BOOK CLUB: "Mind and Body at Ease" by Sarah Powers

I’ve long been a fan of Sarah Powers’ work, so I was looking forward to reading her contribution to Michael Stone’s anthology, Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind. Sarah’s essay is Chapter 7 of this book, and she begins right out of the gate, so to speak, asserting, “Hatha Yoga is an introspective path.” Of course she’ll have no argument from me on this point, but I wonder still how many practitioners understand it as such?

The next part of her opening sentence strikes me a bit strangely though, when she seems to place the “introspective path of self-transformation” that is Hatha-Yoga purely in terms of using “the body as a vehicle for harmonizing and strengthening one’s energy” that allows one to then – with this ‘balanced energy’ – be in a place of better understanding for freeing our minds with the “meditative awareness practice” that is mindfulness. She goes on to speak of “braiding” Hatha Yoga and mindfulness together as our practice life.

I say this strikes me strangely because I think that in our practice life, these are not at all two ‘things’ we braid together as much as one fully integrated, comprehensive practice. In cultivating a mindfulness of body, for instance, while practicing the postures and movements of Hatha Yoga, the practice jointly balances energy and cultivates understanding and freedom of mind. In my own practice, I cannot sense them as two when we approach Hatha Yoga as an introspective path.

I don’t wish to belabor the point here, but I do want to clarify that what may seem like two practices that complement each other can indeed be approached as one single, comprehensive practice. And honestly, this is how it feels when I’ve taken class with Sarah: seamless!

Her distinction between “active attention” and “receptive attention” is an interesting one. Of course, various mindfulness meditations emphasize these different forms of attention regardless of the posture one is in. For instance, the body scan most often used as either First or Second Foundation practice requires much active attention as one directs one’s attention throughout the body in a systematic way. While doing so, one is encouraged to maintain an ‘equanimous mind’ which is a non-reactive receptive state.

That she sees these two forms of attention as related to yang and yin approaches to yogasana is telling, and again makes sense. Whenever I am offering equanimity practice, I emphasize yin-yoga practice, though of course, again, this kind of receptive, non-manipulating kind of attention is also needed in more vigorous vinyasa as well – as Sarah also mentions. It is always, ultimately, a matter of emphasis. Almost always, distinctions made for didactic purposes over-emphasize the differences and make it sound like they are truly separate, while in practice, we find a more fluid relationship to these approaches.

One thing I really appreciated about Sarah’s contribution is her examples from her own life. It is important for practitioners to understand that this ‘practice’ is, as she writes, a ‘life-practice,’ so her use of her hot flashes as an example of working with mindfulness is very pertinent. One caveat: ‘awareness of sensations’ is more accurately associated with the Second Foundation of Mindfulness, and I suspect her referring to is as the First Foundation on page 92 is a typo or simply a slip of the pen, so to speak, which I think becomes obvious when she refers to the First Foundation of Mindfulness as “mindfulness of the body” on the very next page.

I completely feel at resonance with Sarah, especially when she writes about what I call ‘building a bigger container.’ When we rest in a more receptive mode of attention in the face of discomfort, we are doing so not to become more stoic, but to cultivate the ability and capacity to meet the unavoidable afflictions, disappointments and difficulties of everyday life “without adding suffering to our suffering,” as she puts it. This is a real freedom that is truly available to any of us, if we simply give ourselves the time and permission to stay in that receptive state.

I also appreciate her drawing attention to ‘self-talk’ as part of our mindfulness practice. So much of this self-talk can be so unkind and self-lacerating. Most people would be appalled at the idea of saying such things to others, but their minds lash out at them with such vitriol. And then there is all the under-mining self-talk that she speaks about.

In the chain of causation, there is what she refers to as the first and second ‘beats’ of stimulus and assessment, and the third and fourth beats as reaction and action. Mindfulness is a form of nirodha, or containment. We feel a reaction of grasping or aversion to a sensation that is assessed as pleasant or unpleasant and we consciously inhibit any action based upon the conditioning so that we can choose a more creative way to respond.

Sarah strongly makes the point that mindfulness allows us to see the choices our life experience make available to us. Without mindfulness, we live in an almost automatic mode of conditioned reactivity and end up feeling ‘victimized’ by ‘fate.’

