Yoga

art+science

The Yoga Tradition

by Witold Fitz-Simon

Yoga is part of a cultural heritage based in India that stretches back thousands of years. Because of the physical and cultural divide between West and East, there is a patina of exoticism and glamour that pervades the Western view of eastern philosophies, but they are as well-considered with as much intellectual rigor as the pillars of our own culture, the philosophies of Ancient Greece.

The Yoga tradition was codified by a man named Patañjali in the second century B. C. in a book that has become known as the Yoga Sutras. Patañjali took an already old tradition and pared it down to 195 terse verses. (Sutra is Sanskrit for “thread”). This is what has become known as “classical” yoga. He boils it all down to a system comprising eight steps or limbs, which are often referred to as Ashtanga Yoga (Ashta = eight, anga = limb).

The Path To Liberation

Patañjali’s eight limbs are as follows:

Yama - universal observances

Niyama - personal observances

Asana - posture

Pranayama - regulation of the life force or breath control

Pratyahara - sense withdrawal

Dharana - concentration

Dhyana - meditation

Samâdhi - enstasy

The Yamas and the Niyamas are equivalent to the Ten Commandments. The Five Yamas are codes of conduct for the individual in his or her relationship to society: ahimsa or non-violence, satya or truth, asteya or non-stealing, brahmacharya or continence and aparigraha or non-coveting. The Niyamas refer to individual discipline: saucha or purity, santosha or contentment, tapas or intensity, svadhyaya or study of the self and, finally, isvara pranidhana or dedication to the Lord. This last one can be somewhat controversial, especially in the West. It is important to remember that Yoga is a spiritual discipline from India where Hinduism is the predominant form of religious expression. Yoga is not, however, a religion. Though it is often presented in a Hindu context, it can just as easily be applied to any other spiritual context. What Patañjali is calling for is an acknowledgment and a dedication to a power greater than that of the individual.

The third limb, Asana, is the one that most people are familiar with when they think of Yoga. Two different translations of the word are “posture” and “steady seat.” It is thought that, in Patañjali’s time, this referred to the ability to sit for extended periods of time for the practice of meditation. Many of the very early yoga manuals refer mainly to different seated positions. Over the centuries, however, a whole range of poses have been developed to exercise every muscle, organ and gland in the body, to make the body healthy and flexible enough to endure prolonged periods of contemplation.

The first three limbs have more to do with the outside world and the practitioner’s relationship to it. The next two limbs start to take the practitioner in a more inwardly direction. Pranayama refers to the regulation of the life force or Prana. In the Indian tradition this life force is carried on the breath, so, practically speaking, Pranayama refers to breath control. By regulating the breath one is at once controlling the life force and calming the mind. Pratyahara, the fifth limb, is restraint of the senses. The vision is easy enough to restrain, one simply needs to close the eyes, but the other four are a bit harder to control. This limb refers to relinquishing the distractions of the outside world so that one’s awareness can remain inside the body with the mind, the better to be undistracted in contemplation.

Dharana is concentration. It is the last of the limbs that can be actively practiced. Once you have made your body supple and healthy you can begin to sit for extended periods of time. When you are sitting for extended periods of time, if you are ethically sound and personally disciplined, then you will be less distracted by personal and societal ramifications of your actions (guilt, hunger, the police hauling you off to jail for stealing, envy of another person, dissatisfaction with your job, these sorts of things). Without all those mental distractions you can start to calm the mind and withdraw your awareness from the physical space outside your body to the physical space inside your body and also to the metaphorical space within your self. Then you can concentrate on this physical and metaphorical space enabling you to contemplate its depth and subtlety.

This step is what is commonly referred to as meditation. In fact it is not actual meditation, but rather meditation practice. You are concentrating on a single point as a practice at making the body ready for the next step, Dhyana or Meditation. It is impossible for all but the enlightened to sit down and say I am going to Meditate in the proper sense of the word. Dhyana is a state that happens spontaneously when a person who is observing becomes completely involved with that which he or she observes. Have you ever looked at a piece of art or read a book or watched a movie and completely forgotten yourself? That would be a lesser version of this phenomenon.

