Follow the senses

Often when we feel fractured or broken our systems shut down and we cease to relate to the body. Typically we begin to exist only in the head, in the thinking mind which goes on and on in a ceaseless litany that seems to reinforce how broken we are.

The senses and the body are the first steps on our pathway to becoming whole. Yoga (the very word denotes wholeness, coming together) delicately encourages us to tune into the senses and to the sensations of the body.

Start with the five senses

"Every perception is an invitation into revelation. Hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting, touching –
Ways of knowing creation,Transmissions of electric realization,The deepest reality is always right here."  Radiance Sutra 9

So we begin the process of returning to wholeness by simply opening the senses and tuning into everything that is there: tastes, sounds, smells, light and image, tactile sensations. We often forget to notice that taste, smell and touch are always here with us. Hearing and sight dominate. So pause a moment and see what you taste, what you smell, what are the tactile sensations of air on your skin, or the feeling of your clothes on your skin?

The trick here is to just let everything be here without any judgement. This is especially so with those dominant senses, hearing and sight.

If we have all five of our senses intact we are fortunate. However there is always another side to the equation. When we have sight and hearing, they can override all else. So long as the eyes are open we can be so distracted by the images we see. Who can keep their eyes off the moving images on a television? At least we can close our eyes, but then there are the ears!

As I sat meditating this morning, work started up at the block across the road where new houses are being built. There was no un-hearing it. Men were shouting their communications across the block, trucks were arriving to deliver things and the sound of tools began. The challenge was to let it be without judgement. For when we judge something we become fused with it and then disturbances arise in the emotions and the mind rejects what is here. When it is welcomed into the soup of what is here arising, it just arises and passes through and is not experienced as disturbing.

Consider the following potential protracted sounds in our environment.

• The neighbour's dog barking.
• The sounds of heavy equipment being used in the neighbourhood by a road maintenance crew. 
• Aircraft overhead. 
• People talking in a room where you are trying to work.
• The sound of your own tinnitus

Any of these could become totally distracting if you were to judge it as "negative". If however you can simply welcome it to be here does it not begin to recede into being a background to which you can habituate?

So I celebrate the sounds that were in my environment this morning, they truly gave me the opportunity to practice welcoming what is here along with other sensations, as part of the kaleidoscope of  things arising that come and go yet do not touch the inner me.

Be captivated by sensation

"The body is an oblation to Higher Consciousness" - Siva Sutra II:8

Beyond the senses lies sensation. As we practice asana, especially when we come into some semblance of mastery of technique and we achieve ease in the postures, and during savasana and in meditation, we can begin to attune to the subtler sensations of the body. It may take time to develop sensitivity to these subtler dimensions. That's OK. Give yourself permission to explore and take it at your own pace.

There are profound pay-offs.

Firstly, you will recognise what is harmonious and what is not harmonious in the body. Healthy choices become obvious and desirable. and if the body is facing injury or illness, you will know that early and be able to take early steps towards a remedy.

Then you will also discover how every movement of emotion and thought have their own sensation and location in the body. Recognising this you will have an early warning system and can allow yourself to welcome these as sensations as well and as you do find that when you open the door to them they no longer have to break it down and overwhelm you.

In this way we discover our wholeness.

Quieten the mind

"Yoga happens when there is stilling ... of the movement of thought ..." Yoga Sutra I.2

Because it is impossible to truly feel and think at the same time, tuning into sensation has another magical property - it quietens the mind.

Try it now.

Take a moment to settle, you might want to close over the eyes, then notice the state of your mind, the thoughts that are arising.

Now tune into sensation in the body and identify a part of the body you can truly sense and feel, not visualising it, just feeling. Perhaps your lips, perhaps a hand. Stay with it and allow sensation to fully unfold.

Stay awhile really tuning into sensation.

What happens to thinking?

The dance of ever renewing delight

I recently spent a week on retreat, in silence, while also being in community. Try imagining sitting in a dining room full of other people and talking to no-one. Many find it impossible to imagine.