Along with Chip Hartranft’s opening chapter, “Awakening to Prana” and chapter five, “Joining With Naturalness” by Ari Goldfield and Rose Taylor, I find Sarah’s contribution to be my favorites so far. All of them offer solid, sound understandings and approaches that I hope are making the relationship between Yoga and Buddhism more clear among readers. What do you think?

Joining With Naturalness Part Three

Picking up with the section entitled “Buddhist Yoga Exercise,” reminding ourselves, as the authors do in their first paragraph, that there are many varied “Buddhist Yogas” and thus many different ‘exercises,’ let’s explore what Goldfield and Taylor have to say regarding the practices taught by Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso.

They make the important point, I believe common to all Buddhist Yogas, that movement practices are essential for developing the ‘practice mind’ in and throughout our daily activities. While walking meditation is a common practice (especially in the Theravada tradition) for instance, in Zen ‘work practice’ is strongly emphasized. In fact, it was during my Zen training that I learned to hang sheet-rock, as well as use several different power tools!

Goldfield and Taylor remind us of the three qualities of mind guiding the intention behind practice and specify that while exercise has many physical benefits for the body, our mental attitude must be one of ‘renunciation,’ in that we renounce clinging to body as ‘truly existent.’ I might prefer to phrase it as “renounce clinging to body as self.” This is an important piece often ignored in contemporary yoga (asana) practice. In fact, I find that some approaches to practice actually encourage and strengthen identification with the body as self, which will ultimately prove futile, as the body ages and becomes less able to perform the more challenging asanas. This is not, however, merely a contemporary issue, as texts as old as the hatha-yoga tradition (roughly 1,000 years old) already warn that the practice of asana, outside the context of raja-yoga (here meaning meditation) become ‘obstacles to liberation!’

Remembering the second quality, I encourage students to re-affirm their bodhicitta by reminding themselves that they practice for the benefit of all beings. And finally, that our practice is to cultivate the realization of the true nature of ‘things as it is,’ as Suzuki Roshi would often say.

In the following section, “The Key Points of Yogic Exercise,” the authors say that the most profound way to apply the mind during activity is to focus on the true empty nature of phenomena. Their description of maintaining the ‘nondual awareness, the union of luminosity-emptiness’ recalls the practice I teach of “Big Sky Mind.” 

They suggest focusing attention at the point four fingers width below the navel, which in Zen is the hara. Sometimes I too ask my students to focus here, especially during vinyasa practice, as in going from plank to upward-facing dog to downward-facing dog moving from this point. They all express a distinct difference in the energy and fluidity of movement.

Most of the rest of this section speaks of the body as impermanent, in the fact of its constant changing nature. In “Body of Peace,” I emphasize that in fact, nowhere in the universe is there absolute stillness. There is constant vibration, what Tantra calls spandha. What we call ‘stillness’ in meditation is actually a kind of calm-activity, vibrant, yet easeful, vigorous yet at rest.

I especially like the following phrase: “Experience is much softer than when we are clinging to ourselves, objects, and ideas with heavy conceptuality.” This is the “body of peace,” which is boundless and all-pervasive, not limited to the outline of the ‘skin-bag.’

The section entitled “How To Use Sickness To Enhance The Practice Of Buddhist Yoga” is another aspect of Buddhist Yoga that is both often mis-understood and/or ignored. The second of the Five Remembrances is “I am of the nature to have ill-health; there is no way to avoid having ill-health.” Frequently, when I offer this teaching, it brings up a lot of resistance among many students. They think it is ‘negative thinking’ and would rather ignore such realities. They may even be working under the delusion – encouraged by some ‘new age’ thought – that if they are ill they ‘brought it on themselves’ and that if their practice were ‘good’ they could avoid all illness!

What the authors here remind us of is that illness can be worked with skillfully to attain deeper realization of our true nature. And indeed, isn’t it true that when things go well for us, it is kind of easy to let practice slip away? Then the shit hits the fan and we rush back to the mat or the meditation cushion! Many people come to my “Body of Peace” retreat with the notion that a body of peace never feels pain. One of the first things I tell them is that in fact, a body of peace is beyond pleasure and pain; that in going beyond circumstances, there is a peace that can contain pain, that is undisturbed, as Patanjali puts it, “by the pairs of opposites.”

