The Point of Yoga - Why Do It?

Balance and poise in posture and life!

Why am I doing this?  What is the point of Yoga?

 Many years ago I had a dear friend who would challenge my use of words and how I behaved.  He encouraged me to think of things I took for granted; like choosing vegetables from the store.  One spring day, while choosing a wonderfully voluptuous and furry peach, he asked very dramatically, “Are you choosing the peach or is the peach choosing you?”  This story is dedicated to him, Edward Bruehl.

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              I had broken my neck in a car accident and the doctors declared I should have died.  Yet, there I was, five months later, taking my first yoga class.  I don’t know why I chose yoga.  The recommended rehab from the broken neck was unacceptable.  Pain killers and symptom management was not for me.  But when I began researching yoga and the ways it can help one’s health, my instincts simply felt drawn to it.  Perhaps my accident had opened a door for me.  I now had access to a place called surrender. Thus, I was, “letting the yoga choose me?”

              The funny thing about this first class was my choice beforehand.  Since the class was at 9AM, I ate breakfast an hour earlier.  Mistake.  It turns out the recommendation was to not eat 2-3 hours before yoga.  How could I have known?  I felt embarrassed at my sweat, my straining, and my total lack of flexibility.  My mind was constantly comparing.  “Oh, look at that girl twisting into that position.  I can never do that.”  The girl was doing a pose called Triangle.  As I tried the position, my breath got very tight, my chest felt tense, my breathing very shallow, and my eyes must have been bugging out of my head.  The teacher, Mrs. Glassmeyer, strolled over to me, quizzically, and in a concerned voice she asked, “What is your name?”  Red faced with exertion I managed to sputter out “Craig”.  Mrs. Glassmeyer then taught me that yoga for her is simply stretching and breathing.  She told me not to make it too complicated.  I decided it was easy for her to say.

              Then I shared with her my concerns about the neck and wondered what she thought.  She again looked concerned, and then a warm knowing look came over her face.  “You will be fine as long as you take it easy.  Watch your breath, make it a focus for your mind.  Remember, breathe deep and long, and relax.”

             To be honest, it took almost two or three years before I felt one-hundred-percent again from the broken neck.  My first breakthrough was the commitment to do yoga daily, no matter what.  The disclaimer, however, was that five minutes a day would count, but that was the minimum.   I was challenged by a Dan Millman videotape called “The Peaceful Warrior Workout” to do 30 days with that commitment.  He said one would not fall off the path by that momentum builder.  He was right.

          My first and involuntary “breakthrough” came a few months later.  I was practicing alternate nostril breathing, really just messing around, when I felt an intense focus into what I was doing, then, another reality presented itself.

          The feeling was of coming home from a long journey.  I felt totally embraced, totally full of a love so profound it crushed any doubt that there was a “higher power.”  I had been agnostic and very “show me the proof” kind of guy.  The proof came in a form unexpected- so different from all the things "good" about God I had been told about as a kid.  What I experienced was not the demanding, totalitarian, and spiteful god of the Old Testament.  No, it was like I was this Love; a Love shared with something I could not understand or pinpoint.  I knew yoga was the catalyst for this experience.

          Of course, the insight faded, and I chased the experience for another two years.  I was a “mad” spiritual scientist, trying to reproduce the experiment by attempting to reproduce the conditions that brought about “the insight.”  I saw value in doing yoga here.  It made the seeking seem softer, and lighter.

          It was a sobering commentary by Ram Dass that broke me in the midst of my mad searching addiction.   He stated that chasing those kind of experiences leads to suffering and bondage.  They are only experiences, so keep moving on!   That’s when I finally faced that nothing would reproduce it, and then I let go.  And yoga was a big help.  By holding postures, my mind was forced to remain focused on something, so when I got distracted by “seeking,” this focus allowed more space and freedom.