What a treat it was! And a week did not seem long enough in the end.

Silence doesn't only mean "not talking". It means "not doing anything that will take you away from the ongoing meditation and stilling of the fluctuations of the mind". Pretty much no texting, emailing, reading the frivolous, like Facebook,. I didn't take a computer, and the only book I had was my handbag sized copy of the Yoga Sutras interpretively translated by Swami Venkatesananda, as it goes wherever my handbag goes. I did indeed open and read it on a few occasions at night and during the long afternoon breaks, finding that it could take me deeper, rather than taking me away.

Another text that might have also taken me deeper would have been the Radiance Sutras had I thought to take it. Many of the meditation practices we did on retreat were from the Radiance Sutras.

The retreat was titled "Embodied Awakening" and was led by a very talented teacher, Anne Douglas. The title indicates that the body itself is a gateway to awakening. As we come into a heightened sensitivity to information of the body we start to open all of our perception, including to the experiences that are beyond the body.

Through repeated body-sensing practices, meditation and Yoga Nidra, and by not interspersing this with the things that would take us away, we began to enter a more awake state.  An awakeness that is awake no matter what the state of the body, awake even if the body sleeps, dreaming or dreamless, and awake in a vaster sense than ordinary wakeful states.

The Radiance Sutras are Lorin Roche's beautiful, modern, interpretive translation of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra (c.800CE), a lovely text from the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. The title of this post is taken from Sutra 156.

Let me share Sutras 155 -156 with you.

155
Breath flows
Into this body
As a nectar of the gods. 

Every breath is a whisper
Of the Goddess:
"Here is the ritual I ask of you -
Be the cup
Into which I pour this bliss,
The elixir of immortal peace." 

156
The breath flows out with the sound sa,
The breath flows in with the sound ha.
Thus thousands of times a day,
Everyone who breathes is adoring the Goddess. 

Know this, and be in great joy.
Listen to the ongoing prayer that is breath.
Life shall dance in you
A dance of ever-renewing delight.

Perhaps you are put off by this talk of "the Goddess" so lets talk about that. Who is this Goddess?

The text comes from the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. The "Goddess" is, at a story-telling level, the consort of Shiva, who is sometimes called Parvati, but also is known as Shakti. But such terms are actually metaphorical. This God and Goddess are not personalities, they are the Universe, and they are in fact one. The Goddess is the energetic aspect of Consciousness that causes manifestation. In other words, Shakti causes Divine Consciousness to pulse, and matter to come into being. These concepts have a very nice correlation with astrophysics!

So everything is really Shiva-Shakti, and you can experience this, in your body. Your body becomes a pathway to knowing the Divine and a pathway to returning to the knowledge of your True Nature. So the 112 meditations of the Vijnana Bhairava are 112 gateways of the body to returning to your True Nature.

Here in these two sutras our gateway is the breath. "Be the cup into which I pour this bliss", be receptive to the breath, "be in great joy", "listen to the ongoing prayer", "life shall dance in you".

So next time you are lying quietly - in savasana at the end of your next yoga practice perhaps, or even in bed tonight, waiting for sleep, be receptive, open, listen, feel and quietly let this wondrous experience of the breath be meditation and prayer.

There is a poem about how I was feeling when I returned from retreat here.

You might also be interested in a previous post, Siva - Sakti.

Proprioception and interoception in yoga

Credit: coredynamicspilates.com

Interoception, defined here as the sense of the physiological condition of the body, is a ubiquitous informatin channel used to represent one's body from within.

Lab of Action and Body, Department of Psychology, University of Holloway UK

Proprioception is a process by which the body can vary muscle contraction in immediate response to incoming information regarding external forces, by utilizing stretch receptors in the muscles to keep track of the joint position in the body.

The Proprioceptive System, SPD Australia

Yoga: A system of disciplines and exercises aimed at liberation of the self. A discipline involving controlled breathing, prescribed body positions and meditation with the aim of attaining a state of deep spiritual insight and tranquility.

