Sunday Sutras: Unbounded (1.3 and 1.4)

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Last week I started my study of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras with verses 1.1 and 1.2. This week, as promised, we get to find out why settling the mind into silence is something we want to be doing.

1.3 When the mind has settled, we are established in our essential nature, which is unbounded consciousness.

The big word there is "unbounded." Consciousness without boundaries. Consciousness without limits. Sounds good, right? So what limits our consciousness when the mind is unsettled?

1.4 Our essential nature is usually overshadowed by the activity of the mind.

The mind chatters. It creates thoughts all the time. Those thoughts tend to be very mundane and not very focused on the present. Sometimes my mind rehashes the last conversation I had with a friend. Sometimes it reminds me, over and over, of something I need to pick up at the store (except, of course, when I'm driving by the store). Other times my mind comes up with new ideas for yoga workshops or things to blog about. What my mind doesn't do is quiet down.

Underneath all that chatter is knowledge of our essential nature. Which is where things start to get tricky. Isn't it the mind that knows stuff? And if it is, how can I know anything if I turn off my mind?

If you saw the movie Shrek, you might remember Shrek saying "ogres are like onions, they have layers." Our minds are like onions. There are layers and layers of thoughts. The superficial thoughts prompt us to put another load of laundry into the washing machine. Then there are layers of memories. There are math problems and literary themes. And deeper there are reactions to the senses - touch, smell, sight, sound - that create the boundaries that turn clusters of molecules and energy into things. There is a layer of names for these things.

Underneath all those layers, at the core of the onion, is something that is not the mind. People give it different names - the watcher, the soul, the true self - but it is that essential nature that the mind hides. It is consciousness unlimited by the boundaries created by the senses and the associated thoughts. In other words, that consciousness is not constrained by the physical world.

Our true selves don't end at our skin.

When we cease all those layers of thinking, we can experience the limitless soul. That sounds pretty groovy if you ask me. But thinking is in the way. Before we can figure out how to stop it we need to know more about all that thinking that's going on. And that's for next week...

Sunday Sutras: Silence (1.1 and 1.2)

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Now that I've finished my series on the Chakras, I've decided to spend some time with Patanjali, the father of yoga. Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, a very short book of verses, has been guiding yogis for two thousand years, but I'll admit I haven't opened it since teacher training. To get me thinking about it, I'll tackle a verse or two every Sunday. The translation I have is by Alistair Shearer, so I'll be using that one, but there are others.

1.1 And now the teaching on yoga begins.

The first verse is pretty straight forward. I can picture yogis of old sitting in lotus, listening to their guru say those words. Pay attention, because here's where the good stuff starts.

1.2 Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence.

Right there, in the second verse, is the crux of it. Yoga is silencing the mind. It's not eco-friendly rubber mats or butt-lifting spandex pants. It's not headstands or backbends. It's not even breathing deep. It's simply letting go of the stream of thought so all that's left in your head is silence.

Have you ever laid on the grass and watched the clouds? The breeze moves the clouds, forming them into shapes. Your mind starts to associate those shapes with animals, people or things, giving them names, and it watches for the next shape that looks like something. All the chatter in the mind is like watching the clouds, a constant stream of analysis, naming and anticipating. But what if, instead of watching the clouds, you watched the blue sky? What if your mind didn't have anything to associate with anything else? Focusing on the blue sky and ignoring the clouds is like silencing the mind. And silencing the mind is yoga.

That's all you have to do.

My husband hates it when someone says "that's all you have to do," because whatever is "all you have to do" usually requires a big commitment of time, energy, materials or money. When I say "all you have to do is replace that light fixture," he's likely to spend three weekends rewiring the house. I'm sure he just read "that's all you have to do" and cringed.

If you, like my husband, read the second verse and thought that quieting the mind might not be as easy as it sounds, you're right. It's going to take some major rewiring in your energetic house. And if you wondered why you'd want to silence the mind anyway, well, that's for next week...

Yogi, Who is Your God?

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Thanks to the Namaste Book Club, a new online group dedicated to the discussion of yoga-related books, I am reading The Heart of Yoga by T. K. V. Desikachar again. I've had the book so long I can't remember where I got it, or if I ever read the whole thing. The last time I pulled it off the book shelf was during yoga teacher training, when I needed some Sanskrit words for a presentation. This time I'm starting at the beginning and reading cover to cover. I've just finished the second chapter and I'm chewing on what I read.

Desikachar points out that Patanjali's Yoga Sutras do not include a discussion about God. In the Sutras, yoga is defined as the settling of the mind into stillness. The practice of yoga makes us more present, more aware, able to think more clearly, and, as a result, we become who we are truly meant to be. By keeping God out of it, Patanjali kept yoga accessible to everyone, no matter what belief, or disbelief, he had. Considering how much strife has resulted from differing religious beliefs, I'd say that Patanjali had amazing foresight.

While yoga doesn't come with a god, God doesn't stay out of yoga, or at least He didn't for me. I was raised Methodist, but once I was out of my parents' house I started on a long, twisting path away from the church. Convinced that I couldn't be an empowered female in the patriarchal church, I wandered to goddess-based Wicca, explored some other earthy Pagan variants, tried Buddhism, then settled into the Unitarian Universalist church for awhile. I stayed far away from God the Father.

Then, during yoga teacher training, we read the Bhagavad Gita and I discovered a male god who worked for me. Krishna, as described in the Gita, is powerful and demanding, yet wise and compassionate. As I read, my childhood religious education started to come back to me. Something about the story allowed me to reconcile all the concepts of divinity I'd come to know and integrate the Christian God into my own unique spirituality.

What I ended up with was a very personal relationship with God, one that is not dictated by church doctrine or another standardized belief system. I am again comfortable in a church service, free to enjoy the parts that resonate with me and reject those that don't. I can sing my heart out at kirtan, confident that my connection with the Divine is not compromised by the name I'm chanting. I can sit in meditation and hear God's messages to me, and when I teach yoga I trust that the Great Guru is speaking through me.

I guess that, in the stillness of my yoga practice, God settled into me.

Note: While I was busy fluttering from religion to religion, my little brother was at the seminary. He has a PhD in Theology and is a full-time Methodist minister. There have been some interesting discussions over family dinners, as I'm sure you can imagine. Despite my collection of pentagrams, our disagreement about the nature of God and the fact that I still mock him sometimes as only a big sister can, he loves me. It's nice to know that, if I'm wrong about all this, he'll be there to see me into Heaven.