Why Yoga? Part 1

Yesterday, I was having a conversation with a couple of yoga teachers about different workout methods and physical fitness and I began asking myself, “why do I do this? Why yoga? Why not another form of body work or physical training?” I am not teaching the Yoga Sutra to my students in the hot room, I don't get very deep into mythology in class, meditation is a relatively small portion of what I do, so what sets this apart? Why practice yoga instead of another form of group fitness?

These questions stayed with me throughout the day and into the night. I went to bed last night without a real answer. Today I woke up with one.

Nataraja, the dancing Shiva. Image Credit

Yoga is more than a system of body work. It is a process of working through illusion. The body is the tool we use, as it provides a touchstone to reality, but the practice goes deeper into the core of who we are and how we approach our place in this world. There is a deep philosophy to the physical practice of yoga, and like all philosophical practices yoga makes us confront our daily illusions and helps us to dismantle them.

Some of these illusions are simple, some of them complex. Some are shallow and some are deep. Regardless, as we practice body and breath, watching the mind, we start to see them for what they are. Some are nearly universal, but are far from impenetrable.

ILLUSION #1: I AM NOT LIKE OTHER PEOPLE

The modern world has a very real problem with isolation. More and more, people are spending time alone in their homes, away from the people around them. Communities are breaking down and being replaced by digital versions of social interaction. This grows in us the idea that we are different from other people, that somehow something inside of us is ‘off’ or ‘weird’ in a way that cannot be changed. This makes sense, since we spend more and more time on social media and less and less time in face-to-face human contact. Social media presents us formalized, perfected versions of humanity that we ourselves can never be. We begin, perhaps unconsciously, to believe that everyone Out There is not like us. We are imperfect, informal, chaotic, and changing. There is a stark divide between us and our ideas of those around us.

Yoga helps to dispel the myth that we are different. It pulls us out of our ideas and puts us in our bodies, often in rooms filled with other people who share our changing, unpredictable struggles. What’s more, Yoga has been around for thousands of years, benefitting tens or even hundreds of millions of people throughout human history. As part of this tradition, we cannot deny that there is a commonality between us an the rest of humanity. We share something. Our bodies and minds respond to the practice in similar ways. Our experiences are shared. The more time we spend in the practice the less we feel like we are a different sort of human, because Yoga highlights our similarities. Sure, some people can do more or less than us, but the framework of the practice has common effects across all students. 

This is transformative for us. We start to feel a connection beyond ourselves, even beyond our time in history. We gain a broader perspective of humanity across thousands of years and thousands of miles. No longer isolated in our ideas about who and what we are, we start to come alive to the reality of our position in a continuum, a greater whole. We begin to feel connected through the simple act of moving our bodies. 

ILLUSION #2: PAIN IS BAD

One of the primary messages of our society is that we should always be happy. Or rather, that pain is in some way “wrong.” Advertisement culture creates an idea of a perfect, stable happiness that feels no pain and can be bought. This is of course a complete load of BS, but it is nearly impossible to avoid the constant assault of messages that say otherwise. 

But pain is not bad. Pain is a messenger. Pain signals to us that something is in transition. Sometimes this signal can mean a negative transition, like an injury, but sometimes it signals the opposite. Yoga, with its emphasis on mindful engagement of the body, encourages us to look clearly at our experiences of pain and find their source. Instead of automatically panicking at the first sign of discomfort, we learn to slow down and engage the message of pain. What does it mean? How am I changing? Where do I go from here?

This process first arises in the body, but in a dedicated practice it very soon grows to include the mind. We begin to address our felt, emotional experience with the same level of introspection and patience as we did the body. When we feel sadness or loss, despair or heartbreak, we learn to recognize that these emotions and feelings are not themselves ‘wrong’ they are simply a message that something is changing. Just like a physical injury, there is potential for emotional change to be a sign of mental distress, a negative change, but we will never know the truth if we do not engage our suffering and pain with compassion and honesty. Yoga, unlike anything else, teaches us to do just this. First with the body, then with the mind.

