Fear Not the Edge

How do you know that your yoga practice is working? A teacher of mine once replied to this question perfectly. The answer has nothing to do with being able to bind in Marichyasana D or come up from drop backs. In fact, it is not a surprise that it has nothing to do with linear accomplishment of asana at all. Obsessed as we can sometimes get over “progress” in asana, the real power of asana lies in its ability to transform the subtle body, loosening the hold of karmic patterns and stepping up the frequency of our vibration.
I’ve been watching it this summer. For the past three months, I’ve practised outside every morning, alone. Blue sky above, sun cresting over the mountain, sound of the sea in the distance, ripe figs dangling overhead. With plenty of time on my hands and nobody waiting for me to do something else, I often do three hours of asana. As a result, I’m going deeper into poses. (I must say, the heat helps too! As Pattabhi Jois once famously said, “Even iron bends if you heat it!”)

I’ve also had plenty of time to observe the effects of this deeper practice on all aspects of my mind and body. It’s been interesting. For me—and I can only speak from my own experience–the power of asana happens at the edge, where I’m going past my comfort zone into new areas of resistance. This is where I experience a heightening of awareness. This is where I need to go in order to feel afterwards that blissful state where borders become blurred . . . because consciousness has relaxed its hold upon the particular.

I want to make clear what I mean by edge. Since my surgery, I understand this better than ever. I’m not talking about trying to push past the physical limitations of the body (which everyone will experience somewhere). The edge is something different. You need to find it in your own body, and it is only by dedicated practice that the discernment comes. The edge is that place where the physical body resists because knots of density in the subtle body have penetrated into the tissues and created a barrier. It is not a matter of bone shape or ligament length. Though it manifests in the physical body, the source of the resistance belongs to the subtle body, to a lowered frequency of vibration, which makes us dense, rigid in the body and closed in the mind. It is these knots of psychic density that keep us going round and round the same karmic loops in our life. And it is by dissolving that density that we make possible a stepping up of our vibration, an evolution of our consciousness, and a transformation of our life.

For me personally, it is centred now in my shoulders. Some of this resistance comes from my having been on crutches for nearly a year, a logical and purely physical consequence. But the real resistance goes much deeper. Breaking it up feels like glaciers shattering, and the emotion released feels very, very old, definitely beyond the container of this life span. For the past few weeks, it has felt like a knot in the gut, ready to burst into tears at the slightest provocation. But that never happens. The internal pressure just keeps increasing, fed by the poignancy of the day to day, and this “opening” of the shoulders, which really signifies a corresponding expansion of the subtle body and stepping up of frequency, which is taking time for me to assimilate.

So asana does matter after all, but not in the way many people look at it. The efficacy of an asana cannot be judged by its surface appearance. Deep practice looks different on different bodies. And what it looks like is not an indication of its depth anyway. You discern the edge from the inside. It is not something others can see. Skill in teaching comes from observing the peripheral indications in your students’ bodies. You learn by experience how to guide your students to their edge when they are ready to go there.

Teachers and practitioners alike can discern a lot about their encounter with the edge by the quality of their savasana afterwards. Coming out of a deep practice resembles waking up from a refreshing sleep. For a moment upon awakening from a really good sleep, you forget who, what and where you are. For a second, there is just consciousness. Pure. Unattached. And then in the next second, you remember. Identity returns, and with it the call to action, whatever the agenda may be. You get out of bed and start your day. That is sleep.

Yoga, however, involves much more. Though advanced states of yoga and deep sleep both unravel ego identity, they are definitely not the same thing! Sleep does not go anywhere: you wake up, ordinary reality comes flooding back, and you pick up where you left off, acting and reacting according to your karmic patterning.

Yoga practice–when it is working—does not leave you at the same place. The change may be miniscule, but you begin to notice it. Transformation is happening. You do not pick up where you left off. You are different, your life is different, karmic patterns are shifting in all kinds of interesting ways.

Asana performed with the correct intention plays a vital role in this, because going deeper into asana takes you deeper into the subtle body. Strong asana is powerful! It functions like a tool. It begins by kneading, stretching, and opening the physical tissues, but then it moves deeper to alter the vibratory patterns that comprise the subtle body. So good news for all you asana fanatics! The hunger for more asana is not necessarily an ego desire. That hunger is genuine yoga when it comes from your personal encounter with the edge.

You feel it afterwards in savasana. Here is where you can measure the depth in your own practice. Does your savasana take you to a place where you forget for a moment who, what and where you are? (But this is not sleep. You are wide-awake, in an altered state of consciousness.) Do you feel the vibrations of energy running through your body, pulsing into every cell and then beyond? Do thoughts flow like a river, becoming dream-like and then passing away altogether or merging into sensory awareness, so that birdsong and wind are also a part of you? Upon coming out of Savasana, does it take a good while for you to come back into your ordinary thinking mind?

