I’m a Soul Man!

Posted on September 8, 2015 by admin

Although the word ‘soul’ is used in many fascinating, confusing, and contradictory ways, soul always seems to imply some form of integration or relationship between the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the sensuous, or to use the advaita terminology, between the formless and the world of forms. My first ‘felt sense’ of soul came from the Soul music that arose in the 1950’s and 60’s, combining elements of Gospel and its spiritual aspirations with the more sexual/sensual Blues. Nothing better than feeling the presence of Jesus through all the chakras! Thank you Sam and Dave! This made a whole lot more sense to me than the Catholic image of soul as an ‘untainted purity’ that was continually being stained by unending chain of sins, and had to be constantly cleansed by some priestly dry cleaner. My soul wanted heaven and earth to dance together as one. But what exactly is the soul?

The outer, objective world of the senses is relatively easy to describe. We can see and feel oak trees, ocean waves and fire. Finding words to articulate the inner subjective world, the domain of the mystic, the shaman, the poet and the somanaut, is much more difficult, but soul is a word seemingly used by everyone. Soul has recently returned to my vocabulary as three very different perspectives on soul have been offered to me and I am digesting, integrating and hoping to incorporate them into my teaching on the spiritual unfolding currently underway.

Adyashanti uses soul in a very Buddhist/Mystical Christian way. John O’Donohue has a Celtic/Druidic view on the soul, and Hank Wesselman and Jill Kuykendall speak of soul from the Shamanic point of view in general, and the Hawaiian Kahuna tradition specifically.

Adya uses soul as a synonym for what in beginning meditation is known as the witness, or witnessing consciousness. For pre-meditation consciousness, awareness and what arises in awareness are confused, or undifferentiated. Entangled in this confusion is also the self identity. I am my psychological content. All the chatter that goes on in the mind is me and this is a highly unpleasant place to be for very long. In level 1 meditation, or mindfulness, we are taught to just notice or be a witness to what is arising in the mind, without getting involved in the story. This begins the teasing apart of Purusha (soul) and Prakriti, creation, that is the foundation of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

Mindfulness is not so easy in the beginning as the mental habit is to react to almost everything that shows up and to totally forget about just witnessing. Restraining the urge to react, what Patanjali calls citta vrtti nirodhah, takes discipline, tapas or abhyasa, and patience. We teach self discipline and restraint to children, so it is a basic human practice in the beginning. Also, beginners on the yoga/meditation path recognize that ‘mind’ is addicted to having ‘some thing’ to grasp as an anchor, or place to stabilize itself. Therefore, a second aspect of beginning meditation is added.

Concentration practice, also known as dharana – dhyana – samadhi and samyama in the yoga tradition, helps root the nervous system in the world of form so it can relax, feel safe, and begin to trust in ‘letting go’ into stillness. The biological instinct for survival does not necessarily trust letting go. If you are a bunny rabbit grazing peacefully in a field, letting go into your bunny bliss may lead to becoming someone else’s dinner. An edge of anxiety and fear, just in case, keep the bunny genes alive. We have to learn to override that instinct to find the depths of our soul.

With time, we eventually begin to recognize that witnessing, or awareness is actually different from what is arising in awareness. We open to a deep, vibrant stillness, unbounded in space or time. We discover eternity as being ever-present. This is what Adyashanti calls ‘soul’ level consciousness. This level can also be called the masculine, transcendent, or formless consciousness and its discovery is the beginning of spiritual awakening. The ‘sacred emerges into conscious awareness not as another form, but as limitless eternity.

John O’Donahue uses the word ‘soul’ to describe the deep urge of our embodied self to merge with the infinite and links it with the heart. Soul is “a presence from the divine world where intimacy has no limit or barrier.” And as it is linked to the infinite, it can never be truly captured or held. “All you can ever achieve is a sense of your soul. You gain little glimpses of its light, colors, contours. You feel the inspiration of its possibilities and the wonder of its mysteries.”

