A Soliloquy on Identity – Part III: This Moment is its Own Affirmation

Or I could borrow Joseph Campbell’s quote, “You become mature when you become the authority of your own life” for the title of this essay in the Identity series.

I could title it, “Who Am I?” or “The Pathless Path”, if I wanted this chapter to be the beginning of the next section of my autobiography!   

The earlier essay, I left off with saying that needing recognition seems to be one of my fundamental patterns.  In fact, this had been occupying such density in my being that it has taken all this time to stay and work with this part of me and arrive at a location to pen it down. 

We all need affirmation one way or another from our people, our audiences, clients, friends, children, parents… I am seeing around me that most of us need affirmation of various kinds.  This plays out in our lives at different levels and intensities, and we make up some of our narratives depending on our experiences with affirmation (or lack of it), how we understand and learn to handle / mishandle / be with, this need.  And so, what if the normal need for affirmation that begins in a child and can regulate itself into a healthy feedback mechanism for coherent functioning as the child grows older, becomes a hidden (even to herself), compulsive seeking of affirmation through various means and ways even as an adult?

The recognition that I wanted / needed from my world is nothing but simple (or not so simple!) affirmation that I did not get as a child.  I had been an adult by age, living and functioning as an adult outside, driven by the child’s need for affirmation, inside. Carl Jung had said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate”.   This is true for me, except that I don’t call it ‘fate’.  This unconscious relationship with affirmation that I have had made my choices, determined much of my action and has also limited who I am up until now. 

The relationship – I sought affirmation from the authority figures in my life (either I set them up so and they colluded, or vice versa).  And my story has been that I don’t get the affirmation that I want / need from them (since I didn’t get it as a child).  Hence I also set up the stage for not receiving the affirmation from these authority figures. Then I don’t conform, I rebel ‘against’ these authority figures and take up causes to do so.  I became the rebel against any system (for me, authority), the angry young man syndrome.  I constructed my identity, my idea of self, out of this relationship with authority and affirmation.  One of my primary narratives had been this: whoever I see as authority will ‘fail’ me by not affirming me in the ways that I need, and I will find some way to be the righteous rebel, try to get out of the web of authority and strike my own path.  There will be a flash of brilliance as I try to find myself, but I will set myself up to fail, because the sense of self was so enmeshed with the idea of being affirmed by authority, that if there was no authority, there was no self.  Who will affirm me? I was trapped in my cyclical story for the longest while.

However, there is more than one story in the unconscious that direct one’s life. In fact, there are several, and we collect more on the way.  I call in Thoreau along with Jung into this essay, “We are constantly invited to be who we are”.   And so, even though I chose the affirmation one as my primary story, there were others whispering and flirting and gesturing and waving for my elusive attention.  I noticed one such when it simply wouldn’t be ignored – my story of practice versus / and theory, also a gift from my family.  My well, rendered dry with intellect alone, was searching for the water of practice. This took me to the practice of asana-pranayama, and the path of yoga.  This ongoing story led me then to many others, and some more, and continues.  They started knocking on my door time and again as seemingly far-fetched opportunities, uncomfortable questions, bursts of colour, myriad meanings and metaphors, insights …

  

The righteousness soon dropped away.  The rebel is a warrior and this part of cell memory doesn’t get erased that easily I find.  However, she has learnt to set down her arms and keep her sword sheathed unless she feels it necessary to fight.  She has also learnt to see that there are ways and ways of putting up a fight.  There is another story in this of course, that of finding the woman, the shakti.  There is no cause or context for rebellion in these tales.  There is also a story of what to fight for, which is a wondrous one, that of Mother Earth, as ancient as she.  

When these masks were removed, I had to face my vulnerabilities: there is no authority to get affirmation from.  There need be none.  I am not that child who did not get the affirmations she needed, any longer.  I am an adult with many gifts, many stories, having a child of my own whom I need to affirm in many ways while giving her space to grow independent.  But where and how is my affirmation happening? How can I design a wholesome feedback process for myself? Do I need such a thing or is it my need for affirmation acting up? What would I be without this need and seeking for affirmation from authority? What would I be owning up to authority where it is required? Is authority even required or is my mind playing games? What am I missing?  

I turned to my asana-pranayama-swadhyayam, practice, as usual, and a question that stayed is, ‘what would I be without this need, free from this cycle?’  The practitioner and teacher in me joyfully announced the experience: that the practice itself is the affirmation – this moment is its own affirmation.  I realised the truth of this somewhat. When I am practicing, and when I am teaching someone for therapeutic purposes, I need no validation for what I am doing.  I am deeply into the process, and it runs the show.  Every step and moment speaks for itself and illumines the next.  My authority comes from my personal practice and the needs of the process when necessary. 