Who Are You, Really?

To take this a little deeper I need to explain a fundamental concept in both the philosophy and psychology of Yoga. When most of us look at the world around us, we think of that which is behind our eyes looking out and observing the world as being our essential self. It seems so obvious as to be a truism, something completely unnecessary to even point out. When I am sitting on my couch and laughing as I watch the Simpsons on a Sunday night, it’s me that is laughing. The Yoga tradition, however, would say that is not the case. The Yoga tradition would say that it is your mind that is doing the observing and being amused by Homer and Marge. What is in fact your essential Self (with the capitalization being emphatically intentional) is deeper “within” than that. Remember the five sheaths that I spoke about earlier? The essential Self lies within that last sheath (anandamaya kosha). It is a spark of something that is both immanent – meaning so fundamental that it is inherent in what you are as well as being inherent in everything else, organic or inorganic, living or not living – and transcendent – meaning it exists outside the material world and is therefore eternal. This is why there is the acknowledgement of a higher power embedded in Patañjali’s eight limbs.

So you have within you, you are in your essence, something that remains completely unchanged by the anxiety of world war, or the stress over making enough money to pay the bills, or the pleasure you feel when having sex or the joy you experience when being made to laugh by a humorous TV show. The snag is that this essential Self is sheathed in all these layers that are constantly affected by all these things. I had the concept explained to me once rather beautifully and elegantly by Swami Karunananda at the Yogaville ashram in Virginia. Picture a clear night with a full moon high and bright in the sky. Under the moon is a lake and the mirror-like surface of the lake reflects perfectly the image of the moon. Then a rock is thrown into the lake, causing the surface no longer to be still. The ripples and splashes that the rock has made completely distort the image of the moon so that it cannot be seen.

In this metaphor, the moon is the essential Self. The lake is the mind and the surface of the lake are the senses. According to Yogic thought the essential Self is so not of this world that the mind cannot perceive it directly. If you like (to go back to the concept of the five koshas) the mind, which is represented in the last but one of the five sheaths (vijñanamaya kosha) can only look outwards at the other increasingly material sheaths and not inwards at the last sheath, that of the soul or the essential Self. The mind can only perceive the reflection of the Self. Thus the lake knows only the image of the moon reflected on the surface and not the actual moon. Anything that disturbs the surface of the lake, such as the rock, will distort and even obscure the image of the moon. Those disturbances can be strong sensations in the body from illness or discomfort, they can be cravings fed to you by the senses or they can be emotions. The effect of these disturbances results in our everyday, mundane existence.

The Final Step

The first five limbs of Patañjali’s system, then, are designed to enable you to sit without distraction so that you can concentrate and contemplate the undisturbed reflected image of the Self. Then, when you have become so focused on and absorbed by that image of the Self, the seventh limb, Dhyana, has a chance to manifest itself. Once that has happened the first time, so the theory goes, it then becomes easier and easier for it to happen again until, eventually, one is in that state permanently and the last limb has been attained: Samadhi. Samadhi is a state of complete union of the small, individuated self with the Universal Self. In that state of Samadhi it is not that one no longer has emotions, but rather the emotions no longer affect and disturb the connection of the mind to the essential and Universal Self. In fact, the two have become the same thing. There is no longer any distinction between the reflection of the moon on the surface of the lake and the actual moon, and the metaphor breaks down completely.

Oneness Of Soul With Action

How these eight limbs translate into a practice that someone can integrate into their daily life varies considerably. An acquaintance once commented to me with amazement that asking someone what style of yoga they practiced was like asking a musician what instrument they played. It only makes sense that the diversity of human experience even within the same culture would generate a vast number of variations on any given tradition. Look at the many different flavors of Islam, Christianity, popular music or representational painting. Impressionism and Cubism both use pigments on canvas, but are very different from one another. Beyond that, compare the Impressionism of Monet with that of Van Gogh or even Salvador Dalì. We don’t think of Dalì as being an Impressionist, but he did go through an Impressionist phase before he settled on Surrealism as his preferred form.

