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This is a wonderful description of Stage 2 and 3 practices. I highly recommend buying this book, and you will find a link to Amazon.com to this book from this web site. This book will give you a thorough understanding of yogic life, philosophy and principles as applied to modern day practitioners. From Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, by Stephen Cope 1999. Pages 247-254. Meditation in Motion
The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness. Only when there is
stillness in movement can the spiritual rhythm appear which pervades heaven and
earth. -Ts'ai-Ken T'an
in Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics "Yo.
Steve. You wakin' up or
what?"
I pulled my mind reluctantly from a deeper fog of dreaming and turned
over to see the outline of Tony standing next to my bed.
I put the pillow back over my head.
"Go away. I'm
sleeping." Tony seemed
ridiculously perky for 4:30 in the morning.
Tony took the pillow off my head. "No,
I don't think so. C'mon. Or we
won't get our spot."
I dressed quickly, gathered my blanket and threw it around me.
"OK, let's go," I mumbled.
In as we stumbled toward the main Chapel, we passed dozens of ghostly
figures in the near-darkness of the hallways, on the way to their own particular
"spots" for morning Yoga.
The hour just before Sunrise is thought, in Hindu culture, to be the most
auspicious time of the day for most kinds of spiritual practice.
It is called the "hour of Brahma" in and each is believed in
that the quality of prana is particularly pure and strong at that time.
It is also believed that the mind is particularly quiet and clear, having
just arisen from dreaming and deep sleep, and that the "deep
structures" of the mind are especially available for direct observation.
Tony and I found our favorite place at the back corner of the main chapel
and spread out our yoga blankets. The
candles were already lit on the high altar; the low drone of an Indian raga and
the smell of incense softened and warmed the room.
We entered silently into our morning yoga routines.
Ordinarily, after I dropped into my own sequence of postures and
breathing exercises, I was completely unaware of Tony.
But on this morning, I could feel that Tony had entered an unusually deep
state of concentration. It was so
deep that I was getting a kind of contact high from it.
My own concentration deepened. Halfway
through the hour-and-a-half session, I became aware that Tony had gone into a
bridge pose and had stayed there. He held it for at least ten minutes. He began to moan and groan.
Grunting. Panting.
At one point, he began to growl like a dog, and I could feel a powerful
wave of aggression and anger.
Finally, Tony released the posture and began to flow spontaneously from
one deep pose to another, at times flinging himself violently around the back
corner of the chapel. He was making
strange sounds. Spontaneous
pranayamas were occurring. Many of
his movements were jerky - a rapidly vibrating arm, a shoulder, or a leg.
I stopped my own practice and created a boundaried space for Tony so that
he could let go.
The postures, pranayamas, and mudras (literally, "gestures,"
often with the hands) lasted about twenty minutes and ended as spontaneously as
they had begun. Tony entered the
lotus posture and remained in what appeared to be a state of samadhi for another
half and hour. Then, as others were
silently gliding out of the chapel toward breakfast, he just lay down in corpse
pose and entered a state of deep relaxation.
I sat down next to Tony and meditated for the next half an hour.
Finally, he rolled over and looked at me.
He smiled. "I guess I'm
enlightened now."
"Fat chance," I said. STILLNESS IN MOVEMENT
When the practice of postures is combined with conscious breathing and
deep states of concentration and absorption, prana will sometimes spontaneously
"take over" the practice. Suddenly,
energy itself will begin to direct the flow of postures.
In these moments we may have a sense of effortlessness, of complete
surrender to a force greater than ourselves.
This experience can be surprising, compelling, and blissful.
And, it appears to be completely out of our control.
We cannot make it happen. We
can only let it happen.
When Tony and I talked about his experience that morning, he described it
as "being lost in the dance of energy."
"There was a deep sense of calm and quiet at the center of the
dance," he said, even though the dance itself had been vigorous and at
times even violent. He said that he
had found himself spontaneously entering postures he had never before been able
to execute and some postures he had never even seen before.
"The only thing I did," he said, "was to keep allowing it
to happen. Other than that it was
completely effortless. I was not the doer. I
was pure witness. It was like I was
pure prana."
In watching Tony's posture flow, I could literally see the manifestation
of the wave, what bioenergetic therapists call "the original organismic
self-expression." His body
pulsed with life, alternating between expansion and contraction.
His whole organism appeared to be breathing itself, all aspects of the
gross and subtle bodies moving in synchrony like an amoeba under the microscope.