ILLUSION #3: I AM INSIGNIFICANT

The universe is huge. Our minds do not have the capacity to fully comprehend the size of the ocean, much less the cosmos. There are more people in Philadelphia alone than one mind can truly understand. Size and scope are terrifying when we look right at them. Think too long about your own place in this vast eternity and it is very easy to start convincing yourself that you don’t matter at all.

But you do. In the practice of Yoga we begin to understand the power of the microscopic. The more we explore the body in the context of familiar poses, the more we realize subtle changes have profound results. Committed students often have stories about a master teacher who gave them a seemingly minor correction in class, only to have that one command revolutionize their pose. This lights our way to a deep truth to the universe; it is holistic. Beyond interconnected, it is unified. Small adjustments within any system reverberate throughout the whole, the key to transformation is almost always small, minuscule, seemingly insignificant. 

Yoga shows us our place in this vastness. We may feel insignificant, but when we truly understand our place in the unified whole, we see our own deep power and potential.

ILLUSION #4: EVERYTHING I THINK IS TRUE

The ego is a tricky thing. We are always thinking, always storytelling in our minds, making sense of the world around us. This process is powerful, and essential to survival, but it comes with a glitch; we find it all to easy to believe everything we think. We latch on to ideas that we like, and build our entire concept of reality around these ideas. These concepts can calcify, becoming a rigid and unyielding cage of belief. This is especially true when we are stressed out, and our fear reinforces the cage in self defense. Fear says, “keep everything out” but in the process it locks us in. 

This cage of belief is apparent in our bodies. We hold emotional tension throughout our physical systems. Eventually this tension, after years of stress, stiffens around us and holds us in a vice grip. Yoga works to erode this cage, to move it around and slowly, compassionately break it down. Indeed, it is when our cage of ideas opens a bit that we see breakthroughs in the practice. Every student has had a moment when suddenly a pose that felt impossible opens up to them. It feels like a revelation beyond the body, into the spirit. And indeed, it is. These breakthroughs happen when we release ourselves from an aspect of our cage of belief, when something inside us moves beyond our ideas of “can” and “cannot” and steps into awareness of what is, in the moment.

We must remember that thoughts and bodies are constantly shifting. Much of what goes on in the mind is illusion, it will simply fade if you let it. If we grasp onto ideas and beliefs, they will hold us in one place and we may never arrive at the transformation we seek. Instead of gripping and trying to know what is and isn’t true, yoga gives us a place to humble the ego and explore our deeper potential in the moment, as it is. We learn how to do this through the body in the poses. We have our ideas about what we are, and one day at a time the practice will prove us mistaken.

ILLUSION #5: IT IS ALL ABOUT GAIN

Many people think that physical activity is about gaining something. We want to gain strength or flexibility or well being. Even weight loss is spoken about like something to get, a goal to attain. Yoga shows us this is only half the story.

The truth is that life is a zero sum game. You cannot add or subtract from the system of your life, you can only transform it. In order to gain something, something of equal size and value must be let go. All of life is transactional. Like buying an apple, you have to pay the corresponding price for nourishment.

If you want to gain strength, you will often have to let flexibility go. If you want to gain abs you will probably have to let sugar and alcohol go. If you want to gain peace, you will have to let passion go. These are the simple equations, and yoga teaches them to us. 

Many times in the practice we feel stuck or unable to develop a pose, and we don’t know why. We grip and struggle and work for depth in the poses for a long time, and we become frustrated with our lack of progress. We don’t feel intense pain or anything specifically in the way of the pose, it just won’t move. And then one day we relax. Or we inhale. Or we think about some great sadness within us while we are in the pose, and suddenly it grows before our eyes. In my own experience, these moments usually make you cry. Because, as my brother once told me, “when you cry you let something go.” Once we get beyond the idea of gaining something all the time, we discover that much of the journey is about stripping off layers.

