Thinking Upside Down: Yoga Philosophy for Your Studio Practice 9781736560006

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
Where Change Happens
1. Continuous Activities​
2. Contact​
3. Attention
4. Reception
5. Desire
6. Recognition
7. Response
How We Change
8. Specialized Activities
9. Doubt
10. Certainty
11. Mindfulness
12. Discernment
13. Inquiry
14. Investigation
Our Many Selves
15. Body and Mind
16. Physical Body
17. Qi
18. Sensory Consciousness
19. Thought Consciousness
20. Principle
The Two Sides of Action
21. Flow and Constriction
22. Yin
23. Yang
24. Inversion
25. Integration
Increasing Pain
26. The Kleshas
27. Delusion
28. Craving
29. Aversion
30. Pride
31. Harmful Perspectives
Decreasing Pain
32. Limbs of Yoga
33. Spirited Progress
34. Samādhi
35. Trust
36. Non-Delusion
37. Non-Craving
38. Non-Aversion
39. Non-Neglect
Notes

Citation preview

THINKING UPSIDE DOWN Yoga Philosophy for Your Studio Practice

Michael Harrington

Queen Square

Copyright © 2021 Michael Harrington All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. Edited by Joseph JP Johnson Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 978-1736560006

CONTENTS Title Page Copyright Introduction Where Change Happens 1. Continuous Activities 2. Contact 3. Attention 4. Reception 5. Desire 6. Recognition 7. Response How We Change 8. Specialized Activities 9. Doubt 10. Certainty 11. Mindfulness 12. Discernment 13. Inquiry 14. Investigation Our Many Selves 15. Body and Mind

16. Physical Body 17. Qi 18. Sensory Consciousness 19. Thought Consciousness 20. Principle The Two Sides of Action 21. Flow and Constriction 22. Yin 23. Yang 24. Inversion 25. Integration Increasing Pain 26. The Kleshas 27. Delusion 28. Craving 29. Aversion 30. Pride 31. Harmful Perspectives Decreasing Pain 32. Limbs of Yoga 33. Spirited Progress 34. Samādhi 35. Trust 36. Non-Delusion 37. Non-Craving 38. Non-Aversion 39. Non-Neglect Notes

INTRODUCTION

he way we think about yoga shapes our experience of it. We do not enter a yoga studio without an expectation of what will happen there. We may think of yoga as a form of physical exercise, like a workout at the gym, or as something more spiritual, like a church service. Whatever our expectations are, they shape what we notice and what we ignore. You may have never fully thought through what yoga is, but your mind already holds concepts that define it for you. What do you think a workout is, and does it affect only the body? What exactly is a body, and how is it related to the mind? Can you shape your mind by moving your body? You already have answers to these questions, even if you may not be able to state them clearly. Leaving your old answers behind and finding others can change your practice as much as your current efforts. Learning a new pose can be challenging, and practicing regularly is essential. But your experience of yoga will only deepen significantly when you change how you understand it —when you change your concepts. This book offers concepts that can reshape your experience of yoga. Many of them originated in India over two thousand years ago and rode the waves of Buddhist teaching that washed over China in texts and practices brought by scholars, monks, and invading armies. Chinese translators took Indian texts and, simply by translating them, connected them to concepts already within Chinese philosophical texts and meditative practices. These concepts began to circulate in China in the form of Yogācāra Buddhism, which eventually developed into what we now call Zen. No one in ancient India or China practiced anything like what we do in a modern yoga studio. They did not control the temperature of their practice room. And they did not move rapidly from pose to pose or use the wide variety of poses we are now familiar with. Their yoga practice was entirely a

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form of seated meditation, and they guided that practice with the concepts found in this book. Being old does not make a concept good. Time may test ideas to make sure they are true, but time can also reinforce mistakes. The radicals of early twentieth-century China tended to solve this problem by rejecting traditional ways of thinking entirely. But some Chinese philosophers tried a different approach, refining traditional yoga concepts with the insights of newly developed sciences, such as psychology, and embroidering them with passages drawn from classical Chinese texts. Although this modern renovation made the traditional concepts clearer and more persuasive, the philosophers who performed it had one major weakness. They did not practice yoga! They ignored the meditative yoga that was well known in India and China, and they had no ability to practice modern postural yoga, which was only then coming into existence in India. They could not draw on their own experience, and they did not develop a practice for other people. In this book, I have taken the missing step—connecting the concepts of Buddhist and Chinese thinkers to a modern postural yoga practice, something that neither their ancient developers nor their modern interpreters imagined. Although I refer to Chinese concepts such as yin and yang, this is not a book about Yin Yoga (a form of yoga, in fact, developed and practiced primarily in the United States). Nor is it about Chinese analogs to modern postural yoga, such as Tai Chi. Yes, the concepts I explain can benefit people practicing Yin Yoga or Tai Chi. But I apply these concepts to the popular poses of modern yoga used in studios all over the world. This book, in other words, is about using traditional Chinese concepts to shape our experience of modern postural yoga. Although the book is divided into sections organized by topic, the chapters stand alone and do not need to be read in order. For example, if you are interested in desire and how it relates to a yoga practice, you may skip to the chapter on desire. Or, if you are interested in how desire contributes to a decision-making process that involves other activities of the mind, you can read everything around the chapter on desire for context. The illustrations of poses in each chapter, as well as their descriptions, are intended to help you recognize the pose being discussed. They are not a practical guide to taking the pose. The practice of yoga should be undertaken only with the guidance of a qualified instructor.

WHERE CHANGE HAPPENS When modern yoga instructors describe how our minds work, they tend to focus on the five mental activities listed at the beginning of the Yoga Sūtra and commonly referred to as the citta vritti—the “turnings of the mind.” But the Yoga Sūtra’s activities come and go like cat naps. They pop up temporarily to correct the course of the lives we are already living, and we need them more or less often depending on who we are and what we are doing. In the pages that follow, you will discover the more basic mental activities that stay with us as long as we live, though a practice such as yoga can change how they work. Five of these activities were listed in the “Thirty Verses,” a poem composed by the Yogācāra sage Vasubandhu. But here they are souped up with the addition of desire, an equally continuous sixth activity of the mind.

1. CONTINUOUS ACTIVITIES

n old Zen story tells of a rower in a dragon boat race. Before the race, he finds a quiet place by the river to sit and wait until he is needed. After the race, he returns to the place and sits down again, just as before. Everything appears the same. If you were shown a picture of the rower taken before the race and another taken afterward, you would not be able to tell the difference. But, between the two periods of sitting and waiting, his boat won the race. The story ends with the observation that although the rower is in the same physical position before and after the race, it is only after the race that he can rest. This story is not teaching us anything about dragon boat racing. The race is a metaphor for practice. The point is that although practice is important, we cannot easily explain what it does for us. Practice does not turn us into new people or give us special powers we did not already possess. After we practice, we do pretty much the same things we did before. We may not even see that we have undergone a change, especially since changing what we do

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is easier to notice than changing how we do it. The dragon boat racer is doing the same thing before and after the race. But after the race he experiences what he is doing—sitting on the riverbank—as rest. Yoga is no more likely than any other practice to give us extraordinary powers or turn us into different people. It does its work within the activities that form our lives, whether we are practicing in a studio or shopping for groceries. So to understand what is happening in yoga, we first have to understand these ordinary activities of life, whether you call them “turnings of the mind,” as the Yoga Sūtra does, or “activities of the mind” with the Yogācāra tradition. The most basic of them endure as long as life does, and so we call them “continuous activities”—they never go away. These activities constitute a cycle of reception and response. No matter what people perceive, whether with their senses or minds, they are always evaluating the perception as either pleasant or painful. When people receive something as pleasant, they usually do whatever they can to keep that thing around. For example, if I see a quiet spot on the riverbank and I receive that sensation as pleasant, I will likely respond by walking to the spot and sitting. If I am already sitting on the riverbank, then my response is to do nothing. I am already where I want to be. If I find the place boring or uncomfortable, then I will stand up and leave. A yoga class can alter this connection between reception and response. When you enter the studio, you leave behind your typical reasons to receive and respond to things. You do not have your phone or your computer as you lie on the mat in Corpse Pose (Shavāsana) before the class starts. There is nothing in the studio that will earn you money, raise your children, or save the world. This is not to say that being in the studio means you stop receiving sensations altogether. After all, you can still find the music in the studio pleasant, or maybe the temperature is too hot. But you have voluntarily deprived yourself of your typical response. You are not going to get up and lower the thermostat, nor will you leave the studio. A different range of responses lies open to you. You may feel frustrated that you cannot respond in your usual way, wondering why you came here at all. Or perhaps you choose to observe, with interest, the new relationship you are experiencing between reception and response. Nothing forces you to take this last option, but it is the one that will allow you to experience the yoga class as something different from a business meeting or dull dinner party.

The class begins, then, when you enter the studio, not when the instructor begins calling out poses. The instructor simply provides a more active version of what you already experience on your mat. When you move from pose to pose, you are not doing something to keep your job or entertain yourself, as you might outside the studio. You have a chance to turn your sensations and emotions upside down. They become the object of your attention rather than the lenses through which you observe other things. The sensations you feel in each pose may frustrate you. Or they may prompt you to experiment with how you receive and respond to them. Or maybe you simply explore how you receive and respond to your own frustration! In either case, this upside-down use of reception and response is the yogi’s version of the dragon boat race. It is the beginning of a change within the ordinary activities of your life. Related Concepts: The first step toward changing your ordinary activities is to know what they are. There are six so-called “continuous activities” in the Yogācāra tradition. The first three—contact (ch. 2), attention (ch. 3), and reception (ch. 4)—give you your sensations and emotions. The last three —desire (ch. 5), recognition (ch. 6), and response (ch. 7)—give you your ability to act. Whatever yoga does to change how your mind works, it happens within these six activities.

2. CONTACT

e normally direct our senses away from ourselves. In the morning, my sense of hearing puts me in contact with my alarm clock. On the way to work, my sense of sight puts me in contact with the road in front of me. At the office, my sense of smell puts me in contact with the coffee somewhere nearby. The alarm clock, the road, the coffee—all these objects are outside of me. The more I focus on them, the less attention I pay to myself. This outward focus is necessary most of the time. We would not survive if we could not look around for food, protection, social relationships, and so on. But by the time we become adults, we have made a habit of looking outward by doing it all day, every day, year after year. Even if I am on a park bench and I need nothing—and nothing threatens me—the habit of looking outward remains. I am still scanning for something to draw my interest. The habit has grown so strong in most of us that we can spend whole days completely ignoring our own bodies. One reason to practice yoga at a studio rather than at home is that, in this threat-free environment, we can more easily let go of our outward orientation. No one will knock at the door. The cat will not jump on top of you. With

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your mind at ease, you can redirect your attention to the sensations in your own body. Child’s Pose (Bālāsana) is a particularly good place to start. We bend our knees and fold over them, resting our foreheads against the mat. The shape we take with our bodies suggests a turning inward and, in fact, prevents us from seeing what is going on in the room around us. We cannot commit ourselves completely to this pose without being confident that nothing around us demands our attention. The studio provides us with this confidence. It is easy to overlook what you are actually experiencing in Child’s Pose. You may notice that your sense of touch is putting you in contact with the mat beneath your forehead. And we tend to act as though our experience had only these two parts: a sense faculty and an object. But the mat is not the same as the sensation you get from it. What you experience is actually the sensation of sponginess, stickiness, or coolness. Although that experience happens only when a sense faculty—your sense of touch, for instance— comes into contact with an object, the experience is different from either the faculty or the object. The sponginess is your sense of the mat, not the mat itself. The Yogācāra tradition calls this combination “the harmony of the three”: the harmony between an object (such as a yoga mat), an experience (the sponginess), and a human sense faculty (your sense of touch). When you bring the three together, you get what Yogācāra calls “contact.” We have relatively few words to describe what we experience during a yoga class, at least when compared with our outwardly-directed experiences. Think of all the adjectives we have to describe colors and shapes. A long spatial circuit connects my sense of sight, my experience of a color and shape, and the object that I see. The supply of adjectives gets smaller as we shorten that spatial circuit to include only experiences of things we can touch. How many words for colors and shapes can you recall? Can you come up with an equal number for textures? Even fewer words exist to describe our experiences of our internal bodies—muscles and organs—where the spatial circuit is extremely short. This experience of our own bodies is what we cultivate during a yoga practice. And it goes beyond the limits of our adjectives. When I am in Child’s Pose, with my forehead resting on the mat, I cannot see my hips or my legs. Yet I can tell where my hips are in relation to my heels. My external senses are not giving me this information. I have proprioceptors—a sense of touch inside my muscle fibers, tendons, and joints—that tell me where my limbs are. Child’s Pose allows me to refocus my attention on this kind of

sensation. There is still contact, but the entire circuit of the contact takes place within my own body. By spending time each day using this shortened circuit, I can counteract the outward orientation that the rest of my life develops. I can still leap into total outward focus when I need to—jumping out of the way of an oncoming car, for instance. But in ordinary situations, I become more able to maintain a balance of inward and outward forms of contact, of shorter and longer circuits. Related Concepts: This chapter has described an inversion (ch. 24) of the mind, in which we turn our outwardly-directed minds back toward ourselves. The part of the mind we are inverting is called the sensory consciousness (ch. 18). If you skip ahead to that chapter, you will learn that our small vocabulary for describing sensations of touch may arise from limitations in the sense of touch itself, and that these limitations may actually benefit our yoga practice.

3. ATTENTION

n classical China, the emperor periodically inspected the imperial academies. A drum was sounded to announce his arrival. Until then, the students and faculty may have been paying attention to their daily tasks. But when the rhythmic booming of the drum began, nothing could distract them from the emperor’s approach. Attention is what plays the role of that drum in each activity of the mind. That is, attention is what makes an activity of the mind alert or conscious. Right now, your mind is doing a large number of things inattentively. If you are wearing socks and shoes, your sense of touch is reporting the feel of your socks and the pressure of the floor through your shoes. But you are not conscious of those feelings unless someone reminds you of them. And even after the reminder, the sensations soon fade into the background. It is not that these sensations are gone; they simply become unconscious. In the same way, if you are not interested in what you are reading, your activity of sensing the words may fade into the background as your attention shifts to something else—maybe to a memory or a competing sensation. We often think of “paying attention” as the opposite of “being distracted,” as though we could be one or the other. But our waking minds

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are always conscious of something, so they are always performing the activity of attention. When we say we are distracted, we do not mean that we have been knocked unconscious, but that we are not alert to the right experience or that we cannot stay alert to one experience for very long. To focus on a single experience does not necessarily mean to have only one sensation. Most of our experiences have many parts. If I am passing a soccer ball back and forth with a teammate as we move upfield to the opposing team’s goal, my attention can move easily and repeatedly to the ball, to the other person on my team, to the boundaries of the field, and to players on the opposing team. To say that I am paying attention to the game does not mean that my attention is divided between these different objects. Rather, my attention moves easily and repeatedly from one object to another within a defined perimeter, the perimeter of the game. I am distracted only if my attention moves to an object outside the game, such as an argument I had earlier that day or the plane flying overhead. No matter what perimeter defines an activity, our bodies usually belong within it. After all, they are part of nearly everything we do. Whether I am playing soccer or reading a book, my body is present, shaping what I see and how I see it. And so I can bring my attention easily and repeatedly back to my own body without distracting myself, because my body is contributing to whatever I am doing. A yoga class provides the chance to pay more attention to your body’s contribution to your experience. If you take a standing, wide-legged forward fold (Prasārita Pādottānāsana), extending your feet as far away from each other as is comfortable while still standing, then folding forward from the waist, the position of your body shapes what you can see: upside down and behind you. Your body has also enabled various sensations in your limbs and torso. You can bring your attention easily and repeatedly to these sensations as part of the experience of practicing yoga. An unfamiliar pose makes this kind of attention easy. When you take a standing, wide-legged forward fold for the first time, your body calls your attention to unfamiliar sensations in your lower back, legs, and feet. If you are instructed to press down more firmly into the outside edges of both feet, you may have to experiment to find the right muscle for the job. But, once you become familiar with the pose, it no longer demands your attention. You can look through the space between your calves to watch other people in the

class taking the same pose. Or you may shift your attention to planning the rest of your day or wondering how much longer you have to stay in this pose. This is when the real work of yoga begins: building the habit of holding your attention within the perimeter of your present experience, shifting it easily and repeatedly to your breathing, to the sensations you feel in each limb, and to what is happening in the room around you. Related Concepts: Holding your attention on one object or within a defined perimeter, with interest or even excitement, is one version of what traditional yoga calls samādhi (ch. 34). If you hold your attention specifically on the change in an object from moment to moment, you are practicing mindfulness (ch. 11). Traditional yoga focuses more on samādhi than mindfulness, but both disciplines can be useful in a modern yoga practice.

4. RECEPTION

he five-year-old boy who takes a sip of an adult’s coffee and finds it repellent probably will not believe you if you say that in fifteen years he will choose to drink coffee every day. He experiences only the bitterness of the coffee. And bitter tastes are painful—mildly painful, of course. But why would anyone choose even mild pain? That the taste of coffee can be pleasant to the adult but unpalatable to the child shows us that pleasure and pain are not in the sensation itself. At the same time, we do not add pleasure and pain to sensations after the fact. They are how we receive sensations. I receive the nutty taste of coffee as pleasant and the burning touch of a hot pan as painful. And so the mental activity of experiencing pleasure and pain is simply called “reception” in the Yogācāra tradition. The most basic kinds of reception do not involve our conscious minds. When something strikes my patella ligament—the tissue just below my kneecap—a reflex response involving only my lower spinal cord occurs. The impact causes my quadriceps muscle to contract and kick away the obstacle. The sensation in this case is pressure, which my body receives as something to be rejected—that is, as painful. So it responds by kicking away the cause

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of the pressure. A pleasant sensation is just the opposite. My body accepts it rather than pushing it away. Reflexes are entirely outside the mind’s control, but most other forms of reception are shaped by our interpretive activity. I may at first receive a sensation as unconsciously pleasant and consciously painful, just like the child sipping coffee: the pleasantly nutty flavor of the coffee is still there, but the child does not notice it. My changing mind may eventually reinterpret the sensation, allowing me to focus my attention on the pleasure while the pain fades into the unconscious background. Now the sensation is consciously pleasant and unconsciously painful. The child who hated coffee has become the adult who loves it. The bitterness has become unconscious as the attention of the coffee drinker shifts to the nuttiness, or fruitiness, or whatever it is that makes the coffee enjoyable. Muscle exertion produces the same competing receptions. If you lift and extend your legs in front of you from a seated position, arriving in Boat Pose (Nāvāsana), you will feel a strong sensation of pressure in your hip flexors. The pressure sensors in these muscles will tell your brain to reject the action you are performing. But, at the same time, your endocrine system will release hormones to relax you. Which one will attract your attention? The answer will likely depend on how you interpret physical exercise. Is it a necessary evil? Then you will notice the painful pressure while ignoring the pleasantly relaxed feeling coming over you. Do you find physical exercise fun? Then you probably notice your increasing sense of relaxation and disregard the pressure. Sometimes the pain and pleasure both remain conscious but combine to form an emotional state that is more complicated than a single pleasant or painful sensation. I may stay in Boat Pose even though I find it physically uncomfortable. Why? I have identified a concept, maybe the state of being healthy, that I accept or find pleasant. While I am in the pose, my mind consciously receives the concept of “being healthy” as pleasant and also consciously receives the pressure in my hips as painful. The conflict between the painful sensation and the pleasant concept creates an emotion—maybe bravery, determination, or recklessness. Emotions come from our mental ability to pair, oppose, or rank, different concepts and sensations. These complicated cases—pleasant and painful emotions—depend on our minds in a more radical way than painful and pleasant sensations do. Our minds play no role in patellar reflex action. And they can only shape our

attention to certain sensations when there are at least two to choose from, such as when we drink coffee that is both nutty and bitter. But our minds are directly responsible for creating concepts to add to our sensations, and these combinations generate our pleasant and painful emotions. Learning this fact —that our minds are constantly creating new pleasures and pains for us to experience—is one of the roots of traditional yoga. Related Concepts: The root of traditional yoga in which we learn that we contribute to our painful emotions is called non-delusion (ch. 36). But there are other mental activities that help us to shape what we find pleasant and painful. The organization of the parts of our experience provided by discernment (ch. 12) can determine whether they give us pleasure or pain. We can increase the amount of pleasure we take in particular activities by cultivating spirited progress (ch. 33).

