sAdhanA – Looking In, Looking Out (Part 1)

In the philosophy and practice of Yoga, the words sAdhanA and abhyAsA are used almost interchangeably. In my swadhyaya, I recently saw and felt an expanded view of the idea of sAdhanA, a view that I have hitherto read about, appreciated, and tried to emulate in an intellectual way. 

One of my mentors blessed me after I recounted a particularly insightful and transforming meditative experience to her. Her blessing was “May this (experience) create a shift in your sAdhanA”.  Sometimes teachers and their words can be like clear mirrors that one can look into and catch a stunning sight of oneself. 

The flash of a question and a picture of sAdhanA arose in quick succession in that mirror.  The question in my mind had been, “oh, hasn’t the shift already happened? Wasn’t I doing my sAdhanA / abhyAsA with all that meditative practice?”  It was followed by a view of Practice or sAdhanA made up of seemingly discrete images and scenes from my own life, excerpts from stuff that I have read and stories I have been told, all coming together into one whole picture. I attempt here to draw that picture I seem to be holding.

The word sAdhanA is related to the following words in Hindi / Sanskrit:-
- sAdhan – a tool or instrument that helps us reach our goal,
- sAdhya – is like an achievement and / or possibility,
- sAdhaka – is the practitioner.

sAdhanA is a continued practice or discipline that is undertaken in pursuit of this goal. abhyAsA is a persistent and steady effort in one's practice. Both indicate that there is a direction of movement, while also having the quality of staying still with a pursuit / enquiry.  This dual quality is important to my meaning of practice. 

The ultimate journey and goal is to the truth within. This is like a theertha yatra that one undertakes – the big “who am I?” For, what is the truth within one is the most sacred of all things sacred, and the most mysterious of all mysteries, that philosophers, artists, writers, poets, dancers, and all spiritual seekers of all times have sought.

In this Yatra, I have been finding “me” at various times in different ways, at different levels and depths. One seemingly obvious truth that has hit me again and again with progressively harder impact until an extremely protective and hard shell layer cracked and shattered open, is that I can only be myself!  “Everyone else is already taken”.  (Someone has said this quoted phrase, I am not sure who). I have to nourish my unique beauty, as does each one.

It is only when I reach the real “me” inside, shattering years of hardened, comfortable notions, assumptions and beliefs about myself, can I meet the real other.  It is when I can see the ‘me’ who is behind many layers of the front-me that I can see the real person behind the other that I am trying to engage with and relate to. Their real desires and dreams underneath masks of politeness and propriety perhaps. Masks of cultural and other conditioning. The real fears, doubts and strengths.

My sAdhanA takes me continually to the more real Me and a more real world that I inhabit. However it cannot stop there.  Finding the real worldly me cannot be my purpose in this world. Finding this me is for getting to the purpose of my existence in this form. Of this I am now very sure.  It is through and while fulfilling this purpose that I can reach the ultimate Me that is the truth of all truths. In another lifetime.

In Yoga Therapy, especially in the Krishnamacharya Tradition which is my mother and father in Yoga therapy education and training, working with one’s Exhalation is given primary importance for healing and transformation. “It is exhalation that cures” is a statement I have heard often from my teachers.  The Elders say, “Inhalation takes care of itself. It is given by the Lord, the Universal Consciousness or Truth, and an extension of one’s Exhalation.  Make the Exhalation active and strong, and you will find the Inhalation also getting where it is meant to be.”

The Inhalation then is like the prasAdam (sanctified / consecrated gift) that we get after we serve our offerings to the Divine. I am sure this is also something one of my teachers must have said at some point, I don’t remember who or when.  The Inhalation is then all the gracious gifts that I receive from my world. I’m aware - just like that, in the blink of an eyelid, I have substituted the Divine with the world. This feels completely natural and a given for me. Must be the Vedantic upbringing and cultural atmosphere that I live in. Swami Vivekananda saw his Shiva in every being that he met, and served that Shiva (in his own words, Lectures from Colombo to Almora).  That is just one lived example and practice of the pantheistic understanding of my religion. 

The life that I receive is Inhalation. 

