Yoga Meditation

I want to share an experience I had last night doing my Yoga practice. As I said in What Is Yoga, my experience with and knowledge of pranayama is limited, but I think I observed something about it last. I need to talk to my teacher, in the hope that she can help me refine my observation, and help me to figure out where this piece fits, but for now, I’ll write down my observations.

As I was practicing my Sun Salutation, I became aware that my breath was short. It was easy to notice this, since the lessons I learned in The Breath Will Have It’s Way. Although I was already paying attention to my breath, I tried to bring my awareness a little closer to my breath, trying to allow it to become deeper and smoother. For reasons that I don’t understand yet, I wasn’t able to smooth and deepen my breath in this way.

I have only just this second (as I write this, more than 12 hours later) realised that my response to that was to really feel my body. I was aware at the time that I was becoming more aware of how my body was feeling, but it is only now that I realise that some part of me decided to take more notice.

There were two things I noticed in this period of increased awareness. The first was that I was only breathing in my lungs. My teacher has often asked me to feel the breath as it moves through the body, and I have always had trouble with that concept. My resolution has been to try to imagine the breath flowing through the body. But last night, I was very much aware that my breath was only in my lungs, and the rest of me was feeling kind of starved for breath. It felt like I wasn’t actually breathing, but simply drawing air into my lungs, then expelling it. I had a powerful sense that there should have been more.

The second thing I noticed was that I wasn’t relaxed. Although my muscles were still during the held moments of an asana, I still wasn’t relaxed. I was all sthira, and no sukha.

Another discovery I have just become aware of as I write, is that the tenseness I was feeling was somehow both the cause of the breath not flowing out of the lungs and through the body, and the result of the same deficiency. Like the chicken and the egg, I have no idea which actually came first (the lack of breath, or the tenseness), but once in place, they were working together to reinforce each other.

Kathy refers to a wise teacher that inhabits and guides all of us, and during my practice, that internal teacher intervened to help me out. After my third Sun Salutation (I normally do four to six), my internal teacher suggested that this wasn’t working tonight, and that I should let it go. I allowed my practice to revert to a much gentler practice for a while. I found myself following the first practice that Kathy and I worked out together, my first daily practice as a Yoga student. That practice was composed of simple asana, and returning to it felt a little like coming home. The reinforcement started to crack and crumble as I started to relax, and my breath deepened and my body stopped crying out for more breath.

Although I didn’t return to the more challenging practice that is my daily routine now, I did finish off my practice last night with some of the more challenging asana that I have learnt since that first practice. As I slipped into those more challenging asana, my breath remained steady, and my body remained happy.

I caught a glimpse of something last night during my yoga practice that intrigues and excites me. I was working with a version of the sun salutation, that Kathy taught to us in her Tuesday evening yoga class at the Arts Center. It’s not the full on version of the sun salutation (I’m not flexible enough for that yet), but it does include face up dog, and face down dog, which (for me at least) still take a certain amount of effort to hold, especially face up dog. (For the non-yoga people who might be reading this, face up dog is kind of like a pushup, but instead of the back being rigid, it is soft, so the arms hold most of your weight, and the legs hold little).

As I started working with the sun salutation, I was really quite focussed on it. I was concentrating fiercely on holding the two strength asanas of the salutation (the dogs, face up, and face down) for as long as I could. I continued like that right the way through the first salutation and into the second. My judgement of how well I was doing was tied to how many breaths I was holding those strength asanas for. Holding an asana for 3 breaths means that I am working harder than holding it for two breaths, right? Well, no, not actually, as I discovered.

As I was going into face down dog for the first time in the second salutation, I became aware of my breath in terms of it’s own quality, rather than just as a yardstick to measure my exertions. My breath had gone to hell in a handbasket. It was rapid, ragged, choppy and shallow. This is particularly important for me because I am one of the people who unconsciously co-ordinates movements with the breath. I don’t have to think about it, it just happens. As I realised how out of control my breath was, I also suddenly understood that my movements must have been out of control too. They were following the breath, and by association, were just as rapid, ragged and choppy as my breath.

I changed the way I was approaching the sun salutation. I let go of trying to hold the strength asanas for as long as I could, and allowed my intention to become one of getting my breath back into some semblance of order. When I did that, my breath did smooth out, and became longer and deeper. As my breath smoothed out, so did the movements, more or less as I expected they would.