No Gaps

I have a tee-shirt from Zen Mountain Monastery that features an enso and brush calligraphy saying, “No Gaps.” That’s how we are expected to practice: with no gaps, seamlessly throughout the varied activities of daily life. My teacher, Samu Sunim would often exhort us that “there is no way of the Buddha outside everyday life.” Thinking that practice is one thing, and our life is another is one of the most pernicious beliefs a practitioner can fall victim to.

In this penultimate section, the authors are telling us that our training is to be engaged, to act without attachment, with compassion and the energy of bodhicitta. There is ultimately nothing separate from the naturalness we seek to join with. Thus, ultimately, we come to see that therefore there is nothing that truly needs to be ‘joined.’ We have never really been separate!

As they conclude, at first all this takes effort. Our conditioning keeps pulling back into delusion. But, over time we experience glimmers of emptiness and the relaxed ease of naturalness and as practice and life become not-two, life – including pain, illness, aging and death – becomes more joyous, spacious, natural.

I enjoyed this chapter quite a bit, and hope to hear from you, dear readers, what you have received from this reading. 

Book Club: Zen or Yoga? by Victoria Austin

As this is another fairly long essay, and one I believe to be important for our discussion, I am going to post two or three responses. Today, I’m offering my initial response to Victoria Ausin’s opening and the first few questions she addresses. I look forward to hearing from those of you reading along!

Interestingly enough, the opening of this essay from Victoria Austin sounds similar to something Stephen Cope wrote about several years ago about being on a plane and entering into a similar conversation with someone who asked how he reconciled practicing Yoga and Vipassana. I never seem to have these kind of conversations on planes!

When I read Victoria’s statement: “My seatmate’s very natural questions reflect a common view: that Yoga is practice for the body and Zen, practice for the mind” I was delighted! This is a succinct summary of the common misperception practitioners have in general about Yoga and Buddhism. I was further delighted to see her add: “I see the assumption of a mind-body split, Zen versus Yoga, as a feature of the English language, rather than as any actual separation between the territory of Buddhism and that of Yoga.”

Those of you familiar with my own work know that I think it ludicrous to speak of “Yoga and Buddhism” as two different things. Buddhism is a form of Yoga. However, it is legitimate to speak of “Classical Yoga and Buddhism” or “Classical Yoga and Zen” as two different philosophies of Yoga!

Austin makes a point that I am gladdened to see when she speaks of others’ attempts to “integrate these disciplines” that perpetuates or reinforces this assumption that Yoga is about physical practice (the body) and Buddhism is about meditation (which is thought to be about the mind) and singles out Cyndi Lee’s Yoga Body, Buddha Mind as one example. She also mentions Zen Mind, Yoga Body, a work I am not presently familiar with. While I have gone on record as someone with really respects and enjoys Cyndi’s work, I am not as sure as Austin that “… experiencing the books and workshops would resolve the split” that a mere reading of the titles alone would reify. Ironically, I have a student participating in my Body of Peace program here at Kripalu who has recently taken training with Cyndi, and she said that the split is reinforced by the clear “division of labor” with Cyndi teaching asana and her husband, David Nichtern teaching meditation!

While I agree that “Buddhism” has become a religion, it is not inherently so! The concept of “religion” is one alien to the time of the Buddha. He taught a yogic path of liberation, like many other yogis of his time. And Yoga, while not a religion, is religious in its concerns: the freedom for suffering through awakening from delusion or ignorance of our true nature.

After Austin’s “Introduction,” including a brief biographical overview of her own practice path, she presents several questions she has been asked over the decades about her practice of Zen and Yoga, along with her responses.

The Questions

Her first question provides a simple, bare response of what beginners might expect when taking up the practice of Zen and/or Yoga.

Her second question responds to what the promise of Zen and Yoga practice is. I like that she basically shows that while the Buddha outlined the Four Noble Truths, Patanjali pretty much works from the same base: ignorance is the primary cause of suffering; and each offers an eight-fold path to the elimination of suffering.

