Inside Yoga 101 (24/2/14)

When I first started to learn how to meditate there was one lesson which has remained a useful reminder about the realities of meditation: it said that if you can remain focused on your breath and body with your mind quiet and still for one minute you are probably already a Buddha.

When we meditate one minute can feel a like such a long time, and many who meditate have noticed how they can replay their whole life or plan the next ten years or more, and find that just a few minutes have passed. This is how powerful our mind can be, as it can take us far and wide within a few short moments, yet when we return to paying attention to where we actually are, sitting in meditation for example, we realise that we hadn’t gone anywhere.

Meditation is the result of all our efforts to remain focused on one point – in mindfulness practice this can be body and breath, or just the breath, in other practices, this can be a visualisation of the Buddha as practiced in Tibetan Buddhism. In yoga some meditators sometimes use a candle light to stare at for several minutes to focus the mind, and then when they close their eyes, the light remains clear in their mind’s eye.

All of these examples are forms of concentration exercises, and when stripped down to its most simple form, this is all we are really doing: we are finding exercises to quieten our mind and keep it under control (or some sort of control) by giving something to focus on. Some people do find it hard to sit still and focus on just the breathing, for whatever reason, which is why yoga exercises (asanas) have proved so popular, because it is easier to keep the mind quiet while engaged in physical exercises – stretching into stillness.

Yoga has eight limbs and the last four are internal actions: 5, withdrawal of the senses, 6, concentration, 7, meditation and 8, absorption in the point of focus, this is described as being at one with ourselves, and where we can feel unconditional contentment or even ecstasy (ie your sate is no dependent on outside conditions). The goal is to master all four to perform simultaneously, but they can come sequentially, and also randomly. We learn to exercise more control over these, and perhaps master them.

The third and fourth limbs, yoga asanas and pranayamas, refer to the outer actions, the physical exercises we can do to help achieve the last four of the eight limbs (called ashtanga in Sanskrit) – by training the body to find the stillness.

In yoga asanas (exercises we do is most yoga classes) we have the use of the body to develop the focus as well as the breathing, and besides the fact that we feel better after the exercises, we are more focused by the end and more at ease with ourselves, no longer distracted unwanted thoughts or unwanted body discomfort or restlessness.

To simplify this practice: we are stripping away the layers of our mind’s thoughts which are not really needed and exercise far too much control over our daily lives. Think about it this way, how many times in a day do we find ourselves thinking about something we would rather not think about, yet the thought popped into our heads without invitation? Here we are training ourselves to see our thoughts and emotions for what they really are – unnecessary and dispensable.

And if you just had the thought: no, they are important! Think again, is that thought really useful and beneficial to you right now? Most of the time it is not, and if it is a reminder to do something in the future, make a note of it (physical and mental) and drop it, because we don’t need to keep thinking about it. But we do this! We cannot let go of so many thoughts, especially frustrations and angry thoughts – it is as if we enjoy our own anguish and suffering because it feels real and perhaps our sub-conscious says at least it is ours. We become stuck with these patterns and struggle to let go of them.

Recently, at one of my yoga workshops I was asked a very good and relevant question: I struggle to find the happiness (or contentment) described when meditating? Am I doing something wrong?

Not at all, I said. Meditation, as said above, is about stripping away those layers which hide our pure and real nature, which the yogic texts describe as being content and peaceful. The process of meditation can feel at times and perhaps a lot of the time, like hard work; and as the questioner said, she felt as if she was missing something and not getting what she thought lies in meditation.

This is where so much of meditation (in both yoga and Buddhism) is paradoxical. I spent many years practising meditation intensively, including long retreats in silence and periods in wilderness with just myself for company. I too was searching for this place described in meditation texts which appeared so wonderful.

On one three-month retreat I was speaking with my guiding teacher (Stephen Batchelor – who spent several years as a Buddhist monk in both Zen and Tibetan traditons) and I said the more I practice the more I realise that I really don’t know. He simply said: “Good”.  That one word answer spoke millions of words and for me the penny dropped.

On these long retreats, as a result of being in silence and meditating several hours every day, I was able to observe my own thoughts and I began to see the patterns of own mind. Like a surfer who masters the waves of the ocean, by knowing its patterns and keeping an eye on them, we learn to see the waves of own mind, and gradually have more control of them, and to be able to surf the roughest. In time, these waves become less hazardous and reduce in size.

As the second line in the yoga sutras by Pantanjali, states: yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. In other words we learn to have control of the way our mind works, that is, its waves, whatever they might be.

As the questioner pointed out, at times we can feel as if we are not really getting it and know what we are doing, but most of the time, through this practice, in overall terms we see improvement in who we are and how we relate to ourselves. In other words, it is the striving that brings results not arriving at the imagined goal.

As I said to my teacher, I don’t know. But I did feel better. There is a practice called “Neti Neti”, in which we negate all thoughts as not being ourselves. For example, as every thought rises we think “not this”, and keep going repeating. The point is, we are not seeking an answer in practice, we are removing what we don’t need, and then we see how we feel with ourselves.

Once the unwanted thoughts have gone, we feel better and clearer about who we really are, and perhaps we are not sure how we got there – but do we really need to know this? But, and this is the caveat to the whole practice, as the first quote stated, do this for one minute and you are possible a Buddha, already! We might feel we had reached the goal only to lose sight of this goal the next minute – the practice never ends.

That is why it is a practice of perseverance and discipline – it is a long non-stop journey, but a journey worth taking and staying on because the experiences en route do tend to be better than the one we had before we learnt to practice meditation.

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