THE PRACTICE IS YOUR OWN

Of course this list is incomplete. It could go on infinitely, every student’s experience is different, but there is a shared direction. The practice of yoga - done with humility and awareness - shows us our own illusions, and where and how to let go of them. The amazing thing is that the more you strip yourself of your ideas about yourself and your body, the more the body begins to respond. It grows beautifully into this space you create for it. It becomes strong and healthy on its own, without the burden of responding to stories and stresses that are made up in the mind.

If we are to let our inner power grow, it must have light and air to breathe. In time, we will be asked to let go of things that we thought were important or even essential to our us. And in those moments we will have a choice, to release or to hold. Neither option is right, but the choice will be yours. 

A Case for a Higher Cause: Part 1 - Getting it Right/Wrong

"...provability is a weaker notion than truth."

Douglas R. Hofstadter

In his famous talk “This Is Water” the late, great David Foster Wallace spoke of what he called the ‘default setting’ for our minds. He argued our default setting is chronic obsession with ourselves and our own petty struggles with life. I agree with this assessment, but I think we need to take it further. Our default setting includes much more than simple selfishness.

I think the default setting for most of us involves seeking flaws in the world, and in ourselves. We search for imperfection. We label things up and down, good or bad, on and on and on. And this is not necessarily bad itself. It’s part of being human. But we must investigate how and why we do it, largely because we live in a world of messaging. We are constantly being told what to think, what is right, who to listen to, etc… If we’re not careful, we will end up with a system of right/wrong judgment that does not serve us. Our morality can easily become a product of culture, not consideration. What’s more, our own sense of morality can start to work against our well being.

WHAT'S A HIGHER PURPOSE?

I should be clear that “higher purpose” doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with religion or God or spirituality. It just means something that you consciously choose to serve as the foundation for your belief system.  It could be a religious code, a purpose, a method, a faith, a community, a motto, etc… And it doesn’t necessarily have to be permanent, either. It can change and evolve with you as you grow. The key point is that you choose it, actively, after sincere consideration and reflection.

Your higher purpose has the final say in your ethical and moral decisions. It doesn’t have caveats.* You might violate it at times, we all make mistakes, but there are no loopholes. In the personal conversation of whether your behavior is ethical, the buck stops with your higher purpose.

A simple example of a higher purpose might be compassion (or, to clarify with some clunky language, “my higher purpose is to actualize true compassion.”) In the framework of a higher purpose, compassion is not something that's good in specific circumstances. It is good and right and true in all circumstances. It is the final answer, Regis.

Let’s imagine you’re walking through a city and you see a homeless person on the street asking for change. You have an internal deliberation about whether or not to give that person money. If your higher purpose is compassion, then your internal dialogue is framed in terms of “is it compassionate to give this homeless person change?” You might answer yes, you might answer no (I would personally argue the intellectual gymnastics required for a “no” answer in this situation are so complex as to be self-defeating, but that’s a different topic altogether…) the real point is whether you’re using compassion as the standard for your actions. If you choose the higher purpose of “justice” or “social darwinism” or “counting frowns” you might have a different response.

A CULTURE OF RIGHTNESS

So what does all this have to do with the felt emotional life of a human being in the 21st century? Well, a gajillion things, but one of the more pressing ones, I find, has to do with our desire to be right. Because this is a real condition in our society; we all want to be right. In good old Modern USA, our cultural higher purpose is not “I want status” or “make lots of money”, it’s “I will be right at all times.” Money and status are just tools we use to prove rightness. Those who have money and status claim they are right because they have it. Those who do not have money and status claim they are right because they don’t have it. What’s at stake is not really money and status, it’s whether or not we’re right.