5. DESIRE

esire is the root of all things.” We misunderstand this Buddhist saying if we view desire only as an emotion. Every emotion is a way for our minds to receive things and ideas, as when I am angry at my boss and I feel the desire for a new job, or maybe just a slice of cake. The emotion of desire can be strong enough to affect my body, making my chest flutter or my mouth salivate. But if it does not lead me to take action, it is not much of a root. “Desire” can also refer to the pivot in my mind from a passive reception of pleasure to an active response to it. Understood in this way, desire commits me to taking action in response to pleasure or pain and does not have to be an emotion of its own. The squirrel that sees an acorn and grabs it does not have to feel anything at all. It may simply see the acorn, desire it, and respond by snatching it up. No emotion necessary. As a commitment to act, desire can lead us to avoid things rather than chase after them. In other words, desire can emerge from painful as well as pleasant sensations. If the outside air feels too hot, I may want to find an airconditioned room. It does not matter what room it is, as long as it is not too hot. And I respond to this desire by changing location. This type of desire—a

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turning toward pursuit or avoidance—is at least the root of all our actions, if not the root of all things. The regulation of pursuit and avoidance is central to most classical Indian schools of philosophy—including Buddhism and yoga—because the desire for them does not simply come after a pleasure or pain. Desire has the ability to increase or decrease the amount of pleasure or pain we feel. If I feel the pain of hunger because I have not eaten all day, that pain will give me the desire to eat. If I am on a bus and have nothing to eat, then I cannot act in response to my desire. The inability to act gives me a second experience to add to my hunger: the experience of a desire not leading to any response. Because the feeling of frustrated desire is painful to us, I now have two pains: the pain of hunger and the pain of frustration. In other words, the desire that is prompted in me by a pain has only added to the pain. To build the habit of regulating our desires in a modern postural yoga practice, we pay special attention to physically demanding poses such as Chair Pose (Utkatāsana)—whose Sanskrit name is more accurately translated as the “uncomfortable pose” or “awkward pose.” I stand with my feet as close together as is comfortable for my knees and hips, I bend my knees, reach my arms up, and look forward. After a few moments in this position, my quadriceps—the muscles running up the front of my thighs—begin to ache. If I respond in my usual way to the experience of pain, I will immediately leave the pose. But if I use the pose as a way of learning to regulate my desires, I may hold it for a few breaths after I feel the ache, so long as I have determined that I am not actually damaging my body. What am I thinking while I hold this uncomfortable pose? I can remind myself of the reason I am doing yoga and hope that the pleasure of thinking about my goal will distract me from the discomfort I feel. I can direct my attention to the pleasant feeling of extension in the muscles around my rib cage as I reach up. But there is a third possibility: I can cultivate the desire to observe my own discomfort. Wanting to observe my own discomfort is different from wanting something that distracts me from the painful sensation. If I read a book to keep my mind off my hunger, I am hoping to make the pain become unconscious. But if I want to observe my own discomfort, I am choosing to let the pain be conscious. After all, I could not observe it if I were not conscious of it. To the degree that I want to observe this discomfort, I diminish my desire to free myself from it. I also diminish the pain of

frustrated desire because I no longer want to escape the painful sensation. Knowing that desire is the root of all things, then, does not mean that we have to think of ourselves as trapped by our desires. That is, we do not have to regard desire as an enemy. We can learn to regulate it so that it does not add to the pain we experience. Related Concepts: Desire is sometimes confused with craving (ch. 28). A desire becomes a craving when it makes itself absolute. That is, all satisfaction depends on the satisfaction of the craving. If the craving goes unsatisfied, it prevents us from enjoying anything else. When we learn to enjoy even the feeling of not getting what we want, we do not easily develop cravings. The topic of taking an interest in your own discomfort comes up again in the chapter on non-aversion (ch. 38).

6. RECOGNITION

f something happens only once, you cannot experience it. I do not mean something that has parts you have seen before. I mean something that, from top to bottom, inside and out, has nothing about it that you have ever encountered. When you take a yoga pose for the first time—Marichi’s Pose (Marīchyāsana), for instance—you can experience it because it is composed of parts you already recognize. And the instructor can guide you into the pose because you have a shared language for all of its components. The instructor can tell you to sit with your legs extended in front of you because you already know what it means to “sit,” you know what “legs” are, and you have straightened them many times before. You recognize what you are doing when you bend one knee and then twist your torso in that direction. If you put an infant on a yoga mat and tell it how to get into Marichi’s Pose, it will have no idea what you mean. Even if you gently arrange its limbs into the proper shape, it has no experience of the pose. It has not yet built up the repetition necessary for experience, and its body and brain have not yet reached a stage of development that would allow it to recognize and respond to sensations effectively. It is bathed in a chaotic flow of sensations

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that are not yet fully formed. But it is not experiencing Marichi’s Pose. Experience requires both memory and understanding. Memory connects the present with the past, and understanding isolates a thing from its surroundings. These two components are so closely related that they can both be named with the word “recognition.” Recognition can be as superficial as knowing the shape of something, as when I recognize a fluffy green mass on top of a brown cylinder as a tree. But a thorough recognition goes deeper. It provides not just an image, but a definition of the thing recognized. I fully recognize a tree only when I know what it is—that is, when I know its defining characteristics. Knowing the definition of a tree allows me to distinguish it from other things that look similar, such as bamboo. It also allows me to recognize a tree in stages of its development that look different: as an acorn, a sapling, and so on. There is a twist to this story about recognition. Although recognition is essential for experience, it is also dangerous to experience. Think of what happens when you try to sit still and simply experience your breathing. It should be the easiest thing in the world to do—your breathing is easy to recognize, and it is always there to be experienced. But what happens? After a moment or two of experiencing your breathing, you begin to recognize other things. Memories of what you did earlier in the day, or even earlier in your life, take over your thoughts. Or plans for the rest of the day become your focus. Our minds, in other words, have the ability to construct partial experiences, images that remain incomplete because they exclude our five senses. If I imagine an absent friend, for instance, she remains partial or incomplete because my senses cannot perceive her. This incompleteness may make the memory bittersweet, but we often benefit from imagination or partial experience. Remembering people or experiences helps us to learn from them. And anticipating things in the future helps us to prepare for them. The problem arises when the learning and preparing we do each day becomes so habitual that our minds prefer the recognition of the past and future to what is happening around us and in our bodies right now. We do not try to suppress recognition during a yoga class. But we do limit its ability to distract us. If the instructor asks me to notice what sensations I feel as my torso twists during Marichi’s Pose, I do not pause to say the word “torso” or to consider what a torso is. I simply direct my attention to my sensations. I cannot do this unless I recognize what and where

my torso is, but I can let the recognition be unconscious. A yoga class, like a meditation class, is an exercise in letting recognition unconsciously shape the fullness of our present experience rather than using it to distract us with partial experiences. Related Concepts: If you were to draw a map of your mind, the activity of recognition would occur in the part called thought consciousness (ch. 19). You can read more about infants in the chapter on thought consciousness, and you can learn the modern Zen method of keeping recognition from distracting your mind during meditation. Recognition is an essential part of discernment (ch. 12), which assembles the things we recognize into chains of cause and effect, or part and whole.

7. RESPONSE

hen you take a yoga pose for the first time, you inevitably look around you for help. If the instructor cues Half Pigeon Pose (Ardha Kapotāsana), and you have never taken this pose before, you may conjure an image of the pose from a yoga magazine or look around the studio to see what other yogis are doing. The shape you take—extending one leg behind you, resting your front shin against the mat in front of you with the knee bent, and folding forward over your shin—is a response to the magazine photo or the yogi beside you. Even after you have become familiar with the pose, you may still be responding to the images in your mind as you move into it. The more you approach body alignment in this way—visualizing an ideal body shape or imitating what other people are doing—the more you will rely on external appearance as the standard of success. Sometimes this may be a helpful approach to alignment. Instructors giving basic information about how to get into a pose need the language of external appearance for clarity’s sake—saying things such as “set your right knee down behind your right wrist” or “reach your arms farther forward.” If they are demonstrating Half Pigeon Pose to people with flexible hips, they may draw their front shin

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forward until it is clearly parallel to the front of the mat. But there are good reasons not to rely on this approach to alignment. One problem with conforming to external appearance is that it perpetuates the habit of directing our attention away from our own bodies. For most of each day, I already look outward to other people or things. And I shape my own action in response to what I see in others. I look out at the person I am talking to, the road before me, or the screen in front of me. In a yoga class, if I look at the shape another person is taking before I know what shape I ought to take, I perpetuate and reinforce this outward orientation. I miss the opportunity to reverse it. Even when observing my own body, if I move my shin forward until it is parallel with the front of my yoga mat, I treat it as though it were someone else’s. A second problem with conforming to external appearance is that the same shape will not work for everyone. My bone structure may not allow my legs to rotate much in their hip sockets, so I may need to bend my front knee as far as it will comfortably go, while resting one of my hips on a block or other support. If I force myself to follow the people who bend their front knees ninety degrees and lower both hips to the mat without support, I may strain the ligaments in my knee. If I am taking a pose for the first time, I will certainly have to see how other people have taken it. I will need to follow the instructor’s cues for positioning my limbs so I can find my way into the basic shape. But once I am in that shape, I can base further adjustments on the sensations running through my limbs. Do I feel a sense of tautness anywhere in my front knee when I bend it ninety degrees? Do I feel a pinching sensation in one hip when I fold forward? I can modify the pose based on what my muscular pressure and pain receptors tell me. The shape I take in response to the degree of compression and lengthening in the different parts of my body relies on internal sensation rather than external appearance as the standard of success for the pose. Yogis who align their bodies according to internal sensation do not simply conform to an ideal shape or to angles prescribed by the instructor. When the instructor calls out the name of a pose, they understand it as a set of sensations generated in specific parts of their bodies. When yogis hear the instructor cue Half Pigeon Pose, they understand that the pose means, among other things, a sensation of lengthening in the left hip flexors as the left leg extends backward, a sensation of tugging over the back of the right hip as the

torso folds over the right thigh, and no strong sensation of tautness anywhere around the right knee. When they have found the sensations they are looking for, they have taken the pose, even if the shapes of their bodies differ from those of everyone else in the room. Related Concepts: When we respond to internal sensations rather than external things, we are performing an inversion (ch. 24) of our usual response. We turn the outward directedness of our minds upside down as we learn to respond to our physical body (ch. 16) from within rather than to treat our bodies as external things.

HOW WE CHANGE We change our experience by changing our interpretation of what is going on within us and around us. The following pages explain the tools we use in yoga, as in the rest of our lives, to maintain the interpretations that work for us and change the ones that do not. All of the tools listed here can be found in the “Thirty Verses” of the Yogācāra sage Vasubandhu, but they were reworked by Xiong Shili, a professor at the University of Beijing in the midtwentieth century. Vasubandhu’s list already included the activities of certainty, mindfulness, and discernment. But Xiong added doubt as the counterpart of certainty, and he broke discernment down into its two subdivisions: inquiry and investigation. Like other tools, these activities are specialized. We use one or more of them on some things, some of the time.

8. SPECIALIZED ACTIVITIES

ome dogs bark at postal carriers. Even though they have witnessed mail delivered to their houses for years, maybe by the same carrier, they still leap up when they hear footsteps approaching. They bark and hop furiously as the mail drops through the slot or lands in the box on their porches. After there is no longer any noise outside the house, they bark for a few more moments before returning to whatever they had been doing. These dogs do not seem to learn from their experience. They respond to the world around them, but they never doubt whether they have decided on the correct response. They do not wonder whether the mail is really a threat, and they do not inquire into the true cause of the sounds they hear. They just bark. They either do not have, or do not use, what the Yogācāra tradition calls “specialized activities.” Specialized activities allow us to change how we respond to the same sensation. Although there are several of these activities, they boil down to a cycle of doubt and discernment. Doubt is a painful emotion. And like other forms of pain, it demands a

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response from us. In a yoga class, we experience doubt on a regular basis, and it generally has just one object: I doubt whether I can move my body into a particular shape. Even poses such as Triangle Pose (Trikonāsana), often taught in less physically demanding classes, can inspire doubt. To get into Triangle Pose, I step my right foot forward as I turn my left foot parallel to the back of my mat. I drop my right arm to my right shin as I reach my left arm toward the ceiling. I may see other yogis in the class with their left hip stacked over their right hip and their left shoulder stacked over their right shoulder. The instructor may even say to “imagine your body fitting between two panes of glass.” Many yogis, however, cannot rotate their hips enough to stack one on top of the other in this pose. Sometimes they are beginners, and these limits may change with practice. But sometimes bone structure, which will never change enough to make a difference here, limits their ability. In either case, they will doubt whether they can take this version of the pose. As my Triangle Pose continues to look different from everyone else’s in class after class, I may begin to have a second doubt—do I belong in a yoga class at all? If yoga is about copying the shapes made by other yogis in the class, then the limited range of motion in my hips will doom me to failure. But I am not stuck with this interpretation! I can change my interpretation by inquiring into my reasons for practicing yoga. Why did I think it was important to copy the shapes of other yogis in the class? Maybe I assumed that only one version of the shape confers the benefits of increased strength and range of motion. If I do some research, though, I discover that the external shape of the body says little about where and how it is receiving the stress of the pose. From the outside, two people may look the same in Triangle Pose, but one feels only a mild sensation in her hip sockets, while the other feels strong pressure. One feels an uncomfortable tightness behind her front knee, while the other feels nothing at all. Based on this new understanding, I can evaluate the shape I take from the inside, based on the sensations it provides me, not by comparing it to what other people are doing. The cycle of doubt and discernment has led me to a new interpretation of my experience, which then allows me to receive and respond to the same sensations differently. I no longer find the sensation of restriction in my hips unpleasant because I know that this sensation is what I am looking for in the pose. And I no longer respond to the sensation by doubting whether I can take the pose properly, because I know that I am already doing it! So I

respond to the sensation like a yogi: by bringing my attention to it, to my breathing, and to the other sensations in my limbs as I continue to practice. The activities of doubt and discernment are not continuous. They come into play only when we are evaluating how we respond to a particular sensation. Without them, we are like the dogs barking every day at the mail carrier—stuck with the same response to the same sensation every time. Related Concepts: Although we give the six specialized activities of the mind a rest now and then, we use them relatively often. The first three —doubt (ch. 9), certainty (ch. 10), and mindfulness (ch. 11)—either prompt us to change our interpretation or reinforce the interpretation we already have. The last three—discernment (ch. 12), inquiry (ch. 13), and investigation (ch. 14)—are how we change our interpretation, once we decide that a change is needed.

9. DOUBT

llnesses and injuries throw off our experience of the physical side of yoga. Even if we have years of practice, these changes in our bodies return us to the status of beginners. We can no longer be certain of what poses we can take, how far into them we can go, or what their effect will be. Crow Pose (Bakāsana), for instance, usually looks inaccessible to beginners, but it does not challenge yogis who have been taking it for years, unless they are ill or injured. If I am ill, I may wonder whether I have the stamina to balance on my arms as the pose requires. I can answer that question by trying to take the pose. Or I can experiment with more and less demanding versions of it. But are my efforts making my illness worse? I cannot say for certain. This unpleasant feeling—the feeling of doubt—is more common in experienced yogis. Beginners typically respond to the instructor’s cues in two ways that avoid doubt altogether. When the instructor cues Crow Pose, for instance, the beginner may decide that she is just not cut out for it. She will simply take a different pose when it is cued. There is no place for doubt because she does not consider taking the pose at all. The second response is that the beginner plans eventually to take a full version of Crow Pose but

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takes a modified form of it for now. She plants her palms in front of her, squats behind them, rests her knees on her triceps, and then experiments with how much weight she can shift forward onto her arms and off her legs. This beginner does not experience doubt because she anticipates being able to take the pose in the future. Her thoughts are focused on her future ability rather than her present limitation. The following exchange between a yoga student and instructor illustrates these two responses. After class, the student says to the instructor, “I’m just not able to take Crow Pose.” The instructor replies, “Not yet.” Neither attitude allows for doubt. The problem with these responses is that they limit our attention to what we can control. We either exclude what we cannot control (by saying “I’m just not able to take Crow Pose”), or we expect that everything will someday fall within our control (by saying “Not yet” rather than “Not ever”). Experienced yogis typically do not have these options because they have committed themselves to taking physically demanding poses. Maybe they think these poses are healthy, expect improved physical appearance from them, or equate physical exertion with progress in yoga. But our control over physically demanding poses decreases when we are ill or injured. So, when these experienced yogis experience an illness or injury, they cannot help but feel doubt. They cannot stop thinking about the pose because they have committed themselves to taking it. However, they cannot know whether taking it will be harmful or helpful. So who is right—the beginner who avoids doubt or the experienced yogi who suffers it? Neither has stopped in a good place. Beginners who avoid doubt are limiting what they can get from the practice. And experienced yogis who suffer doubt needlessly add to their pain. The experienced yogis who face doubt, however, are better positioned to move forward, because doubt is unpleasant. It stimulates our minds to find a way to get rid of it. Beginners, not suffering this unpleasantness, may be content to remain as they are. When properly guided, doubt can lead us to a more traditional approach to yoga, one that affects the mind, not just the body. Doubt prompts us to ask whether we can learn to find pleasure in the situation that we currently experience as painful. The move toward a traditional yoga practice happens when we see our situation as something like a roller coaster—it scares the child and entertains the adult. The processes of growth and decay in our

bodies can be a source either of worry or of interest. As we begin to cultivate the latter, we experience that distinctively dizzying pleasure of being consciously in the presence of what we do not control. Related Concepts: Doubt can be good if we are easily motivated by pain. And most of us are, at least early in life. Once we can find other motivations, some of that doubt can be turned into trust (ch. 35), which finds pleasure rather than pain in what we do not control. We can also take pleasure in what we do actually control, and that kind of pleasure is certainty (ch. 10).

