I’ve been practicing Hatha yoga on a daily basis now for almost twelve years, teaching it for five, and to tell the truth, I feel like I’m just learning to give the practice its proper regard.
When I first began practicing daily in 2008, I thought of Hatha yoga as a way to get some physical exercise that would support my main practice, Zen Buddhism. With its emphasis on rigorous seated meditation, its anti-metaphysical metaphysics, and its style of assaulting, head on, the great matter of life and death, Zen seemed to be much more serious than Hatha yoga, which is often considered, even by it’s practitioners, a preliminary practice to the subtler aspects of Raja yoga.
I felt much as Ram Dass must have when he reflected on a period in his own Bhakti (devotional) chanting practice. “I wanted to meditate,” he said, “All the big boys meditated. Everyone else just sang.” Except in my case it was, everyone else just stretched.
I no longer practice Zen. It’s been years since I powered through an intense sesshin, sat across from a roshi to do koan work, or even entered a zendo, yet I still have a certain predilection for the approach.
In some respects, I still find it more direct to sit right down and work with the mind than to manipulate the gross and subtle bodies through intricate postures, breathwork, and concentration techniques in order to spontaneously experience true nature. What’s more, there is nothing, in my experience, like sitting in stillness without doing anything at all to help me open into that perspective whereby I recognize myself as a witness to my thoughts instead of mistaking myself for the thinker of those thoughts. I’ve yet to discover anything more effective to help me see, again and again, why it’s sheer folly to believe the ideas and models that my brain is ceaselessly concocting.
Yet even though the bare-knuckle sitting approach can be a tremendous aid to remind me of the egoic predicament, even though it helps me perceive, at times, my inherent union with the entire Kosmos, to taste form as emptiness and emptiness as form, it’s also true that a vigorous vinyasa yoga practice usually has a greater effect, day to day, in helping me stay patient with my kids, feel contentment in my life, and get on with my other work than almost any amount of sitting.
I once asked one of my yoga teachers, Jim Bennitt, what Tantra is, and he told me, “From what I’ve been taught (and agree with) as long as the practices are making you a better father, husband, teacher, etc., etc., you are on the right track. Don’t let the techniques draw you away from your worldly responsibilities. That’s Tantra to me. Making EVERY aspect of your life better.”
That answer blew my mind. Here I was, over a decade into dedicated spiritual practice, and I had never really thought about making that my primary index for assessing the efficacy of what I’d been doing. Certainly at the outset of my seeking, I wouldn’t have even been able to hear such an answer. I didn’t want anything practical. I wanted something sophisticated, esoteric, transcendent of the mundane shit I was tired of slogging around in.
I’m still learning to see aspects of the vanity, escapism, and spiritual materialism that have hallmarked much of my approach to Hatha yoga and spiritual work in general, but that’s not to say I have regrets. It’s all just part of my path, and as I recently read on Twitter, “if you can’t see what an idiot you were ten years ago, you’re probably still an idiot.”
In some ways, it may sound trite to issue a reminder that spiritual practice should make your daily life run more smoothly, especially in the current climate where yoga and mindfulness have been co-opted by the wellness craze with it’s insatiable desire for optimal physical health, emotional resilience, increased productivity, yada, yada, yada… but I think those of us who have been practicing over a long period of time with the primary aim of fully awakening are still likely to occasionally lose sight of these more down-to-earth concerns and get caught up in a kind of transcendental elitism.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the subtle sounds you may hear in savasana, visions of Christ or the Buddha that might flash across the back of your eyelids when you sit in contemplation, or the direct knowledge that your body, mind, and all of existence are actually inside you, these experiences can easily become just one more way to reinforce the illusion of separateness.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s all great. The visions, the sounds, going deep, deep, deep to where it all dissolves. Yet it seems necessary to keep in mind that we each have to do our unique dharmic dance with as much beauty, wisdom, and compassion as we can muster on every plane of reality, not just those rarefied spheres that might seem to set us apart.
So in that spirit, I’d like to invite you to join me tomorrow, Friday, 5/22, for a free vinyasa yoga class. The class will be LIVE on Ahimsa Yoga Studio’s Facebook page at 10 am central. Here’s the link:
https://www.facebook.com/ahimsafamily/
If you can’t be there LIVE, check the page later to do the class at your convenience. It will be archived on the page along with other classes led by me and the many amazing teachers at Ahimsa.
suburbanyogadad.com 