What I wasn’t expecting to happen was that it would prove to be just as physically demanding when I focussed on my breath as when holding the strength asanas had been my primary focus. The reason is simple, and I probably should have expected it, but my mind was too busy concentrating on the task I had set myself I guess. Imagine that it takes as long to breathe one long smooth breath as it does to breathe three short shallow breaths. Then it stands to reason that letting a movement or asana live in one long breath is going to be just as demanding as letting the asana live in 3 short breaths.

I learned a lot from my practice last night. I learned about setting intentions. My original intention was very tightly focussed. So tightly focussed in fact, that I couldn’t even judge the progress I was making (or not) towards my intention. When I picked a different intention, I was able to see a much larger picture, and work much more effectively with that larger picture than I was working with the smaller, more tightly focussed picture.

I also learned something about the way my breath leads my body. I had thought to try and control my movements, and allow my breath to follow those movements unconsciously. Instead, when I was working with the movements, my breath was still leading my movements. It was just covertly leading my movements through the back door, instead of obviously leading through the front door. When I switched my focus to my breath, my breath was permitted to lead from the front, which is where it apparently prefers to lead from.

One more thing that I learned about is being present with your practice. This is kind of difficult for me to explain, but when I was concentrating so hard on working in the strength asanas, I wasn’t really present in my practice as a whole. I noticed that when I backed off a little, I was much more present in my practice. It’s kind of like spending time sitting with a friend, rather than sitting with a friend studying their shoe. You get a lot more out of just being with the friend than you would if you were with the friend, but studying their shoe all the time. Now that I think about it, I’ve observed that effect before, but this is the first time that I’ve actually kind of sat down and thought to myself “I’ve noticed that” (noticing being different from observing).

Kathy, (my yoga teacher) suggested to me in a recent lesson that I think about what it means to be kind to myself. This is because I admitted to her that I tend to be very hard on myself, both in judging myself harshly, and pushing myself very hard to accomplish certain things.

As with anything, being kind to yourself is going to be different for different people. In fact, being kind to yourself today will probably mean something different to you that what being kind to yourself meant to you yesterday. But in looking back over what I’ve tried to do, and what I should have done, and what I might have done to be kind to myself during the course of my life, I think I can see some nuggets of commonality that lurk beneath the day to day variations of what being kind to myself requires. For me, being kind to myself appears to be a dichotomous relationship between the firm and the soft, the strong and the giving, the master and the pupil.

This dichotomy is not some fantastic new discovery - indeed it has been around for centuries. In his book, The Heart Of Yoga, T. K. V. Desikachar illustrates the concepts of sthira (steady alertness) and sukha (comfort and lightness) by relating a story from Indian mythology, which shows the same qualities.

“… The story tells of Ananta, the king of snakes, floating on the ocean, his long snake body coiled to form a comfortable couch on which the god Visnu lies. The snake’s thousand heads reach up and out like an umbrella over Visnu. On the umbrella rests our earth.

The snake’s body is soft and gentle enough (sukha) to serve as a couch for a god, and at the same time is firm and steady enough (sthira) to support the whole earth.”

At first glance, it might seem that sukha alone would be the kernel of kindness, and if that was the case, then sthira might be the opposite of kindness in some sense. Indeed, this is the belief I have been chasing for far too many years. But I am starting to realise that kindness depends on equal parts of each, just as Desikachar advocates that sthira and sukha must be present in equal parts for a good yoga practice. (Personally, I wonder [from my very inexperienced point of view] if it would not be closer to the truth to say that sthira and sukha must be present in equal parts for a perfect practice, and that a good practice is any practice which brings the student closer to achieving sthira and sukha in equal parts?)

The correct balance of suhka and sthira is the whole key to kindness. For myself, I usually tend to come down at one extreme or the other. In some cases I tend to push myself very hard. In my own yoga practice, this usually means soreness, aches, pains or other kinds of discomfort, as I push myself to achieve new levels of strength, or flexibility, without letting them develop at their own pace.

In other cases, I tend to be too soft on myself, sacrificing something that may be of tremendous benefit to me, because the price of that benefit is facing some kind of discomfort. But then, not facing that discomfort causes discomforts of it’s own later down the road, discomforts that are usually much harder to deal with. Perhaps that is why when I do push myself, I tend to push far too hard.

There is a middle ground in there somewhere, a middle ground where kindness may be found, and it is that middle ground that is most fertile for fostering real progress and understanding. I’m not saying that progress and understanding cannot be found at either end of the spectrum. In fact, it must be present to some degree, or those of us who currently exist there are doomed to remain there for eternity. But perhaps progress and understanding is a lot more difficult to find at the extremes, and once found, a lot more tenuous.