagreement,’ no real comments possible, other than the following.

I had the pleasure and honor of finally meeting Jill (I had had some brief e-mail exchanges back when I lived in NY) during the first Spirit Rock Mindfulness Yoga Teacher Training, where she shared her story with the group. I was moved then, and I was moved once again while reading her story.

I think it should be manifestly clear from her story just how non-dual the body and mind are. My teacher, Samu Sunim, always spoke of mindbody (which more or less translates the Sanskrit term namarupa). Rupa is form, and in particular refers to the body, and nama, from which we get the word, “name,” refers to what in Buddhism would be called the other four aggregates (skandhas): feelings, perceptions, mental formations and consciousness.

Even before I met Jill, we bonded over an e-mail exchange where she wrote me to offer her agreement and gratitude in response to a letter to the editor I had had published in Shambhala Sun. My letter spoke to the point that in the Buddha’s teaching of the First Foundation of Mindfulness, it is eminently clear that all activities of the body, from walking, bending, reaching, and twisting or turning to the side to defecating, urinating, eating and bathing can – and should become – expressions of practice. Jill says the same thing in the section entitled “Sitting Straight” when she writes: “…practicing a Yoga posture became just another shape in which to meditate.” My only comment would be to say, make that ‘hatha-yoga posture’ as Yoga itself is meditation – or perhaps more precisely, the meditative ‘stance’ or attitude of mind.

As she states in the section “Straight To The Heart,” with the awareness a master teacher such as Jill brings to her teaching, the postures of hatha-yoga can indeed become a “doorway into the mind,” and one that may often be more accessible to many folk who would find sitting meditation much too difficult to engage in. Mindfulness of the body “in the body” is the meditative approach to cultivating greater intimacy with the body – and seemingly paradoxical – just what allows one to come to the realization that body is not-Self! In order to touch the water of the ocean, one must penetrate the wave. The wave is the ocean; form is emptiness. Yet, we cannot touch the water without touching the wave; emptiness is form!

Book Club: Zen or Yoga? by Victoria Austin (Part Two)

Taking up where I left last post, Austin responds to the following question, “How did Yoga become a word for a physical tradition?” by quoting B.K.S. Iyengar. However, the quote speaks of “merging the individual soul … with the Universal Soul” and while this may be one way of speaking of Vedanta, it makes absolutely no sense in Patanjali’s model, which elsewhere Austin says Iyengar teaches. This is one of the more tenacious misunderstandings rife in the western hatha-yoga community!

In fact, I don’t think Austin ever really answers the question. A more straight-forward response would acknowledge the historical and cultural conditions that led to the emphasis on physical practice when Yoga was brought to the west over the last century or so. Ironically, Vivekananda, often seen as the first Indian yogi to introduce Yoga to the west spoke at the Chicago Congress of Religion at the end of the 19^th century, but never mentioned the word “yoga,” and shied away from asana practice because he thought Americans would find it ‘strange!’

In the following question, as to whether Yoga and Zen, as both ways of uniting body and mind aren’t after all the same path, Ausin offers a really good response. Undeniably, both offer practices designed to unite body and mind, and both speak about suffering, its causes, and how to ameliorate it, but they offer dramatically distinct rationales. So, they offer distinct paths, while being ‘universal’ to some degree.

Sadly, I think Austin falls far short in her response to the following question, “Why would someone study both Zen and Yoga.” After her clear and concise introduction, in her response to this question, she falls back into equating Yoga with the physical practice of asana and Zen with meditation!!!! I find this frustrating. The second half of her response does indeed call this a “false duality,” but the whole first half speaks in terms of Yoga providing a way to ‘search out obstacles of body and mind that otherwise may block the Zen practitioner from taking real refuge” because they may have “great difficulty sitting.” And Zen, she says, with its “teachings of sitting, precepts, and work can be a revelation for the Yoga practitioner who has lost contact with any of the eight limbs of Yoga” by providing “a wider view.”

What Austin is describing here is the way things are when we speak of the situation in the majority of Hatha-Yoga studios, where it is all physical and little or no teachings of the ethics and meditation. BUT, it would have been clearer had she spoken of Hatha-Yoga and Zen, rather than Yoga and Zen.

I think her response to the last question I’ll take up here, “How is Buddhism yogic?” is excellent. I am delighted that she even says something I often mention in my History and Philosophy lectures: the Buddha’s teachings are the “first sustained expression and development of yogic ideas.” So many contemporary yoga practitioners, because of their limited understanding of Yoga as the physical practice of asana, are confused and surprised when I make similar comments. Yogic ideas permeated the Upanishads (some of which appeared before the Buddha) and the epic poems (including the Mahabharata and it’s Bhagavad Gita), but nowhere before the Buddha do we find such a coherent path laid out. And we don’t really see it again until Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra.

I hope to file my final posting on this chapter of Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind by the end of this week, but meanwhile, I look forward to your comments.