And this gets very dangerous very fast, because we start wading into the waters of “right according to whom?” So we look around for authorities to validate our rightness, we insulate ourselves in bubbles of rightness with other like-minded people, and we vilify those who challenge our rightness. We build massive, complex intellectual frameworks to protect our rightness. We build entire industries dedicated to our desire to be right.** Indeed, there is nothing more fashionable to us today than a right opinion.

FACEBOOK RIGHTNESS

There are stages in the struggle to be right. The first stage is what I call “Facebook Rightness.” It isn’t exclusive to Facebook of course, and Facebook didn't invent it, it’s just totally apparent there. When we are lost in our desire to be right, at the basest level, we simply bludgeon those who disagree. We try to overwhelm our adversaries with information, or shame them, or insult their intelligence or maybe even their very humanity. Our desire to be right manifests as righteousness - as if all questions of merit had been answered already - and we make the opposing view inherently wrong, full stop. 

There is no discussion in Facebook Rightness, because there is no real desire to solve the problem. The problem is not something to be solved at all, it is simply the playing field on which we stage our game of “who is right?” We take the game very seriously, while pretending to take the problem seriously.

To use an example from national politics, liberal progressives (a group I count myself a part of) didn’t solve racism by electing a black president, we just shamed the people who voted against him. We will not solve the problem of divisive anger by voting against Trump, either. From all appearances, we will simply continue to shame his supporters, and perpetuate the problem. Shaming people has never once in the history of mankind made people change their perspective, but that doesn’t stop us. This is because we like the problem. We like being right, and Trump and his supporters make it deliciously easy to be completely, undeniably right. Right?

When lost in Facebook Rightness, we are not sincerely interested in solutions, we are interested in winning.

SELF LOATHING RIGHTNESS

This is a big one, largely because we can get really stuck here. I know I have. Self Loathing Rightness is what happens when we make our own fallibility the subject of judgmental thinking. In this condition, our desire to be right overwhelms our need for self care, and we begin to tear ourselves apart.

This can happen in many forms. Sometimes we attack humanity as a whole (“we’re destroying the planet” or “we are inherently violent and evil” or just “people suck”), sometimes we attack a social group that we ourselves are part of (see: the penultimate paragraph of the previous section), and sometimes - you could even say very often - we attack ourselves as individuals (“I’m worthless/fat/stupid/a fraud/a failure…”).

This is a real conundrum, especially for people with very active minds. Because, see, if our higher purpose is to be right all the time, we will be constantly on the lookout for things to judge. And it doesn’t matter if we ourselves are the target, we would rather be right than happy. Or maybe, we would rather be correct about reality than at peace with our place in it.

A great many of us have been through this. We look in a mirror and see something we don’t like. Immediately we start judging that thing. Then we stop and remember that we shouldn’t judge, that self love is important, and so we begin beating ourselves up for judging. Which, of course, is another form of judgment and self loathing, which we realize immediately. Then we’re judging for judging the judging, and we are stuck in a loop. Then we feel that the very fact that we are stuck in a loop means something must be broken in us. How could we be so selfish? We’re so self obsessed, that’s pitiful. There are people suffering all over the world and here we are worrying endlessly about superficial things like appearance and social status and caloric intake and all the while the climate is changing and species are failing and refugees are homeless. Can’t we see the bigger picture? We must have some kind of design flaw, stuck in this selfish loop, navel gazing. We must be a failed version of a person. And on and on and on… 

What’s important here is not that the thought process is painful - it is - but that it has a motive. It wants to figure things out. It wants to be right about itself, even if that means self hatred. When the higher purpose of the self is to be right, it will sacrifice everything else on that altar. It’s also important to notice that very rarely does this thought process actually lead to anything like personal change or development, it just makes us feel like shit. (And then we feel like shit for feeling like shit and oh no here we go again…)

SPIRITUAL/PHILOSOPHICAL RIGHTNESS

There is in all of us, whether hidden or on the surface, an intense desire to have our chosen path be right. We want to have found “the thing,” and the temptation to believe that we have done so is powerful. We see this in Yoga, Mindfulness, Televangelical Christianity, New Age Spirituality, Corporate Buddhism, Scientism, Democratic Socialists, and all kinds of other systems of thinking that assure us they’ve got things figured out. And when we join a group with a common purpose, like a yoga studio or a church, there is often an initial rush of satisfaction or elation. We feel we have really figured life out and will never again be in danger of wrongness. But the rush fades in time. It always does. Then the world becomes unpredictable and chaotic again.