The Free dictionary.com

I start this post with some definitions. I didn't make them up, I googled the terms and took what came up. To me, both proprioception and interoception are important in yoga.

The word interoception is a new one to me but the practice of it is not. In somatics we call it the soma, the felt sense of the body, from the inside. It is tuning into sensation and becoming sensitised to the messages of sensation. In iRest we practice Body Sensing, both during Yoga Nidra and in movement.

The word proprioception is more familiar to me. I have always understood it as the way we sense our body's place in space. Thus when we are standing we know where our head is in relation to our torso, our pelvis and our feet.

Children must develp proprioception in order to learn to walk, pick things up and place them where they want to place them. It is fascinating watching this unfold when you watch a baby grow.

Both are important to yoga.

Proprioception is important to the physical discipline of yoga, to alignment, and to the ability to maintain good posture in sitting.

It is not a given.

Most people starting out in yoga, unless they are coming into yoga from another finely tuned physical discipline such as dance or gymnastics, find it difficult to find good alignment and this is due to a deficiency in proprioception. Even though we have learnt to stand up, walk around, pick up a cup of coffee and get it to our mouth, at a finer level we still do not have a clear sense of the position of our body in space. Hatha Yoga is fantastic to help to develop it and this will have great benefits in our coordination, our posture and as a falls preventative as we age.

Have you ever received an adjustment in which the teacher has suggested a new way to do a pose, but the next time you come into it you still cannot find that position and the teacher adjusts you again? Somehow we must develop an internal way of feeling our way into that spatial relationship that is good alignment, we need to fine tune our proprioception.

Interoception is a pathway to proprioception. By sensitizing to the body as sensation we become more aware of the signals that can feed our proprioception.

Even more that that, interoception is like another sense that is a portal right into the present, directly to the goal of yoga, into awareness of who we really are.

But lets drop the complicated word. A simpler term is body-sensing.

We train our ability to body sense as the teacher invites us, in relaxation, to note what is present, to open the senses, to note the feel of the breath in the body, to bring different parts of the body into focus. As we do this thoughts become defocused. they may quieten completely or they may just cease to be as interesting as we sense the body, thoughts simply come and go without distracting us. We enter the present moment and we may well find that in that state we open to spacious awareness and begin to recognise our true nature.

As we open into body-sensing we also begin to experience the body as vibratory energy, a kind of radiance. The sense of being a physical entity begins to dissolve, the sense of the body's edges may become fuzzy. We know from physics that everything is really energy but in the normal everyday state we do not usually sense that. In body-sensing this becomes a reality to us.

The practices of body-sensing arise from the yoga practices of Kashmir Shaivism. A hallmark of Kashmir Shaivism is its focus on practices that the ordinary person can do to achieve awareness of their true nature in this lifetime. No need to be an aesetic and meditate in a cave. This is a path to enlightenment anyone can do. It's perfect for us in our modern world.

The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra is a text of 112 meditations designed for the householder, framed as a conversation between Shiva and his goddess consort Parvati, or Shakti. the lovely modern translation by Lorin Roche, The Radiance Sutras, makes these meditations very accessible and from time to time we try them out in the Sunday morning class. Here is a taste.

"The senses declare an outrageous world -
Sounds and scents, ravishing colors and surfaces
Decorating vibrant emptiness."

Body-sensing is also practised as we move. Again in the words of the Radiance Sutras, 'the soul reveals itself to itself through movement, energy infused undulations and gestures of hand, foot, spine, face and form". In hatha yoga form and movement become the meditation, ever inviting a heightened awareness of the body as sensation.

Follow sensation. It might be the path to wholeness.

I am grateful to the many teachers who have taught me to practice yoga as body-sensing, especially Dr Richard Miller, Jennifer Carbanero, Fuyuko Toyota, Anne Douglas and Kirsten Guest.

Anne Douglas is visiting Australia in June to teach a retreat "Embodied Awakening". Find out more here.