It then follows that the Exhalation is what I am offering to the world. What I give to the world around is like the Exhalation that I follow during my AsanA-prANAyAma practice.  I also wonder that there is a correlation between the quality of one’s Exhalation and the quality of one’s contribution in prANA exchange. (Every engagement in the world is an underlying exchange of prANA)

My sAdhanA on the mat is a practice of keen attention on the breath and body, which continuously takes me to a keen attention on where my attention is.

My sAdhanA off the mat is the keen attention I am able to offer to my world and the natural manifestations of that attention.

The spiritual practice that we call sAdhanA then does not stop with an individual, personal practice that I do with this limited ‘me’ that I can conceive of – limited by this body, my thoughts, emotions and breath.  It will include all that I do in the world outside, and even beyond to what my world is doing.  Every movement (physical, mental, emotional…) has to be infused with sAdhanA then for it to be worth its name (without making it into an injunction!).  And ‘my’ sAdhanA is not just mine. It is connected to everyone else’s.

The Yoga sutras talk of Bhava Pratyayas, people who are born in or experience and live in an exalted state of awareness, in a state of Yoga. Ramana Maharishi for example. These people don’t do, and don’t need to do an active sAdhanA as we understand it. Their very being is sAdhanA and if anything, they also undertake sAdhanA for the sake of healing and transformation of others. Their very presence is sAdhanA.

But for the rest of us, an active sAdhanA is prescribed by Patanjali in the Yoga sutras. And I realise that for me this includes all the work and everything else that I do, off my mat as well. And do, I must. This is part of my spiritual practice.  The keen inward attention during my personal practice, and the keen attention on matters of the world are like two polarities that I have to hold together, simultaneously. They make each other. Like Exhalation and Inhalation together make a breath.  Make life.

Someone like a Swami Vivekananda didn’t rest with his individual moksha. He served incessantly and achieved enormously in the public domain within the short life that he lived.  He talked some, and demonstrated much more, the interdependence and mutual existence of one’s inner journey and its outward, social manifestation. Gandhi’s life without a doubt was cut and woven together from the same spiritual cloth.  I recently read in an article by Pannalal Dasgupta about “this strange, Janus-like quality of Gandhiji – two faces looking in seemingly different directions.” 

This is the quality I believe my practice needs to strengthen.  It is the Practice. Of being able to look in and look out simultaneously without letting go of either.  For sAdhanA to come into its power, it needs to move out from the mat and change matter; Manifest as a coming together of the inner and outer journeys. And this is the meaning I give to the blessing I received from the mentor.  

Unrequited Love?

The old story was that of unrequited love. From parents, from friends, situations, opportunities, relatives, a beloved canine, my childhood journal...from the world. 

There is no question of requited or unrequited love. Love is just love. It is there, a spontaneous exchange, connection and perception of prANA. By unrequited, what we actually mean is that it was not requited in the way we wanted or expected it out of our limited and conditioned minds. 

The new story for me has at least two nuances to it. One is that I have been blind to the universe's ways of requiting my love. My environment and cultural conditioning includes an axiom that the universe does requite our love; there are no two ways about it. I stand on this fundamental ground. What's more, I have in recent times been experiencing the truth of this in many small and big ways. I have started to recognise the numerous ways my love is being requited. Just not always in the ways that I envisage it. 

The other nuance and corollary to the above is that I have always been expecting an equal and returning force of love, a requiting, from humans around me. What a huge burden to put on myself and another. This reduces my capacity of love to a transactional expectation. It also functions on a limited understanding of how people love, and constricts the space of love. Who is to decide how much is equal and the same? And how can it ever be the same when no two entities are the same? There are as many ways to love as there are creatures on Earth, or more. How is it then possible that another give me love just the way I give another? There is only one unique me, and there is only one unique another. And this is not even yet taking into considerations the vagaries of one uniqueness - the circumstances, duhkhas, preoccupations, changing aspirations, needs and whatnot through the passage of seasons and time. 

Here's then to new stories of Love, stories that have no beginning or end, but just a constant buoyant recognition of another in oneself, and self in another, or a striving for that union.