These are all signs that your asana practice is efficacious. You may need to hold your ankles in kapotasana to get to this place. Or it might happen for you after a simple bhujangasana. Actually, some schools of yoga teach that the more “advanced” poses are necessary only for those with greater density. More evolved souls require only basic poses. (According to that school, I must be very dense!)

Then after savasana, it’s time for you to get on with your daily life. So back to the original question: what are the indications that your yoga is working? My teacher put it very succinctly. Out of your practice, you feel both profound indifference and profound contentment . . . and these two go together. Whatever the quality of your practice, whether deep, superficial, long, short, distracted or focused, you move onwards with a sublimely indifferent disregard. Coupled with that, and this is most important, is a profound state of contentment: that free-floating joy not connected to anything in particular and infusing every aspect of your life.

Santosha (contentment) was the subject of my last blog earlier in the summer, shortly after I arrived in Sardinia. Now, at the end of the summer, I’m in a very different place. But I have to laugh. All the “issues” I was dealing with then (workmen, no car, wifi woes, etc.) have not been resolved. Nothing miraculously happened to change the surface circumstances of my life. Instead, those things have simply ceased to matter. And my state of contentment has never been deeper.

Much has flowed from the depth of practice, particularly this last month. The knot in my gut began to ease last week, the internal pressure softening as a few tears finally came. I was lying on the beach, reading a very moving collection of short stories all on the theme of motherhood: the sea before me, the sky above, the hills at my back. Memories of my own mother and my two grandmothers became entangled into these stories so poignant and tragic. Now I too am both mother and grandmother, contributing to the psychic landscape of young ones recently arrived into my life. But the tears were for more than these stories.

Though we’re each caught up in our individual narratives, all our stories overlap. They intertwine into one vast multi-dimensional story. It became very clear to me in that moment that the expansion of my subtle body coming out of practice is not “me” getting bigger, but me getting smaller, me unravelling into the finer elements, “my story” merely a mental construct that has lost its internal structure. My stories, your stories, the author’s stories, they all weave into the same cloth. The “my” we attach to them is a device of fiction. This was not a thought I had there on the beach. It was an embodied sensation. A swim in the sea sealed it. The particular story that brought on the tears served as catalyst, but it was merging into the sea that released it all into the bigger picture. Tears came with that release.

And that brings me to my final point about yoga practice. The “container” in which we practice really matters. Once again, I can only speak from my own experience; for others it can certainly be different. But being so close to nature this summer and being so much alone have definitely contributed to the power of my practice. It is something very elemental. I can count on my hands the times this summer I’ve stepped into a car. Weak wifi has kept me from doing all but the most essential computer work. And there’s been no point checking my phone in the morning, because I have no reception. Instead, the thinking mind goes quiet and the body rhythms merge with the cycles of nature.

Sea, sky, wind, sun, rock, wild boar, figs, peaches . . . these are the textures of my days. The intense heat of midsummer (which I love!) has passed. Days are shorter now, with a touch of coolness evening and morning. Afternoon sunshine is dazzling, with a fresh breeze off the sea and the sky an endless blue. Mediterranean autumn has a particular poignancy, because it carries so much summer with it. But autumn is here too. The leaves on the fig tree are yellowing. The village is nearly deserted. The outside world is ravaged with horrific violence and tragedy that I hear of through distant carriers. But here the ravaging belongs only to the elements, waves pounding against rock now that the wind is up, wild boar rooting into the earth, sun shrivelling the last few figs remaining on the tree.

Summer passing brings on a bit of the bittersweet. And yes, I feel it too. Yet the darkness, contraction and death–all that autumn signifies–contains also a beacon of hope. It is a time for setting down roots, for going inwards and drawing from the stillness. Then out of darkness comes the light. Out of death comes new life, both merely phases of the same Shakti, who is ever abiding. Nature works in cycles, not lines. The yoga tradition puts it into the context of the great yugas, the great ages of time that keep turning and returning. Autumn signifies this perpetual return. The Celtic tradition understands this too, and so celebrates the New Year in autumn.

So this is where I am now, suspended here at the end of summer as if on a high note, knowing this reality soon will close down for me, but so totally here in the most breath-taking beauty of this moment that it could not be otherwise.

Powerful asana has me at this edge, which though not always comfortable, has made possible an opening so that oceans of light could flood in, dissolving some of that stubborn density and allowing me to rest in a vastness made just that bit more accessible by the energy of this most extraordinary container.

It is beyond words, beyond thought. It just is.
“Il mare negli occhi la collina nel cuore”
(Sea in the eyes and hills in the heart).

And the peace I feel with it all is quite near to perfect.

Om shanti