          Shortly after that, another insight arose.  It was in savasana (corpse pose in yoga – just lying down), lying on my back, after doing an intense hour of yoga. I was practicing breathing, watching one point in the air go in and out of the body.  "Suddenly, I was floating on a boat,” and a subtle yet discernible rhythm became perceptible.  Like a giant heartbeat, it swept all of my awareness into it, and when I became too mental, it would fade away.

What did not fade away was a strange yearning in my chest - in my heart.  Has anyone ever yearned?  It was a non-specific yearn, and it often followed a period of intense activity or work.  Could it be that something was using this “yearn” or sensation as a signaling device?  A teacher of mine had eluded that the yearn was coming from “the source.”  Was it outside myself?  It felt very intimate, so I rested in the paradox of it.

I began to see that yoga helped dig out layers of experience, unquestioned conditioning, and suppressed emotions I could not process clearly during my formative years.  I often asked myself what this yearning was?  I was instructed to get curious about what is naturally curious in me.  To basically rest in the inquiry and question, rather than finding happiness in the answers.

            The experience ended, as all do, and I was left with one of those awestruck feelings that I was really onto something.  What I did not know before was that by seeking, seeking something outside of myself, outside of right now, I would forever remain in bondage.  As a teacher told me many years later, "we are like fish swimming in the ocean of spirit, thinking we are thirsty and looking for the very water we swim in."  Talk about a huge relief at that retreat!  at this point in my life with yoga and inquiry I began to.

SEEING EDGES

           I began to consciously seek "walking the edge."  Yoga was part of this, and inquiry was becoming a valuable tool.  Some favorite edges to explore were the edge of sleep and wakefulness, the edge of highs from herbs (any type) with sobriety, and the edge of life and death surfing waves that could crush my body and my surfboard.  Yoga helped me walk the edge of where comfort left and tension began, of where the breath became strained, and where mindfulness faded, into wherever my mind wanted to be - other than right here.

DIFFICULTIES AS OPPORTUNITIES

         Yoga became another way to explore this edge.  My best teachers challenged all of us to focus on the postures or breathing exercises that were the hardest, not the ones we could do easily.  I hated this!  But it did teach me about where I was strong and weak.  In holding postures, for minutes sometimes, offered a grounding point for my very active and anxious mind.  That grounding point was my body and its sensations.  These difficult postures became opportunities for balance and growth, as I was to find out many years later.

FACING FEARS AND SEEING WHAT IS TRUE

          After seeing these edges more clearly and lucidly, I began to try consciously facing situations that were difficult, without going asleep at the wheel of life.  Like going into silence for three to ten days at a time, alone or in retreat with others.  Layers of thought and feeling I thought I had “processed” came up during these times, like old father issues.  One was a lucid daydream where I was beating my father’s chest, upset about him never being there for me emotionally as a child.

         I began to see that all my stories held no truth at all.  They were just stories, like a movie.  And then I had a strange dream. It came nine years after beginning yoga, before a nervous breakdown, a broken engagement, and the loss of a health community I had spent years building with a few other people.  The dream was ending, my sleep was ending, and I was passing down a long corridor, like the inside of a living whale’s belly, and the belly spoke to me!  It seemed to say, though it came in the form of feeling, “Time to go back to sleep.”  This eroded any foundation in me about what reality actually was.  I thought I was waking up?  But this voice said the opposite.  It was yet another reminder to question everything, question even what I called “being awake.”

REMOVE IDENTIFICATION WITH DREAM

           Like a detective, I seem to explore anything in health, spirit, or life that does not make sense.  Continuing to get triggered by my own recycled thoughts and feelings seemed inefficient.  In Buddhism they talk about resistance and attachment cause things to stick, and remain in place.  “What we resist, persists.”  It feels counter-intuitive to jump right into uncomfortable feelings.   To actually feel them, to let them be, allowing some love to shine on them, like how a mother loves her child, is the only way I know of to release the resistance.  It definitely worked for me.  One teacher, many years later, talked about this process.  He called it identifying with one’s illusions.  I looked back at the feeling of “being identified” with a movie.  We all know those times where we are not in our bodies, when a movie is so good, we become so enamored with the movie that we “escape to the movies.”  But we always come back to our own body and awareness, don’t we?  The one constant is our own self as a reference point.  And yoga is a big help with this.

