Yoga Injuries and the True Purpose of Yoga

Some people underestimate yogasanas and some overestimate them, so let's assess their value in the course of our spiritual evolution. To many people yoga means asanas only, while yogis and spiritual leaders profess that the physical discipline of asana is not at all necessary for self-realization. Both of these views are extreme, for asanas are neither absolutely essential nor are they altogether unnecessary.

- Swami Satyananda Saraswati


On the news recently was a segment on the dangers of yoga practice and the growing numbers of injuries. It was based on a recent article in the New York Times called “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html?_r=1). With increase of popularity of yoga there has been a corresponding increase in injuries attributed to yoga practice. However, the percentage of injuries per practitioner is far less than in many other popular forms of sports and exercise. As Eva Norlyk Smith, Ph.D. writes, “Indeed, the number of yoga injuries treated in emergency rooms or doctors' offices rose to 5,500 in 2007, according to the Consumer Products Safety Commission. The same year, the number of yoga practitioners reached an estimated 15.8 million. That pegs the number of injuries at 0.035 percent, or about 3.5 out of every 10,000 practitioners.” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eva-norlyk-smith-phd/yoga-health_b_1191479.html

Overall it seems your odds of being able to safely practice yoga are pretty good. There is another problem issue lurking under the surface here though: “yoga” is not a term denoting physical exercise. Yoga is a spiritual discipline that takes many forms which fall into four main categories; devotional, intellectual, active and meditational. The physical practices of hatha yoga, referred to as “asanas” of “yogasanas,” are actually a subset of the meditative branch of yoga. Somehow they have become identified in the popular mind as being the entirety of yoga! If you go to the gym to practice yoga in order to become physically fit, good for you and be careful. You should understand though that strictly speaking you are not actually practicing yoga at all. You are practicing “yuppie calisthenics.”

Meditation is much more central to true yoga practice and to practice asanas properly means to adopt a meditative attitude. The poses must be practiced slowly with awareness. They are meant to do more than just improve health; they help open up the energy system of the body to allow for the acceleration of the development of higher consciousness. The asanas should be integrated with pranayama – breathing practices and with relaxation/meditation practices. This is the integral approach.

The practice of asanas should be approached systematically as well. Just as a first grader doesn’t jump into algebra, a beginning student shouldn’t start with major asanas. Begin with the series know as pawanmuktasana as outlined in Asana, Pranayama, Mudra, Bandha by Swami Satyanand Saraswati. They can be found here as well: http://www.healthandyoga.com/html/yoga/asanas/pawanmuktasana1.asp This series is complete in itself and you may never need to go further. Unfortunately many yoga teachers skip these altogether.

Yoga is ancient tradition which is here as a means of awakening our spiritual potential. It is antithetical to our competitive, material and superficial cultural mindset. Yoga is about developing transcendent awareness, a means of merging with the infinite. Injuries result when we reduce it to a form of physical exercise, when we are taught improperly and when we are not paying attention to the body’s messages. It is the opposite of fashion – it is more important to feel good than to look good.

Trusting the Universe

Art by Alex Grey (http://www.alexgrey.com/)

Do you think you can take over the
universe and improve it?
I do not believe it can be done.
- Lao Tzu

There is a tremendous hubris that we have when we are afraid of reality, when we hide behind the ego’s façade and when we think we need to be in control. In truth we cannot even control ourselves until we have surrendered to the deeper wisdom of the evolutionary unfolding of the universe – what Lao Tzu referred to as the Tao. “The universe is sacred.” he writes in the Tao Te Ching. “You cannot improve it. If you try to change it, you will ruin it. If you try to hold it, you will lose it.”

The physical universe is a temporary and changing expression of transcendent wisdom and love. Every being within it is nurtured by this energy. Our very existence is a gift of love. But somehow we get this crazy idea that we have to defend ourselves from it. The most powerful thing that we can do for ourselves and others is surrender to it. Surrender is not passive however; we have to be committed to that surrender in every moment of our lives.

Ordinarily we surrender to our outward view of circumstances, to the illusory projection of our minds conditioned as they are by false beliefs and phantasmagorical interpretations. Spiritual surrender means surrendering inwardly, letting go of anger, resentment and the need to be control. It is not apathy; it is awakening to the inherent joy within us independent of whatever is going on in our lives. It is from this place of peaceful inner acceptance that we can move forward guided by a deeper wisdom and intelligence.