The concept of Yoga as a tradition rather than a monolithic dogma is, I think, very important. It is very much a system in which teachings are handed down from teacher to student, from Guru to disciple. There is an acknowledgement of what has come before that can be traced all the way back to the time of Patañjali and earlier. That does not mean, however, that the teachings remain immutable in their expression, no matter how much a given proponent would like it to be so. Take, for example, two lineages that are fairly well-known in the West: those fostered by Swami Sivananda and Tirumalai Krishnamacharya.

Swami Sivananda was an Indian renunciate, or monk, who lived from 1887 to 1963. He taught a very jovial and upbeat version of yoga rooted in the devotional tradition of Vedanta. His disciple, Swami Vishnu-Devananda (1927 – 1993) came to the West in 1957 to open several Sivananda Vedanta centers. Another famous disciple of his, Swami Satchidananda, came to the United States in 1966 where he made his home until his death in 2002, and where he founded the Integral Yoga organization. Both schools have an ascetic flavor to their expression of yoga. They are both founded around the concept of an ashram, a cross between a monastery and a community center. Both place a strong emphasis on community and study of the scriptures with the physical practice of asana being secondary to the devotional aspects. Even between the two there are substantial differences, Sivananda still retaining a strong Hindu flavor, while Integral Yoga is more ecumenical in its approach.

The second lineage, also of great prominence in the United States and Europe, is that of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888-1989) and his three disciples: his son, T.K.V. Desikachar, K. Pattabhi Jois, as well as Krishnamacharya’s brother-in-law, B.K.S. Iyengar. Even though Krishnamacharya’s teachings were deeply rooted in the Yoga scriptures, his expression of Patañjali’s Yoga was decidedly secular, and even scientific. While fully embracing the liberating potential of Patañjali’s philosophy, Krishnamacharya’s work centered around the use of asana, the yoga postures that we know today, as a vehicle by which to heal the body and bring it into harmony with the Self. This emphasis is strongly reflected in the approach of his three principal disciples. Even then, his approach shifted and evolved through the course of his life. In the earlier part of his life, in the 1930’s, his approach was much more athletic, especially as applied to teaching children. It was in 1927, at age 12, that K. Pattabhi Jois began studying with Krishnamacharya who taught him the six vigorous sequences of poses in Jois’ Ashtanga Yoga system. T.K.V. Desikachar, Krishnamacharya’s son, came to yoga much later in life after a period working as a mechanical engineer. By that time, his approach was softer and more individualized, which lead to the system of Viniyoga which Desikachar still teaches to this day.

The third disciple of Krishnamacharya that I mentioned above, B.K.S. Iyengar, only studied with Krishnamacharya for a short period of time, around two years, before being sent off to teach. Mr. Iyengar’s approach to asana and pranayama is entirely self-devised, but the spirit of Krishnamacharya’s concerns are evident in his method and Mr. Iyengar continually gives full credit to his teacher in all his writings.

The great innovation of Mr. Iyengar’s approach to asana and pranayama is a synthesis of Patañjali’s eight limbs within the two physical limbs. Mr. Iyengar and his daughter and son, Geeta and Prashant, address philosophy and spirituality in their talks and writings, but all of that gets harnessed in their classes to teach spiritual freedom through practice of the postures. It is Mr. Iyengar’s contention that all the limbs of yoga can be practiced in any of the others.

