Om Shanti: A Yoga Blog

Hi there. I just stumbled upon your yoga bog and was so excited. Nice work! I am a write for Fitugar (http://fitsugar.com/), a health and fitness blog. I and am also a yoga instructor.

I thought you might like to check out my 2 yoga groups. One is called Yoga Stretch and Tell (http://teamsugar.com/group/110449) where you can share stories and questions that are yoga related. The other group is called It’s a Stretch: Fit’s Yoga Challenge (http://teamsugar.com/group/71612). Here I post pictures of yoga poses and challenge others to send pictures of themselves doing them.

Warm regards,
Jenny Sugar
Editor, fitsugar.com

Hi there!

I’ve been learning how to balance in the middle of the room for handstand (for the longest time!) and the engines brought me here. I really like and very much appreciate how much effort you’ve willingly and selflessly put into the clips, and the clear and concise description of the poses. Very inspiring! I’ve also enjoyed reading your views on yoga. Thank you so much!

Blessings from sunny Singapore,
Shirley

I appreciate the thoughtfulness with which you’re exploring this profound teaching on your blog, which a friend pointed out to me this morning. I’d like to share a few thoughts from an article I wrote last year, slightly modified to address your concerns:

Many have asked if citta-vrtti-nirodha is a nihilistic, life-denying suppression of the mind. There are four important aspects that should be considered in this regard.

First, does nirodha actually mean ’suppression’? As the yogi continually ‘yokes’ attention back to the ‘object’ – be it bodily or breath sensation, luminosity, or other phenomena – he/she is simply dropping back from the usual stream of bodily and mental reactivity that produce the sense of how ‘oneself’ seems to ‘be’ at any given moment – back into the moment itself. Because these patterns of reactivity are so familiar, well-practiced and automatic, the initial attempt is fraught with resistance and can be frustratingly difficult. With practice, though, the yogi finds that the process of nirodha begins to unfold with less and less effort. At a decisive point, all effort drops away, paving the way for almost all forms of effort to soon be recognized as suffering itself! So only those who haven’t gone far enough down the path to experience this will reduce nirodha to ’suppression’.

Remember the perennial image of a glass of muddy water: let it be still, and the particles will settle to the bottom. When they do, the actual nature of the water becomes visible for the first time. It turns out the water was clear all along. Just as importantly, the forces that caused the grains to settle – gravity and entropy – are completely natural and ever-present, merely requiring the right conditions to take effect.

In fact, nirodha doesn’t really connote ‘suppression’ at all – in the process Patanjali is describing, it simply means ‘cessation’. Nowhere does he counsel the yogi to crush down any sort of mental activity, but instead to awaken from it to some aspect of the here and now – the ‘object’ – again and again. Today we might even call it ‘yoyo-ga’!

Furthermore, cessation is a process for which we all have an aptitude to some extent, just as surely as we’re wired for distraction. It’s just that this aptitude is far less developed than other ones, except by yogis. The Buddha hinted at the naturalness with which it emerges and develops – bhavana – in describing how with skillful application the mind bends and inclines toward cessation just as the Ganges flows to the sea. Patanjali put it a different way: the phenomenal world exists to reveal its true nature, and the revelaton is always close at hand.

The second thing to consider before judging yoga to be life-denying is this: what life are we talking about? In the cultivation of yoking one realizes he is actually coming closer and closer to life as it is in the here and now. Whatever the object may be, it is not static but rather unfolding in real time, and the yoga of ‘yoking’ to it brings the yogi into an unprecedented intimacy with how things are. This process-directed knowledge is of a radically different nature than the ‘reality’ comprised of mental labels, concepts, and selfness. Through the cessation process the yogi begins to see through his usual, nonstop identification with that mentality, and to understand that his sense of past, future, and the continuity that seems to unite them – forming the basis for self and world – are but ongoing fabrications of mind. To frame our query another way, is the unexamined identity that asks the very question about life affirmation and nihilism actually doing a better job of affirming life than the direct knowing – jnana – possible through yoga? It should be self-evident that any useful answer to the question will only occur to those who have experienced both.