THE POINT OF YOGA

         Over the twenty years following the car accident in which I broke my neck, I explored many methods of self-help, counseling, diet, herbal medicine, yoga, and other techniques.  I discovered what many healers call, “the layers.”

          I write today, 16 days after another life threatening accident on a bicycle, and I see Life as initiating many of the things I had thought I was the one exploring.  Yoga has acted as a bridge between what is unconscious in me, and what is conscious.  Perhaps Life was just awareness, and yoga was a tool it used?  What I once thought of accidents, coincidences, or strange circumstances, became clear they may not have been.  I realized more recently that clarity on the level of attention and awareness is a pre-requisite for seeing deeper layers of consciousness.  And that is why sitting in silence, spending time alone, or whatever we choose to do or be in our down time, offers more clarity.  Deeper layers revealed themselves as I was able to “digest” them.  Deeper layers reveal themselves to be digested.

And finally, for me, this is the point of yoga, at least for me: to help me see more clearly the foggy areas that were not awake, like when we wake up in the morning feeling groggy and dull and are not super sharp.  Bringing my mind back to points of attention like the body, the breath, and sensations are like focus points, so as not to be caught up in the endless stream of diversions and distractions we all know about.  They are ok, let’s be clear about that, but for some of us, the desire is to go deeper, and see things that would normally be unavailable in “the leaf blown in the wind” consciousness.

Sadhana

          This word is used in India for yoga, and preparatory work before meditation.  Yoga is a prep for a relaxed body, an open mind and seeing more clearly.  The old Vedics, and the ones who developed yoga, are said to have made yoga not a thing in and of itself, but a way to navigate very very subtle levels of awareness.  This is why many schools of spirit in India say “one must have a guru.”  A guru is only a guide, in the best sense of the word.  He/she points at things we may not have seen.  As will a good yoga teacher.  They may challenge our assumptions about what we are doing or being.  Yoga can offer this also.  I found out a saying that fits this, “The Truth is self-evident.”  Direct experience is the best teacher.  No one can offer what we see for ourselves, and feel and taste, and explore.  The roots of the word yoga, mean “union.”  And seeing and feeling this through own experience offers something we may never get from being spoon-fed truths or by going to a seminar, or talking without  feeling and exploring what the words are pointing to.

 Easy for you to say!

         I once thought to myself, at my first yoga class, how easy it was for my teacher to say, “let go,” or “remain present,” or “don’t make things so complicated.”  Over twenty years later, I sit in a different chair, so to speak.  I see where she was pointing, and I acknowledge my own words will feel the same to those reading this.  If I could offer one thing in closure, it would be these exercises:

*When we feel out of sorts, overwhelmed, or stressed, it may be too late to ask for help or make grand attempts at being present or loving or to let go.  Use awareness like a lens, look wider and larger.  Look and feel.

*Life is a practice, so is yoga.  Remember the old cliché, “practice makes perfect?”  Just as a bricklayer must lay one brick at a time, so some of us must lay a foundation daily and as we remember to.

*Ask to remember to be present more.  Ask with authority of knowing it is already on its way.  And feel gratitude for something, even as small as the fact that you can feel anything.  Abundance builds on abundance, not on wishing something away, or clinging to things as they pass.

The Three P’s of Creating: Present, positive, personal

Always use present-tense statements about your life, positive ones like, “I am free of this ___________,” not “I cannot eat that or do this.”  Or “I wish I had $1000 next month.”  And finally, keep it personal, do not wish for something outside of your experience.

As we practice, my wish for you all is to see the point of yoga for yourselves.