And this is OK.

It’s essential that we acknowledge that our systems of thinking are not final answers. The are not, in the end, right. They are methods living, not life's solutions. As the Zen masters would say, ‘don’t mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon.’ In the spiritual path the pursuit of rightness manifests as the desire to be done, to be complete, to have it figured out. And this desire simply gets in the way of the deep work of discovery.***

Those of us who choose to live on a spiritual or philosophical path must be honest with ourselves. Unyielding humility, sincerity, and honesty have the power to deeply alter our consciousness and bring harmony to our lives. But too often we use great ideas and spiritual traditions to reinforce our pre-existing patterns. We make ourselves right because of our diets or our physical practices, our bodies or our clothes. Or, a step further, we make ourselves right by being those enlightened ones who rise above corporatism and vanity and say things like “yoga is not about looking good” or “mindfulness has nothing to do with Whole Foods.”

It is essential that we ask ourselves, “am I doing this to be right?” If we are, then we’re missing the point and exacerbating the problem at hand; namely, that in this culture we prize rightness above peace, harmony, happiness, generosity, compassion, understanding, and all other virtues.

MAKING A CHOICE

The first verse of the Dao De Jing is “The Dao that can be named is not the true Dao.” This is usually understood to mean that words cannot ever fully describe reality. I say it goes further; there is no way to be right about reality. Systems, be they spiritual, logical, scientific, philosophical, whatever, will take you only so far. Eventually they all disintegrate because reality is not a system, or at least not one that we can comprehend. Rules only apply so far. Eventually, we have to acknowledge their and our limitations.

But this does not mean we can surrender to nihilism. We must participate in the shaping our experience, or it will be shaped for us. There is no stopping the mental process of judgment. We must choose something as our higher purpose to ground our judgments, to give them meaning, or we will be sucked into our culture’s default mode of thinking. Then our higher purpose will be personal rightness, which manifests as greed, anger, and self loathing.

The value of spiritual systems is that they help inform our thinking, they give us practices and stories and themes and traditions that have proved effective to others. But in the end we must choose our own way. And when we choose, we accept that we may be labeled as wrong. We accept that there are powerful arguments and logical structures that can be presented against our higher purpose. We accept that we may one day feel compelled to revise our choices and find a new higher purpose. And we still make the choice.

---

NOTES

*It might, however, make you feel weird or strange or bad sometimes. Personally, I see this is as sign that I might want to investigate my higher purpose and see about redefining it.

**What is the whole body-image industry based on if not “right beauty”? What are the thousands of diet fads if not “right food”? What is religion if not “right belief”?

***In the yoga community this can be especially tricky because there are many of us out here who are trying to make a living as teachers. It’s very difficult to persuade the modern American consumer to practice by saying, ‘hey, I don’t have the answer, but this is an effective method, though I can’t really tell you where the method is going because there is no "arriving" per se, so I’ve not arrived myself, and in the end you’ll never really 'get’ anywhere, or at least you don’t want to think about it like that… but you should totally come try it out.’ That’s just bad marketing. Good marketing involves convincing people you’re right. But, see, most yoga teachers value authenticity and humanity, so “good” marketing can feel really icky to those of us who have been humbled by the spiritual path… so we say things like “it’s not the destination, it’s the journey” which is of course true, but oversimplified and cliche to the point of near meaninglessness… needless to say, this whole process can turn into a loop of it’s own.