Yoga and Spirituality

What is spirituality? What has it got to do with Yoga anyway?

How do we know what it might be? Is it important anyway?

Yogic philosophies understand our existence as dominated by the experience, survival instincts, seeking after pleasure and running from pain that constitutes our separate nervous system. These Yogic philosophies all suggest that it is also possible to have a broader identity that just this obsession with our own nervous system experience. Our belief in our own boundaries and separateness and our massive attachment to that experience of separateness constitutes our ego. Yoga is all about changing our view, from the view of ego to one of broader connection and engagement. This connection and the journey into that and the lived experience of that has historically been called 'spirituality'. Yogic practice is precisely about creating this lived experience, starting with the body and gradually working deeper.

Whilst understanding the value of models of liberation from whatever source, school, system or religion. Whilst appreciating texts, scriptures words and formulas attempting to point towards this broader reality. What we are really concerned with is the direct existential grasp of reality 'as it is'.

Many have the idea that to seek 'God' or enlightenment one has to run away to mountaintops and lonely places away from the mass of humanity. Some may find what they seek this way. However like the poet Kabir or even Reg Presley's song sung by Wet Wet Wet, we know that 'Love is all around- everywhere I go, I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes'.

We all deeply know that like a fish in water we cannot not be in 'what is' the transcendent and immanent reality. We all know that we also cannot not be that which is; because if we weren't then it wouldn't be either, and it is.

We need to find ways to uncover our conditioning and release our true nature, hence the need for Yogic practices that assist that process. There is no requirement to travel anywhere to develop 'spiritually', except that is into your being. There is ultimately nowhere else to go, every thing can be done here and now because that is also all there is. There is no need to go anywhere to find truth or oneself or reality as if they were somewhere else. It is all here, right now.

The Yogic practices that help us to remember that, are unique to each individual. As we make our journey into deeper connection we use teachers as technical guides and loving friends on the path to help us to discover our own way. If we become dependent on them or fall into worshipping them then they/we as teachers/students have momentarily failed in our mutual task of helping to emancipate ourselves.

Many seek a discarnate, disembodied spirit divorced from earthly reality, perhaps even as an escape from reality. For many people this vision of spirituality and can be very useful. Many find that such visionings are eventually dead ends. Why? All visions or images are projections onto what is by the mind. These mind created trips are maybe temporarily useful, however in truth for the real development of the human being we seek freedom from all our fabricated mind trips.

To find this Radikal Freedom we need to develop our understandings of our mind and our hearts (and their connections). If our mind with its conditionings sees reality through a particular filter, influenced perhaps by the conditioned dreams of our hearts, it is our responsibility to cultivate awareness and take the courageous step of letting go of that filter. Having let go we can begin to see life and death in all its raw and beautiful reality.

We are incarnated (literally in the meat) and like Eckhart Tolle states in The Power of Now, the only gateway we have to the transpersonal understandings of what spirit as connection really is, is our physical body and our heart.

Yoga gives us earth contact, the full conscious grounding to begin the journey into the realm of spirit as connection whilst being present in the here and now.

Yoga gives us the root, the grounding, to successfully explore the internal realms of cognition, emotion and sensation and to fully understand the connection of all these so we become 'body-heart-mind-cosmic conenction' rather than body and separate mind. For it is only when we are 'body-heart-mind-cosmic connection' that we can make the journey towards full being.

Carl Jung said he would rather be whole than good. Paradoxically it is only the whole who can be good. Those who seek to be 'good' and have not first dealt with their shadows merely wreak chaos and destruction in the name of goodness. We do become enlightened by plotting 'good' deeds. We cannot think our way to enlightenment as so many would like to believe, hence the limitation of models, schemes, plans and formulas. We do not become enlightened through imagining visions, images or beings of light. We can only engage in the enlightening process by seeing our own shadows and allowing the light of the Essence to shine through it. The awareness thus created, when it is followed by hopelessness and surrender leads to acceptance.