In this sense, the soul is not an aspect of the physical world, the world we see, feel and directly contact, but it is in the realm of form, as it can change, mutate, grow and evolve. It inhabits the subtle realm, underground, hidden away. Poet David Whyte defines soul as “the indefinable essence of a person’s spirit and being. It can never be touched and yet the merest hint of its absence causes immediate distress.” Depth-psychologist James Hillman adds “the search for the soul always leads into the ‘depths’.” John O’Donohue’s book “Beauty” was written to help nurture the soul. “The human soul hungers for beauty.” And “we feel most alive in the presence of the Beautiful for it meets the need of the soul.” This use of soul is a lot juicier than Adya’s, but Adya uses the word ‘spirit’ to integrate the feminine as a realization of the soul. Same inner experience, slightly different wording.

As yoga students and somanauts, we can dive into the depths of our own souls through the water element, the metaphor for emotions, the inner world and the unconscious mind. Poseidon, or Neptune to the Romans has his trident, the symbol of the trifurcated muladhara/earth element, as he prepares to plunge in the depths of the oceans. The unconscious hold our fears and anxieties, as well as our unrealized higher potentials. If we want to wake up, we must take the plunge and liberate the soul from the habit and conditioning of feeling separate and lost. Mindfulness, or the awakening of “soul”, provides swimming lessons so we do not drown during our dives into the inner ocean. Beauty, awe and delight steer the soul safely through the turbulance of our life experiences. Start in the shallow end of the pool, and work your way into the deeper waters. A mindful and juicy asana practice is even better as it will help you become a very proficient navigator of the water element.

The Shamanic world has a complex view of ‘soul’. Although there are subtle variations on soul among various indigenous cultures across the planet, almost all agree that the human has three souls, or three aspects or levels of soul, that are involved in the reincarnation process and our life journeys. The following is from the Hawaiian Kahuna tradition as taught by Hank Wesselman and Jill Kuykendall in The Spiritwalker Teachings. (Kate and I will be diving more deeply into these waters when we study with them in person next month at Esalen. I find their teachings very similar to my own experiences with yoga and lots of fun to play with.

In the Kahuna tradition, the three souls, the Soul Cluster, are the Celestial, The Body and the Mental, and health and well being occur when all three are aligned and working together harmoniously.

The Celestial Soul, also known as the Spiritual Soul, Oversoul, or Angelic Soul are all names for the Immortal Soul known as Paramatman in the Vedic tradition. It’s essence is infinite light and at incarnation the Oversoul sends a holographic seed of light to awaken and enliven the other two mortal souls. This energy is transferred to the other two souls in the form of breath, or spiritus. Although everpresent, the Celestial Soul remains hidden from the other two until they attain a level of harmonious integration on the mortal plane. Then, seeds of further growth and development can be planted in the mortal souls to bring out higher and higher dimensions of consciousness into the world.

This seed first awakens and engages with the Physical, Earth or Body Soul as breath or prana. The Body Soul comes from two sources, mother and father. Not only do the sperm and egg come together on the physical plane, but also a psychic/energetic field from each of the parents combine to receive the seed from the Oversoul. The Body Soul carries the evolutionary intelligence at a cellular and organic level and handles all physiological functioning, including the urge for continuous growth, healing and development. Memories as well as all of our learned behaviors are stored here. The Body Soul is analagous to a combination of the anamaya, pranamaya and manomaya koshas in the Vedic tradition.

The Body Soul also is involved with all forms of perception, including the inner world as well as the outer. It is always honest, as it perceives without editing, interpreting or assigning meaning. And most importantly for our future explorations, the Body Soul contains the gateways to the inner world of the shaman. Because it is the perceiver, it is the giver and receiver of all shamanic experiences. (This image is from Michael Williams’ web site on prehistoric shamanism.)

Very much like computer hardware, the Body Soul follows directions and can be further programmed and this becomes a possible source of problems, as it operates in concert with the Mental Soul, which has access to ideas, imagination and creativity.