A third thing to consider: is there any validity to the assertion that our mind and senses distort ‘things’? As yoking proceeds and gnosis spontaneously develops, what becomes visible is the contingent way that phenomena arise. This is the true meaning of dharma, in fact: the causal processes that appear to us as the ‘things’ of nature – self and world, great and small. The word dharma arises from the verb root, dhr, signifying the way things are ‘held’ or ’supported’, i.e., not simply existing as eternal substances or essences in the ether. We experience phenomena as things with self-existence because that’s the way our consciousness operates. Thus, when I look down at my teacup, I see a thing, because I have a thing-producing, proliferative (prapanca/papanca) consciousness.

Let’s be clear: Patanjali would never deny the cup’s reality – he was not an idealist and took pains to distance himself from that strain of thinking among his Yogacara Buddhist contemporaries. It’s just that the forms and mentality known to one as the teacup are representations projected as one’s consciousness of the cup. The whole world lies within this fathom-long body, as the Buddha famously proclaimed. Everything we know is contingent, therefore, on the convergence of an external basis (the processes comprising the cup), an internal basis (the processes comprising the eye or other sense organ), and the consciousness associated with that mode of perception (the processes comprising visual consciousness, for example). The Buddha was the first human being I know of to clarify this relationship, and the Yoga-Sutra also addresses it, albeit with a different emphasis.

Thus, all instances of sensorimental ‘contact’ are contingent, and the ‘things’ that ‘impinge’ have no ultimacy, just the particular,conditioned appearance or behavior of that moment.. As we’ve known since 1927, thanks to Werner Heisenberg, this is even true of subatomic particles. So, perhaps it would be better to say not that our consciousness distorts things, but rather that it fabricates ‘things’ out of ‘not-things’ like processes and relationships. This crystallization of processes into an illusory ‘thingness’ or existence – what the Buddha called ‘birth’ – is of great value, of course. Like the ice on a river, it allows us to walk around on top in all directions, but it conceals the true nature and momentum of life flowing just beneath the surface.

Finally, the fourth thing to consider is whether the yogi, once arrived at cessation, remains there. Some have gone so far as to infer that cessation abruptly terminates the conditioned stream that had been known as the person, resulting in death! Happily, this doesn’t seem to have happened to Patanjali, the Buddha, or any number of other realized yogis, however.

In fact, the initial cessation experience is usually described as occurring in an inconceivably brief instant. Since thoughts so short-lived rarely carry much information, suspicion might arise that a single instant could convey a vast, transformative knowledge about oneself and reality. Of course, one must remember that other kinds of epiphany are perfectly familiar to us – flashes of insight or ’seeing through’ (vipasyana/vipassana in Buddhist tradition) that are of a different nature than conceptual knowledge. They’re not initially ideas at all, but momentary glimpses beyond thought, beneath the surface. There are many contexts in which these glimpses can occur – religion, art, sexuality, sports, nature, family – and the insight is almost always then associated with its context. If the yogi rigorously adheres to the here and now, though, it is these very contextual notions that must keep dropping away – even the notion that one is doing yoga. Taken far enough, the path arrives at a complete, if momentary, cessation of all contextualizing: citta-vrtti-nirodha.

And what does nirodha briefly but decisively reveal? The Unconditioned. Whether symbolizing this objectively (nirvana/nibbana) or subjectively (isvara/purusa), the discursive mind cannot fully wrap itself around the fact that the Unconditioned is actually neither objective nor subjective. Both the Buddha and Patanjali were careful to qualify their respective terms, understanding them as mere designations, and it is mostly philosophers who are likely to suffer any conflict between inevitable notions of dualism and non-dualism inextricably bound up in the symbols themselves.