10. CERTAINTY

hen I am developing a new skill, such as learning how to play the guitar, I must pay close attention to my own body. I study my fingers as I form them into shapes on the fret board. If I am trying to strum a single string, I may glance down to the strumming hand before quickly turning back to the hand on the guitar’s neck. This constant looking back and forth is awkward and shows that I have not yet fully acquired the skill. Once I have acquired the skill, I typically stop paying attention to myself. When I pick up my guitar, I do not worry about whether I can hit the right notes or strum the rhythm smoothly. No longer paying attention to myself, I sense the music, my fellow musicians (if there are any), and the audience (if there is one). I look outward. This outward focus is one of the goals of skill acquisition. I would not bother learning to play the guitar if I thought I would always be focused on my fingers. Some researchers believe that attention to our bodies impedes our use of a skill—that if I notice sensations in my fingers while playing the guitar, I will hit a wrong note. This belief is probably unfounded, but it is true that when we are certain our bodies can do something, we usually ignore them while we do it. Certainty is, in fact, the pleasurable feeling of not having to

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pay attention to something. Daily life, for most of us, is permeated with certainty. For example, I routinely use several simple skills—walking, sitting, making coffee, driving a car. At one point, I had to work hard to develop each of these skills. But now, none of them are difficult and so do not require my attention. I assume that they fall within the limits of what I can do. That is, they fall within the limits of what I control and know. This certainty extends beyond my own body, because I control and know more than just myself. If I am certain that my guitar is in the closet, it is because things within my house are under my control. No one can come into my house and take the guitar away. If I am certain that the bottom string of a guitar is tuned two octaves below the top string, it is because this fact falls within the number of things I know, and the things I know are within my control. No one can enter my thoughts and alter my knowledge of octaves or guitar tunings. Things within my control and knowledge give me a feeling of certainty. But things outside my control and knowledge do not necessarily make me feel uncertain. I can choose not to think about them at all. Or I can regard them as things that I could learn if I wanted to. Could I ever play the harpsichord? If I want to avoid uncertainty, the two possible answers are that, yes, I could if I wanted to or, simply, I do not care. One side effect of a regular yoga practice is the accumulation of certainty on a massive scale. A new pose may not feel comfortable at first. But once you have taken it a few times, it no longer demands your attention. If you have practiced yoga for years and the instructor cues Warrior One Pose (Vīrabhadrāsana I), you will step one foot forward and lift your arms over your head without having to think about it. The only way for the instructor to ensure that you are paying attention to your body is by introducing a variation, maybe having you bring your hands together behind your back in an arm bind. Now your ability to balance may be slightly impaired, and so the pose requires your attention again. I treat certainty as, if not a problem, at least a challenge for yogis, because yoga traditionally aims at cultivating our attention rather than freeing us from it. We do not allow certainty about Warrior One Pose to free our attention for other things while we take the pose. In this respect, traditional yoga is unlike learning to play the guitar. Not only do we pay attention to our bodies while learning a new pose. We also develop the tools we need to

continue paying attention even after the pose is familiar. Certainty is a challenge to our practice, much like a tight muscle. If I feel tightness in my left leg as I step my right foot forward to take Warrior One Pose, I may shorten my stance slightly to work around the feeling of tightness. And if I feel certainty while I am taking the pose, I may remind myself to notice my breathing, as well as the sensations in each limb, as a way of working around the feeling of certainty. Although certainty is pleasant, we treat it as an addition to the other pleasures of yoga, not a substitute for them. Related Concepts: Even when almost nothing seems to be in your control, you can at least be confident that you know time will continue to pass, and you can rest your attention on that moment-to-moment activity. That form of attention is known today as mindfulness (ch. 11), and certainty is a necessary part of it. But to prevent our certainty from leading us to stop paying attention, we cultivate the habit of non-neglect (ch. 39).

11. MINDFULNESS

e tend to focus on completed poses, not on the transitions from pose to pose. If I am in Garland Pose (Mālāsana), sometimes called a deep squat, and the instructor asks me to stand up slowly into Mountain Pose (Tādāsana), my attention may immediately shift to the image I have of the new pose. Or I may focus on the list of motions necessary to get there. My knees are currently bent, so I first slowly straighten my legs, then I drop my hands to my sides and bring my feet together. In my mind, I have a motionless image of the final pose, or a series of motionless steps to get there. While my body moves between poses, my mind stays fixed on the next pose or on each completed step. As I focus on one motionless image after another, I am not actually experiencing time. The same thing happens, strangely enough, when you check your watch. If you are in the middle of a yoga class and wearing a watch, maybe you glance at it now and then. The number on the watch interests you only because you can compare it with the number the watch will show when the class is over. Maybe the class ends at 10:40, and your watch displays 10:05. These measures are not really about time at all. You are comparing two concepts—two numbers, in this case—and the difference between them

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creates a feeling. If you are interested in being somewhere else and the difference is a large number, the feeling may be unpleasant. The smaller the difference, the more pleasant the feeling. Or, if you are enjoying your experience, you may feel better if the difference is a large number. There is no movement or change involved in this activity. It is a simple act of comparison, and comparison is not an experience of time. Our only way to actually experience time is to use the Yogācāra activity known to modern readers as “mindfulness,” a word that, in English, is often misunderstood. But no matter what language you are using, the concept of mindfulness is tricky to define. The Sanskrit and Chinese words for this concept often mean nothing more than memory—understanding what you are now experiencing by relating it to something you remember from the past. In popular culture, the English word “mindfulness” has less to do with memory and tends to mean simply paying attention to what you are doing. So if you are only interested in what your wellness coach means when she tells you to be more mindful, skip ahead to the chapter on samādhi, which is the Sanskrit word for a pleasant state of stabilized attention. Mindfulness is sometimes described as an “awareness of the present moment,” and this is almost true. But we are never in direct contact with time. We only make contact with things, and time is not a thing. It would be more accurate to say that mindfulness is not so much about becoming aware of the present moment, but becoming aware of things as they appear either to change or remain the same from moment to moment. There are two components to this experience: our sense of the thing’s novelty and our sense of its familiarity. When something is new, it stands out. So we pay attention to it. But once something becomes familiar, it ceases to demand our attention and we typically let our recognition of it become unconscious. The keyboard I am using to type this is familiar to me, but once I am in the act of typing, I pay no attention to it. If I want to be mindful of the keyboard, I must treat it as both familiar (so that I know I am not seeing it for the first time) and new (so that I give it my full attention). And I get more of the feeling we expect from mindfulness by keeping this up for more than a passing second or two. Mindfulness is easier to maintain when we are paying attention to something that is perceptibly changing. My keyboard appears motionless, but my breath does not. So the flow of my breathing is a good object for

mindfulness in a seated meditation practice. The movement of my limbs from one pose to another will do the job in a postural yoga class. As I rise from Garland Pose to Mountain Pose, I can sense the new position of my legs at each moment. I would not recognize them if I had no memory of perceiving them before, and I would not sense them as new if my attention were not directed at them. Mindfulness, then, includes components of both memory and stabilized attention without being reducible to one or the other. It is how we really check the time, as opposed to the simple comparison of numbers we make when looking at a watch and saying we have “checked the time.” Related Concepts: The word “mindfulness” in popular culture often refers to samādhi (ch. 34), a pleasant state of stabilized attention. Its more technical use by both yogis and psychologists refers to the experience of things passing through time. This experience requires both attention (ch. 3) and certainty (ch. 10), which allow us to see things in the present (that is, as new) and as having existed at a previous moment (that is, as familiar).

12. DISCERNMENT

oung children depend almost entirely on other people for their interpretation of the world around them. They may seem independent and demanding—whatever they want, they want it now!—but their way of relating to other people is largely an imitation of what they see others doing. Certain classical Indian and Chinese philosophers think that some of us never grow up. The Chinese philosopher Mencius claims that most adults “engage in an activity without understanding it, make it a habit without examining it, and follow it until the end of their lives without knowing the way of it.” That is, they never get beyond the interpretation of the world they had as children, which is an interpretation given by others. That interpretation becomes habitual, and they do not possess the tools for changing it. At least some of us, though, become able to interpret the world for ourselves. We can identify cause and effect relationships and organize parts into wholes, all of which the Yogācāra tradition calls “discernment.” What is it that causes us to be sad? What are the parts of a fulfilling life? We can accept the answers that our parents, friends, and popular culture give us and settle there. Or we can discern our own answers, which may or may not be

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the same as theirs. Going to a yoga class will not help you become more discerning. If anything, it will reveal the degree to which you have absorbed the answer of popular culture to one question: What is the relationship between the mind and the body? Most of us learned our answer to this question from our childhood experiences of sports and physical education classes. Perhaps coaches, videos, books, and posters introduced slogans such as “mind over matter,” “push through the pain,” and “no pain, no gain.” These slogans gave you an interpretation of your own mind and body, even if you were not able to put it into words. You may, even now, when you feel fatigue in your quadriceps muscles while jogging, think of yourself as using “mind over matter” so that you can keep going. Or you may think to yourself, “No pain, no gain.” A yoga practice does not force you to change this interpretive framework. When you come to the yoga studio and feel a similar discomfort in your hamstrings during a One-Legged Forward Fold (Jānu Shīrshāsana), you may employ the same interpretation. Sitting with one leg extended in front of you and your upper body folded forward as you reach for your foot, you may feel a strong tugging sensation in the hamstring of your extended leg. As your hamstring resists further movement, you may say to yourself, “No pain, no gain.” You may think that you are using “mind over matter” to stay in the pose, just as you did while jogging. Such short phrases are more than inspirational clichés. They express a particular interpretation of the mind, the body, and the relationship between the two. The body does not come off particularly well in this interpretation. It is little more than a source of pain. In fact, it has to cause pain in order for the athlete to “gain” anything. The body is not understood as making an active or positive contribution to the experience of exercise. It is instead passive, inert “matter” that must be shaped by the mind. This matter is not conceived as supple or cooperative, but as dense and intractable. So the mind that shapes the body must not only be separate from it. It must be opposed to it. The body, unwilling to be shaped, causes pain. But the mind forges ahead, forcing the body to take on a new shape. Of course, you do not need to discern the actual relation between the mind and the body before you practice yoga. Ideally, you are not worrying about whether you have discerned anything correctly while you practice. But your previous acts of discernment—acquired through reading books, or

listening critically but thoughtfully to teachers—will cause you to pay attention to certain things, and act in certain ways, during your practice. Whether and how you reflect on those experiences and actions outside the studio will then shape your experience of future practices, as well as the health of your body and mind. Related Concepts: Discernment takes two forms: the simpler one is inquiry (ch. 13), and the more complicated one is investigation (ch. 14). Both of them work by combining the different concepts we understand through recognition (ch. 6), putting them into relationships of cause and effect or of part and whole.

13. INQUIRY

ou showed up at a yoga studio and made your way through a yoga class, and it felt painful or boring. Now what? Unpleasant experiences, whether in yoga or anywhere else, can trigger a process of inquiry. I experience something unpleasant, and I do not want it to happen again. So I try to discern its cause. If I can figure out what caused the bad experience, then I can hopefully avoid it in the future. In other words, inquiry involves not seeing an experience on its own, but as an effect with a cause you hope to discover. Did I find the yoga class unpleasant because my body would not do what my mind was telling it to do? Was it boring because I moved my body into the pose easily and then had nothing to occupy my attention? Both of these questions provide evidence that the mind and body are separate and opposed rather than united and collaborative. But have I gathered the right evidence? And have I interpreted it correctly? Perhaps I come to a yoga class with a head full of popular clichés about the mind and body. I assume that the mind must “push through” the pain that the body causes in difficult postures. After all, “no pain, no gain!” I have to use “mind over matter” to make my body do what my mind desires. When

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there is no such difficulty, my mind wanders off because my body does not demand its attention. My experience in a yoga class will then alternate between physical pain and mental boredom, which reinforces my assumptions about mind and body. If the body opposes the mind, then of course the body will complain when the mind tries to control it. And the mind will gain nothing from the body that has already done as it was commanded. In Eagle Pose (Garudāsana), for instance, unless my right hip is extremely mobile, I will not be able to tuck my right toes around the back of my standing left leg without straining my knees. Maybe I notice a tingling sensation along the outsides of my knees after taking the pose. If my view of physical exercise is solely based on the idea of “mind over matter,” I will identify the cause of this tingling sensation as my body’s resistance to being shaped. If I take the pose again, I may apply more force to my knees to get my right toes around the back of my standing leg, attempting to overcome my body’s resistance with the power of my mind. Eventually, I may feel a sharp pain as one of the knee ligaments tears under the strain. This sharper pain can then reinforce my belief that my body is keeping me from succeeding at yoga. Instead of assuming that my pain in the pose is the result of a separation and opposition between the mind and the body, I can consider another possibility. What if the mind and the body were united and collaborative? What effects could I expect to see as a result of their union and collaboration? I might find that my body has its own organization. It lets my mind know when I have gone too far or not far enough in a pose, and it provides my mind with sensations to observe while in the optimal shape. In Eagle Pose, for instance, my right hip provides no sensation of pressure or tugging when I extend my leg forward. I have not gone far enough to achieve the desired sensation in the pose. Once I bend my right knee and wrap my right shin around my standing leg, I feel pressure in my hip without any significant tension in my knee. I can now shift my attention easily and repeatedly from this sensation to the engagement of the leg muscles that hold me up, to my breathing, and back again. If I start to feel a sharp pinching in my right hip, along with tautness in my knee, I know I have gone too far. My body has acted as its own mind, using its own organization to let me know what I should be doing. This information reinforces my view that the mind and body are united and collaborative. Most of us will be happy to end our inquiry here. We can simply

conclude that viewing the mind and body as united and collaborative is less likely to lead to injury during a yoga practice and more likely to give us a positive experience. But we might be able to go further, undertaking a fullblown investigation into the true nature of the mind and body. This task can be accomplished only outside the studio as we put our thoughts into the form of written work or verbal discussion instead of, or in addition to, our postural yoga practice. Related Concepts: In this chapter, I have offered one example of how the sense of touch can provide evidence for the union and collaboration of mind and body. Other examples can be found in the chapters on body and mind (ch. 15) and sensory consciousness (ch. 18). Inquiry, through which we identify a single cause-and-effect relationship or a single part-whole relationship, is the simplest form of discernment (ch. 12).

14. INVESTIGATION

n classical China, wandering scholars often met for debates at the courts of various regional rulers. In one of these debates, a logician and a Confucian faced off in the court of a prince. The logician made a famous argument known as “Zang’s three ears.” The argument says that if you look at Zang, an ordinary man, you will see only two ears. But when you speak about those ears, or when you recognize what they are, you need the word “ears.” This word is a third component of Zang’s ears. Without it, the appendages attached to Zang’s head are just shapes. So Zang has three ears: the two visible shapes and the word “ears” that allows us to recognize what those shapes are. When the logician had concluded this argument, the Confucian did not respond. He simply left the room. The next day the Confucian and the prince met. The prince asked the Confucian what he thought of the logician’s argument. The Confucian responded that the argument was good, but that he had a question of his own for the prince: “To argue that Zang has three ears is very difficult and in fact comes to the wrong conclusion. To argue that Zang has two ears is very easy and, in fact, speaks the truth. Which would you prefer?” As this story shows, the Confucians of classical China were suspicious of

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subtle arguments—and not only when those arguments try to prove a false conclusion. Even arguments that prove something true have a version of the problem with “Zang’s three ears.” If I want to show you that two plus three equals five, I can set down two pebbles in front of you, then set down three pebbles next to them. When we count the group—five pebbles! We do not have to count the numbers in our minds separately from the pebbles that we see. But if I want to show you the area contained by a curve, I have to separate the numbers used to calculate this area from the shape that we see and treat them as though they existed by themselves in our minds. These abstract numbers are like the word “ears” in the logician’s argument. When we investigate our experience, we add something to it: a language that appears to be independent of our sensations rather than embedded in them. We may even decide to avoid returning to our sensations, preferring instead to stay at the level of the mind where we can solve the problems of logic and calculus. In other words, we may decide that we like math. Although doing math will not hurt you, it draws your attention away from your sensations. Most of us are not tempted to do math during a yoga class. But our minds easily begin to construct arguments in response to things we hear. If the instructor tells me to notice the sensation of weight in my legs, I can recognize the concepts of “weight” and “legs” without separating those concepts from the actual sensation of weight in my legs. But if the instructor tells me, as happens from time to time, that “floating your legs in the air reverses your blood flow,” I have to construct a complicated train of thought to understand what this means. I cannot tell from my sensations that my blood flow has been reversed. And the unlikeliness of this statement may lead me to construct an argument in my mind. Is it reasonable to expect that Hips-on-a-Block Pose (Viparita Karani) will cause the blood in my legs to reverse its direction of flow? If my blood flow changes direction, how will that affect me? Hooking up multiple causeand-effect relationships into a single chain like this, organizing many parts into a single whole, or doing calculus, is what I call “investigation.” The more complicated my investigation becomes, the less I am able to stay connected to what I am actually experiencing. I stop paying attention to the sensations in my legs because I am counting the cost of a reversal of blood flow in my body. Because investigation can separate us from our sensations, I have tried to

limit the amount of investigation this book requires by presenting each concept separately from the rest. The concepts can be connected through investigation: some are causes of others, and some are parts of others. But when you are in the studio, do not make them into a third “ear.” Let them become tools for directing your attention in your practice, shaping your experience of what is happening in and around you rather than distracting you from it. Related Concepts: Investigation is more complicated than inquiry (ch. 13), although both are forms of discernment (ch. 12). Unlike inquiry, investigation links multiple causes of a single effect, multiple effects of a single cause, or sequences of cause-and-effect relationships, where the effect of one cause becomes the cause of another. Investigation tends to lead us into harmful perspectives (ch. 31).

OUR MANY SELVES Everything we do with our bodies affects our minds. The reverse is true as well: The things that go on in our minds affect our bodies. Each level of the body and mind is a kind of self, sometimes initiating action of its own and sometimes responding to action initiated elsewhere. To understand the lines of connection between these selves, modern yogis often draw from the concept of the koshas—five levels of the body and mind first articulated in a text called the Taittirīya Upanishad. In the following pages, you will progress through these five levels. Kosha fans beware! The description of the five levels provided here aims to be useful and accurate rather than faithful to the traditional texts. The final level especially differs from the last of the traditional koshas and uses the language of the Chinese rather than the Sanskrit tradition.

15. BODY AND MIND

he invention of the telescope allowed us to see more things in the night sky. But it also gave us a glimpse of how the mind can seem isolated from the body. To see the rings of Saturn, Galileo needed his body, of course. But he inhabited a different world from the one he was observing. Normally, we expect contact to change things, as when a boot leaves a footprint in the dirt. But Galileo’s observation did not change anything about the rings of Saturn. Likewise, no matter how magnified, Saturn did not physically affect Galileo. Anyone who has spent time looking through a telescope is familiar with an even more obvious phenomenon: discomfort. To see through the telescope, you must hold still, often with your head bent over the eyepiece in a way that soon becomes uncomfortable. Your physical body makes itself noticeable only when it is detracting from the experience. These three phenomena—not affecting the object, the object not affecting you, and your body appearing to detract from the experience—do not change when you take away the telescope. Looking at a painting on the wall does not change anything about the painting, and the painting has no physical effect on you. Finally, though your body is necessary for you to see the painting, you

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are only reminded of it when it detracts from the experience, as your legs become tired after standing too long in the same position. The more exclusively we use our sense of sight, then, the more we isolate ourselves from the bodies around us (since we do not affect each other) and from our own bodies (since they seem only to detract from our experience). And it is a short step from simply seeing to simply thinking. You only have to close your eyes. Once Galileo had seen Saturn through the telescope, he could imagine it in his mind with no real change in the experience. He could then sit down and get the discomfort of his body out of the way, as his mind thought about the principles that govern the physical bodies he had seen. He could become almost a bodiless mind, dwelling on the principles that govern mindless bodies such as the planet Saturn. One reason we emphasize the sense of touch in yoga is that it makes this isolation of body and mind more difficult. If, instead of simply looking at a stone lying on a beach, I touch it, the pressure of my hand makes the stone sink farther into the sand. My act of sensing the stone affects the stone. And touching the stone affects my fingers as well—they become cooler as they remain in contact with the stone’s cold surface. Now, rather than getting in the way, my body actively shapes how I experience the stone. If I press my fingers against it, I sense its smoothness, but if I brush my fingers across it, it may feel rough or scratchy. My proprioception—my inner sense of muscle position—works in the same way. When I come into Dancer’s Pose (Natarājāsana), I balance on my right leg while reaching my left arm back to hold my left foot. Because I am looking forward, I cannot see the position of my left thigh behind me. I can, however, use the proprioceptors in my quadriceps to sense the position of my left thigh. This sensation will occur whether I move my leg or not. But the quality of the sensation will change as I increase or decrease the pressure in my leg muscles. My body is not just the object that I feel in this pose, and it is also not just what senses the object. As it moves, it determines what kind of sensation my proprioceptors will report. There is nothing wrong with isolating our minds from our bodies at certain times: when thinking through a difficult decision, investigating the principles of the world around us, and even when gazing at the stars. In our yoga practice, we take the counterpose to these isolating actions, preventing them from becoming so habitual that we lose the ability to reintegrate our mind and body when the investigation is over and the problem is solved.

Related Concepts: The levels of the body and mind can be distinguished by their degree of tangibility and malleability. The physical body (ch. 16) is easily touched and shaped, but it is regulated by unconscious systems— known in the Chinese tradition as qi (ch. 17)—that are not. Sensory consciousness (ch. 18) and thought consciousness (ch. 19) are intangible but mostly in our control, and principle (ch. 20) is sometimes tangible but totally out of our control.