But, what does this mean for my question?  Who am I by myself? What is my process then if that is what I am looking for?  The stories that came knocking now were vague sightings into a dark wilderness that I began to see from the edges but didn’t initially venture into, being fearful of what I may find.  Tentative steps and short trips into the forest revealed more stories. Walking alone in the moonlight breathes energy into this quest.  Walking alone, even more.  Stories of art, aesthetics, writing and beauty rose up from the unconscious.  An avalanche of memory, I remember the numerous instances that I had bypassed when life had been inviting me to be who I am.  How did I not attend these stories earlier?!  

But there is no path prescribed by any authority in that wilderness.  I need to plunge headlong into it. I smell a story of fear here.  Fear holds me back from making that dive.  Fear of what? Perhaps of making mistakes.  What is the question I need to ask now? It strikes me that I am not afraid of making mistakes in my personal practice, or even with a student.  I completely trust the process and the relationship and there is an element of something much larger than merely ‘I’ that I give up myself to.  I believe that this something may be the grace of the universe, god… that is always available to each of us. The “Ishvarapranidhana” that Yoga sutras mention. How do I open myself to receive it? How is it that I can feel this in asana-pranayama and not with this fear that holds me a prisoner? Or am I just trying to escape into a variable called Ishvara and say, this is all I can do, that this is my best? What is the fear holding me?  The fear that I may be wrong about all of this: perhaps I am imagining the stories of creating and writing and art, perhaps I am not this at all. But why does fear stop my action? Can I move despite fear? I see a story of the habit of fear. How do I engage with this? 

I remember the first time I went into Sirsasana (headstand). It was a surprise. Had I known earlier that our goal posture for that day’s group practice was headstand, I would have skipped the class. Just 3-4 postures before our goal, it was mentioned casually that we need to prepare in that current posture well, if we wanted to go up on our heads.  My hands went cold and clammy, thinking of my positional vertigo condition etc. But the environment of my yoga sangha, colleagues and friends doing the practice, the instructor (whose sirsasana is to die for!), and my commitment to improvement in asana-PY practice made me stay.  I still can taste the ramyam of going up on my head that day. 

Perhaps I need to surprise myself out of my fear of being wrong.  How? And even if I am wrong, what other choice do I have?  All I have are these stories and my practice. I have nowhere to escape, no masks to hide behind, and I don't want them.  I am in this space from which there is no going back and the way forward and sideways is a jungle with no path.  Just many symbols and metaphors and ideas and a quest for beauty.

I cannot see the path ahead all that clearly, and I do not know for sure that this is a pattern that has stopped “directing my life” as Jung says. But I can say definitively that my mind cannot even turn in the direction of my affirmation-need without me being aware of it, and pausing to look at it with careful caution and interest, and also keep the wilderness in view.  Perhaps my short forays in, will prepare me to walk straight and deep into the jungle one of these days without returning to safety. 

A Soliloquy on Identity - Part II (Viśokā vā jyotiṣmatị̄**)

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?

1. 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,

2. 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,

3. 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.

---------------
** 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.  

A Soliloquy on Identity - Part I (Looking through the lens of the Yoga Sutra)

So many of our routine, everyday statements are identity statements - what I am, what I am not, What I like, What I dont like, What so-and-so does to me, I dont usually....

And I carry all my identities with me, all the time, protect and nourish them, put them in glossy packages, unpack and repack and organise them in various ways.

All these identities create the form of the 'I' - Asmita¹ (YS² II.3, II.6).  This means that the more identities I collect, and create distinct shapes of the 'I', the more distinct, clear form of the 'I' emerges, and gets sharper and sharper.  And I get stuck in that asmita. 

"I am a Yoga teacher, therefore I am" 

Now, wow. That is a strong identity that I seem to be carrying.  Even as I am writing it, I can feel its pull-push. I am quick to put up defences to protect this statement (identity) and my mind seems to be bent on sabotaging any efforts on my part to try and play with this statement, try and drop it and see.  It took a long while for me to stay with trying to drop this. So my hands and feet became cold, my stomach started churning.  I stayed with these sensations and persisted with trying to drop it, by returning to it after every distraction and detour that my mind presented to me.    
What if my limbs do not move, are paralysed? I cant do the āsana practice that am able to do today. I have my breath, my head and neck can still move, perhaps my hip can twist. Alright. 
What if I lost my voice? Maybe I cant facilitate and instruct to teach others.  Perhaps I will come up with other ways to teach. 
I went on in this manner, until I reached bare basics - being left with my breath and mantra for a personal practice. 
Then, what if I started losing my memory...

So, reality is changing all the time. Sat Vada and Parinama Vada - What I am experiencing now is true, and that it is changing is also true. However, I find that my identities are not fluid enough to change and move with reality.  I am stuck in the clear shape of the "I" that I have created.  I only see my identity, not reality. 

