In part I of this soliloquy, I had talked about seeing reality as is, and about a sense of lightness when I drop all my luggage in perception (my filters), and seeing as is. I had had this feeling of lightness, of not being weighted down when some of the filters dropped. I had also mentioned in consequence, finding the inner light that ends sorrow, Viśokā vā jyotiṣmatị̄**.
While examining the identity statement that I had mentioned in Part I, “I am a Yoga teacher, therefore I am”, some scenarios came up when I was almost violating another’s space by imposing my yoga solutions onto the situation. I looked at one of them from various angles. For example, I asked myself, “what if I did not play the role of a yoga teacher in that space / situation”. Instead, I played only the primary role - that of a friend in said situation. What would I have said and done and not said and not done? How would it have played out? Some clear visuals emerged wherein I was demonstrating being that yoga teacher, true to the qualities of one as I see it and as I have studied, and true to being a friend, listening completely, than when I had carried the tag of ‘yoga teacher’ in me. When that tag (extra baggage) dropped, I felt free, content, unburdened, and there was a burst of light in the region of my heart. This was momentary, and brought to mind, Patanjali’s sutra, Viśokā vā jyotiṣmatị̄** (YS 1.36). In retrospect, it was an apt sutra that presented itself to my mind - because, as it happened for me, when inner disturbance (caused by my stuckness to an identity) subsided, even for a moment, the pain of it also did ( I felt free of it,viśokā), thus discovering inner luminosity (jyotiṣmatị̄) - my burst of light.
However, beyond the momentary feeling, all this is pure speculation on my part to try and fit the sutra to that experience because they happened contiguously. I also see that I am “attached” to my insights and experiences in swadhyaya, such that I cannot edit them out in even in presentation. And this word, attachment, is important, as my examination seemed to point out to me, which I will come to by and by.
The fleeting high faded and the tension of the examination returned in the next few moments with a question that my mind threw up, “but I am a yoga teacher, how can I not own up to it, there must be ways where I can keep my commitment to being a yoga teacher and still not violate another”. Alright then. I took a deep breath and parked the question for the next day’s āsana-pranayama time, allowing it to simmer in the back chambers until then.
So, I decided to dig into the dense phrase, “I am a yoga teacher” - what in the beingness of the yoga teacher do I identify with?
- My personal practice of āsana and prāṇāyāma is a non-negotiable part of me being a yoga teacher, because it is the practice that reveals to me what I can teach. However, does this mean that I will not practice if I am not teaching actively? No. My time on the mat is also in some ways the bedrock of my swadhyaya. I understand my own intentions, emotions and directions deeply, and any ability to stay anchored and dance with all of this comes through my practice. So while the identity of yoga teacher includes in itself the component of āsana-prāṇāyāma and meditative practices, these are today a part of my functioning as a coherent human being. So in fact, this is a part of my identity as a human being and I can probably ‘lose’ my practice only if I lose my memory, in which case I would not remember any methods and techniques to innovate and create new spaces and ways of sustaining practice and so on. The process of slowly eliminating component after component of my yoga practice and seeing what remains, that I had written about more in Part I, has been viscerally important, because it confronted head-on some key fears that I held (hold?), and lent itself to discovering the creative ways of working with and sustaining my practice that I had just mentioned above. And hence, I also challenged the attachment that I felt to different parts and aspects of my practice, and the benefits that I think I am getting thereof. This is when some part of the denseness of the identity started clearing up. Could I go through my practice and its experience, being committed to it, and yet not get attached / stuck to any of it such that I can move on when the next moment presents a new situation to me? An example that presented itself to me: we all say “get on the mat” for doing the practice, and I use this term quite seriously and extensively - I realised that the āsana component of the practice was (is?) something in the zone of attachment for me. The few days that only prāṇāyāma is possible, surface level acceptance would actually be hiding dissatisfaction. Fine then, what if I cannot “get on the mat”, for practice? What if I could only sit on a chair and breathe? What if my practice could consist only of prāṇāyāma?