16. PHYSICAL BODY

ost of us do not want to be dead. But we tend to objectify ourselves as though we were. I may, for instance, study myself in a mirror to see how I look—that is, to see everything about me that is not directly alive. The colorful, complex, visible shape I see is my physical body, the same whether it is dead or alive. Of course, the limbs of a dead body do not move like the limbs of a living person, but a rigid corpse is still a physical body. The physical body of a living person gets its complicated and agile movement from elsewhere, from the mind and the unconscious systems that shape and regulate its activity. One reason to not put mirrors in a yoga studio is that they perpetuate our tendency to see ourselves as objects, to isolate our physical bodies from our minds and the unconscious processes that keep us alive. In a studio with mirrors, I am tempted to use the mirror to see what shape my body has taken. When I take Side Angle Pose (Pārshvakonāsana), my right knee is bent, and I rest my right forearm on my right thigh as I reach my left arm toward the ceiling. Is my left arm drifting behind me? I can look in the mirror to find out. How deeply have I bent my right knee? Again, the mirror can tell me. But when I look at myself in the mirror, I am a mind looking out at my

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body as though it were a corpse. I am having an out-of-body experience while I am still in my body! When I remove the mirror, the easiest way to tell how deeply I have bent my right knee is to cultivate my proprioception—my internal sense of muscle position, which relies on pressure receptors located throughout the muscles in my right leg. This proprioception may seem less precise than the other senses because it takes place away from my eyes’ reach, in the interior of my muscle tissues. But the physical body is immediately present to my senses and immediately available to be acted on—that is, it is thoroughly tangible— whether I am sensing it from the outside or the inside. From the inside, I can sense it with proprioceptors and act on it with nerve impulses, just as from the outside I can sense it with my eyes and act on it with my hands. For yogis, the most significant difference between the external and internal sensation of the physical body is that our internal activity of sensation cannot separate itself from what it senses. My mind can separate itself from my feet when I look at them, so much so that I can put my feet where I can no longer see them, by wearing shoes. But in proprioception, I cannot remove the sensory activity of my mind from the muscles it is sensing. My proprioceptors are embedded in the muscle tissue, so I cannot treat my physical body as an object, as though it were a corpse. A yoga class provides an opportunity to cultivate this interior experience of the body. If the instructor reminds me to pay attention to my breathing, I could hook myself up to an electronic respiratory monitor. But a monitor only gives me a symbol of my breathing in the form of data on a screen. It is still outside of me. Instead of turning to symbols, I can experience the actual process of breathing through the pressure receptors of my rib cage, through the sound transmitted through my bones, and through the feel of the air moving through my throat. When the instructor tells me to press the outside edge of my back foot down in Side Angle Pose, I do not look back to see if my foot is flat against the mat. Instead, I notice the tension running along the outside of my lower leg and ankle and the compression in the soft tissues around the sole of my foot. Beginners often find this kind of attention difficult. Even a studio without mirrors has other people in the room. So, when I am in Side Angle Pose, I may be unable to stop imagining that the people behind me are watching the back of my head. I may imagine myself as they see me. In that case, I am still experiencing my own body from someone else’s perspective—namely, the

perspective of the people behind me. Directing my attention to my breathing and proprioception can lessen my tendency to see myself from their perspective. This training of my attention may last, at first, for the duration of the class, but with practice, it may eventually shape the course of my life outside the studio. Related Concepts: Looking at yourself in the mirror, or trying to see yourself as other people see you, is not always a bad thing. But it does reinforce the habitual outward directedness of the mind, discussed in the chapter on contact (ch. 2). At its worst, it can become a tool of pride (ch. 30), and it can provide evidence for the harmful perspective (ch. 31) of seeing your body as an object separable from your mind.

17. QI

e tend to identify with the parts of ourselves that we control. Our thoughts, for instance, are usually under our control. And so most of us are happy to think we are where our thoughts reside—that is, we equate the self with the conscious mind. We accept responsibility for the decisions we make with the conscious mind, finding it fair to be rewarded or punished for them. The physical body, too, is mostly under our control, especially in its surface boundary of skin. I can pinch it, paint it, cut it open, and sew it up— and I control the limbs that it covers. After all, I move these limbs constantly, even if most of this movement is just my fingers over a computer keyboard. I easily identify with this exterior surface. If someone takes a picture of this physical body, I find it normal to say that the photo is a picture of “me.” I can sense some of what hides behind my skin through receptors in my muscles and connective tissue. And I consciously control many of the muscles that wind through my body. But I usually do not think of my interior body being accessible in the same way as the exterior of my body, and I do not identify with it easily, if at all. This is because there is something else at work there, something between the two extremes of the physical body and the

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conscious mind. That “between” is all the systems that regulate the health of my body and mind: the digestive system, the respiratory system, the vestibular system, the circulatory system, the nervous system, and so on. These systems function independently of my control, and are only indirectly visible through their effects. The Chinese tradition gives these systems the name of qi (pronounced roughly like “chee” in English, and often spelled chi). The Sanskrit tradition gives them the name of prāna, and a Western analog is the classical Greek concept of the pneuma, often translated into English as “spirit.” Depending on who is using them, and in what context, these words can have a bewildering variety of meanings. In the context of this book, when I use the word qi, I am indicating the unconscious systems that regulate our health. These systems affect the parts of us that we control: the physical body and the conscious mind. If I have not eaten in a while, my digestive system may contract the muscles around my stomach, and my nervous system may cause me to sweat. These actions are visible in the physical body, but they are caused by something we do not perceive directly: the digestive and nervous systems. Sooner or later, the effect of these systems will make its way to my conscious mind. As my digestive system causes my stomach to clench, my conscious mind senses the clenching, receives it as painful, and begins to desire food. I may feel that these mental activities are in my control, and I do have the power to choose how I respond to them. But they originate outside my mind, in my qi, so I cannot avoid them completely. Still, one system within the qi easily moves back and forth between my conscious and unconscious self: the respiratory system. Although I was breathing before I became consciously aware of it, I can also choose to regulate my breathing. And by regulating it, I may indirectly be able to regulate the actions of other unconscious systems, especially the nervous system. Adding the practice of modern postural yoga to this breath regulation allows me to manipulate many other unconscious systems—nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, lymphatic, synovial, and so on—in ways that I do not fully understand. For instance, I cannot directly produce the acid that will lubricate my hip joint through a conscious act of my mind. But I can move my physical body into a posture that puts a mild stress on my hip, and this stress may affect my synovial system, stimulating the production of the acid needed by the joint.

Although we engage in this manipulation of our qi throughout our postural yoga practice, it does not require physically demanding poses. When I sit in a meditative posture, such as a Supported Hero’s Pose (Sālamba Vīrāsana), I may simply be focusing my attention on my breathing without trying to change it, but I can also intentionally lengthen my inhales and exhales. If I also engage the whisper muscles in the back of my throat to make my breathing audible, I have fully adopted what yogis call “ujjayi breathing.” I slow my breathing down, acting on my nervous and endocrine systems, and I breathe audibly, drawing my conscious attention to what originated as an unconscious activity. In ujjayi breathing, I weave together my conscious and unconscious activities in one of the few ways that I can. Related Concepts: Because our qi is outside our control, it is something that causes us either the pain of doubt (ch. 9) or the pleasure of trust (ch. 35). One way to build trust is to cultivate practices that take pleasure in what is outside our control. These do not have to be extreme sports! The simple practice of lengthening our inhales and exhales affects our nervous system, which we do not control, and can bring about the pleasure of spirited progress (ch. 33).

18. SENSORY CONSCIOUSNESS

hen we use the phrase “five senses,” we recognize that seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling are somehow connected. We may assume that they are interchangeable—that each one contributes equally to our experience. But experience always involves thought, and the five senses do not all lead to thought with the same degree of ease. Sight is the “easiest” of the senses. It is difficult to be wrong about it, and it also provides me with the most information. I can go an entire day without ever seeing anything I do not recognize. If I see an orange ball, I do not wonder what it is—my sense of sight immediately leads me to the thought of a citrus fruit. Hearing is only slightly less precise. I rarely hear a noise without recognizing, at least in general, what it is. If I hear a creaking sound, I know a door is opening in my house, even if I am not sure who opened it. Smell is at the other end of the spectrum. I often smell things without knowing what they are. Because I am used to this imprecision, I tend not to pay much attention to the smells around me. What kind of pollen is perfuming the air when I leave my house on a spring morning? I am not even

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sure that I am smelling pollen, so I take little notice of it. I am unlikely to ask myself technical questions about it. Touch is also at this end of the spectrum, in both its likelihood of making mistakes and the amount of information it provides. Say I am in Extended Side Angle Pose (Utthita Pārshvakonāsana), with my right knee bent, my right forearm resting on my right thigh, and my left arm reaching forward above my left ear. If I am not looking up at my left arm, I cannot see whether it is straight and roughly parallel with the side of my rib cage. The touch receptors in my left arm muscles report the location of my left arm, but if I look at my arm in a mirror, I may find that it is not where I thought it was. In other words, my proprioception—the sense of touch in my muscles—has not reported information accurately, or has not provided enough information. The ambiguity of touch is not a problem for our yoga practice. In fact, if we are working to enhance our sensation of ourselves through our practice, this lack of information will actually be helpful. Senses that provide precise and copious information tend to trigger a thought process. When I see a house, I ask the questions that lead to knowledge of it: How much does it cost? Does it need a new roof? What kind of neighborhood is it in? Is it ugly? But when I engage my left arm muscles in Extended Side Angle Pose, I am less interested in knowing whether my arm is parallel to the floor than in becoming aware of its interconnected muscles, fascia, tendons, and ligaments. I can cultivate this awareness without knowing the precise position of my arm or having a technical understanding of its anatomy. To maintain that focus on touch, we have to be careful how we use our sense of sight. Yoga studios typically have little decoration, for good reason. When our sense of sight is gathering information, we stop paying attention to our other senses. When yoga instructors tell you to “set your drishti”—that is, “set your gaze”—during a yoga class, they are not advising you to gather information using your sense of sight. The point is not to look at something, but to look out from something—from yourself. The stability of your gaze, set on one point, indicates that nothing in the room is drawing your attention away from yourself. A Zen Buddhist saying provides this same guidance in a more evocative and elliptical way: “Although he sees form, he is like a blind man.” Like the blind man, the Buddhist monk receives no information from visible objects, and yet he has not closed his eyes. When you use your sense of sight in a yoga practice, you are likewise positioning yourself to ignore information

from visible objects. This happens not by closing your eyes, but by paying attention only to how steadily you are holding your sense of sight— something that is happening in you rather than outside you. Related Concepts: For more reasons to use your sense of touch rather than your sense of sight while practicing yoga, read the chapter on body and mind (ch. 15). The data provided by the sensory consciousness only becomes experience when it is processed by the thought consciousness (ch. 19). By itself, without the addition of another form of consciousness, the activity of the sensory consciousness is contact (ch. 2).

19. THOUGHT CONSCIOUSNESS

hat might it be like to have the five senses but no thoughts to interpret them? Your eyes would detect the wavelength of light that we sense as greenness, but you could not call it “green.” Only thought enables us to name things. You could not even distinguish this green wavelength from another wavelength, because only thought can make distinctions. And you could not understand that the wavelength is produced by a maple tree outside your window, because only thought can identify cause-and-effect relationships. Sensation without thought would give you nothing but a chaotic bath of sensations. Perhaps this is how infants sense the world around them. Do they have sensation without thought? A Zen Buddhist monk once asked his teacher this very question, though in slightly different language. Traditional Buddhist philosophy refers to thought as the “sixth consciousness,” since it is added to the five senses as a kind of sixth sense. What the monk actually asked was, “Does a baby have the sixth consciousness?” Before we get to the teacher’s response, we should note that the monk’s

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question has practical consequences for Zen Buddhists who, following a long Chinese tradition, advocate living the life of an infant. An aspiring monk could be forgiven for wanting to know how a baby interacts with the world. If you are going to become like a baby, you need to know how babies experience the world. Even if we conclude that the infant has no thoughts, we may still wonder whether we can reproduce this state as adults. Beginners at meditation often approach their practice in this way, as an attempt to stop thinking. When they find that they are unsuccessful at stopping the flow of their thoughts, they sometimes decide that they are “not good at meditation” or that “meditation is just not for me.” The common beginning of a modern meditation practice, however, does not involve trying not to think. Instead, meditators occupy their thought consciousness with something that will not interfere with their meditation. They count their breaths. As I exhale, I silently say “one” to myself, then “two” with the next exhale, and so on. After I reach “ten,” I start over with “one.” While my thought consciousness is busy counting, my senses of touch and hearing can focus on the feel and sound of each breath entering and leaving my nostrils. This direction of the senses to a single object—the breath —is known in several traditions, including Zen and yoga, as one-pointed meditation. In a modern postural yoga practice, we do not typically count our breaths as a way of occupying our minds. Instead, we move our thoughts through the sensations in our bodies. If I am in Hand-to-Foot Pose (Pāda Hastāsana), standing folded forward with my palms tucked under the soles of my feet, I can notice the tension in my hamstrings and the ligaments surrounding the vertebrae in my lower back and neck. I sense the warmth in my quadriceps, the pressure of my feet against my hands, and my breathing—none of which could be distinguished from other sensations without the use of my thought consciousness. This meditation is not as one-pointed as focusing on breathing alone, but its treatment of our thought consciousness is the same. We give our thought consciousness something to do in a way that enhances our conscious sensations rather than distracting us from them. As for the monk who asked whether a baby possesses the thought consciousness—or, as he puts it, the sixth consciousness—how did his teacher respond? Even in answering questions, traditional Zen teachers avoid giving the thought consciousness a chance to distract from the present

moment. Their answers typically take the form of the seemingly incomprehensible statements that we have come to know in American popular culture as “koans.” The teacher’s answer or koan for the monk was “a ball is thrown into racing water.” The next step of the monk’s Zen practice is to confront this seemingly meaningless statement, letting it destabilize his thought consciousness. Wrestling with incomprehensibility like this is less common among yogis. Instead of confronting koans, we modern yogis typically go to a yoga class, where we experience a distinctively yogic fusing of thought and sensation. Related Concepts: Recognition (ch. 6) and discernment (ch. 12) are the two basic activities of the thought consciousness. The chapter on recognition has more to say about babies—they do not, in fact, have fully-formed thoughts. Yogis often consider the thought consciousness to be a problem for their practice, but this is only because it tends to reinforce the outward direction of the mind, orienting it toward the past and future rather than the present.

20. PRINCIPLE

cook in classical China butchered animals precisely and efficiently, with no apparent effort. When his employer marveled at his excellence, the cook explained, “When I first started to butcher oxen, all I saw was the ox. After three years, I no longer saw the ox as a whole. At the present time, I face it spiritually and not with my eyes. I rely on the heavenly principles, and so I pass my knife through the great gaps and guide it through the great cavities, letting what is already there take the lead.” The cook’s mystical explanation has been debated by scholars. But we can say at least this much: He attributes his prowess to “heavenly principles,” and these principles are connected with “letting what is already there take the lead.” What is already there? Well, the ox, of course! But not the ox as something that can be understood with just one word. The ox is not a smooth ball of processed meat but a structure of organized parts. When the cook says that he “no longer saw the ox as a whole,” he seems to mean that he began to perceive how the parts of the ox fit together. And by cutting along the boundaries between the different parts of the ox, rather than inserting the knife according to his own desires, the cook is able to do his job without

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effort. The world around us—and within us, in our own bodies—also has structures marked out with boundaries, some of which we can see. The visible line between the root and soil shows how the tree grows; the visible line between the quadriceps and the femur shows how the upper leg lifts. But other boundaries can be seen with our minds in addition to our eyes, or sometimes instead of them. The invisible line between the coach and the athlete shows how the team functions; the invisible line between the mind and the body shows how the animal functions. The principle, in all these cases, is that the line separating one thing from another also shows how the two things are related. When the cook follows the principles that shape the ox, he is looking for the boundaries that separate the different parts of the animal so that he can slice with less effort. When the rest of us follow the principles that shape our world, we are looking for the boundaries that separate the world’s different parts so that we can live in it with less effort. In a yoga class, we can practice “letting what is already there take the lead” by learning how to recognize the principles that shape our bodies in each pose. When the instructor cues Double Pigeon Pose (Dwi Pāda Kapotāsana), I can either impose my image of what the pose should look like, or I can respond to what I sense in my own body. Do I sit with one shin stacked on top of the other? If the principles that shape my hips and legs do not allow me to rotate my legs a full ninety degrees in their hip sockets, then forcing them will pull and perhaps eventually tear the ligaments on the outside of my knee. If I sense a tightening in my knee as I rotate my legs, and I am following the principles that shape my body—that is, if I am “letting what is already there take the lead”—then I will take a less extreme version of the pose. I may simply tuck my ankles under my knees rather than trying to set one shin on top of the other. To follow the principles of your body like this, learning the body’s strength and range of motion from experience, requires education and attention. Luckily, there is another method of following principles that requires no effort, as long as you are practicing a physically demanding style of yoga. Once you have moved your body through a series of strenuous poses, and you lie down on your mat for a moment of rest, you may be too tired to think about anything. You can give yourself over to whatever is

happening in that moment. This action, too, lets what is already there take the lead, as you consciously surrender yourself to whatever is happening. You know that you are not trying to impose your own ideas on anything because you are not trying to do anything at all! There is nothing wrong with using yoga to get a clear sense of what this experience feels like. But when we associate “being in the moment” too closely with the yoga studio, the practice turns into a kind of drug. When we want to feel the calm of surrendering to the principles of the world, we head to the yoga studio, forgetting that we are in the studio to develop habits that can shape our action everywhere. Related Concepts: Principle is the part of your mind that is outside your control; qi (ch. 17) is the part of your body that is (mostly) outside your control. We use discernment (ch. 12) to understand the principles of ourselves and the world around us, but we use trust (ch. 35) to take pleasure in them, even when we do not understand them.

THE TWO SIDES OF ACTION The ancient sages, whether they wrote in Greek, Sanskrit, or Chinese, tended to think of everything as a kind of stuff or material. The mind is made of one kind of stuff, the body is made of another, and even actions can be broken down into the stuff that composes them. The Sanskrit schools of philosophy divided this stuff into three forms, known as the three gunas. The Chinese schools of philosophy divided it into two forms, known as yin and yang. These days we have a better language for describing the stuff from which things are made (mapped out in the periodic table of the elements). But the older language remains useful when we want to analyze our actions, whether they are yoga poses or anything else we do. Modern yogis, especially in the United States, have increasingly been thinking through their poses with the concepts of yin and yang. The more precisely we understand these terms, the more easily we can settle into the styles of yoga that bear their names.