"My mind was so focused that all distractions were tuned out,"
Tony said. "I wasn't aware of
you or anyone else around me." Tony
went on to describe a sense of unwinding. "It
was kind of like I was one of those wind-up kid's tops, and the whole outpouring
of movement was, like, winding me down. Finally,
I just got to the end of the wound-up energy, and I was completely still inside.
The relaxation afterward was unbelievably deep.
"But here's the most amazing thing.
For part of the time I was actually flying.
I was on the ceiling. I was
over the altar, looking down. I was
in Bapuji's alcove, watching the whole scene.
I was, in a way, everywhere at once."
Tony described this as the discovery of his "astral" body.
He was, in his experience, no longer confined to his physical body.
"And then this other thing happened. Sometimes my body was huge, filling the whole room.
Sometime I was as small as an ant. It
was better than acid."
Through the years of my teaching career at Kripalu I have seen many
spontaneous posture flows, Yogis surrendered to the wave of prana.
When it happens, it can be entrancing to onlookers, just as Tony's was to
me that morning. It seems that our
own minds are captured by another mind and body that is deeply surrendered to
absorption and spontaneous movement.
But what is actually happening? Is
the body being taken over by the magical power of prana? By some higher intelligence?
Do we have any control over the conditions that create this kind of
altered state? And how do we
describe Tony's experience of flying? THE STATE OF FLOW
Tony's posture flow was not magic. Nor
was it the result of some secret " transmission" from a powerful guru
or enlightened being. Prana is not
a kind of alien substance, or "third force," which was taking over
Tony's body. The entire experience
of his posture flow was a manifestation of one of the central laws of Yoga:
energy Follows awareness. As states
of concentration deepen in the body -- mind, prana also becomes more
concentrated. Deep states of mental
and physical absorption gather and focus prana into a powerful stream.
When these conditions of absorption are merged with an attitude of
surrender and non-reactivity, the spontaneous flow of postures can easily
emerge.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has done extensive research on what
he calls "the state of flow," or "the psychology of optimal
experience" in everyday life. These
are the states, for example, characteristic of the jazz musician "in the
groove," or the athlete "in the zone."
He identifies three elements, in particular, that typify these altered
states of mind and body:
-- the merging of action and awareness in sustained concentration on the
task at hand
-- the focusing of attention in deep you or involvement without concern
for outcome
-- self-forgetfulness with heightened awareness of the activity Csikszentmihalyi
found what he believed to be the key prerequisite for dropping into the flow
state: the mental and physical flexibility to track and adapt to the changing
demands and input of the environment on a moment-by-moment basis.
In the case of posture flow, this means the capacity to fully attune to
and respond to the changing signals of the prana body.
In rapid states of movement like the one Tony experienced, the attention
must be highly tuned to rapidly changing discrete moments of sensation.
This quality of mental one-pointedness has the effect of drawing the mind
even more deeply into absorption.
A second requirement is the ability to "forget the self" in
action. All self-consciousness is
dissolved for short periods of time, as awareness of the activity itself is
heightened. The "actor"
then has a sense that he is not acting at all.
He is not the doer. He
abides as the still point around which the movement takes place.
The state of flow can be blissful, because it gives us a compelling taste
of action unimpeded by anxiety -- that is to say, action completely detached
from concern for outcome. The
resulting experience results in a sense of bliss, rapture, contentment, and
harmony. These states of harmony
are characteristic of a heightened stage of Yogic concentration known as dhyana. DHYANA As
the mind develops the capacity to remain one-pointed and settled on the object
of concentration (sensations and feelings in the body) during the practice of
writing the wave and holding the posture, we may penetrate momentarily into a
deeper phase of concentration, dhyana. In
the sutra describing dhyana, Patanjali uses the word ekatanata, which means
" extending continuously or unbrokenly" -- referring to the absence of
interruptions from distractions. One
commentary on the Yoga Sutras adds: "this continuity may be compared to be
continuity of the flow of water in a river or that of oil being poured from one
vessel into another."
When we penetrate into the state of dhyana, a sense of easy flow will
saturate our experience -- a sense of the "streaming" of the mind.
In this new phase of concentration there is a marked quality of
effortlessness, a sense of receptivity to a natural process, and a miraculous
sense of dropping into a state of pure union with the object of our
concentration. The mind experiences
a visceral, a live connection with the subtle sensations of the energy body and
seems capable now of penetrating into its very core.
As Patanjali says, the mind " shines with the object."
All of the contemplative traditions recognize that with this maturation
of concentration some startlingly new features arise in consciousness.
Most traditions have a name for this new level of skillfulness.