Everything that occurs does so as the working out of an interconnected unfolding of the universe. We cannot grasp its infinite complexity with our small minds. However, we can tune in intuitively and devotionally. When we do we enter the miraculous. We rise above the ego’s narrow perspective and join the universal mind.

Your Inner Divinity

We are not simply biological creatures, the result of a happenstance of chemical processes, walking the earth just trying to get through it all with a minimum of harm to ourselves and others. We are Creations of the Deity, Products of the Divine, Individuations of God.

- Neal Donald Walsh


Because we tend to live on the surface of things, the world of the mind and the senses, and because we tend to believe the information programmed into us by society, few of us even suspect that we are radiant divine beings in disguise. Instead our scientific culture maintains that we are accidental by-products of an essentially meaningless universe. Our religion, on the other hand, has taught that we are basically shameful sinners. Neither of these views is very uplifting or empowering.

In order to truly evolve both psychologically and spiritually we need a new a vision of ourselves and our place in the universe. And, seriously, how could we be anything other than direct manifestations of a Divine Consciousness evolving in and through this universe of form? As Alan Watts put it, “The ‘real you’ is not someone being kicked around by life. The real deep down you IS the universe.”

The analogy of waves and the sea has been used by mystics throughout the centuries. Our relationship to the cosmos is as waves upon the ocean. The wave is a temporary manifestation of a greater whole, never separate and never really anything other than the ocean itself. We have identified with the wave of our present form and have forgotten our essential nature. “There is a Secret One inside us.” says Kabir, “The planets in all the galaxies pass through his hands like beads./That is a string of beads one should look at with luminous eyes.”

Because of our ignorance (of our true nature) we experience emotions like fear, anger, desire, greed and pride. We lash out at others sometimes without realizing that we are actually attacking ourselves. Once we recognize our true Self, then these emotions dissolve and we can relax. This is true surrender. We surrender the false for the real; ego-clinging for Love.

“Meditation” is a primary means through which we can rediscover our connection with the deeper Self. There are many ways to meditate of course. As Angelina Jolie puts it, "I find meditation in sitting on the floor with the kids coloring for an hour, or going on the trampoline." (I never thought I would quote Angelina Jolie in a meditation blog!) In order to find it though most of us need to learn a method, mantra, vipassana, etc. through which we can learn to disconnect from the surface of things to enter the depths.

Stress is both a symptom of our lack of deeper awareness and it is something which keeps us trapped. Meditation helps us learn to relax and let go. The practice of yoga nidra is a powerful way of learning to relax deeply and to explore deeper levels of consciousness.

Please join us for guided yoga nidra practice on Saturdays at 3:00 PM starting Jan. 7, 2012. We will be meeting at Plexus Pilates, 6940 Indiana Ave Riverside, CA at 3:00 PM. It will last approx. one hour. Cost is $10.00.

Creating a New Reality

Sankalpa is the subtlest form of intention in the field of pure potentiality. In the infinite consciousness Brahaman holds the whole universe in his consciousness through sankalpa. It is sankalpa that holds together the web of sutras that uphold all life and interdependently and synchronistically co-arise as space-time events in the entire cosmos. When the individual sankalpa is aligned with cosmic sankalpa it orchestrates the infinite organizing power of the entire universe so that the individual intention becomes the cosmic intention and the cosmic intention becomes the individual intention.

- Deepak Chopra, MD.



What is our purpose in life? Is it to amass material wealth at the expense of others? Is it to exhaust ourselves in the endless pursuit of selfish pleasure? Or is it, perhaps, to awaken spiritually to realize our inner potential for unconditional love and joy? If you say ‘yes’ to answer number three than you are opening the possibility of creating a new reality. We are talking about a world in which poverty, hunger, war, violence, crime and much of our physical and psychological suffering, cease to exist. It is a world that we can and are bringing into being through the power of sankalpa, or deep intention.

Sankalpa comes from Sanskrit and means vow, resolution or intention based upon our connection with the highest truth. It is not wishful or magical thinking; nor is it baseless “affirmations.” Instead it comes from a deeper part of ourselves connected with desire, will, purpose and meaning. Swami Satyananda has said, “Anything in life can fail you, except for your sankalpa.” It is that powerful! In Yoga Nidra practice we develop a personal sankalpa which is seeded in the subconscious mind and nurtured through multiple repetitions over time and practice.