The Mental Soul or Ego Soul tends to remain in the background in young children as they are very much body centered in the early years, but begins to emerge as the child begins to question the world. The Mental Soul is the source of thoughts, creativity and imagination, assigns meaning to experiences, makes decisions and acts to guide the Soul Complex on the life journey. These choices are directed by the beliefs and the self sense that arises in the Mental Soul from our life experiences. This self sense, or ego, (constructed by the ahamkara), responds to both positive and negative experiences. Positive ones build self confidence and a strong sense of personal power, and our life choices flow from wisdom, compassion and creativity. Negative experiences such as various types of trauma can lead to a damaged self sense, emotional pathology, and life choices based on fear, aggression or self loathing. These traumatized belief structures also interfere with the Body Soul’s capacity to sustain health by sending it bad software leading to a debilitation of energy and illness.

The Body Soul can give feed back to the Mental Soul about these imbalances, as it is always honest. But the Mental Soul, in its creativity, can lie to itself. It can distort the direct information the Body Soul to sustain its own belief patterns. The question for healing becomes how do we begin the allow these two Souls to work in synchrony? The Mental Soul has to learn how to listen objectively to the Body Soul, to trust it’s information, and to discover the inherent power in the physiological wisdom that is at the heart of the Body Soul. A key aspect to the wisdom of the Body Soul is the Shamanic Gateway, and we will go into this in more detail in a further posting. When the Body Soul and Mental Soul are in synch, the Oversoul can be seen and heard, and the next level of spiritual growth can proceed.

Patanjali on the Mat

Posted on August 18, 2015 by admin

An embodied yoga practice allows the possibility of decoding the Sanskrit lessons imparted in the Yoga Sutras without too many trips to the dictionary, because yoga is ultimately experiential and not a collection of ideas.

There are two great discoveries offered by Patanjali. First, we are always in direct connection with the infinite Ground of Being, known in the Yoga Sutras as Purusha, or drashtuh, the Seer. In Vedanta, this discovery is known as atma-jnanam, knowledge of the true nature of the Self. However, as humans, we tend to forget this reality, stop feeling whole and at peace, and become spiritually confused.

Therefore, Patanjali’s second great revelation is that there are many psychological, emotional and spiritual practices or disciplines available to us to help dissolve this confusion and help us return to feeling whole. These skillful means or upayas are cultivated by tapping into the wisdom of life itself, awakening the innate intelligence, aka buddhi, and discovering that embodiment of the Divine, whether as a galaxy, a star, or a human being, always involves a balance of complementary forces and energies, known as yin and yang, or the dvandvas. (II-48, tato dvandva anabhigatah)

Patanjali does not spend many sutras on atma-jnanam. He mentions it at the beginning in I-3, as drashtuh svarupe avasthanam, returns to it in the very last sutra, IV-34, and that’s about it. (The Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita offer very rich and metaphorical descriptions of embodying Self Knowledge, so perhaps Patanjali did not feel the need to replicate those.) But he does an amazing job of offering maps and models of the mind states that create problems, and practices to heal the ones that are dysfunctional. Our on the mat practice will be samyama in asana.

The most important sutras come right at the beginning, I-2 through 1-4. We will change the order slightly, (as this is how we actually experience them), and then expand upon them a bit to give us a basic overview before we get into practice. (Please refer to the Yoga Sutras Study Section for the more literal translation and additional commentary to these and other sutras.)

I-4 vrtti sarupya itaratra: Being human is not easy. Our thinking mind complicates the world unnecessarily and this leads to what the Buddha referred to as the state of suffering, or dukkha, where we forget our own infinite spiritual nature. Identification of the self with dysfunctional beliefs and thoughts is the source of this suffering, or to use Patanjali’s terminology, of not being “in Yoga”. This creates a self sense that is inadequate, constantly needing to either add or subtract something in order to find inner peace. This is of course an impossible pursuit and shows up in the body/mind as tension, fear, anxiety, stress and trauma.