In Buddhist traditions, for example, it is called "access Samadhi,"
or beginning Samadhi. There are two
experiences in particular that characterize absorption at this level.
First of all, there is the achievement of a whole new quality of
steadiness. Once stabilized, the
Yogi can hold his concentration for long periods of time and can therefore hold
postures in a " steady and relaxed" fashion.
Secondly, there is a remarkable change in the Yogi's perception of the
body. As the yogi's mind becomes
more and more one-pointed, the object itself (in this case, the body) seems to
become more and more subtle, drawing the mind deeper into itself. In postures, there will then arise as state of absorption in
pure physical sensation, without any elaboration, association, Judgment, or
reactivity by the mind. In one
study, psychologist Dan Brown found that Yogis experiencing dhyana were
primarily attentive to, and occasionally absorbed in, the pure perceptual
features of the object of their attention -- the texture, Color, and movement of
subtle sensation.
As Brown describes this experience,
" the
Yogi has stopped the mind, at least in the sense of its so-called "higher
operations": thinking and pattern recognition The Yogi keeps his awareness at the more subtle level of the
actual moment of occurrence or immediate impact of a thought or of a sensory
stimulus." This
state gives rise to what Buddhists have sometimes called "bare
attention." All associations
and comments of the mind are completely pared away from consciousness.
The practice.
Is experienced as a succession of discrete events: pulses, flashes,
vibrations, or movements without specific pattern or form...Though mental and
bodily events occur moment-by-moment in uninterrupted succession, attention
remains fixed on each discrete moment. Awareness
of one event is immediately followed by awareness of another, without break for
the duration of the sitting period, or for as long as this level of
concentration remains.
When the Yogi has reached this point of skillfulness, something
astonishing can begin to happen, as it did to Tony that morning. As attention becomes "bare," not only does the
subtle energy body dominate the stream of consciousness, but the perception of
the body itself also undergoes changes and becomes increasingly unstable.
The body seems to lose its solidity, its hard edges.
The object changes size, shape, location and luminosity. It may become, for example, as large as the ocean or as small
as a mustard seed. What once seemed
to be a fixed internal representation is now experienced as an image in constant
change.
Tony's perceptions had become so refined that he had begun to deconstruct
the gross physical anatomy. He
experienced this as his astral body. He
could fly. A SPIRITUAL WARRIORTony
was the youngest son of a first-generation Italian-American family in which an
impulsive and violent father had dominated everyday life.
Tony had grown up on the streets of Chicago with three older brothers,
one of whom was particularly jealous of Tony's status as "his mother's
baby." Early on, Tony learned
to defend himself around his father and his older brothers.
Later, he learned to fight his way through school.
He had been smaller than the other boys in his grade and he had adopted
and exterior toughness -- a tough-guy stance.
As a result of all of this, Tony had a kind of flash-point response to
any perceived threat -- a real "in your face" attitude.
Underneath be tough-guy exterior, Tony had a huge heart.
He'd been drawn to spirituality early, as an altar boy and a choirboy in
the Roman Catholic Church, and he still thought of himself as a devout
Christian. He had stayed on in the
home longer than his brothers, to protect his mother from his father.
He was deeply attached to his mother and felt, as he put it, "ready
to sacrifice his life for her" -- but it wasn't clear that she wanted
things any other way than the way they were.
When I first got to know Tony, it was clear to me that he was carrying a
lot of baggage. But Tony had never
been particularly interested in psychotherapy.
Instinctively he took the direct route of the body, of energy, for
working with his anger and hurt. He
had become interested in martial arts early on and had excelled in them.
One of his martial arts instructors had interested him in Yoga, and when
he got involved with Yoga postures, he did them like a Warrior.
In his Yoga practices, Tony was fearless, total.
He regularly got up somewhere in the wee hours of the morning.
There were frequent sightings of him in the main chapel at 4 a.m., doing
his intensive Yoga sadhana. The
whole program had to be finished by 730, so he would be available for his job in
the kitchen.
Tony had been practicing deep states of concentration in postures, and
though he wouldn't have described it this way, he had refined his attention so
that he could easily drop into states of dhyana.
This practice gathered and focused enormous amounts of prana, which
further supported his practice. So
great was his connection with energy that he seemed to need astonishingly little
sleep.
Tony had a particular Devotion to Bapuji, whom he saw as a kindred soul,
a kind of Warrior of the spirit. His
practice was, indeed, leading him in the direction of Bapuji's practice -- the
sadhana of effortless surrender to prana.
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