Your personal sankalpa is a short positive formula that you must develop carefully for yourself. It should be based on your own natural inclinations, your svadharma. One of my teachers put it this way: “If you are naturally inclined to be an artist, you won’t have much success with a sankalpa that says ‘I will be a rich and successful lawyer.” You should be careful if you tend to be overly perfectionistic. Perhaps an intention to be more accepting and compassionate towards your self is best. “You have already written your sankalpa – love to you.” States Swami Niranjan, “Extend that you into every being, so everyone becomes ‘you’. That is the ideal sankalpa.”

In yoga therapy sankalpa can be used to alleviate negative habits, facilitate healing and overcome inner and outer obstacles in life. Our biggest problem is often the storehouse of negative, self-limiting and defeating beliefs that we have in our subconscious. These have to be brought to the surface through mindful introspection and released. This can be done through the practice of inner self-observation as discussed in our last post http://mindful-yoga.blogspot.com/2011/12/experiencing-inner-silence.html. This can be done alongside the practice of sankalpa where we are training the subconscious in a positive direction.

Ultimately, the sankalpa that you develop should be in harmony with the cosmic will, Dharma, Tao or the Will of God (or whatever trm you prefer.) We must be able to connect with a “higher power” beyond our self-centered ego perspectives in order for it to have true power. The first step then is to open oneself in the silence of meditation and ask for your deeper life’s purpose to be revealed to you. Be quiet and receptive. You may get an answer then and there, or it might come later through a meaningful coincidence. When we attune to our intuition this way we open ourselves to Divine guidance.

One’s sankalpa acts like a bridge between the conscious and subconscious minds. Used within the practice of Yoga Nidra, as developed by Swami Satyananda Saraswati, it opens a new dimension of the personality, new insights and new potentials. “If we have a sankalpa which maintains the motivation and drive,” states Swami Niranjan, “then lethargy will not set in. But the sankalpa has to develop the willpower. Just a positive affirmation will not do anything. We all think we should become this or become that. We need to get rid of a particular habit, nature or obsession. We can understand that rationally, but we cannot apply it due to lack of motivation. Sankalpa fills this vacuum in our life.”

Let your sankalpa be connected with love on the deepest most unconditional level. Love is what Is.



Join me on Saturday, January 7, 2012 for a workshop in developing your sankalpa. It will be held at Plexus Pilates, 6940 Indiana Ave Riverside, CA at 3:00 PM. It will last approx. one hour. Cost is $10.00.  Please call (909) 373-6060 to reserve space.

Reference:
http://www.yogamag.net/archives/2005/ajan05/lovesank.shtml

Learning to Be

Your duty is to Be, and not to be this or that.

- Ramana Maharshi

Yoga is not therapy; yoga is not trying in any way to make you adjusted to the society. If you want to define yoga in terms of adjustment, then it is not adjustment with the society, but it is adjustment with existence itself. It is adjustment with the divine!

- Osho

We have been conditioned by our society, culture, circumstances and karma to “not be,” but to live in an imaginary world of fear and desire. It is a world of striving for achievements which are ever elusive, seeking the comforts of past securities and longing for some indefinable something that we call “happiness.” It is a world in which we have falsely identified ourselves with the characters we play in an increasingly absurd tragicomedy. It is a world in which we are afraid to love and afraid to be loved.

And it is a world we are willing to defend with our very lives. We cling to it because we are afraid of being obliterated; afraid of the abyss we sense deep within ourselves. Society is structured to keep us locked into our imaginary world. There is no sense in protesting it. It is a mutual agreement we all make. “I won’t blow your cover if you don’t blow mine.” What would be happen if we dropped all the props and encountered the naked emptiness of the stage? As Marianne Williamson stated in a quote that has now become quite famous,

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

It is important to remember that on awakening to our true nature we also recognize that we are “nobody special.” The ego longs to be special; the soul doesn’t give a damn. Being isn’t special. It is so ordinary that it is ridiculous and it is absolutely wonderful. It doesn’t need to pretend anything.