I-2 citta vrtti nirodha: This dysfunctional mind activity can be transformed by resolving the energies of these activities back into the flow of aliveness. This harmonious, elegant movement rooted in the eternal is known as the Tao in Chinese and is described in the Tao Te Ching, the famous treatise attributed to Lao Tzu. Patanjali offers many skills and practices that can be called upon to alleviate the distress and shift the self identity and we will focus on one today, samyama, described in Patanjali’s third chapter, the Vibhuti Pada. We are becoming more and more clear about the neuro-science and biology of fear, anxiety and trauma, the roots of suffering, including how they arise and how they can be healed, and we will use this to inform our practice.

I-3 tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam: When the dysfunctional activity ceases, the Infinite Ground of Being shines forth, the “I AM”, the sense of self, dissolves into this, and remains stable there . There is an ‘Awakening’ to the fact that ‘I am wholeness’ that is both unimaginable and indisputable. In the Zen tradition, this glimpse into one’s true nature is called Kensho or Satori. The Japanese character for satori is depicted on the left.

However, the identification process, a specific type of mind activity, (ahamkara) often eventually reverts back to its habit of feeling separate and lacking. Thus the ‘Awakening’ is often unstable in the beginning. It may last minutes, hours, or even days, but can’t quite stick. Thus Patanjali requires the stabilizing of the awakening to be considered “being in Yoga” by using the term ‘avasthanam’. In sutra IV-27 and IV -28, Patanjali returns to the process of stabilizing the awakening.

The spiritual irony of this is that we are always connected to The Ground of Being, because that is all there is, there is only wholeness. We forget, get distracted, and before we know it, are totally lost in delusion (avidya). This is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the “Fall from Grace” as depicted here on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Our practice on the mat is to re-solve the dysfunctional mental patterns that manifest as thoughts and beliefs that have an immediate affect on the cells, tissues and organs. If we carry the water image further, we are dissolving, like salt into water, these patterns of mind activity (citta vrttis) into the feeling of Oneness. It is tangible, visceral opening that emerges when the organism feels totally safe and very awake. Usually our being awake carries fear or anxiety of danger, as this is the biological priming of our nervous systems. Danger lurks, and you will survive if you are on alert. And feeling safe by itself usually doesn’t take us into the spiritual breakthrough. There has to be an openness, alertness, curiosity and intention to stay present to whatever is arising known as mindfulness. Mindfulness, a mind state that gets stronger through practice, will allow us to sustain our practice through the moments when we do not feel totally safe and will allow the samyama in the postures to also strengthen.

Our first exploration on the mat will be finding the balance of weight and lightness.
(Follow the link!) From the perspective of the organism, the first question of safety is ‘where am I’. The first orientation, where to bring attention (dharana), is to the felt sense of weight. Find the felt sense of weight. Stay there. Live there. Patanjali calls this embodied state of being grounded ‘sthira‘ and is deepening our connection to Mother Earth, at all levels of reality.

The second orientation is to the space around me. I need to feel safe in my environment. I find this in movement, and through the felt sense of lightness or levity which allows me to float in grounded-ness, like a fish in water. I become 3 dimensional in perception and action. Patanjali calls this ‘sukha‘. Thus, to be fully embodied is to be both sthira and sukham, as Patanjali describes in II-46. Staying in this dynamic state of balance, of weight and lightness, roots and wings, with action, perception and intelligence flowing as an single stream, begins the samyama.

Take this awareness into the standing poses (follow the link), and we will add one more clue from Patanjali to integrate into the samyama. The first two practices Patanjali introduces, even before samadhi, are abhyassa and vairagya. On the mat these are related to how we use energy in the poses. Abhyassa is the disciplined and conscious direction of your energy towards healing. In asana, it means to deepen the stability of the samyama by bringing more cells, organs and tissues into the conscious flow. It is a choice to bring your attention to a highly refined state. Vairagyam is the complementary practice. It involves withdrawing of energies away from patterns that are hyper-tonic (excess rajas) or hypo-tonic (excess tamas). Where in my body/mind am I overworking? Too aggressive? Overly contracted? Where in my body/mind am I dull, unconscious, asleep? Take from here, add to there, all the while monitoring action and perception to feel how the changes are actually manifesting.