21. FLOW AND CONSTRICTION

ow we think about illness shapes how we treat it. If we define an illness as something that attacks the body, then treating it becomes a matter of cutting out or destroying this thing. In other words, medicine will focus on surgery or antibiotics as the primary means of treatment. This approach will be most effective at identifying things that can be cut out of the body, such as tumors, or that can be destroyed within the body, such as bacterial infections. If we define an illness not as a thing existing by itself but as a constriction within the body, then our method of treatment changes. Although something attacking the body causes the common cold, I do not treat it by trying to cut out or destroy the pathogen. Instead, I try to identify and relieve the constriction that enables the pathogen to flourish. The parts of the body causing the constriction do not need to be removed because they may be perfectly fine in themselves, even though they are causing a constriction in the body as a whole. Every constriction involves an action, and every action has two

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components: one that initiates the action and another that receives it or carries it out. The Chinese tradition refers to these components as yang (what initiates the action) and yin (what receives or carries it out). If I perform the action of typing on a keyboard, I am the yang component and the keyboard is the yin component. If a squirrel is performing the action of eating an acorn, the squirrel is yang and the acorn is yin. How we identify the yang and yin components depends on how we define the action. If we define it only as a movement of the physical body, the yang component of typing on a keyboard is the muscles in the hands and wrists, and the yin component is the corresponding bones. If we define it only as an activity of the mind, my desire to send a message is the yang component and my response of generating nerve impulses is the yin component. A constriction is anything that keeps the yin and yang components of an action from coming together. The constriction may incapacitate one of the components, as when a broken wrist prevents me from typing. I—the yang component of the action—am incapacitated. Or the constriction may be a third thing that isolates the yang and yin components from each other. If a cat gets between the squirrel and the acorn, then the yang component (the squirrel) cannot approach the yin component (the acorn) to eat it up. Incapacity and isolation are the two kinds of constrictions that yoga attempts to loosen. Yoga does not help us with every constriction. Acute constrictions, which prevent an action from happening, and which may be bodily or mental, require the assistance of a medical professional. If I cannot type because my wrist is broken, I need a doctor, not a yoga class. Yoga will generally make an acute bodily constriction worse. If I have a broken wrist and I take Downward Facing Dog (Adho Mukha Shvānāsana), the stress of holding myself up by my hands and feet while I straighten my arms and legs will only do more damage. Yoga is designed to work on constrictions that are chronic—that is, they do not prevent us from performing an action altogether but they stop us from performing it well. Whereas traditional yoga is interested in constrictions of the mind, modern yoga tends to focus more on chronic bodily constrictions. For instance, if the muscles, tendons, and ligaments around my wrists are chronically weak or have a limited range of motion because I rarely use them, or because I use them only in a limited way, yoga can help. After a few months of taking Downward Facing Dog, I will see at least a small

improvement in the strength and flexibility in my wrists. As the constriction is loosened up through this increased strength and flexibility, I become more able to flow through the actions that I was once able to perform only with difficulty. Related Concepts: Yoga poses can be characterized as yin (ch. 22) or yang (ch. 23) based on whether we apply the physical and mental stress of the pose ourselves or we let something or someone else do it. Traditional yoga mostly employs mental stress; modern yoga mostly employs physical stress. But both forms of yoga use inversion (ch. 24) and integration (ch. 25) to overcome chronic constrictions in our bodies and minds.

22. YIN

he shapes we take with our bodies are never free of tension. Even if we seem completely stable in a yoga pose, two forces are at work: one that pulls us further into the pose, and another that resists this pull. Whether we identify a pose as yin or yang depends on what is doing the pulling and what is doing the resisting. If I am taking Supported Cobra Pose (Sālamba Bhujangāsana), I begin by lying on my belly, then I press myself up onto my forearms. I now have two choices. One is to engage the muscles in my back to draw my chest forward through the opening between my arms. The other is to relax those same muscles, letting my legs and torso sink down toward the mat. If I draw my chest forward, and this motion continues, my entire body will eventually pass through the opening in my arms, and my torso and legs will end up extended in front of me. Of course, this never happens. I intentionally prevent it by engaging my abdominal and leg muscles to straighten my body, making it too inflexible to slide through the opening in my arms. And, whether I want it or not, there is enough inflexibility in other tissues of my spine and legs, including bones, tendons, ligaments, and muscles, to prevent such a deep bend.

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This version of Supported Cobra Pose, in which I pull my own body in the direction of a more extreme shape, is a yang pose. It is a pose where I myself initiate the action in the same way that I initiate any action: by contracting muscles. A yang pose, in other words, is one that depends on muscles applying stress to themselves and other tissues of the body. I can make the same external shape but change both the direction of the pull and what is doing the pulling by relaxing the muscles in my torso and legs. I am still propped up on my forearms, but I am no longer drawing my chest forward or pointing my toes back. Gravity takes over the work of pulling me into the pose, even though it is drawing me down and not forward. If nothing resists this pull, I will end up with my legs and torso dropping below my head and arms, as though I were hanging from a chin-up bar. Two forces keep this from happening. First, my yoga mat and the floor set a boundary to gravity’s downward pull. And, second, even though much of my torso is still off the mat, the tissues of my spine and back are not flexible enough to follow gravity indefinitely. This version of Supported Cobra Pose, in which I let gravity pull my body toward a more extreme shape, is a yin pose. It is a pose in which, after I get myself into the basic shape, I no longer initiate the action. I have to let my muscles relax. A yin pose, in other words, is one that depends on muscles relaxing themselves. Stress can still be applied to them by gravity, by weights placed on them, or by the hands of the instructor. But they are not stressing themselves. Up to this point, we have been discussing yin in the body, but yin can also describe the mind. We could even speak of a yin pose of the mind, one in which the mind’s activity is initiated by something outside of it, just as the action of a physical yin pose begins outside the body. A physical yin pose involves the muscles relaxing while the bones, tendons, and ligaments, as well as some muscles, remain inflexible, preventing me from ending up lying flat on my mat. A yin pose in the mind will also involve both relaxation and inflexibility, though in a way suited to the mind. When I am trying to solve a problem or plan something, my mind moves from thought to thought. Even if I focus on just one thought, I still feel a kind of movement as my mind tenses to hold onto that one thought. A yin pose of the mind is just the opposite. I relax my attention. This is not the same as daydreaming, which still involves the mind moving itself, controlling its attention and planning out the future. Relaxing my attention also does not

mean falling asleep, which would temporarily put an end to my interaction with the outside world altogether. Instead, I let my mind be a relatively inflexible frame through which thoughts and sensations can pass, entering from outside and then leaving again. As I lie on my mat at the end of a yoga class, I may hear the sound of birds chirping outside the studio. My mind does not tense to hold the sensation. It remains in a state of relaxation, a readiness for whatever sensation will pass through next. Related Concepts: Poses are called “yin” not because they are entirely free from yang (ch. 23), but because the yogis taking them try to be as yin as possible. In these poses, the yang component—whatever initiates the action of the pose—comes from outside the body. There is no action without both a yin and yang component, as you can see in the chapter on flow and constriction (ch. 21). You can revisit the “yin pose” of the mind by looking at the third form of meditation described in the chapter on samādhi (ch. 34), where the chirping birds come up again.

23. YANG

ome yoga poses work equally well whether we are drawn further into the pose by our own muscles or by something else—by gravity or the hands of the instructor. We give the name “yang” to those poses in which our own muscles draw us further in, intensifying the stress that constitutes the action of the pose. A pose that requires muscle engagement to put a healthy amount of stress on the body is one that works only as a yang pose. If we consider only what happens to the physical body during an action, and we consider only those actions that begin inside the body, the muscles are always where action begins. If I am lying on my back, with my legs extended in front of me, and I want to lift my legs into the air while keeping them straight, my hip flexor muscles will initiate the movement. They will contract, drawing my leg bones off the mat and bringing me into Upward Foot Extension Pose (Ūrdhva Prasarita Pādāsana). The hip flexors are the yang components of the action—that is, they initiate it. The leg bones are the yin components—they receive or carry out the action. Of course, many other actions have to occur at the same time for this to happen, and the pose is successful because of their integration. The weight of my legs may start to rotate my hip bones forward, lifting my lower back off

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the mat and drawing me into a backbend instead of lifting my legs off the floor. So I have to engage my abdominal muscles, firmly holding my hips in place and keeping my lower back from hyperextending. Here, my abdominal muscles are the yang component, and my hip bones are the yin component. In the version of Upward Foot Extension Pose described above, the muscles play the yang role. But muscles can just as easily become yin when something outside the body takes over the role of initiating the action. If I lower my legs to the ground in Upward Foot Extension Pose, gravity takes over the yang role, continuing to draw my body down and settling me into what is now Corpse Pose. Or if the instructor physically supports me in the pose by holding up my legs, the instructor is now the yang component while my muscles relax and become yin. Upward Foot Extension Pose is not a pose that works equally well as a yin or a yang pose. When I let gravity draw my legs down to the mat, the pose turns into Corpse Pose, which is not really a yin or a yang pose for the body. The physical action of a yoga pose is the application of stress to a part of the body, but no stress is applied in Corpse Pose. When I lie flat against the mat, so much of my skeleton is touching the mat that no stress can be put on the soft tissues of my body. So there is no action to be divided into its yin and yang components. My body also receives little stress if the instructor holds my legs up. Possibly the tension in my hamstrings will increase slightly as my quadriceps relax and my legs straighten, supported by the instructor. But for most people this will be a negligible amount of stress. Upward Foot Extension Pose is only effective as a yang pose. If we think of the activities of the mind as similar to yoga poses in the body, we can find yang poses here as well. A yang pose in the body involves a stress applied by muscle contraction, whether any visible movement follows this contraction or not. I can move my legs as part of Upward Foot Extension Pose. But I can also hold them motionless in the air, as my hip flexors continue to stress themselves and other parts of the body by contracting. The analog to muscles in the mind is the faculty of attention. In fact, the English words “attention” and “tension” come from the same Latin root. Muscles tense in the body; attention tenses in the mind. My attention may be attracted by something outside me. For that moment of being attracted, my attention plays a yin role. But as soon as it locks onto that thing, my attention becomes yang, tensing itself to hold the thing in view. If I am writing a letter and a bird lands on a branch outside my

window, my attention is attracted by the bird. But once I pay attention to the bird, my attention becomes yang, tensing itself to keep my mind conscious of the bird, uninterested in everything else. A yoga class is, for the most part, one long yang pose for the mind. I apply a mild stress to my attention, keeping it within the perimeter of my present experience, and drawing it back when it wanders off. Related Concepts: Combining the actions of different parts of the body to complete Upward Foot Extension Pose is an integration (ch. 25) of the body. What we call “yang poses” for the mind require attention (ch. 3), but the mental components of ordinary actions we perform throughout the day may not involve attention at all. You can find the yin and yang components of ordinary action in the chapter on flow and constriction (ch. 21).

24. INVERSION

umans are double-sided. If we consider our bodies, we find that they have a front and a back side, a left and a right side, a lower half and an upper half. If we expand our view, we can see that humans have a bodily side and a mental side. And our minds have an inward-directed side and an outward-directed side—that is, our minds either put us in contact with ourselves or with things outside us. We inevitably develop one of the two sides more than the other. Either the left or right side of the body is dominant in most of us, and unless we make a conscious effort to do otherwise, we will disproportionately develop this dominant side. Typically, we use our lower body to support our weight, while our upper body concerns itself more with tasks that require manual dexterity, such as typing or cooking. And for most of the day, we concern ourselves with things outside us, which requires that we develop our mind more than our body, and the outward-directed side of our minds more than the inward-directed side. An inversion is an exercise for the sides of us that we normally underdevelop. We perform inversions—understood in this way—throughout each yoga class. But we may not notice many of them because they make up

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only half the poses. If I am right handed, I will continue to develop strength in the right side of my body, but every pose that stresses the right side will be accompanied by a pose that stresses the left side. For me, the latter pose is an inversion. If I spend my day hunched forward, the poses that round my back will perpetuate that activity, but the backbends will reverse it. For me, a backbend is an inversion. Yoga instructors usually refer to inversions as those poses that lift our feet and hips above our hearts, reversing the roles of the lower and upper body. Depending on what kind of inversion you are taking, this can put the weight of your lower body on your hips (in Hips-on-a-Block Pose/Viparita Karani), your head and neck (in Headstand/Shīrshāsana), your shoulders and neck (in Shoulderstand/Sarvāngāsana), or your wrists (in Handstand/Adho Mukha Vrikshāsana). Since our heads, necks, shoulders, and wrists do not usually support much weight, they benefit most from poses that allow us to control the amount of stress we put on them. We lose that control with a Headstand, Shoulderstand, and Handstand. In a Shoulderstand, for instance, you cannot put less than the full weight of your body onto your shoulders, and you cannot control how much you flex your neck. If your shoulders can already tolerate the full weight of your body, and your neck has an impressive range of motion, then the pose will work for you. If not, it will stress your upper body excessively. There are poses throughout the practice that allow you to control how much stress you put on your upper body. Holding a Bridge Pose (Setu Bandhāsana), for instance, allows you to flex your neck as much as Shoulderstand, as you lie on your back with your knees bent and lift your hips and chest toward the ceiling. But you can also decrease the amount of neck flexion by lowering your chest and hips. You can increase the weight on your shoulders by lifting a foot off the mat, or decrease it by placing a block beneath your sacrum. Yoga instructors do not typically call Bridge Pose an inversion, but it does what an inversion does. It reverses the role of a part of the body. The poses mentioned so far are about inverting one part of the body in relation to another—making the left side do what the right side normally does, for example. These inversions increase the tolerance of the underused parts of our bodies. But a yoga practice also gives us a chance to invert the body as a whole.The body usually carries out the actions that the mind

initiates. To use the Chinese terms, the body is yin, and the mind is yang. If we allow the sensations in our bodies, and the quality of our breathing, to decide how we will practice, we invert the usual roles of the mind and body — the body becomes yang and the mind becomes yin. And by directing our minds inward, toward these sensations, we invert the usual outward direction of our minds. These are the inversions that accomplish the goal of traditional yoga: a change in the ordinary activities of our minds. Related Concepts: This chapter and the next one, on integration (ch. 25), are the core of this book. The other chapters unfold and examine the different kinds of inversion and integration. In this chapter, I have focused mostly on inversions of the body. I could accomplish a body/mind inversion by deciding what to do based on what my body is telling me, as described in the chapter on inquiry (ch. 13). The inversion of the mind—reversing the mind’s usual orientation from outward to inward—is described more thoroughly in the chapter on contact (ch. 2).

25. INTEGRATION

n an oil lamp, opposites work together. That, at least, is the point of the metaphor used by the philosophers of classical India. They observed that the oil is liquid but the wick is solid, the oil is cold but the flame is hot, and the wick is dark but the flame is light. Yet these three components—oil, wick, and flame—do not fight against each other. They work together to produce the light that is the function of the lamp. Even though giving and receiving—or yang and yin, to use their Chinese names—are opposites, they come together any time we perform an action. When you are lying on your belly and the instructor tells you to rise into Upward Facing Dog Pose (Ūrdhva Mukha Shvānāsana), your triceps contract to give a motion to your arm bones, straightening your arms. The muscle and the bone, like the flame and the oil, work together as one. Of course, the metaphor of the lamp is incomplete. If you pour oil on the floor, drop a wick into it, and set it on fire, you will get a brief explosion, not the light of a lamp. The flame, wick, and oil must be kept in a certain shape and fed in a certain way. In other words, you need more than just a flame, wick, and oil, to get a lamp. The same goes for yoga poses. If all you do is straighten your arms to

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take Upward Facing Dog, you increase the stress applied to other parts of your body. The weight of your body will pull your torso down between your shoulders. And if you do nothing to counteract it, your shoulders will hunch up toward your ears. Your weight will also draw your thighs and hips down toward the mat, increasing the curvature of your lower back unless you resist it by engaging your abdominal and leg muscles. Hunched up shoulders and a highly extended lower back are not necessarily wrong. But they receive more stress in these positions, and you will destabilize your shoulders and back while applying even more stress if you move directly from here to another pose. If your shoulders and back cannot tolerate the stress, they may let you know by causing you pain, which will then constrict your ability to take Upward Facing Dog in the future. Avoiding this constriction requires that you approach the pose not as the action of one part of your body, but as the integration of different muscle groups acting in different places throughout your body. Integration, as I use the term here, is the combination of small actions to make a larger action more effective. The complete action of Upward Facing Dog, for instance, flows out of the smaller actions of straightening the arms, dropping the shoulders, tensing the abdominal and leg muscles, and making other small adjustments that may seem unconnected to the rest of the pose. Modern postural yoga focuses on this integration of actions in our bodies and, to some degree, the integration of body and mind. But it has a limited ability to integrate our mental activities with one another. A thorough reflection on the state of our minds is not really possible in a modern yoga class. For instance, you cannot simultaneously take Upward Facing Dog and organize the many desires in your mind without distracting yourself from the sensations in your body. You may even forget which pose you are taking. So if, like many modern yogis, you only practice yoga in the studio, you will necessarily neglect the integration of your mental activities even as you become an expert at bodily integration. The philosophers of classical India and China go in the opposite direction. They generally leave the integration of our bodily activities to the medical tradition and concentrate on the integration of our minds. They investigate the sources of our painful emotions, and they identify the many activities we can perform to limit the power of these emotions over us. The challenge for the modern yogi is to find the ways that a postural practice can prepare us to do the work of this mental integration.

Related Concepts: This chapter pairs with the chapter on inversion (ch. 24) to form the core of this book. But without the other chapters, it is difficult to understand the different kinds of inversions and integrations. I have focused in this chapter on bodily integrations. For an example of a body/mind integration, read the chapter on recognition (ch. 6). For an example of an integration of the mind, read the chapter on non-craving (ch. 37).

INCREASING PAIN If you are going to find a solution, it helps to know what the problem is. The most basic problem for us, at least as the Indian schools of philosophy identify it, is that we unnecessarily magnify and prolong our own pain. The methods we use for this are called kleshas in Sanskrit. Most yoga instructors have studied the five kleshas as they appear in the Yoga Sūtra. The list that appears in the following pages, drawn from the “Thirty Verses” of Vasubandhu, is the same, except for the final klesha. The Yoga Sūtra says that the final klesha is “clinging to life,” but this is really just a form of craving—craving one’s own life—and craving is already covered in the third klesha. The final klesha listed here is “harmful perspectives,” following the list presented in the “Thirty Verses.”

26. THE KLESHAS

hen we describe painful sensations, our language sometimes confuses the pain with the thing that caused it. If someone asks me why I am not taking Bow Pose (Dhanurāsana), I may say that it is because I have a torn abdominal muscle. But, in fact, I avoid the pose not because of the torn muscle, but because of the stabbing pain I get when I use it. My explanation simply moves past the sensation to its cause. Why am I limping? “Because of a broken toe.” Why am I holding my neck so straight? “Because I have a stiff neck.” We confuse painful sensations with their causes so easily because each cause produces its own distinct sensation. If I have a torn abdominal muscle, I feel a pain that is distinct in character and location from all other kinds of pain. It is easy to think of the pain solely in terms of its cause—as the pain of this particular muscle. If I want to think about the pain in isolation from its cause, I have to develop a different vocabulary. “Throbbing,” “stabbing,” and “tingling,” for instance, are words that help me describe painful sensations without referring to their cause. Emotional pain does not as easily become identified with a cause. A word such as “frustrated,” for instance, describes a pain without identifying its

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source. If I used to take Bow Pose in every class, but an injury now makes it impossible, I may feel frustrated. When we hear the word “frustrated,” most of us can recall situations when we felt the same emotion, and they likely have nothing to do with Bow Pose. The Chinese tradition identifies seven basic pleasant and painful emotions: joy, sadness, anxiety, anger, love, dislike, and desire. Their names are as imprecise as “frustration.” Not one of them is named after a part of the body, a thought, or something external. Their names float free of any specific cause just as the emotions themselves do. A painful sensation is usually named for a part of the body because the sensation provides information about that part. Painful emotions are different: they are not concerned with a single part of the body. Instead, they involve situations that may have many parts, some or all of which may be outside the body. My view of who I am, of what other people expect of me, of health and happiness—these all contribute to my frustration, and emotions are not articulate enough to let me untangle all their threads. Emotions neither isolate a single cause nor direct us to a single solution. The stabbing sensation I feel when I take Bow Pose tells me where something has gone wrong. I can then fix the pain by relaxing my abdominal muscles. If I forget about those muscles—when getting out bed, for instance —I will get an extra stab of pain to remind me until the injury has healed. Likewise, a painful emotion, arising in a situation I do not fully understand, motivates me to experiment creatively with ways of changing my situation. To rid myself of the frustration I feel by not taking Bow Pose, I can try different approaches. I might stop exercising, stop going to yoga classes, or take advanced yoga poses that do not stress my abdominal muscles. Any one of these actions could potentially solve the problem, whether or not I identify the causes of the emotion correctly. Because emotions do not clearly reveal their origin, we can easily get our diagnoses wrong. Our minds have several methods of misidentifying the origins of our painful emotions in ways that can amplify and prolong them. These methods are called kleshas in the yoga and Buddhist traditions. The Sanskrit word klesha literally means “associated with suffering,” but the yoga and Buddhist philosophers use it to refer to the methods by which we amplify and prolong painful emotions. If you are feeling sad because a friend of yours moved away, a klesha will compel you to increase and sustain that sadness. To the degree that modern yoga originates in the physical exercise culture

of the nineteenth century, it has no more power to alleviate our painful emotions that a run in the park does. To make modern yoga more effective against the kleshas, we have to reconnect it to traditional yoga, first by identifying the kleshas, and then by investigating the ways in which the kleshas can surface in a modern yoga practice. Related Concepts: The kleshas play the role of villains in the mental cycle of flow and constriction (ch. 21). They constrict our minds, preventing us from being able to act effectively. Three of the five kleshas go together and are known as the “three poisons”—delusion (ch. 27), craving (ch. 28), and aversion (ch. 29). The remaining two are subordinate: pride (ch. 30) is really a specific kind of craving, and harmful perspectives (ch. 31) are a complicated form of delusion.