Mr. Iyengar writes about this at length in his book “The Tree of Yoga”. Imagine yourself doing a relatively simple pose like Utthita Trikonasana (Extended Triangle Pose). Your right leg is turned out and you have extended your trunk out along the leg and placed your right hand on your ankle. You are valiantly stretching the back of your right leg and your right hamstring is speaking to you. There’s not much going on in the front of the right leg, however, and the left side of your body is completely forgotten. If you are over-stretching the back of the right leg to the point of pain and even injury, then it’s fair to say you are committing violence against yourself. But what about the right thigh? It’s not being worked, it’s not in pain. Mr. Iyengar would say that leaving the thigh soft and untended is also doing violence, albeit indirectly. The muscles are not being used, which means they have not been fully irrigated by the blood flow and have been denied an opportunity to be toned, which in turn will lead towards their atrophy. So, to practice non-violence, one must be working in a balanced fashion in both the front and the back of the leg.

With the right and left sides are balanced and integrated, then there is truth in the actions of the right leg. And when the left and the right sides, and the front and the back, of the whole body are balanced and integrated, then there is truth in the entire pose. With that total balance, that total stretch, then all five of the sheaths of the body are working together harmoniously and there is a oneness of the soul with the action, which is a definition of brahmacharya, or continence. Similarly, with total attention to the details of the pose, there is nothing more to achieve, and there is no need to steal and no greed. All the Yamas are observed.

In this perfect Utthita Trikonasana (and it should be said that this is a perfection not of form or shape, but of awareness and intention) the whole body is exercised and all the cells are cleansed and fed by the blood, making them pure and healthy (saucha) and therefore in need of nothing else and content (santosha). That health, in turn, can beget a burning desire (tapas) to stay healthy. The more one is able to perform this Utthita Trikonasana with harmoniousness, then one can start to become aware of the deeper and more subtle aspects of the body (svadhyaya or self-study). And lastly in the Niyamas, a more mature intelligence is developed in which one identifies less with the small self and more with the Universal.

On the physiological level, life force (prana) is regulated (yama) in the form of the flow of blood. As applied to the breath, this means not a lot of huffing and puffing and holding of the breath, which puts undue strain on the body, but rather consciously allowing the breath to flow freely and unfettered. And with one’s awareness fully engaged in the performing of the pose there is a withdrawal of the senses (pratyahara).

From here on, the limbs become more difficult to express in the asana. Dharana, concentration, means allowing the awareness to exist in all parts of the body simultaneously and not just the part that is perhaps stiffest or most sore. In any approach to a pose there are two paths, one from the deepest part of the self out to the periphery, which is what happens when we are concerning ourselves with the form or shape of the pose. The other would be from the periphery back to the deepest part of ourselves, when we are using the shape and form of the pose as a vehicle for deeper understanding. When both those directions are in balance, then there is Meditation or Dhyana. The final limb, Samadhi, can then occur when all of the above conditions are met and not only the awareness suffuses the entire body, but the spirit does as well. (To refer again to the lake metaphor, the moon and the reflection of the moon become one and the same.)

All this seems quite an ambitious proposition, and quite daunting to the beginner. Mr. Iyengar has taken this into consideration in his meticulous and methodical approach. One must go from the known to the unknown, from the gross to the refined. This means starting with the physical body, including the arms and legs, with all its stiffnesses and discomforts, with all its aches and pains. This is the primary aim of this book: to provide you with a framework by which you can begin to understand how the body works mechanically in the context of asana so that you can practice on your own in an intelligent fashion and begin to open the body up.

In my yoga journey I have tried a number of different styles, from the fast-moving vinyasa (flow) style that is so dominant in New York, to the softer and more meditative traditional Hatha approach. Though they all have their merits, the combination of deep, meditative attention with the physical rigor of the technique continues to vitalize my practice. There is a reason why this approach is the most practiced around the world. It can be applied to anyone, the young and energetic, the elderly and infirm, as well as those with injuries or particular physical needs. I have seen first hand how those who have either devoted themselves to this approach, or who have incorporated the approach into their preferred style, have transformed their bodies, their minds, even their entire lives.

It all begins with the logic of the body.

© 2006 Witold Fitz-Simon.

This article can be found online at http://www.yogaartandscience.com/yphilo/yphilo.html