Why? Because from the perspective of the Unconditioned the Conditioned can be truly seen for what it is. Knowing firsthand the utter difference (kaivalya) between the ‘two that are not two’ is the great power – discrimination, or viveka – conferred by yogic praxis. The yogi emerges from cessation and continues to proceed as a stream of contingent processes, but now he knows it.

Imagine a museum-goer delighting in the colorful characters and setting of Seurat’s La Grand Jetee. If he comes close enough to the canvas he’ll realize that the top hats and parasols are nothing more than aggregations of tiny, round dots of paint. He can always step back, though, and once again be able to visualize the images. Forever after, though, he will know that they are only being made possible – ‘upheld’ – through the constructive processes of consciousness, and have no ultimacy in and of themselves. He also will realize that this is not a private matter, but true of everyone else in the room and perhaps all beings everywhere.

Although the great yogic teachings point to this exalted and liberating knowledge, they are nothing more than maps. The mind cannot conceive what lies beyond its own cessation through yoga anymore than what lies beyond death. Citta-vrtti-nirodha , therefore, is a path that must be taken and gone down.
© 2007, 2008 Chip Hartranft

hi there
just love your blog and photos,,you are amazing,i am a yoga teacher in marrakech. would love your opinions on my blog
namaste
aisah

hi your site is awesome. the videos are very helpful. even if i don’t understand everything on this blog because my english is not so good, i really love to read here. thank you!

greets from germany
m.

Hi Folks,

Just wanted to let you know that I am teaching the latest yoga class in the Los Angeles metro area “Late Night” classes every Tues/Thurs for 10:45 PM – 12 Midnight, at Power Yoga West in Santa Monica. (www.poweryoga.com)

We are getting about 25 people per night and I think it may help your readers who are busy into the late evening to know that yes, here in Los Angeles, we even have a class which starts at 10:45 PM and which will help them wind-down from their long busy day.

The class is very mellow, though with some challenges, and something for all levels. My site: http://www.yogainsight.net

Thanks for sharing with your readers!

Namaste,

Etan

If you ever decide to do book reviews on your blog in addition to studio reviews, I have a great suggestion for you–”Enlightenment for Idiots” by Anne Cushman. It’s a great novel, about yoga!

In the name of full disclosure, I am the personal assistant for this writer. However, I knew I wanted to work for this writer because her book is smart, funny, and inspiring. “Enlightment for Idiots” revolves around the life of Amanda, a twenty-nine year old yoga instructor and freelance writer who gets assigned to write a “For Idiots” guide to Enlightment. On the way, Amanda contends with a boyfriend who doesn’t call back, an unplanned pregnancy, and trendy gurus who don’t quite “get it.” Ms. Cushman is an experienced yoga and meditation teacher, so this book is infused with a deep spiritual wisdom and knowledge of yogic philosophy and practice– however, the difference between this book and other spiritual books I’ve read is that this book takes on subject matter I can actually relate to.

I was so glad to come across this spiritual and entertaining read. As far as I know, it’s the only one of it’s kind.

Hi! I’ve been reading your wrist-pain entries, and I have a question for you…

I have wrist pain in my left wrist from an old injury, and I’m taking a Vinyasa Power Flow class. I have been modifying Plank Pose, Chaduranga, and Up-Dog by making fists, and for me, that relieves the pain. But I’m having a problem flowing from Up-Dog (on my fists) into Down-Dog. It feels unnatural and uncomfortable to do Down-Dog on my fists, and actually, my wrist is not bothered when I do Down-Dog on flat palms.

So, I’m wondering how this flow “should” look when you modify and do it on fists. Could you post some pictures or a video of how you would do Vinyasa Sun Salutations on fists?

Thank you for the informative bolg! You’ve already written the best collection of ideas for wrist-pain that I’ve found!!

wow, i am so glad i found this site.
what a clean layout, awesome inspiring posts.
its now my favorite yoga blog.
thank you.

one small thing.
update more! lol

thanks for being you
thomas patrick fusco

this is our planet..
this is us..
namaste.