Evolution of a Practice

When I was a child I could not sit still - I was always running, jumping, climbing, playing, exploring…

But there was one activity that kept me motionless: I would sit for hours fishing by a lake. Here I would enter into a kind of meditation - all my attention fixed on a small float, waiting for a fish to bite….

Many years later, my teacher described an auspicious visualisation that one could use for meditation practice - he told us to visualise a lake with a surface unruffled by wind, a perfectly reflective mirror. In this lake one could visualise lotus flowers, perhaps a swan and a small island with a temple… this was almost exactly the image from my childhood (no temple)!

I spent a great deal of time out in nature at that age and somehow felt very connected to her. At times it felt as though there was no clear boundary between my internal world and what I perceived externally. I dreamed (predicted/created?) what would happen and I was an active, waking participant in the formation of my dreams.

Sometimes when I looked at natural phenomena, the edges of objects were not sharp, but there was a golden glow or corona similar to the what I have seen in Kirlian photography. What I experienced perceptually and in dream felt totally real and concrete.

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Around the age of 10, as my intellect became more developed and I started to read the newspaper, I became aware of the horrors of life - human atrocities, warfare, famine, genocide, murder etc.. As if overnight, my wonderful experiences in nature disappeared and I became filled with darkness and despair. It was as if I had experienced the fall from innocence in the garden of Eden and had become aware of the nature of suffering.

The reality I was now exposed to was full of darkness. The future was bleak and depressing and I developed a feeling of foreboding, alienation, not belonging, or not wanting to participate in a life of misery. The existence that I now felt was so much less real than what I had experienced before.

This was the beginning of my search for yoga. I wanted to find my way back to thot innocent bliss and sense of truth that I had previously experienced. It took me decades of searching, and even after I had found what I was looking for, it still took me decades to properly recognise it. In the meantime I continued to be a bit hyperactive - whether it was through physical activity or mental gymnastics.

I found yoga in my late 20s but even though my interest was in meditation, I insisted on continuing to jump around from pose to pose like a monkey looking for the just the right spot to sit. Even after I started a sitting practice, my posture practice continued to move, like a wheel which once starts spinning takes time to slow down and stop, even though it is no longer being driven.

Then the pandemic closed my yoga shala. I had felt an obligation to continue practicing what I was preaching. But now I stopped teaching, I finally felt it was OK just to focus on sitting meditation exclusively. Although Pattabhi Jois taught me so many postures, he also told me that only one was necessary, if it was perfect. A perfect posture, according to him, is one in which you can sit for three hours comfortably. This became my practice.

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According to yoga, the mind is a physical, though subtle, organ. If you keep jumping around, keep moving around, no matter how much you try to quieten your mind, it continues to spin. We do certainly need some exercise to keep healthy and reduce the stress of living, but how much?

According to Ayurveda, one should only use 50% of one’s energy or strength in exercise: when one begins to sweat, it is time to stop. Profuse sweating is not necessary, is even a detriment to yoga, unless one is going through a detoxification process. Once one feels the prana moving, once one has a sensation one is “flying” or “buzzing” one may sit and enjoy the energy, one may utilise it for meditation.

Many people do not stop at this point, but need to keep gong until they melt into a puddle of sweat and pass out in shavasana. Unfortunately, good guidance in the path of yoga is not very common and although many yoga practitioners are attracted to meditation, they often get quickly frustrated and give up. For most people yoga is just an exercise system.

In my own practice, I eventually recognised that even the efforts at pranayama created some stress in my mind that interfered with my meditation. I have found that I now prefer just to sit. My mind gets stirred by activity.

It is better for me to sit very early in the morning before I engage in any activity or too much thinking. I also find that my one simple posture allows me to release tension or pain in any part of my body and can indicate the underlying mental tensions that cause the physical stress.

It took a very long time to find my way back. I had been searching in the wrong place!