How do I see reality, as is? What has helped me is my āsana and prāṇāyāma practice, and swadhyaya.  Though consisting of many methods and exercises to help facilitate self reflection, my swadhyaya has been to a large extent through my āsana-prāṇāyāma practice, locating myself in my body and understanding how it works, and through this, my mind.  This has helped me to at least step in the right direction many times, sometimes to have glimpses of situations, myself, the world around me, without the filter of my identities.  By "step in the right direction" I mean, to begin to notice an identity statement, understand its triggers, origin, how it works (in) me; such that at some point I can begin to work it, play with it and so on.  Something like what I did earlier with the yoga teacher identification. 

When I see reality, as is, there is no identification, no identity, only reality.  I drop all the luggage I am carrying and hence there is a sense of lightness.  Then one may find the inner light that ends sorrow, "Viśokā vā jyotiṣmatị̄" (YS, I. 36).  

But then, I do need identity.  I am reminded of the story of the mendicant and his loin cloth that was told by one of my teachers recently.  That mendicant identified with 'his' piece of loin cloth so much that he slowly started accumulating other identities one after another, in protecting that one, until he had a homestead, complete with wife, children, cows, the works.  His single piece of cloth became his consuming identity. He made it so.  However, what about the will to practice every day?  I need my will to do my sadhana in the direction of "Chitta Vritti Nirodha" (YS, I. 2), when all the movements of the mind cease. That will is part of Asmita, and it is necessary for me, to get to the point where it drops away by itself.  

Until then, I do need the Asmita. Actually, whether I need it or not is immaterial. It remains! All I can do is to acknowledge it, examine it, inquire and stay with my practice.  However, as a Yoga practitioner, I am given a direction, and clear signposts on the path to see if my asmita is moving in the right direction - the Yamas (signposts of ethical conduct) and Niyamas, observances towards self discipline (YS, II.28 to II.32).  

The niyamas, inner and outer purity (Sauca), contentment (Santosha), austerity (Tapas), self reflection / study (Swadhyaya) and surrendering to a higher intelligence (Ishwarapranidhana) are clear ways of quietening the mind / checking in with one's quietening, such that the self more and more stays with itself - self discipline. Prana gets dissipated lesser and lesser as the niyamas strengthen. This gets manifested externally as the yamas - not-violating (Ahimsa), seeking truth (Satya), not wanting that which is not one's (Asteya), moving towards truth / continence (Brahmacarya) and not being covetous (Aparigraha).  Patanjali goes on further to state that staying with the yamas unconditionally, irrespective of circumstances, is a great vow. And I am discovering in my practice that staying with the niyamas facilitate the yamas.  These two for me are intertwined, braided together with the same thread, lending themselves to my favourite definition of Yoga, as relationship, as union (although in seeming contradiction, it is also about separation of the "I" from Identity!). What I do with the other, I do with myself. What I do with myself, I do with the other.  This is a simple truth that has been coming up again and again in my practice.  How much of my fears I project to the people closest to me. How I have been taking on my parents' anger. How much of love reflects and re-reflects like in a hall of mirrors with my children. The niyamas work with the "I" and the "I"; the yamas with the "I" and the "other".  Each reflect the other.  How beauty. 

In considering the beauty of this connection, I feel that all the components of the yoga practice are so woven together, intricately.  I find such logic in the connections that make that fabric.  It is commonly felt and said that āsana practice today has been taken out of the larger context of yoga sadhana itself and practising postures for physical fitness and beauty alone will take us away from wholesome meaning and direction.  However, then that cannot be Yoga. The practice leads us to the next step.  I have found in my āsana practice, that whenever I allow the intelligence of my body to lead the way, I make progress with the practice in whatever way. "In whatever way" is important because many times our minds set goals or targets for the practice that are not in tune with the inherent rhythm and intelligence.  Remember, its a mind that is stuck in its identities.  Hence, the surrendering to the inherent intelligence is a useful check-in. So, whenever I am struggling in the practice, it is more often than not that I have stopped listening to that inherent intelligence, wisdom, and have allowed the mind to take over.  Then I've got to simply exhale, and inhale and allow the practice to fill me.  It will show me the next step.  Vyaasa states in his commentary to YS III.6³, "Yogena Yogo Jnaatavyo; Yogo yogaatpravartate" (Yoga is known by yoga; Yoga becomes manifest by yoga").   And hence, even if practiced for supposedly lesser goals (check-in: this could be an identity statement if we are making it so), the āsana practice could inevitably lead the practitioner to the other components in the path (they are so connected) and thus facilitate meaning and direction. 

