If you can control the rising of the mind into ripples, you will experience Yoga.
Patanjali
Yoga is not all about stretching and turning our bodies into pretzels as so many of us in this western culture tend to believe. It is actually a science of the mind...a practice that will help us to smooth out all those ripples, those mental modifications, those vrttis , that disturbance that gets in the way of us experiencing the natural state of mind...peace. The asanas are just one limb of this eight-limbed practice that takes us there. And it is all a practice...something we have to commit ourselves to doing everyday. The real practice is observing the ripples that disturb the mind's calm surface and just allowing them to disperse without interfering.
The Bird on the Water Analogy
Michael Singer, in the video linked below, gives the analogy of a bird sitting on top of the water. The bird represents Self...the water represents mind. Mind and bird are not the same thing! Despite what it may believe, the bird is not the mind...it just uses it to get from one place to another. The water/mind is a tool. When the mind/the water is smooth and easy, the bird is happy. When the water is rough and turbulent, the bird is not happy. It is unhappy not becasue of the water or what ever circumstances life was handing out but because of its tendency to fight that which it does not like. So it is splashing and thrashing about fighting the water of the mind, believing it is stuck in that water... and making that water even more turbulent. The water can get so disturbed that the bird may feel like it is drowning in it and there is no way out!
Isn't that how we feel many times. Our minds are always on overdrive, it seems. Our water often seems so turbulent and we get so caught up in it we feel we are drowning in our worries, our fears, our obsessive thinking, our "problems"... what Patanjali referred to as mental modifications.
There is a way out!
Though Life may continue to offer challenges; though it is normal to have rough water from time to time both in our inner and outer experiences...we can control most of the suffering that we experience by not interfering with Life.
Stop Making More Ripples
You see there are two types of ripples on this water, according to Singer: Primary and Secondary. (This description brings to my mind, the Buddhist teachings of first and second arrow. ) The primary ripple is the mind's initial reaction to a life event. We meet with a challenge, for example, and it disturbs the mind...causing fear, anger, resentment, grief. All these are very natural responses to challenge, just as it is very natural for the human mind to seek comfort and pleasure, to want things to be "okay in here". So a ripple appears on the clear, calm water of our natural mind causing a disturbance. Now if we leave the ripple alone, it will eventually go away...leaving the water still and calm again. But...it is, unfortunately, our tendency to train our minds to do whatever it can to make sure the water stays calm, to remove all ripples and all "unwanted" things...to seek the "wanted" things...to make the water, Life and the mind go the way we want it to, to be the way we want it to be. That is where the secondary ripples come in. Our interference in attempting to stop the rippling, stop the disturbance, make the water behave to our liking... actually makes the water more turbulent. We don't often see that it is our effort to control the waters, our fighting against it and our resisting that make it more turbulent....we blame the water. We blame Life.
What we need to do is stop fighting, stop looking at life events as the cause of all our desperate swimming to stay afloat....and really look at the mind and what it is doing. When we realize we are not this water, this mind...and that we can step away from it, get out of it by going through it...the secondary ripples will no longer be aggravating the current ...we will no longer be drowning in something we never had to drown in...and the waters of the mind will calm themselves.
That is pretty cool!
Michael Singer/ sounds True ( June, 2021) Ceasing to Be Caught in the Waters of Mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxMS_el-5yA
Sri Swami Satchidananda (2011) The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Yogaville: Integral Yoga Publications.
No comments:
Post a Comment