This process has moved me definitively in the direction of carrying my practice lighter, and much more in the realm of, it being a commitment and responsibility, which I believe is vital in the smaller and larger social contexts that I live in. The idea of carrying my practice lighter is something I will examine later.
The discussion is about what in the beingness about a yoga teacher do I identify with. To continue,
- It seems very important to me that I help others with their healing and learning processes (and particularly in and through the framework of yoga). I find such empowerment, continue to heal and understand phenomena in finer ways, in and through my yoga practices, that it becomes crucial for me to facilitate this for others. Why does the latter feel consequential to the former? I have an idea and will get into it through the conversation. I work with therapy - using āsana and prāṇāyāma courses and techniques therapeutically, say, to alleviate pain, to work with stress, handling disease and disorder and so on. Āsana and prāṇāyāma practice is like a magic potion that works in miraculous ways to heal the body. Where nothing else moved my chronic wheezing disorder a millimetre, my yoga practice did. And how! The key inspiring factor for me in this process is that the raw material and the medicine is (in) one’s self - body, mind and breath. One needs nothing extraneous1. This for me lends passion; it is deeply satisfying for me when another feels this sense of empowerment, say for instance, by arriving at an underlying cause for pain in his / her body.
In one way, this empowering that another feels justifies for me my personal practice. My body and mind is the laboratory. Teaching another means responsibility, and thus also accountability. I cannot instruct students without having practiced myself - by this I mean the process of practice, of putting myself through the methods and applications that I may put my students through. And so we come to the matter of teaching being consequential to personal practice. I don't exist in a time-space warp of my own - I am made alive and express myself in the contexts and relationships that I live and move in. And to this extent I am completely connected with everything and everyone around me. We all experience and manifest these connections in small and big, myriad ways. I see again and again that my relationship with myself manifests in my relationships with the other.
I believe that it is also a cultural learning and value that I carry - that there is a single thread running through all of creation and all divisions are perceptions. Hence it is also a logical conclusion that whatever I do to/with the ‘other’ I am doing to/with myself and vice versa. We have grown up listening to stories like that of Ramanuja who was told that sharing the mantra that he had learnt with others would mean that the benefits of the mantra wouldn’t accrue to him, and yet, he went ahead and shouted out his teachings from the top of the temple to all who would listen; listening to the value in many stories like this that puts the other first, in our relationships and in different contexts. I realise that this is a background chant that goes on in my culture.
Like many others that I know, I had made this into an oppressive “should” (‘should put the other before myself’) for the very longest time, judged myself negatively and finding myself limited and yet being pulled and acting on strong desires that seem to put me before others, seeing ‘negative’ outcomes, slapping more judgments on myself, and tightening the ‘should’ noose further. This had become a self-fulfilling, degenerative loop. The obvious but regularly missed twist in the story is that what I do to myself, I do to the other. As a result, many of what had been judgments on myself, got translated and projected as expectations on and from the other. For instance, I judged, losing my cool in a bus and ranting at someone for not passing my money to the conductor, as totally uncouth and uncalled for. (alright, I called myself worse names!) I am not sure if it is obvious, that then I would / may expect my neighbour in a bus not to yell at me if I were unwilling to pass her / his money because of a genuine circumstance. And expectations blind us from perceiving and understanding the other’s reality and situation. To cut a longer story short, my yoga process cut into the degenerative pattern and stayed with it, and at some point glimpses of the true value of the cultural learning of oneness started showing up, and continue to do so, in countless connections and interrelationship. What remains mostly is the teaching being a consequence and natural extension of practice - a strong thread holding this identity together.
Then, what if I were not able to teach due to life circumstances? I went through the questioning, eliminating and reflective writing2,3. This has been a tough premise and process, even painful. My mind either refused to stay with it or offered collusions which I accepted until further reflection established them to be what they are really. By collusion here I mean easy scenarios, conclusions and explanations that the mind presents us with regularly to either hide behind or to cover the truth of the situation. This is the mind’s way of coping and not looking at hard realities which it is unable to accept.