And all the while feeling the ever-present Divinity radiating with more and more brightness from your heart out into the world.

Chakras, Vayus and Asana in Awakening

Posted on August 12, 2015 by admin

The Big Picture

Yoga is the exploration of: Awakening and stabilizing that Awakening, aka: Enlightenment, Self Realization, Moksha, Freedom from Suffering, etc, and involves Awareness, Attention, Intention, and Identification. This awakening allows our own unique creativity to emerge as a crucial component to the on-going planetary and Cosmic awakening arising in the fullness of this moment.

This exploration requires:
1. an ability to: differentiate the two perspectives available to humans:
Purusha and Prakriti, Being and Becoming, Luminous Emptiness and Creation, Now and Time, The Changeless and Impermanence, etc; cultivate each as a proficiency or skill, and integrate them into …

2. the realization of Oneness, of Non-duality, Advaita. That the two points of view, while differentiated, are never separate from each other. Purnamadah, purnamidam.

3. the recognition that the “I am”, the Self, Atman, ‘drashtuh svarupe‘, where the Infinite emerges into form as Soul, is eternally unbounded, luminous and the source of all creativity.

4. the understanding that life conditions, experiences and karma have created patterns of belief, thought and emotional reactivity that can obscure or completely hide the inner light of soul and inhibit creativity.

5. that there are skillful means, upayas, that specifically address these obscurations and reveal the inner light. (Citta vrtti nirodha, sthira sukham asanam, Mindfulness, etc.

6. that these obscurations appear as either rigidity, an imbalance of tamas, or chaos, an imbalance of rajas; or possibly combinations of the two. And they all involve a confusion of self-identity. (vrtti sarupyam itaratra.)

7. Somatic practices such as hatha yoga transform these imbalances back into coherence and harmony, sattva, by bringing attention/awareness to the deeper structures of the nervous system, including the gut body and cardiac nervous system, as well as the other physiological systems, which have their own inherent intelligence that moves toward healing and wholeness. Surrender into this awakened intelligence ( ishvara pranidhana, II-47: prayatna shayithilyaananta samapattibhyam) dissolves (nirodha) the self confusion (avidya), and allows the light of the soul to shine clearly (I-3: tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam,) and Divine creativty to emerge as your life journey.

8. This process of healing and awakening creativity is an evolutionary impulse rippling throughout the entire Universe. (I-40: paramaanu-parama-mahattvaanto’sya vashikaarah

The Details

How can we work with chakras and vayus ‘on the mat’ to transform psychological/emotional/spiritual confusion into light?

There are seven major energy centers in the human, known as chakras or energy wheels. As somanauts, we bring the buddhi (as light) to each and explore them as regions of movement and coordination of movements. This allows ‘enlightened posture and movements, or movement/posture as Divine Prayer. When all seven have been turned on (lit up), there is a clear sense of the spinal axis as emerging from the chakra line, like beads of light on a string. This of course, is refined in tadasana.

Our spiritual home base.
4th chakra: The center of our universe, where love, wisdom and compassion are awakened and sustained and all the chakras learn to work together. We begin here, and return again and again until we are rooted here as a felt sense in the body deeply linked to Mother Earth and Father Sky. It also supports heart and lungs, and feeds energy to upper limbs and head for movement and support and integrates the subtle spinal movements with the breath. Feel the heart chakra as a point where the infinite expands into form and keeps going. It’s a continuous opening.
Lower chakras:

1st chakra: tail and legs: the three pillars of support in tadasana, and the anal mouth, the root of the gut body. The first cosmic gate, opening a connection to Mother Earth. 2nd chakra: Sacral region: small movements at sacro-illiac joints and the bladder as an organ of support and vibrancy. 3rd chakra: upper abdominal region: liver, kidneys, spleen, stomach, adrenals, descending fibers of the diaphragm, T10 – L3 and more. Modulates spinal curves where the lumbar undergoes large changes in shape. We’ll see more below when we get to the samana vayu.