Her response to the third question, “How much of Zen is mind training?” I think could have been a bit more succinct, but she eventually gets around to saying that seeing Zen as simply “mind training” is an impoverished view. Primarily, I would add, this impoverished view is based upon the assumption that mind can be fully separated from body, and engaged action in the world. A huge part of my Zen training was work practice, which over the years included weed-pulling, painting, hanging sheet rock, dusting, cooking and assorted other activities. Can this be called “mind training?” Can it not be called “mind training?!”

I would also add that along with “family practice, diversity, and mass media,” important other contributions America (and the west) have brought to Zen is psychological sophistication and understanding, recovery programs, political activism, feminism and ecological activism.

The fourth question is the parallel to the third: “How much of Yoga is body training?” I think Victoria muddies the issue here by bringing in the eight limbs as having been transmitted in diverse traditions and styles, and then referring to Bhakti, Hatha, and Raja. The famous eight limbs of Patanjali are not the only models of Yoga. There are paths with less and paths with more limbs. Bhakti Yoga is itself made up of many individual traditions, many of which never speak of the eight limbs.

Indeed, some scholars assert that the eight limbs found in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra are a later interpolation, and that the original Yoga taught by Patanjali is the three-limbed Kriya-Yoga! Iyengar Yoga does indeed offer an integration of the Hatha-Yoga tradition (which famously downplays the yamas and niyamas as evidenced in the Hatha-Yoga Pradipika, its earliest foundational text) and Raja-Yoga as embodied in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra. Each alignment instruction given in an Iyengar class is seen to be a dharana, or a point of concentration. Austin’s profound example of B.K.S. Iyengar’s exhortation “to learn to take the muscles evenly inward” is further evidence of the fallacy of thinking we can separate the body and the mind.

"Awakening To Prana" by Chip Hartranft (Conclusion)

The final part of Chip’s essay begins with the section entitled “Bhavana: To develop and ‘make much of.’” In fact, it is helpful and important to remember that the word most used by the Buddha for the mental cultivation of meditation was indeed bhavana. As Georg Feurstein points out in his ‘ten fundamental principles’ of the Yoga Tradition, the practice is yoga is all about process. I think even those traditions that emphasize “sudden awakening” do so with an implicit awareness that such sudden awakening occurs after some time of practicing. In Zen, the Korean master Chinul, as well as others, speak of ‘sudden awakening; gradual cultivation.’ This refers to the fact that after the sudden awakening into our true nature, there is a gradual cultivation of that insight, or as Chinul said: “It is not enough to be enlightened; one must live an enlightened life.”

In the sections “Right Effort” and “Gathering Energy,” Chip argues against what is perhaps the most common process in meditation when he suggests that “most yogis benefit from feeling a larger field of awareness and observing” rather then beginning with a “more specified field right from the start.” Frankly, that has not been my experience. Most of my students have a hard time with non-specific awareness and seem to benefit most from first developing what the Japanese tradition calls joriki – a kind of physic energy that allows for the sustaining of awareness which enables them to observe ever-changing field of mind-body experience without getting caught or swept away in them.

However, I do think the points he makes in the section “Within and Without” are valuable to contemplate. For example, I have had many students who found “listening meditation” more accessible than breath awareness or even mindfulness of sensation. Further, Chip argues that the idea that the Buddha meant “in somebody else” when instructing the yogi to be mindful of the body…within, without, or both is “improbable.” I personally do not make much of this, but I also agree – as Chip also notes – that the commentarial tradition that says “external” does refer to others is indeed of great value! Just think of how often you sense the emotion and energetic state of those who you are close to. Such sensitivity is a boon for the cultivation of right action.

In the section entitled “No ‘There’ There,” Chip draws the parallel between the vision of dharma-megha-samadhi mentioned by Patanjali towards the end of the Yoga-Sutra, and the vision of the dhammas arising and passing away. It is this understanding that all phenomena are not ‘things’ at all, but momentary conditions of energy in constant flux that leads to what the Buddha called the liberation of ‘letting go.’ As Thich Nhat Hanh puts it, we should not think of this as a letting go of reality, but rather letting go of our wrong perceptions and misconceived notions about reality! Letting go means relinquishing all that keeps us (falsely) separated from reality as it is. All boundaries between ‘us’ and the ultimate reality, between us and others is seen as not real. However, for Patanjali, having reified awareness as a Purusha, offers a letting go of one reality (that of the material universe) to abide in another reality (pure spirit or pure awareness). I think this philosophical difference is one that should not be white-washed nor ignored.