But yes, what is required is to get on that mat, every single day. I cant lose my practice. It took me 6 years of irregular, irreverent and piecemeal practice and corresponding benefits before I committed to deep and steadfast practice.  It took another 4 years of that practice, before I was ready for the practice to show me the next leg of the journey. If my practice is consistent, and I keep returning to it without losing my way and I do so again and again because I hold my practice in such faith, reverence, then yes, it holds steady and stable and shows me the next ground to achieve, "Sa tu dheergakala nairantarya satkara adhara asevito drdha bhoomih" (YS I.14). It is just right here to pause and feel the gratitude for a teacher who had immense faith in me and never let up on me, never gave up on me. It took a while before it sunk in that it is simply her process, her faith in her practice that propelled and reflected her. How best can I honour this tradition of teaching and learning than to offer her and all my teachers and this tradition (where the greatest teachers have teachers), all my practice and continue the work.  

So the more work I do, intense āsana-prāṇāyāma practice, and understand through āsana more and more of how my body works, and through that, my breath and my mind, initially going in and out of swadhyaya and then at some point, firmly being established in the ground and practice of swadhyaya, more are the insights that I seem to gather about the workings of the "I" and the world and the engagement of the "I" with the world.  And then, I start identifying with my insights.  After all, I do have the working of the asmita within me. My insights start becoming more identity statements that I gather and may hoard.  I have newer insights and carry those luggages too.  I can forget on a daily basis that the measure of what is real is changing from moment to moment - Maya. And get stuck to the insights of the previous moment and start thinking that I am the next best thing to Patanjali! Bhrantidarshana - misapprehension / delusion.  This one obstacle that Patanjali mentions in the path of practice, is a quagmire and can in a snowballing effect lead to all the other obstacles that are mentioned. (YS I.30, vyadhi styana samshaya pramada alasya aviratti bhrantidarshana alabdabhoomikatva anavastitattvani chitta vikshepa te antarayah) In my experience, any one or the other can lead to the rest in a chain reaction. I am ill and weak, more liable to fears and doubts, my mind could be hazy and unclear leading to fatigue and carelessness, which leads to mistakes, then I doubt my abilities and my path, want to try other things and regress in the progress I have made so far.  This is the simplest and most obvious connecting chain of reaction that I see time and again.  Another cycle could begin with self-doubt, a complete non-starter freezing action, evoking inertia, and over time carelessness, leading to misapprehension and restlessness, giving way to taking refuges in different ways, further leading to ill health, inconsistency and regression in practice. 

I am in the trap of bhrantidarshana.  What now? Here is where the yamas and niyamas come into play. The logic of the yamas and niyamas is inescapable.  I simply get on the mat again the next day. I do my prāṇāyāma. I have my breath. I inhale my commitment to practice and inquiry.  I exhale and seek the truth.  I hold ahimsa as the paramo dharma and in reverence my dialogue with compassion in intent, word, action and response, and above all, offer every moment of practice in surrender to this Universe. (YS 1.34, Pracchardana vidaranabhyamva praanasya) I live the prasada that the Universe gives me. And the cycle starts again the next inhale / exhale. As I allow this prana that is born every moment to suffuse my body, my being, it leads me to "what now". I am then in that apavarga location (of learning and inquiry) and all that I see is for me to learn, understand and move towards truth and freedom, and I do not consume and / or be consumed by the experience (say, of Bhrantidarshana)  (YS II.18, Prakasha kriya sthiti sheelam bhootendriyatmakam bhogaapavargartham drshyam).  I stay and watch the bhrantidarshana, watch the mind perform its tricks and understand some more. 

What I see is that, even as I read and talk about dropping the mind and getting into the realm of being a witness, an observer (the drshta), it is all still the mind. It is the mind which is observing itself. And hence there is a chance it gets sharper and clearer with relentless practice. There is also the chance here again of bhrantidarshana, I can easily think that I am already so much in the observer state, that I am the observer (though the thinking faculty is still the mind!).  This could be the ultimate bhrantidarshana. Action from this state could become extreme himsa then. However, bhrantidarshana is an inevitable part of this process. It is hence useful to be sceptical about one's own insights and treat them lightly.  They are simply signs and sights on the way. And still, perceptions of the mind.  They will pass.  It is work-in-progress.  It is all play and experiment as well. The social boundaries for compassion, peace and happiness are clear - the yamas and niyamas indicate them.  And the direction is crystal clear - As the practice matures, Intelligence acts through us⁴, "Tada drashtu swaroope avasthanam" (YS I.3). 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

¹Asmita - The identification with the "I", self construct
²YS - Yoga Sutra, the text of aphorisms on Yoga given by Patanjali 
³Sutra on viniyoga - intelligent steps, application on the path. 
⁴Sutra translation - Raghu Anantanarayanan