What remains is the question for me to stay with. I realise that I cannot in truth ‘resolve’ it. This can happen (if at all) only if the situation comes to pass (my mind is automatically saying “God forbid!”), that is, with the experience of it. Until then, any ‘resolution’ will remain intellectual. Life is happening in the meanwhile and I can be alive, vibrant by staying with the question and hence with the possibilities that get thrown up in my relationship with my question. I am probably going to dig into this further, later.
For now, to move on with the present discussion of what in the beingness of the yoga teacher do I identify with,
- It also seems that I seek to be seen and known as a yoga teacher. This recognition is important for me. In fact, this conversation on identity began faintly in my mind with a discussion about ‘recognition’ several years ago, with an artist friend. He was telling me that it doesn't matter to him if he does not get the credits for his work (art). My point had been that this could be indifference to one’s work / commitment at some level, wearing the mask of virtue. Today, I think that it could additionally be masking fear of failure or non-acceptance (not necessarily in the case of my friend). Actually, he was so much at peace (or seemed to be so) with what he was saying, and I felt I knew him enough to think that he is not an ‘indifferent’ person. However, this conversation lodged in my mind to come up time and again, because I realised even then that I seemed to need recognition for my work, for all that I am and do.
Now, examination reveals that I don’t seem to seek recognition from strangers. It may be fine with me, say, to have my work in the public domain with no one unknown to me, knowing its my work. I seem to seek recognition from my own world, the people I know, love, respect and admire. I will go down this road a little later.
Right now, I sit down to look at something that has come up a couple of times in the examination, and came up again at present with this question: will I continue to work even if I do not get this recognition from my people? Yes, I most certainly will, however, the way I work, what I feel while working, my expectations, how much of myself I invest, all of this will depend on the extent of my attachment to the recognition and to the seeking of it. Here is ‘attachment’ again. The intensity of attachment I feel to the various aspects of the identity statement seems to be determining their respective forms. On the surface it may seem obvious: “Hey, you are talking about what you identify yourself with - you are then attached to it, right?” Right. So, let’s dig into that attachment. Perhaps the matter of attachment is one of degree. Intensity. When I am stuck in these identities, then I cannot flow with the current. Then that creates disturbance, suffering. The more intense my attachment to (my idea of) recognition, the more intense is my suffering!
Here is my feeling of viśokā, my jyotiṣmatị̄ again**. And here is yet, my attachment to the sutra! It’s time to stay and simmer with the question of attachment, and that of attachment to recognition.
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** Viśokā vā jyotiṣmatị̄ - The classical commentary and interpretation of this sutra is "finding the inner light that ends sorrow". As explained by one of my teachers, this is based on a "particular practice of seeing the light travel through the Nadis, emanating from the Daharam, the minute space where the prānā, jeevātma and paramātma reside". It becomes necessary to state this since I have incorporated the sutra into my own experience and interpreted the sequence of the phenomenon to suit me.
** Viśokā vā jyotiṣmatị̄ - The classical commentary and interpretation of this sutra is "finding the inner light that ends sorrow". As explained by one of my teachers, this is based on a "particular practice of seeing the light travel through the Nadis, emanating from the Daharam, the minute space where the prānā, jeevātma and paramātma reside". It becomes necessary to state this since I have incorporated the sutra into my own experience and interpreted the sequence of the phenomenon to suit me.
1 One of course needs a teacher and may need crutches and aids sometimes to achieve certain functions, but the reader is requested to see the essence of what is being said - that the body-mind-breath is the medicine, besides also, self-effort or Will if you want, which is the raw material (the potential), and hence one already has what it takes.
2 In fact, this series of longform essays is based on the notes from my reflective writing besides the examination and drawing, and then fleshed out with some thinking, studying, and editing and further writing.
3 Reflective writing is meta work. Meaning, it is writing based on what is happening with the writer and the writing while writing; her emotions primarily and secondary processes based on those. It is not writing based on thought, analysis and intellectual processes. However, by the very nature of the writing, this aspect (of form, and process in this case) also comes under the microscope of the process since the dominant and pervasive mental activity of these times seems to be intellectual thought, and it is quite easy for this part of the mind to take over and masquerade.