27. DELUSION

lassical Indian philosophy warns that misunderstanding is the key cause of magnifying and prolonging our painful emotions. One school of philosophy even names the five kleshas—the five ways to make our painful emotions worse—after forms of misunderstanding: “stupidity,” “delusion,” “great delusion,” “weighty stupidity,” and “blind stupidity.” Each of these is then subdivided into more specific forms of misunderstanding: eight divisions of stupidity, eight divisions of delusion, ten divisions of great delusion, and so on. We can be stupid in a lot of ways! The trouble with equating misunderstanding with the kleshas is that not every mistake is painful. If I am practicing yoga at home and I take Warrior Two Pose (Vīrabhadrāsana II), reaching one arm to the left and the other to the right, my proprioception may mistakenly tell me that my right arm is parallel to the floor. When I look back and see that my arm is actually drooping, I realize my mistake. That realization by itself is not painful. At home, I can notice my mistake and correct it without experiencing any negative emotion. The story may go in a different direction if there are ten yogis behind me who can see every move I make. In a studio class, when I see that I have

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mistakenly let my arm droop, I may feel embarrassed. Embarrassment is a painful emotion, and I feel this emotion after noticing my public mistake. But this does not yet constitute a klesha. The klesha does not arise until I identify my mistaken proprioception as the cause of my painful emotion. Be careful—there are two different mistakes here! Thinking my arm is parallel to the floor is the first mistake, and I feel embarrassed when I discover it. But considering this first mistake to be the cause of my embarrassment is a new, second mistake. Mistaken proprioception by itself cannot be the cause of my embarrassment since I do not feel embarrassed when I make the same mistake practicing alone at home. The crucial factor here is a set of assumptions: that other people are watching me, that it is important for them to see me as good at yoga, and that being good at yoga means having arms parallel to the floor in Warrior Two Pose. Caring about what other people think is not always a bad thing. We would have a hard time relating to others if we did not want them to see us favorably. The problem is that I am missing the fact that the activities of my mind—in addition to the presence of other people and an awkward pose—are contributing to my painful emotion. This is what the Yogācāra tradition calls “delusion.” Two different mistakes occur side by side in my Warrior Two Pose example, but sometimes delusion is the only mistake I make. For example, I can correctly identify a promotion at work as something that would have made my life more enjoyable. The delusion is to think that the boss who denied it to me is the sole cause of my disappointment. Or I can correctly identify the traffic on the freeway as preventing me from getting to work on time. The delusion is to think that the other drivers and the construction crew that closed a lane on the freeway are the sole causes of my anger. Because delusion prevents us from identifying our own cravings and aversions, these three—delusion, craving, and aversion—are known in the Yogācāra tradition as “the three poisons.” Delusion does not usually magnify or prolong our painful emotions by itself. It simply makes the other kleshas possible by drawing our attention away from internal sources of emotion. If I already think my boss is making me angry, I might not investigate how my own mind contributes to the shape of my anger. Or, if I am feeling an emotion without knowing its cause, I will search for something outside me as the cause. If I am feeling bored, for instance, I may focus on the book I am reading or the person who is talking to

me as the source of that boredom. Overcoming this tendency is the first step toward recognizing the ways in which we ourselves contribute to our own pain. Related Concepts: Delusion is not an activity of its own, but a distorted form of discernment (ch. 12). It is a mistaken identification of a cause-andeffect relationship. That is, I do not identify the activities of my own mind as one of the causes of my painful emotions. When this mistaken identification develops into a philosophical system, it becomes a harmful perspective (ch. 31).

28. CRAVING

he absence of a pleasure can make our experience of everything around us painful. Imagine applying for a job that involves a raise and a move to a town you love. You may like the town where you live now and still have good relationships with your family and friends there. You just want something better. When you find out that you did not get the new job, you are disappointed. Disappointment is a painful emotion, so maybe you go out for a drink with your friends to take your mind off it. End of story. But now suppose that, in your disappointment, you no longer want anything from the town where you live now, and you have no interest in spending time with your family or friends. If you cannot have the job you wanted, you do not want anything else either. Nothing has changed about the world around you. The shift from pleasure to pain has its cause in you. You have magnified your feeling of disappointment by allowing it to eliminate the pleasure you would otherwise find in other parts of your life. And you prolong the pain by cutting off the things that could improve your experience. In other words, you are making use of what the yoga tradition calls a klesha—specifically, the klesha known as “craving,” which works by isolating one desire from the rest of our desires.

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Traditional yoga is designed to reduce craving, but modern yoga sometimes seems to thrive on it. People often walk into a yoga studio for the first time not aiming to reduce their cravings, but to satisfy them—especially the craving to look a certain way. This may be the craving to gain or lose weight, to take the most physically demanding version of each pose, or to align the body in an aesthetically appealing way. Wheel Pose (Ūrdhva Dhanurāsana) can easily attract this kind of craving. The yogis on either side of you may lie on their backs with their palms flat against their mats, fingertips facing their heels, and then lift their torsos into the air. If you have never taken this pose before, you may crave it when you see other people taking it. That is, you may feel disappointed in your yoga practice because you cannot take this pose. It is probably not Wheel Pose that you are craving. Maybe you crave the admiration of other yogis in the class, the benefits that you believe only physically demanding poses can provide, or the exhilaration of what you believe is an advanced yoga practice. Craving perfection is another temptation for yogis. It is an unusual kind of craving because it desires something better without defining the improvement concretely. For instance, I may enjoy the job I have, but I know it is not perfect, so better jobs are possible. Knowing that there are better jobs is not a problem by itself. But if it makes me dissatisfied with my current job —that is, if I actually start to experience my job as painful—then I am craving perfection. This craving is a kind of perpetual dissatisfaction generator, because any job I have can always be better than it is. Yogis slip into the craving for perfection by expecting that they will constantly be increasing their strength and range of motion. If they are satisfied with their current practice, it may be because they see it as leading to something better in the future. Sooner or later, Wheel Pose will challenge this expectation. Once we pass the age of forty, most of us begin to develop bony growths along the vertebrae in our spine, and these sometimes reduce the depth of our backbends. If, as you get older, you find that you cannot bend as deeply into Wheel Pose, how does that make you feel? If you feel that you are failing at yoga, then you know that Wheel Pose was a craving rather than a beneficial part of your practice. Related Concepts: Like the other kleshas (ch. 26), craving is not an activity of its own, but a distorted form of discernment (ch. 12). It mistakenly

identifies the causes of pleasure in a way that increases our pain. Pride (ch. 30) is a specific kind of craving: the craving to have the world always be what I say it is. How do we reduce our cravings? By practicing non-craving (ch. 37), of course!

29. AVERSION

ertain warriors of ancient China were described as having “eyes of aversion.” When a warrior became angry, or simply intent on getting something done, he dropped his hand to his sword and put aversion in his eyes. We might say that the warrior was “glaring” at his opponent. We think of glaring as a temporary facial expression—I only glare at people when I am angry at them. But the “eyes of aversion” in ancient China can also refer to a character trait, an enduring feature of a certain kind of person. When a classical Chinese philosopher visited the king of Zhao, he found the king surrounded by warriors. The philosopher described them as people with “unkempt hair, rough beards, and floppy caps with long and crude tassels. They have eyes of aversion, and talk only of their work.” This reference to “eyes of aversion” is meant to be critical. The warriors made fighting such a habit that it shaped their very character. They were good for nothing else. Aversion is not the same as a simple response to sensation or emotion. I usually respond to a painful sensation by removing whatever is causing it. If my shoes hurt my feet, I take them off. This does not mean I am averse to the shoes. Or if not getting a promotion makes me feel disappointed, I may

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distract myself by getting a drink with some friends. This action does not mean I am averse to my current job. But what if my mind tries to ensure that I never feel these painful sensations or emotions again? It may begin to hunt down everything associated with the pain, and to provide me with an additional shot of pain whenever I encounter, or even think about, those things. This additional shot of pain usually takes the form of anger. Because my mind is generating this emotion itself, and its purpose is to protect me from something indefinitely, I can call it up any time I want—“I get angry just thinking about it!” So I magnify my original pain by adding more, and I prolong it by making it a permanent form of protection. Aversion shows up surprisingly easily in modern yoga. Yogis put money and time into their yoga classes, and they often expect a return in the form of improved health or physique. Most of us readily and restlessly balance the cost against the benefit of any activity and are highly sensitive to any indication of waste. If I am working on the arm balance known as One-Legged Koundinya Pose (Eka Pāda Koundinyāsana), I may feel that the time and money I put into coming to class are being wasted if the instructor does not include this arm balance in the sequence of poses. It is a physically demanding pose, requiring that I hold a low push-up position, rest my right thigh on my right triceps, and then draw my body forward until I can lift my back foot off the mat. Without athletic poses like this one, I may feel that I am not getting enough physical exercise to justify the cost of the class. My mind may start to inoculate me against coming to class in the future by arousing irritation at everything associated with the class—the instructor, other yogis, the owner who sets the price of the class, the distance of other studios, and so on. Or, if I do not have the necessary arm strength, hip mobility, and range of motion in my wrists to take this pose, I may feel that my time and money are being wasted while other yogis practice the arm balance. If I worry that the pose may damage my wrists, I can feel like the class is actually a danger to my health. To protect me from injury, my mind may arouse my irritation at the instructor, the studio—everything associated with the class. This multiplication of targets constitutes aversion. Like craving, aversion is a source of concern for traditional yoga because it increases the number of objects that we do not find pleasant or that we find actively painful. It makes our world smaller and smaller as there are fewer

and fewer things that we want to encounter. Related Concepts: Aversion is often a consequence of craving (ch. 28). If I crave something and I do not get it, then my mind may build up anger toward everything associated with my inability to get what I crave. Riding the nonaversion (ch. 38) train is the traditional way to break down the habit of aversion.

30. PRIDE

e typically think of pride as putting ourselves above other people. But we experience it more often in a subtler form, one that occurs when we are doing our best to help other people and may not be consciously thinking of ourselves at all. Imagine that a friend asks for your advice in choosing between two apartments. You do not really think that one is better than the other, but to help her decide, you recommend one. Later, she tells you that she rented the one you did not recommend. You are so annoyed that you are unable to focus on anything else, even though you did not initially care which one she chose. What is the source of your painful emotion? Since you think that your friend chose a good apartment, it has nothing to do with concern for her welfare. You are annoyed only because she did not allow the two apartments to have the value you assigned to them. This is what you crave: that things have the value you assign to them, even if you assign that value arbitrarily. This craving can be present even when you know you are wrong. For instance, if my friends see me as an expert in late twentieth-century popular culture, they may ask me who directed Return of the Jedi. Maybe my answer is “Steven Spielberg.” When I meet them a few weeks later, they tell me I

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was wrong. It was actually directed by Richard Marquand. I feel the painful emotion of embarrassment because I did not get what I want—for my friends to believe that the film was directed by the person I named. I know I was wrong, but I am upset that reality does not correspond to what I said it was. Or, at least, I am upset that my friends do not believe that reality is what I said it was. A similar form of pride sometimes afflicts modern yogis. When they need everyone (including the instructor) to believe that they can take the most physically demanding version of each pose, they experience pride. Because their pride is satisfied by what other people believe, not what actually happens, they do not have to take the most physically demanding version of each pose. They only have to look as though they are taking it. Any pose that allows you to look as though you are taking the most physically demanding version without actually doing so is a good indicator of pride. In Revolved Triangle Pose (Parivritta Trikonāsana), for instance, with my right foot forward I bend forward from the waist until my left hand can touch the mat. I then twist my torso as I lift my right hand toward the ceiling. In the deepest version of this pose, my hips stay parallel to my mat while my shoulders are perpendicular, and my right arm extends straight out from my shoulder socket toward the ceiling. Having hips parallel to the floor and shoulders perpendicular to it requires a ninety degree rotation of the spine from hips to shoulders. Most people are only capable of about forty degrees of rotation through this part of their spines, and so they will not be able to twist anywhere near enough to get their shoulders perpendicular to the mat. Once you reach the point where your shoulders and right arm are angled upward about forty degrees from horizontal, and you cannot twist any farther, what do you do? Some yogis want to look like they are in a deeper version of the pose, so they crane their right arm back until it points straight up toward the ceiling. If their shoulders are healthy, this will not damage them. After all, we intentionally crane our arms back in other poses (such as Bow Pose). The point of Revolved Triangle Pose, though, is to twist the spine while in a partial forward fold that tests your balance. Craning your right arm back only makes you look like you can go more deeply into the pose than you actually can. You make other people believe in the reality you want, rather than what is actually there. Related Concepts: Pride magnifies our pain by forcing us to deny or resist

reality. But reality is always there to push back—that is what makes it reality! If you have a philosophical turn of mind, pride can easily lead to harmful perspectives (ch. 31), since these allow you to build an alternate reality for yourself in words and concepts. But pride itself is a specific form of craving (ch. 28)—when you cannot be happy unless the world is whatever you say it is.

31. HARMFUL PERSPECTIVES

mistaken perception is still a perception. This, at least, is the view of traditional yoga. If I walk in the woods at night and misperceive a coil of rope as a snake, this momentary mental image of a snake is no less real than any other. How do I get rid of the mistaken perception? I gather additional evidence. I look at the path again, and this time I see a coil of rope. I blink and look again, and I still see a coil of rope. Now I can be reasonably sure that the first image was a misperception. But what if I build on the first image instead of acquiring additional evidence? I can draw many other conclusions about the woods: that they are dangerous and should be closed at night, or that the paths should be widened to increase visibility. My initial fear, caused by my momentary misperception, was limited to the snake. Now I add new things to fear: dark paths, the woods, and so on. And I connect these frightening things as I make my fear the basis for a system of land management. This system is a harmful perspective, an interpretive framework that

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enables us to magnify and prolong our painful emotions. The system of land management in my example would affect too few people to bother the yogis of classical India. These yogis were more concerned with the harmful perspectives that interpret the body-mind relationship, and that made their way into widely-read Indian philosophical texts. The perspectives employed in these texts are not only for philosophers. By seeping into popular culture they become the unconscious assumptions that limit how we understand our bodies and minds. Investigating a harmful perspective during a yoga class would be counterproductive. Your complicated thought process would interfere with your ability to pay attention. Outside of class, though, consider thinking through the assumptions you bring to your practice. For instance, how do you interpret lower back pain when you take Locust Pose (Shalabhāsana)? If you are lying on your belly and lift your head, heart, arms, and legs to take the pose, and you feel a cramping sensation in your lower back, you may feel that your body is just getting in your way. By generating a painful sensation that you cannot endure, your body keeps you from taking a more physically demanding version of the pose. This feeling of frustration is not yet a harmful perspective. It only becomes harmful if you go home after class and build a philosophy in which the body is a distraction to the mind. You could even write a book about it. If you know a little Sanskrit, you could add in some Sanskrit words to impress your reader, referring to the liberated, bodiless self as purusha or ātman. You could explain how we free ourselves from pain by separating this purusha from both the body and the reasoning mind. This perspective may be fine when you discuss it in a philosophy classroom. But it becomes harmful when it shapes how you perceive your own emotions. If you use the concept of purusha to explain why your body is the source of your feeling of frustration, then that concept has become a harmful perspective. The concept of purusha has a reality of its own, just like the mistaken image of the snake on the path at night. Overcoming it, then, involves the same kind of activity as overcoming my image of the snake. I have to look at things around me repeatedly, from as many sides as possible, using as many tools as I can. I look at the coil again and from different angles, and I consider what could look like this other than a snake. I think about other things my body is doing in Locust Pose, and I realize that, without my body, there is no pose at all. The rope is coiled like a snake, but that is not all it is.

My body can be a source of pain, but that is not all it is. Related Concepts: Few modern yogis are thinking of classical Indian philosophy while they practice. The harmful perspectives that afflict them are more likely slogans derived from the philosophy of physical exercise: “no pain, no gain,” “mind over matter,” and so on. You can read about these harmful perspectives in the sections on discernment (ch. 12) and inquiry (ch. 13). All harmful perspectives are a development of the more fundamental problem of delusion (ch. 27).

DECREASING PAIN Is it the most famous list in all of yoga? The Yoga Sūtra’s list of the “eight limbs of yoga” has at least become part of modern yoga teacher training programs everywhere. But it is an unwieldy list. The final three limbs are arguably synonymous, and others vary from the extremely specific (breath regulation) to the extremely general (non-harming). A list that does the same job, but without these defects, can be found in the “Thirty Verses” of Vasubandhu. The version you will encounter in the pages that follow has been boiled down to seven essential activities by the twentieth-century philosopher Xiong Shili and is reordered here to form a logical sequence, from the spirited progress that inspires us when reducing our pain, to the non-neglect that brings us back when we have gotten distracted.

32. LIMBS OF YOGA

ne of the epics of early India tells of a king named Bhagīratha, who wanted to wash the bones of his ancestors in the river Ganges. Unfortunately for him, the Ganges did not exist! Actually it did exist, according to the epic, but it flowed through a different world, and not a single drop of it made its way to Earth. Bhagīratha undertook a series of prayers accompanied by physical austerities over the course of thirty-thousand years to persuade the gods to reroute the Ganges. When they answered his prayers, the river began to flow through India as it does now. A large stone carving in Mahabalipuram dating from the seventh century depicts Bhagīratha undergoing his austerities by doing nothing other than a clearly recognizable Tree Pose (Vrikshāsana). In other words, certain poses that we still take in modern yoga classes, such as Tree Pose, have a long history as forms of austerity. They once belonged to the realm of asceticism, not athleticism. The Sanskrit word for austerity—tapas—literally means “heat,” and practicing in the hot sun was part of the life of a traditional ascetic. By practicing in a heated room, you can add this form of austerity to any style of modern yoga, whether or not you take Tree Pose or any other traditional pose. The heat will increase the

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stress applied by whatever pose you are taking to some of the unconscious systems of your body, making you sweat more, changing your breathing, and releasing hormones to compensate you for your discomfort. But yoga in a cooled-off room is not entirely free of austerity. Even if you practice restorative yoga, in which no stress is applied to the physical body or its unconscious systems, you still have to set aside time during your day to practice it. There is a discipline involved in getting yourself regularly to the studio, and this break in your ordinary activities is clear from the fact that you end up in clothing you would never wear to the office, on a mat in an empty room, with no phone, keys, shoes, or anything else that allows you to function in the outside world. Then, during the practice, you take shapes with your body that you would never take outside the studio. Most people do not slip into Tree Pose as part of their jobs. Taking the pose is a form of discipline or austerity. The discipline of traditional yoga does not aim at producing physical benefits, as modern yoga often does, or at gaining favors from the gods, as in the story depicted on the rock wall at Mahabalipuram. Traditional yoga is concerned with weakening the kleshas, the mental habits that magnify and prolong our painful emotions. The specific practices that accomplish this are known in various Indian traditions as “the limbs of yoga,” “causes of success,” “the eightfold path,” or “good mental activities.” There are often eight of these practices, but their number, names, and content differ, sometimes even between the lists contained in a single book. There is no reason to identify any particular number or set of names as definitive, not even the one that I am presenting in the pages that follow. Will you find these limbs in modern yoga? You cannot help but employ one or two of them when you attend a yoga class: those that use the movement of the body to produce changes in the mind. If you are taking Tree Pose for any length of time, the challenge of balancing will keep your attention from wandering away from your own body (using the limb of samādhi). And the stress of the hot room will release hormones to make you find the activity pleasant (using the limb of spirited progress). Other limbs begin with an act of the mind, so you cannot employ them without intending to do so. Nothing compels you to pay attention to the pleasure of breathing while you are taking Tree Pose (when you use the limb of trust) or to become curious about the frustration you feel when you lose your balance (when you use the limb of non-aversion).