Yoga is a discipline developed to help us learn to be; or rather unlearn how to “not be.” It is about bringing all of the frantic imaginings of our minds to rest. It is discipline of mind and body that enables to drop mind and body. The awareness which seems to reside within them is unbounded by time and space. It is the ever-present luminosity of Being.

Why then have so many of us practiced this or that discipline for years and still remain neurotic wrecks? It’s because we haven’t yet let go. We haven’t yet surrendered. Use your meditation to vigilantly observe the ego. Realize that you are not that and let it go.

When you are ready.

Freedom and Bondage

Only by a tranquil mind does one destroy all karma, good or bad.
Once the self is pacified, one abides in the Self and attains everlasting bliss. If the mind becomes as firmly established in Brahman as it is usually attached to the sense objects, who, then, will not be released from bondage?
-- Yajur Veda

Bondage is a theme that runs throughout the spiritual teachings of the world. We are bound by karma according to Hinduism and Buddhism, and by sin according to religions like Christianity. If we consider a little more deeply however we discover that we are really bound by our unconscious thoughts and actions. We are bound by mind, which is based on the thought that that we are not free.

According to Yoga philosophy we are conditioned by five underlying sources of bondage. First and foremost is “ignorance.” This means the non-recognition of our true nature as the Self. The second arises from the first and is known as “ego-identification.” It is the mistaken belief that we are these limited body-mind manifestations. The third and fourth are desire and aversion. These underlying impulses drive us to distraction so that we never take the time to look inward, to allow the mind to become quiet and to recognize our peaceful and blissful core. The fifth is the fear of death. It is the tendency to cling to what is familiar although temporal.

The Self is at the core of our beings and is beyond space, time and becoming. It is in a state of blissful loving contemplation. It is the Self, which is pure awareness, who sees through the distorted lens of the mind. We are bound because we believe only in the reality of the seen. We don’t reflect upon the seer. We don’t recognize our own being. That underlying Being, who is the true “I” of each of us is always and absolutely free. In fact we are essentially beyond even these notions of freedom and bondage.

We can’t think our way out of the trap of the mind. Instead meditation means witnessing the mind’s machinations and detaching oneself from them. Through this process the mind loses its hold over us and we can break free from illusion, delusion and confusion.

Beyond God

Quantum cosmology concludes that there is only one, unified wholeness at the fundamental level of the Unified Field of Natural Law and no real fundamental division into observer and observed. Thus quantum cosmology verifies that the Unified Field observes itself in a completely self-referral manner and thereby confirms that the unmanifest, quantum-mechanical Unified Field of Natural Law is* a field of self-referral consciousness which generates the whole manifest universe by its process of self-observation. http://www.worldpeaceendowment.org/invincibility/invincibility2.html


The concept of god has become highly problematic for us in these post-modern times. Who or what is god? Does “he” exist? The Buddha was way ahead of us on this one. He didn’t answer the question but seemed to have considered it irrelevant. “God is a concept,” said John Lennon in an insightful and courageous lyric, “by which we measure our pain.” Still many of us intuitively sense or intuitively “know” that there is a greater being operating in and through this universe. And we sense that we are an inseparable part of this “greater being.” This greater being is who we are beyond our limited and limiting concepts. “God” him/her self is another such thought-construct. Once we get beyond the motive of social regulation, the “god” that we have been taught to believe in is an intentional fabrication. We might as well believe in Santa Claus.

Our thinking is inherently dualistic. We think in terms of self and other, but what if there is no “other?” What if the whole basis of our thought process is fundamentally flawed? We generally like to regard god and religion as benign at worst, but perhaps they are not at all – or at least in the way they have evolved over time. Unlike Richard Dawkins and others in the strict atheist camp, however, I am not suggesting that the whole idea of god and religion is aberrant in the face of scientific materialism; far from it. Instead we need to evolve our concepts, transcend dualistic thought and recognize the truth of our own being. “God” is not some being separate from us but is at the core of each of us.

When we are able to silence the lower “monkey-mind,” known as manas in yogic terminology, we are inherently able to access higher intuitive wisdom and knowledge. Does this wisdom and knowledge come from some being outside of ourselves, perhaps from outer space aliens? Or does it come from a deeper part of our own being? The nondual source of our beings is perfectly omniscient. It doesn’t know things dualistically however. It knows immediately and nonconceptually. This mode of knowing is what we call compassionate love, as distinguished from self-centered love. It is unity consciousness.