The hopelessness here is letting go of the delusion that 'we' can change, that the 'I' can change. The 'I' cant change itself, it can only carry out activities that give the illusion of change. Tricks like, I'll start wearing beads and or wearing Orange or getting particularly bendy. All are tricks without surrender after surrender after surrender.

Acceptance can become love. When we accept the truth of our own desperate situation and have some kindness towards the truth of our dilemma. Maybe then change happens because love flows from our deep natural essence, our original goodness.

So long as happiness, good, change, love or even enlightenment are goals for which we strive; which are placed somewhere in the future, then we create a duality between us in the present and the goal we seek in the future. So long as we strive for this goal it eludes us. The more this 'good' is placed outside of us the more we have to study it, analyse it, create maps and models, plans and schemes of how to attain it. The more we get involved in abstractions, divergent opinions and confusion. The more this 'good' (read enlightenment, love, happiness or whatever else) is objectively analysed and subjected to discursive thought, the more it is treated as something to be attained by special virtuous techniques. In this way it becomes less real and less attainable and disappears further into the imagined distance. Of course to remedy this we have then to try harder, do more techniques, cut off some part of being that is in the way (how about desire! Many seekers try to cut this off, except of course desire for the now unattainable good!) So as we concentrate more on the means or the techniques to attain this 'good' so the end becomes more remote, so we work harder and the means become more and more elaborate. As the means become ever more elaborate so we have to devote our lives to studying the means, which of course become ever more elaborate. So we spend all our time and energy in devotion to the systematic means of practicing useless techniques which go nowhere. This is paraphrased from Thomas Merton and creates in his words nothing but "organised despair". As Shakyamuni is reported to have said "There is no way to happiness, there is no way to peace, there is no Way to love... happiness, peace and love is the Way" or as St. Augustine said "Love and do what you will".

We cannot accumulate merit or virtue, certainly not as a conscious act, it is then only creating some ego ideal ( I am a nice person!). The Bhagavad Gita points out the illusion of grasping the fruits of actions. It is the Zen of doing nothing of no action that is Yoga. Giving up the illusion of the actor, the doer. Allowing. Allowing the nameless Tao, Bodhicitta, the Essence, the Mystery the source of all form, action, goodness and love to shine through us. We can't do it, it is not our doing, it does. When we allow and become more in harmony with this 'Essence' then the wisdom as to how to act and when to act makes itself clear, seen, felt and heard. We act then not out of conscious striving, towards 'egoic aggrandisement' or self conscious mode of deliberation but out of spontaneous 'natural goodness'. This is the spiritual path to do nothing at all about?

Eckhart Tolle says:

“Your outer journey may contain a million steps; your inner journey has only one; the step you are taking right now. As you become more aware of this step, you may realise that it contains within itself all the other steps as well as the destination. This one step becomes transformed then into an expression of perfection, an act of great beauty and quality. It will have taken you into Being, and the light of Being will shine through it.”

As soon as you engage in trying as doer, of course you lose it! One can perhaps just steadily allow awareness to grow. In developing awareness we can more clearly see and hear and feel the strategies of ego to sustain its dominance. Actually it is the moment-by-moment glimpses that free us. As soon as we do anything with the awareness we are once again sucked into the game. Ego is useful, it helps us to negotiate around the world, to survive, it is useful like a car is useful, it gets us around.

However if the car takes command and drives us around we are in terrible danger! The best thing to do with ego is love it, polish it, take it out for a drive, understand how it works and with love, laugh at the antics as it repeatedly tries to drive. Yoga is the cessation of the identification with the waves or fluctuations of mind-body, whereupon they slowly cease. Yoga is really everything we do, all our relationships, all our communications, every breath that we breath in and out.

Have fun, play, explore, breathe well. Be happy and find the root of happiness, be loved and loving and find the root of love, be joyful and find the root of joy, be well and find the root of wellbeing. Blessings Be and Much Love

Christopher Gladwell