Finally, Chip points out how Patanjali would most likely not recognize much (if any!) of what goes on in the typical contemporary hatha-yoga class as yoga! The deep states of concentration he spends most of his time on in the Yoga-Sutra, are by definition impossible to attain while in Downward Facing Dog! So Chip asks if we’re really doing Yoga while on the mat and he says “yes.” I say, “maybe” or at best “it’s possible.” As he points out, if one takes the appropriate mental stance to one’s experience while on the mat (that is to say, if one is practicing and cultivation mindfulness) in such a way that our mind-body conditioning is revealed so that we grow in insight and equanimity, and more toward the stillness of sitting, then one is ‘doing Yoga.’ As I often point out to my students, while practicing “Tree” for instance, if you are cultivating stability and ease mentally, even if continuously falling ‘out of the pose,’ they you are ‘doing Yoga,’ but if you are struggling, and getting caught in irritation or frustration, they you’re just standing on one leg! And apparently not even doing a good job of it!  :-)

Metta,

frank jude

Book Club: "Awakening To Prana" by Chip Hartranft (Continued)

In today’s post, I’d like to take up where I left off in the previous post in discussion of Chip Hartranft’s contribution to Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind. In section five Chip introduces Yoga’s Eightfold Path, Ashtanga.

He begins by saying that despite differences of philosophical description and emphasis, the yoga paths of Patanjali and the Buddha are “virtually indistinguishable.” In fact, I have heard some scholars say that Patanjali offers a form of “samkhya-vipassana,” and while I think this is actually quite accurate, there are other scholars, such as the esteemed Georg Feurstein, who though giving Chip’s translation and commentary on The Yoga-Sutra a very strong positive review, also asserted that Chip goes too far in drawing the parallels. Here, Chip even implies that Patanjali was inspired by the Buddha “to adopt the well-known structure of the Buddha’s eightfold path.” I think there is no argument that one eightfold path influences the other; however, there is some evidence that may lead one to assert that the ‘real’ yoga originally taught by Patanjali is the kriya-yoga he describes and that the yoga he is most known for, ashtanga, or the eight-limbs model, is actually a later editorial insertion!

An interesting observation, in any case, is that in the Buddha’s eightfold path, the first two limbs are related to wisdom, the middle three to ethics and the last three to meditation, which in Patanjali’s eightfold schema, the path begins with the first two limbs of ethics, then goes into progressively deeper interiorization of consciousness. Here again, many (Buddhists) have asserted that all the following limbs are devoted to meditation, and that Patanjali’s path lacks the wisdom component. I disagree with that assessment, but it does seems that wisdom for Patanjali must come from the deepest levels of concentration/absorbtion (samadhi) while that is not seen as necessarily so for the Buddhist tradition. One last remark about the two paths here that I’d like to make is that when the Buddha’s Eightfold Path is presented as the Three Trainings, then the first limbs are ethics, the middle three are related to meditation and the final two are related to wisdom. This ordering seems more in line with Patanjali’s ashtanga-yoga.

In the next two sections, Chip briefly notes the yamas, as “disciplines” that address the yogis relationship to the world and the niyamas as “disciplines” relating more to the yogi’s internal personal sphere. While this is something often stated, and makes for a handy, efficient summarization, the situation can easily lead to overstatement. For instance, the first yama, non-harm (or as Chip has it, non-violence) does indeed relate to how a yogi should act in the world with the intention of causing no (or as little as possible) harm to others. But many teachers have also pointed out the importance of non-harming oneself through one’s thoughts and actions.