A few of the limbs can only be employed fully outside the yoga studio. You will actually distract yourself from Tree Pose if you reflect on the things that bring you pleasure in your life and try to harmonize your desires for these different things (when you use the limb of non-craving). In other words, the limbs of yoga are a discipline practiced both inside and outside the studio. To practice only postural yoga in the studio, or only ethical reflection outside the studio, is better than nothing. But ideally we weave these practices together into a life that holds its shape no matter where we are. Related Concepts: In the list I am using here, there are seven limbs of yoga, also known as “good mental activities.” Two of them, spirited progress (ch. 33) and non-neglect (ch. 39), provide the necessary preparation for the experiences of samādhi (ch. 34) and trust (ch. 35). Used properly, these experiences bring about the remaining three limbs—non-delusion (ch. 36), non-craving (ch. 37), and non-aversion (ch. 38)—also known as the “three roots.”

33. SPIRITED PROGRESS

hen the scholars of medieval China wanted to criticize Buddhists or anyone else who practiced meditation, they would sometimes use the phrase “dry wood and dead ashes.” The idea is that people in meditation have removed all vitality from themselves, so they appear to be dead. As a result, they are of no use to themselves or anyone else. It is, of course, possible to become like dry wood and dead ashes in a meditation practice. But you have to remove a key component from it: what the yoga tradition calls “spirited progress.” Whenever we do something, pleasure is involved, though it may not be pleasure we find in the action itself. I do not mean pleasure as an intense emotion, but simply our willingness for an activity to continue. I may not be willing to have an office meeting continue—except that I want to keep my job. Because I am willing to keep a job I enjoy, I sit through the meeting. Although the meeting is unpleasant, having my job is not. Likewise, I may not want to spend another minute in meditation—except that I think it has health benefits, and I want to be healthy. I do not enjoy the meditation for its own sake, but I do it anyway. There is no spirited progress in this approach to either the office meeting or the meditation practice. To approach an activity

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with spirited progress is to take pleasure in the activity itself, regardless of what effects the activity produces. Modern postural yoga has an advantage over more traditional meditation practices when it comes to spirited progress. We are accustomed to link physical exercise with spirit. “Team spirit” and “school spirit” are phrases we often use to talk about competitive sports. Even if my physical exercise is not competitive, as when I go for a recreational jog rather than running in a marathon, I can still feel spirited by competing against myself, going for a personal best time or setting a similar goal. So when I come to a yoga studio, popular culture has already conditioned me to put myself in a spirited frame of mind. During the Sun Salutation (Sūrya Namaskāra) sequence, I have the option of jumping from Forward Fold Pose to Low Pushup Pose, lowering from High to Low Pushup Pose, or dropping all the way down to the mat. My competitive spirit may prompt me to jump back to Low Pushup Pose, the most physically demanding option of the three. This competitive spirit, even when it only pushes us to compete against ourselves, is of ambiguous value for a yoga practice. Competition easily fosters pride, which is not something we want to cultivate in a yoga practice. But physical exercise can generate spirited progress even when the instinct for competition is removed. When we exercise, our bodies generate the same physical sensations we feel when emotionally engaged with something. My heart rate increases, I may get flushed, I breathe more deeply, and so on. Even if I feel sluggish when I arrive at an athletic yoga class, it is difficult to stay that way. Spirited progress simply means becoming conscious of the pleasure in the activity rather than the discomfort. During a physically demanding activity, this may be easy to do. When your nervous system is releasing hormones in response to the stress you put on your body, it will be difficult for you to ignore that pleasure. This kind of spirited progress works from the outside, starting in what you do with your body and shaping how you experience it. If you are practicing a more meditative style of yoga, you can still cultivate spirited progress, but your progress will have to come from the inside. It can start with the intention you bring to your practice, the commitment to practice not with your teeth gritted but with attention to the pleasure the practice provides. Even if your body looks like dry wood and dead ashes while you are practicing, the intention you set at the start of the

practice is to fill it with the same vitality that you would bring to a run in the park. Related Concepts: Spirited progress can be rooted in our unconscious bodily systems—what the Chinese language calls our qi (ch. 17). When I stress my body, my nervous system releases hormones to relax me. But spirited progress can also be rooted in a conscious mental activity when I experience recognition (ch. 6) of the pleasurable side of my practice.

34. SAMĀDHI

n the unsettled political realm of classical China, wandering scholars sometimes visited the courts of princes to offer their guidance. One of these scholars showed up at the court of the prince of Liang. The prince asked the scholar, “How can I bring stability to the world?” The scholar responded, “Stability is brought about through unification.” The prince and the scholar were talking about government. But they could just as easily have been discussing meditation, which is equally dependent on stability—though it is a stability brought about through the unification of the mind rather than the world. The Chinese Buddhists observed this connection between stability and unification. So they used the Chinese word for “stability” to translate the primary Sanskrit word for meditation, samādhi, which literally means “unification.” It is easiest to understand stability and unification in one-pointed meditation, when we hold our attention on a single object. Our attention is unified because it is directed at only one thing. And this unification makes the mind stable. It no longer wanders from one thing to another. As we move our bodies in modern postural yoga, we have to give our attention to each new pose we take, so we cannot employ one-pointed

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meditation. But we can still maintain a state of samādhi. We do not hold our attention on a single object, but we let our attention move easily and repeatedly between the components of the single experience we are having in each pose. Gate Latch Pose (Parighāsana) is a good example of this cyclical movement. From standing on my knees, I extend one leg out to my right, resting my right heel on the mat. I reach my left arm up and over my head and rest my right hand on my extended right leg. For the short time I am in the pose, I let my attention move from one part of my experience to another. I recognize the pose I am in—that is the attentive use of my mind. But instead of wondering what pose is coming next or what is happening outside the studio, I move my attention from my recognition of the pose to the sensation of my body in the pose. I feel the lengthening in the muscles running along the left side of my rib cage, and I let my attention extend up my left triceps and left forearm. I drop my attention to the sense of tautness in my right hamstring. And I let my attention return again and again to my internal sense of slow, steady breathing. When we relax on our backs at the end of a practice, we also relax our attention. But there is another form of samādhi to work on here. Just as you can tense or relax your muscles, you can also tense or relax your mind. Tensing your attention means holding it on something, whether that something is your breathing or the many facets of your experience. Relaxing your attention means letting in whatever sensation passes through the body. This could be the sound of birds in the trees outside the studio, the cough of someone in the room, or the bead of sweat rolling down the side of your cheek. Samādhi here is the constant readiness to receive whatever comes to you, without trying to hold onto it when it arrives. This relaxed attention can be just as challenging as the tensed attention you maintain during the active part of the practice. Though samādhi can be a challenge under any circumstances, you give yourself no chance to achieve it if paying attention is simply an unpleasant slog. In this respect, too, meditation resembles the political unification that the prince and the wandering scholar were discussing. The scholar explained to the prince that unification requires leaders who do not enjoy killing other people. When such leaders rise to power, people will flock to them. People will want to be part of the kingdom, seeing that its leader does not treat them as expendable tools. If they were brought into the kingdom by force, that

force would actually generate instability, as the people would always be dissatisfied with the leader they were forced to serve. People only become unified because they want to be. The same goes for meditation. There is no samādhi without wanting it, because the purpose of samādhi is to introduce an internally generated pleasure to our lives. You can certainly hold your attention on a single object without enjoying it, but that kind of attention is not samādhi. If the enjoyment of meditation does not come naturally to you, then you may need to cultivate a different activity first—a sense of spirit. Related Concepts: We need samādhi to provide us with an internallygenerated pleasure so that we can practice non-craving (ch. 37). You can read a longer discussion of one-pointed attention in the chapter on thought consciousness (ch. 19). If you do not find this kind of attention pleasant, you can cultivate spirited progress (ch. 33) to find the pleasure that will elevate your attention into samādhi.

35. TRUST

he sacred texts of the Vedānta tradition describe an ideal land north of India, where “stately trees can scarce uphold / the burden of their fruits of gold,” and the people who live there “sweet lives untroubled spend / in bliss and joy that know not end.” The name of this land is Uttarakuru, and no one has ever seen it. You can still feel confident that Uttarakuru exists, despite having no experience of it. And maybe you hope to be reborn there someday, though it is not something you study or care about as part of your daily life. This is not trust, but certainty—a pleasant feeling of familiarity and control. You can safely set Uttarakuru aside, letting it be an unconscious part of your religious practice that does not need to be studied or questioned. On the other hand, proving that Uttarakuru exists—or at least making arguments in favor of its existence—is also not trust. Proofs and other arguments aim to make the unknown into the known, the foreign into the familiar. They cannot let the unknown remain as it is. In the language of Western philosophy, you could call these two approaches to Uttarakuru “faith” and “reason.” Faith gives you confidence in Uttarakuru, and reason leads you to knowledge of it. Because you cannot take

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a trip there, there is not much else you can do. But if you could travel to Uttarakuru, you could approach it with what the Yogācāra tradition calls “trust.” Trust is the pleasant attention to things within our experience that we do not control. It is much like vacationing in a foreign city, except that you do not have to leave your yoga mat to do it. A foreign city has laws and customs I may not fully understand. Part of the pleasure of traveling there is recognizing an order that is unfamiliar to me. I have no more control over the laws and customs of a foreign city than I have over the principles that govern my body. Principles are the threads that connect cause and effect, part and whole. They do for bodies what laws do for cities, providing the rational structure that holds them together. I cannot control these principles, but I can trust them. If I have a slipped disc in my lower back, I may experience a pinching sensation when I take Camel Pose (Ushtrāsana), standing on my knees and lowering my hands back to my ankles while I lift my chest. I know that the farther I go into the backbend, the more I will compress the discs between my vertebrae. But I can never be quite sure how far is too far or whether the pinching sensation means I need to lessen the backbend. The pinching sensation may not be pleasant, but I can still enjoy exploring the principles my body is following, despite not knowing precisely what they are or when they apply. It is not the pain in my back that I am trusting here. I control the pain because I can adjust how much my upper body leans backward. What I trust is that leaning back a certain distance will put a healthy pressure on my spine, but another distance will apply too much pressure. My body will send me signals, however difficult to interpret, in each case. A yoga class is largely a chance to explore the contours of these principles, which shape our experience of our bodies. We are constantly learning the limits beyond which each part of the body will suffer too much stress or cause us pain. These limits may involve the physical body. Or they may involve our unconscious processes, what the Chinese tradition calls qi. The shape of my spine limits how deeply I can take a backbend. There are also limits based on my respiratory system and the other systems that function outside my conscious control. We can approach these limits with doubt, feeling the unpleasant sensation of uncertainty about whether each movement will do us harm. Or we can approach them with trust. Trust means that I take pleasure in the experience of the principles outside my control that govern my body, even as I am taking control of my own movement to avoid injury.

Related Concepts: When my body does something so regularly that I know exactly how to cause it, such as cracking a knuckle, I experience certainty (ch. 10) rather than trust. But, usually, I am not perfectly clear about how far I can go in a pose before I trigger the effect I want. Then I can experience trust, knowing that my body follows a certain principle (ch. 20), but never knowing precisely how or when that principle will apply.

36. NON-DELUSION

tiger once prowled near a village in medieval China. An unlucky farmer was in the fields while the tiger was hunting, and the tiger mauled him. When the local magistrate heard about this, he came to the village to alert the people of the problem. The mauled farmer was in the audience that gathered. The villagers were shocked to hear about the tiger, but the farmer’s expression differed from those of his fellow villagers. The magistrate noticed the difference and recognized that although everyone in the village knew that tigers can harm people, only the farmer’s knowledge was genuine. As you read this chapter on non-delusion, you may understand it in the same way that the villagers understood the magistrate. You will gain one kind of knowledge—that is, you will be able to say that non-delusion occurs when we recognize ourselves as one cause of our painful emotions. But the next time you are sitting in traffic and angry, you might fail to see yourself as one cause of your increasing anger. In that case, you are like the villagers hearing about the tiger. You have read about non-delusion, but you have not experienced it for yourself. A modern postural yoga practice gives us a limited opportunity to

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develop non-delusion. Each pose requires that we make modifications to suit what our bodies are ready for. When we make a decision about whether to modify a pose, a predictable and fairly simple set of emotions will arise—the kind of emotions we feel when overcoming challenges, facing limitations, going too far, and not going far enough. But as the poses change while we stay the same, and the same emotions repeatedly appear, we are offered a glimpse of how we contribute to our own feelings. In Warrior Three Pose (Vīrabhadrāsana III), for instance, I may balance on my left leg while my arms reach straight forward and my right leg extends straight back. Maybe the shape of my body and the capacity of my muscles allow me to benefit from this version of the pose without any risk to myself. Or maybe I would get more out of the pose, and risk less, if I brought my hands to my heart or lowered my right leg slightly. These modified versions allow the pose to be just as beneficial for some people as the unmodified version. Once you have taken your version of the pose, you can notice what emotions arise. If you have taken the unmodified version, are you frustrated by having to balance on one leg? Do you feel good about taking a version of the pose that looks like what you see on the covers of yoga magazines? If you are taking the modified version, are you embarrassed that other yogis in the class appear to be better at the pose than you are? Do you feel satisfied that you have discovered the version that is most beneficial for you? The point of recognizing these emotions is not to get rid of them or criticize them, but to notice their three causes: you, the pose, and the surrounding environment. And you can recognize this connection of causes no matter what the resulting emotion is. For example, frustration results from the same set of causes as satisfaction. Non-delusion is simply the realization of all the sources of our emotions, including our own minds. When we notice these sources during a pose, we experience non-delusion. We are not simply reading about it. Then we know our emotions as the farmer knows the tiger. We are no longer stuck with the other villagers’ secondhand knowledge. Outside the studio, you can take this realization a step further, investigating the reasons why certain poses seem to create certain emotions. Are you embarrassed when you take a less extreme shape because your identity is tied to looking like an advanced yogi? This is a question that would distract you during a postural practice, but it is part of the therapeutic project of traditional yoga. The final step, which is a whole course of study

on its own, is to consider the role you play in the emotions you experience outside the studio. The practice of non-delusion in the studio alone will have a limited effect on your life as a whole. It can, at least, build the habit of noticing the many factors that come together to produce your emotions, including those factors inside your mind. But since you have nothing to observe other than yoga poses during your studio practice, there is no guarantee that you will experience the same non-delusion when you observe other things in the outside world. Related Concepts: The complicated reasoning process required for fullfledged non-delusion would distract us during our postural yoga practice, so we limit ourselves to what can be learned through a simple process of inquiry (ch. 13). I inquire into what emotions appear to be caused in me by each pose, and I notice the disconnect between the shape I take and the emotion I feel. Non-delusion works to combat both delusion (ch. 27) and harmful perspectives (ch. 31).

37. NON-CRAVING

raditional yoga is short on details about weakening the mental habits that increase and prolong our painful emotions. One of these habits is craving, which makes the pleasure we take in anything depend on acquiring the thing we crave. We would suffer less if we weakened our tendency to crave. Traditional yoga acknowledges that we need a tool to accomplish this, but it simply names the tool “non-craving” and says little else about it. This ambiguity is like being addicted to nicotine and having your doctor say you need to stop smoking. Yes, you may want to stop smoking, but the trick is knowing how to do it. A course in non-craving that works from the inside out requires you to investigate your cravings. That is, you have to think about the things that bring you pleasure and answer the question of whether you could still find pleasure if these were denied to you. Then you would have to locate the pleasure in the things you do not crave and pay attention to that pleasure even when you lack the things you crave. This course is not something you complete in an afternoon. It requires coming back regularly to the identification of your cravings as well as the pleasure in things you do not crave, often enough that you begin to change your habits.

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During a modern postural yoga class, such a rigorous mental inventory would be distracting. But modern yoga does provide the opportunity to develop a more limited form of non-craving. You diminish a craving for one thing, at least temporarily, by finding something else pleasant. An athletic yoga practice, or one held in a heated room, will stress your body enough to make your nervous system release hormones that are hard to ignore or find unpleasant. If you are feeling bad and come to a yoga class, the physical exercise will make you feel pleasure in your practice, whether you want it or not. Of course, most physical exercise will accomplish this goal. Nothing about it is specific to yoga. More specific to yoga, and also requiring more attention on your part, is finding the pleasure in two activities you perform in almost every pose: holding your attention on the sensations you feel and exploring what changes bring about the sensations you want. Taking athletic poses may more easily draw your attention to these activities, but you must still make an effort to cultivate them. If you are in a Chair Pose Twist (Parivritta Utkatāsana), for instance, the stress you put on the muscles wrapped around your torso makes them easy to notice. You can also easily shift your attention to the sensations in your legs because standing with bent knees stresses your quadriceps and other leg muscles. Because the pose is strenuous, it also requires you to take in more air, making your breathing easier to notice. So your body will attract your attention in several ways. But a contribution on your part is still required: letting yourself pay attention, and bringing spirit to that attention—that is, finding pleasure in the activity. Chair Pose Twist also allows you to explore how changes in your shape affect your experience of the pose. What happens if you lower your hips more and lift your shoulders? What happens if you bend your knees less? The point here is not really to solve a problem. It is to become more curious about both the abilities and limitations of your own body, which change from day to day and which are largely outside your control. The more you take an interest in learning what these changes are teaching you, the more the life of your body can become a source of pleasure in your practice. Any time that you actively seek out pleasures to counteract the loss of the thing you crave, you are practicing non-craving. The experiences I have just described have the benefit of always being available because they are the experiences of your own body. A yoga class simply helps you build the habit

of noticing them. Related Concepts: Non-craving can be brought about by spirited progress (ch. 33), which allows you to find pleasure in whatever you are doing. More specific to yoga are the two activities of samādhi (ch. 34) and trust (ch. 35), which provide a pleasure that you can cultivate at any time. Allowing each thing we do to provide its own pleasure brings about an integration (ch. 25) of the mind.