Upper chakras.
5th chakra: continues support and movement of head, jaws, mouth, and tongue. Integrates cervical and thoracic curves in movement and support. 6th chakra: inner ears, third eye, pituitary center. Subtle movement of skull on C-1, a place often stuck. Cranial-sacral work involves integration skull and sacrum, 6th and 2nd chakras in subtle inner waves and inner energy fields. 7th chakra: crown, above the skull, organizes movements that totally release neck. The second cosmic gate, opening connections to the heavenly realms/Father Sky.

Now we add to the mix the physiological/spiritual organizing energies of aliveness known as the Five Prana Vayus. These are:
Prana = what we take in / expansion / upper body centered
Apana = what we get rid of / condensing / lower body centered
Samana = what we choose to keep / the balancer / middle body centered
Vyana: distributing the good stuff to all cells and tissues
Udana: growth and development on biological, emotional/psychological/spiritual levels.

Can we ‘feel’ these five organizing activities as movements of energy and energetic fields? Can we integrate these with the chakras? This will bring us to the basic laws of living structures and the effortless support they offer. Then our poses and practice in asana become divine prayers, healing and awakening creativity.

The primary organizing activity in the Universe is the balance between expanding and condensing. This is the yin/yang of Taoism and Chinese medicine, and also ‘Tensegrity’ as articulated by Buckminster Fuller, Tom Myers etc. In a tensegrity structure, like the human body, the compression elements push out against the tension elements, which in turn pull in against the compression elements. B.K.S. Iyengar describes asana as the balancing of centripetal (toward the center) and centrifugal (away from center) forces. (Light on the Yoga Sutras on Patanjali). A star, like our sun, is delicately balanced between the intense condensing caused by gravity and the equally intense expansion created by the nuclear fire. Our life flows from this dynamic relationship at all levels of reality.

As the prana vayu governs taking in, we can experience it as an expanding energy field centered in the chest (fourth chakra) to open heart and lungs. It is the yang, or centrifugal energy. Imagine this as a radial expansion, like the opening of the hoberman sphere. In kinesiology, we feel prana also in supporting the action and movement of the arms, ribs and head.

The apana vayu governs releasing out and thus is a condensing or squeezing field centered in the lower body (first and second chakras). It is the yin, or centripetal energy. When functioning in a healthy manner, apana squeezes out solid and liquid waste from below, but also helps to squeeze the air out of the lungs. Kinesiologically, apana can be felt supporting the action and movement of the pelvis, legs and tail, maintaining grounding energy in posture and movement.

Samana is the balancer. It integrates the upper body action of taking in with the lower body action of squeezing out. Usually described in digestive terms, as it is a third chakra energy, somanauts explore the samana’s role in balancing the upper body and lower body in movement. It’s role is to integrate the movements of upper body/head and arms with movements of the lower body/legs and tail like in the cheetah. Notice the cheetah is actually flying more than running. Notice also the coiling and uncoiling of the core as it oscillates between flexion and extension. This is the mammalian action will will explore first in the asanas.

Ideally there is a single integration of all five vayus, the prana, apana and samana riding on vyana and allowing udana to function at highest most refined level possible. Iyengar describes this as samyama in asana, where organs of action, organs of perception and intelligence (buddhi) integrate into a single conscious movement in the entire body.

Now we add the poses. Take what we have covered above and integrate with what follows.

Integration through the Standing Poses

Lesson 5 of the basic course in my home study section of the site covers this,
(and saves me the need to rewrite it all! ) so please click here to continue.

Flipping the Dog (Please click here.)

Into Inversions

Preview of Coming Attractions