In his section on asana, Chip makes the important point that if we take Patanjali’s instruction here to heart, then rather than being merely a progressive ‘step-ladder’ the eight limbs are holistic and even holographic in that any one limb carried to its deepest depths can – in Chip’s words, “mature to the point of transformation.” In fact, after years of practice, several years ago I began teaching a retreat/workshop entitled Body of Peace that is based simply on the three aphorisms related to asana (as well as a single paragraph from Dogen’s Genjo-Koan.) Another point Chip emphasizes is though one can indeed seek to create stability and ease in hatha-yoga-asana practice, it cannot be denied that the most subtle levels of relaxation Patanjali is speaking about cannot arise outside of more stable postures such as sitting – and, as the Buddha might add, lying down.

I totally agree with Chip’s take that the pranayama of Patanjali is not to be confused with the more active pranayama of hatha-yoga, but instead relates to the subtle changes that naturally arise when one “yokes” one’s attention to the breath and the energy currents riding the breath. I am sure many of you who practice meditation have found times when the breath has grown very slow, with long gaps between the breath, and perhaps even periods of time where the breath seems to have stopped completely, effortlessly. 

Extending into pratyahara, Chip describes this as attention becoming so unifed that the power of externals to distract is “neutralized.” What I find interesting about pratyahara is that while many speak of this as akin to a tortoise withdrawing it’s limbs, and to a complete blocking out of any awareness of “externals,” I find the Zen teaching on keeping the sense doors open, so that awareness of externals remains, but, without distraction a kind of more subtle and deeper practice of pratyahara. In fact, the kind of samadhi where all awareness of externals is absent is often derided in the Zen tradition.

Chip concludes his overview of Patanjali’s ashtanga-yoga by simply stating that the final three limbs form a continuum where all “names, concepts, psychosomatic structures, and volitions come to subside, after which only a phenomenon’s bare arising and passing away remain.” Hence, from one-pointedness (dharana) to one-flow-ness (dhyana) to total absorption (samadhi).

The birds have vanished into the sky,

And now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,

Until only the mountain remains.

--- Li Po

Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind Book Club: "The Introduction" by Michael Stone

Michael lays out his purpose in conceiving and editing this book in his very first sentence where he says that it is written for those who find themselves “compelled by the teachings and practices of both Yoga and Buddhism” who are “moved to better understand the porous border between them.” He goes on to affirm their “interdependent history,” and their shared goal of “recognizing suffering and bringing it to an end.”

Before going any further, we again need to clarify what it is that we are referring to by the term “Yoga” in this passage. If one is referring to what I call the “ocean” of teachings and practices originating in the sub-continent of India, I’d say to speak of “Yoga and Buddhism” is already inaccurate as Buddhism is a form of Yoga. If, however, one is referring to the so-called “Classical Yoga” of Patanjali, then we can most certainly compare these two Yoga traditions, but for accuracy, I’d write “Classical Yoga and Buddhism” for greater clarity. And, from this perspective, it is certainly true that the Yoga teachings of the Buddha and of Patanjali share both an interdependent history AND are their respective traditions are incredibly porous!

Michael makes a point that I find both important, and personally frustrating at times in its having to be necessary at all: Yoga has been reduced in the contemporary mind to being all about body practice, and Buddhism has been equally restricted to being an exclusively mental practice! Nothing could be further from the truth!

Michael makes an interesting analogy with trees, comparing (Classical) Yoga and Buddhism to an oak and a maple tree. They share many commonalities, and of course have many differences. He takes it through three levels of comparison. I too often make use of the tree analogy, but I have one tree: the Tree of Yoga. And one branch of this tree is Buddhist Yoga, and another is Classical Yoga (and others include Vedanta, Tantra and from that in turn Hatha.

What do you think? Does either of these models seem more relevant to your own understanding?

What may come as a surprise to many readers is just how little we know of the Buddha and Patanjali as individuals. Do you think this makes any difference as to how we should receive their teachings?

Finally, I would love to hear from any of you regarding what may be the most pertinent issue raised in the Introduction: Michael asserts a “fundamental affinity between mind practices and body practices.” What do you think of this statement? How does it relate to your own experience of meditation and/or sitting meditation? Is it accurate to conceive of meditation as being about the mind and hatha-yoga-asana to be about the body? Or do you agree that this is a simplistic reduction at best, and perhaps a broad misperception?