38. NON-AVERSION

ainful emotions typically shape how we see other things. If I am angry, I pay attention not to my anger but to the person at whom it is directed. Or, if I am sitting in traffic, my anger can extend to the other cars, the lane closure that caused the traffic, and even the people who will be upset that I am going to be late. This lens-like character of our emotions is what makes aversion possible. We do not have to limit our emotions to the events or people that first inspired them. We can turn the lens of our emotions toward anything and everything—making ourselves into the unkempt, rough warriors of ancient China with their “eyes of aversion,” the warriors whose only purpose is fighting and who see everyone as an enemy. What happens if we turn our attention to the emotions themselves? As we bring our emotions into focus, we withdraw attention from the things outside of us. If I focus on the arrow I am shooting, the target recedes into the background. In the background, everything returns to its emotionally neutral state. During a yoga class, we use attention to our emotions to build a limited form of what traditional yoga calls “non-aversion.” Though we typically

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begin with sensations rather than emotions, and specifically with painful sensations not associated with a bodily injury. For instance, I may feel an uncomfortable sensation in my lower abdomen while taking Side Plank (Vasishthāsana). I have taken a pushup position with my arms straight, then flipped to one side, supporting my body with one arm while I reach my other arm toward the ceiling. To keep me from slumping toward the mat, the muscles in my lower abdomen contract. If I do not take many poses like this one, those muscles may respond to the stress by sending me the sensation of discomfort. Once I ascertain that this sensation is not a sign of damage to my body, I can simply observe it. Unlike painful emotions, sensations do not tend to migrate from one object to another. The pain in my abdominal muscles stays there. So it cannot become a lens through which I view other things. And when I pay attention to it, I am also paying attention to the part of the body where I feel it. I reverse my usual outward orientation and let my attention rest on a sensation in my own body. Our minds are not trained simply to observe painful sensations. Their usual response is to figure out how to stop the pain, or to find out what caused it in the first place so that it never happens again. Paradoxically, in response to a painful sensation, our minds can generate additional pain in the form of a painful emotion, usually anger, directed at everything associated with the sensation. The longer I stay in Side Plank, the more my mind is likely to generate anger—maybe at my own body, maybe at the instructor who is not moving on to another pose, and maybe at itself for deciding to come to class in the first place. Now I have a second pain to observe. The point of observing my initial sensation was to reverse my mind’s usual outward orientation. But this new observation aims to focus my attention on the lens through which I become averse to things around me. Observing a painful emotion does not typically make it go away. But it allows us to see its boundaries—that it is not a thing we see outside us, but a lens through which things are seen. To deepen this non-aversion, I need to leave the yoga studio and consider the emotions I experience in the context in which they occur. I need to notice what role I play in expanding (or contracting) their boundaries. I have to observe the anger that comes over me when I am sitting in traffic, arguing with a friend, or reading the newspaper. Building the habit of observing my emotions during a yoga class can help me remember to observe my emotions

when they occur outside the class. But traditional yoga, at least, is interested in building a habit of non-aversion that arises equally in every context and is not just an echo of the awareness I had in the yoga studio. Related Concepts: When we see the boundaries of our painful emotions, we can bring about an integration (ch. 25) of the mind, observing that one emotion does not have to crowd out the rest of our mental activities. We have some ability to prevent our painful sensations from generating frustration in the first place. For instance, when we cultivate the desire (ch. 5) to observe our own painful sensations, we prevent emotions such as frustration from arising.

39. NON-NEGLECT

hen I can easily hold the external shape of a pose, I may be tempted to neglect what I am doing. Once I have acquired the basic shape of Crescent Lunge Pose (Ānjaneyāsana), for instance—stepping my right foot forward and coming onto the ball of my left foot as I lift my arms toward the ceiling—I appear to be in the pose. If that is all I care about, I can lose focus and think about other things. Instructors sometimes move quickly through poses such as Crescent Lunge, expecting that yogis will feel bored at the lack of effort required to look like they are in the pose. But this kind of pose is a great chance to practice what traditional yoga calls “non-neglect.” Non-neglect is simply noticing when you have become distracted so that you can bring your attention back to what you are doing. In a yoga class, the instructor can act as an external form of non-neglect. During Crescent Lunge Pose, the instructor may remind you to notice the tension in your left hip flexors, the quality of your breathing, or the sense of compression in your lower back. But what if you are practicing at home? B.S.P. Pratinidhi, one of the pioneers of the Sun Salutation, advises people to place a picture of “something or someone of significance” on the

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wall in front of them as they practice “to aid concentration.” Under the watchful gaze of the person depicted on the wall in front of them, their mind is less likely to wander for long periods of time. In other words, their respect for the person in the picture translates into taking their own practice seriously. External forms of non-neglect can be useful, but they are also risky. What motivation do I get when I post a picture of a respected person on the wall in front of me? I may feel that I am now practicing in a more elevated and serious context, but I may also feel fear and shame. If I am a Buddhist and focus on a picture of a Buddhist deity, I can let the fear of suffering for my misdeeds motivate me to practice diligently. Or a picture of a revered teacher may motivate me to practice diligently because I do not want to feel ashamed in front of my teacher. Fear and shame can easily turn into kleshas—that is, ways of magnifying and prolonging our painful emotions. If we use external forms of non-neglect when we practice, we also need to take care that we do not become motivated by fear and shame. Traditional yoga is more interested in cultivating an internal form of nonneglect, which we acquire by becoming so familiar with a thing or activity that we feel a comfortable sense of certainty about it. When I enter my office every day and see three chairs, a desk, and some bookshelves, I quickly get a sense of certainty about what belongs there. That certainty becomes so habitual that I never consciously have to remember how my office is supposed to look. I just recognize it when I see it. If I walk into my office and one of the chairs is gone, I notice the absence because my habitual sense of certainty has been disturbed. We can develop this same form of non-neglect in our yoga practice, though it is not familiarity with the outward look of a pose that we are aiming at. In fact, becoming too comfortable with the outward look of a pose can actually tempt us to neglect it because it no longer requires our attention. Instead, we aim to get comfortable with our experience in the pose: that cluster of sensations that repeatedly draws our attention. The feel of my breathing, the tension in my left hip, the compression in my right quadriceps —these have to become as familiar to me as my office furniture. And, of course, I have to see them as belonging to the pose no less than the furniture belongs to my office. Then, when I get distracted from these sensations by the things I have to do later in the day, I will notice something missing from my thoughts. “Right!”—I will think. “I was paying attention to my

breathing!” And then I can bring my attention back to it. This is the endless practice of yoga. We pay attention to ourselves, body and mind, in the present moment; our attention drifts off to things around us, or to the past and future; we notice the shift, and then we come back to ourselves. Related Concepts: Non-neglect takes certainty (ch. 10), which usually makes us stop paying attention to something, and turns it into a stimulus to our attention. External forms of non-neglect can prompt us to feel fear and shame, which easily turn into forms of craving (ch. 28). I crave the approval of my teacher, or the goodwill of a deity, and without it nothing else matters to me.

NOTES Introduction Most modern yoga students who pick up a book about the philosophy of yoga will expect it to focus on concepts from the Yoga Sūtra. But the Yoga Sūtra has no special relevance to modern postural yoga. Because it was written fifteen hundred years ago, its author or authors could not have practiced modern postural yoga. And it has no discussion of specific poses. In India, the philosophy of the Yoga Sūtra was quickly swallowed up by the various versions of Vedānta or what we now call Hinduism. It became theological, pointing to union with a deity as the goal of yoga, which has little to do with the experience of most modern postural yoga practitioners. To find a traditional yet non-theological philosophy of yoga, which explains human experience without reaching beyond that experience to some sort of deity, we must look to China rather than India and to a form of yoga sustained by the Buddhist rather than the Hindu tradition. The concepts in this book are my application to modern postural yoga of the Yogācāra philosophy developed by the seventh-century Buddhist monk Xuan Zang in his Demonstration of Consciousness Only and reinterpreted for the twentieth century by the philosophy professor Xiong Shili in his New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness. Xuan Zang’s Demonstration has been translated into English by Francis H. Cook in Three Texts on Consciousness Only (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center, 1999). Xiong Shili’s New Treatise has been translated by John Makeham (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015). If it seems strange to discuss yoga and Buddhism in the same breath, it is worth noting that the Yoga Sūtra itself shows Buddhist influence. On this, see James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, The Roots of Yoga (UK: Penguin, 2017), xvii and note 31. In China, yoga developed as part of Buddhism,

whereas in India, yoga developed as part of Hinduism. There is no continuous development of yoga philosophy from classical India into the twentieth century without some association with either Buddhism or Hinduism. Take your pick, but this book has chosen to follow the Buddhist development of yoga. Except where noted, all translations in this book are my own. Scholars of Sanskrit use various diacritical marks when spelling out words. Of these marks, I preserve only the macrons over vowels and the tilde over the “n” consonant where appropriate. Whereas Sanskrit scholars put a diacritical mark over or under an “s” consonant to indicate that it should be pronounced roughly like “sh” in English, I have simply changed the “s” to “sh” and removed the diacritical mark (shavāsana instead of śavāsana, for instance). This allows uninitiated readers to acquire a roughly accurate pronunciation of the Sanskrit, so long as they note that “c” should always be pronounced as “ch.”

1. Continuous Activities The story about the dragon boat racer appears in the commentary on Koan 45 of the Blue Cliff Record, where it is attributed to a Zen teacher named “Dragon Tooth.” See The Blue Cliff Record, trans. Thomas Cleary and J.C. Cleary (Boston: Shambhala, 2005 [1977]), 273. The language of the story in Chinese is ambiguous enough that it may actually be the boat that can only rest after the race! Lists of mental activities appear in various Indian philosophical texts. The Yoga Sūtra (Book 1.5) lists five: perception, error, interpretation, sleep, and memory—these are the famous “turnings of the mind” or citta vritti familiar to yoga teachers everywhere. The Bhagavad Gītā (Chapter 13.5–6) lists seven mental activities: the senses, longing, aversion, pleasure, pain, response, and resolve. These, at least, are the mental components of what the Gītā calls the “field”: the body and mind. The Sāmkhya Kārikā (Section 4) lists three mental activities: perception, inference, and testimony. My presentation of the mental activities follows the lists made by Xiong Shili, New Treatise, 235 and 243. The Sanskrit phrase for continuous activities is sarvatraga caitta. The

Chinese is heng xinsuo 恆心所. Other English translations include “universal mental activities” (Cook) and “omnipresent mental associates” (Makeham).

2. Contact My presentation of our outwardly-directed contact is strongly influenced by Drew Leder, who summarizes the work of previous philosophers as well as making his own original contribution in The Absent Body (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 11–35. He refers to the body in its outward directedness as “the ecstatic body.” See especially page 21, where he mentions discussions of this concept in Jean-Paul Sartre, Erwin Straus, Hans Jonas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. I mention only proprioception here. But a complete account of contact should also explain the terms “exteroception” and “interoception.” Exteroception refers to contact with an object outside the surface of my skin. If I see a tree across the street, that is exteroception. If I touch my own head with my hand, that is still exteroception because my head is an object outside the surface of the skin of the hand that is touching it. Interoception refers to contact with an object in my viscera, primarily the organs in my torso. The sensation of a full bladder is interoception, as is a stomachache. You cannot shorten the circuit of contact by using a tool. For instance, if I have a friend in New York City, calling her on the phone does not form a circuit between me and my phone. I am talking to my friend, not to the phone. The phone is just the medium that connects me to my friend, who remains the object of the contact. And the circuit spans the distance between me and New York City. The phrase “harmony of the three” (sanhe 三合) occurs at Three Texts on Consciousness Only, 68, where Cook translates it as “union of the three.” The Sanskrit word for contact is sparsha. The Chinese is chu 觸. Other English translations include “mental contact” (Cook).

3. Attention The story about the emperor visiting the imperial academy is from the

Book of Rites, “Wenwang Shizi,” 30. For a translation, see James Legge, The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Confucianism, Parts III–IV – The Lî Kî (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 1:359. I mention it because it says that the drum “alerts” (jing 警) the students. This same word is used by Xuan Zang to define attention. See Three Texts on Consciousness Only, 69, where jing is translated as “arousing.” You may wonder whether it is true that attention to our bodies does not usually distract us from what we are doing. After all, if I am playing the piano and I pay attention to my fingers, am I not likely to hit a wrong note? Richard Schusterman, Thinking Through the Body: Essays In Somaesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 204–209, argues that it is anxiety and not attention that causes mistakes in such cases. Certain schools of Indian philosophy turn the activity of attention into a thing. The yoga and Sāmkhya traditions call it purusha. The Vedānta tradition calls it ātman. If we consider attention as having its own reality, then it becomes possible to separate the attention from the rest of the mind and from the body. This is exactly what the Yoga Sūtra advises, making this text an important specimen of mind-body dualism. It is worth wondering what will be left when there is attention by itself with nothing to pay attention to. The Sanskrit word for attention is manaskāra. The Chinese is zuoyi 作意. Other English translations include “attentiveness” (Makeham).

4. Reception Our extraordinary flexibility in how we receive our perceptions is demonstrated by the study published by Rachel S. Herz and Julia von Clef, “The Influence of Verbal Labeling on the Perception of Odors: Evidence for Olfactory Illusions?” Perception 30 (2001): 381–391. As part of a larger experiment, Herz and von Clef took forty people and had them twice smell a solution of isovaleric and butyric acids. The first time they labeled the solution “parmesan cheese.” The second time, one week later, they labeled the same solution “vomit.” Eighty percent of the people changed their report of the perception from pleasant to unpleasant, even though they were smelling the same solution! When they changed their recognition of the

solution, their reception also changed. When I say that we always receive our experience as either pleasant or painful, I am agreeing with Xiong Shili, New Treatise, 237–238. The earlier position of Yogācāra philosophers is that some receptions are neutral. See Three Texts on Consciousness Only, 70. Xiong Shili argues that the neutral receptions of these earlier philosophers are actually pleasant receptions that no longer cross the threshold of conscious perception because we have experienced them for such a long time. The Sanskrit word for reception is vedanā. The Chinese is shou 受. Other English translations include “feeling” (Cook) and “received [sensations]” (Makeham).

5. Desire When we use the word “desire” for an emotional state that may not lead to action, we are talking about a kind of reception and not about desire as a distinct activity of the mind. Not all Yogācāra philosophers agree that desire is one of the mind’s continuous activities. Xuan Zang argues that desire is not continuous because we experience no desire when we are faced with objects that arouse neither pleasure nor pain. For his position, see Three Texts on Consciousness Only, 165–166. Xiong Shili rejects the idea that any objects are truly indifferent, as well as the idea that we ever remain focused on an object that does not inspire a desire in us. As a result, he locates desire among the continuous activities. See New Treatise, 238–240. The Sanskrit word for desire is chanda. The Chinese is yu 欲. A highly technical discussion of its role in early Buddhism may be found in David Webster, The Philosophy of Desire in the Buddhist Pali Canon (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), 112–117.

6. Recognition Because infants have no capacity for recognition, they depend on the care of older human beings. But what about the babies of other animal species, which have to care for themselves right away? They cannot wait to build up

the repeated sensations that will eventually provide them with recognition. They need the wisdom of experience right now! That is what instinct provides. Instinct is a substitute for recognition, or perhaps it is a permanently unconscious and changeless form of recognition. Recognition includes what we call imagination, so you can recognize things that do not exist. The visualization techniques of Tantric yoga and certain schools of Buddhism make use of recognition in this way. You can recognize a chakra—one of the traditional Indian bodily energy centers— even if there is no chakra there to recognize. And you can hold your attention steadily on the image of this chakra, receiving whatever benefits there are to be gained from stabilized attention. In other words, chakras can be beneficial to your health even though there is no evidence that they exist. The Sanskrit word for recognition is samjña. The Chinese is xiang 想. Other English translations include “conceptualization” (Cook, Makeham).

7. Response When I refer to “internal sensation” and “external appearance” as two different standards for alignment, I make the same distinction as Bernie Clark between what he calls “functional alignment” and “aesthetic alignment” in Your Body, Your Yoga (Vancouver, BC: Wild Strawberry Productions, 2016), 22–23. I have not adopted his terminology because “functional” is a potentially misleading word when discussing yoga poses. Outside the yoga studio, functional alignment is the posture that will best allow us to perform a particular task. There is no comparable task to perform during a yoga practice. But we do adjust the shape of our bodies to get certain sensations while we practice, and if we can call this a task, then functional alignment helps us perform it. The Sanskrit word for response is cetanā. The Chinese is si 思. Other English translations include “volition” (Cook) and “creative impulses” (Makeham).

8. Specialized Activities My list of specialized mental activities follows Xiong Shili, New

Treatise, 243. Classical Indian texts love this kind of mental activity, sometimes to the point of excluding all others. Take the list of five “turnings of the mind” or citta vritti in the Yoga Sūtra: perception, error, interpretation, sleep, and memory. Only the last of these could be considered a continuous activity, if we identify it with what I call “recognition.” The rest are specialized activities, the first three of which are forms of what I call “discernment.” The final activity, sleep, does not really belong in a list of mental activities at all. See the diplomatic comment of Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (New York: North Point Press, 2009), 41: “the commentators acknowledge here that there is some difference of opinion regarding whether or not sleep is an actual vritti [mental activity].” Bernie Clark, Your Spine, Your Yoga (Sechelt, BC: Wild Strawberry Publications, 2018), 107 discusses the anatomical factors that prevent many of us from stacking one hip on top of the other in Triangle Pose. See his note 481 for a comment specifically on the cue to “fit your body between two panes of glass.” The Sanskrit phrase for specialized activities is viniyata caitta. The Chinese is biejing xinsuo 別境心所. Other English translations include “mental activities with specific objects” (Cook) and “object-specific mental associates” (Makeham).

9. Doubt A student taking an exam may experience doubt about whether she knows the right answer. This, too, is the unpleasant feeling we get when confronted with what we cannot control. But in this chapter I am concerned only with our inability to control certain parts and states of our bodies. The philosopher Havi Carel refers to this as “bodily doubt” in Phenomenology of Illness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 92–103. Although Carel mentions “different degrees of bodily doubt,” she is mostly concerned with the most radical form, found in serious mental or physical disorders, which “may profoundly change the structure of one’s experience” (93). Her focus on this extreme form of bodily doubt sometimes leads her to exclude the less radical forms from doubt altogether. A more comprehensive account, though without the language of doubt, may be found in Leder’s discussion of pain

and disease in The Absent Body, 70–83. The Sanskrit word for doubt is vicikitsā. The Chinese is yi 疑. Other English translations include “uncertainty” (Makeham).

10. Certainty Although my definition of certainty can be applied to mental concepts, I focus on bodily experience in this chapter. This kind of certainty has something in common with what Havi Carel calls “bodily certainty” in Phenomenology of Illness, 88–92. Carel, though, moves back and forth between what she calls “existential feelings” and “particular emotions.” The existential feeling of certainty is “that our bodies will continue to function in a similar fashion to the way in which they have in the past” (89). The certainty associated with a particular acquired skill appears when “I pay no attention to my typing and take for granted the speed, ease, and painlessness of this activity” (90). In this chapter, I am only concerned with the latter. Leder’s discussion of skill acquisition, which includes learning how to use tools such as guitars, in The Absent Body, 30–35 is also relevant. The Sanskrit word for certainty is adhimoksha. The Chinese is shengjie 勝解. Other English translations include “resolve” (Cook) and “verification” (Makeham).

11. Mindfulness As I note in this chapter, the English word “mindfulness” can mean several different things. I am defining it only as it is used in phrases such as “mindfulness based stress reduction.” This form of stress reduction is tantamount to the experience of time as I describe it in this chapter. See Marc Wittman and Stefan Schmidt, “Mindfulness Meditation and the Experience of Time,” in Meditation—Neuroscientific Approaches and Philosophical Implications, Studies in Neuroscience, Consciousness and Spirituality 2 (Switzerland: Springer, 2014), 199–209. Mindfulness, understood as the experience of time, is clearly not the same as paying attention to what you are doing, though these two meanings are often confused. It is actually difficult to experience time when you are paying

attention to what you are doing. This is why people read books or play games to pass the time. When they are paying attention to the books or the games, they do not notice the passing of time. It is unfortunate that the same word should be used to describe these two generally incompatible experiences (experience of time and paying attention to what you are doing). The Sanskrit word for mindfulness is smriti. The Chinese is nian 念. Other English translations include “memory” (Cook) and “recollection” (Makeham).

12. Discernment Do some people really never grow up? That is, do they never acquire discernment? The passage from Mencius, where he seems to say so, comes from The Book of Mencius, 7A5. See James Legge, trans., The Chinese Classics, vol. 2, The Works of Mencius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1895), 451. Classical Yogācāra philosophers say the same thing more explicitly. See Three Texts on Consciousness Only, 169. Like Xiong Shili, New Treatise, 243, I treat discernment as identical with inference, and I treat “inquiry” and “investigation” as its two parts. But in many Buddhist, Vedic, and yogic texts it can refer to an elevated state of mind similar to samādhi. See, for example, Yoga Sūtra, Book 1.48, and the discussion of it in Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, 158–59. The Bhagavad Gītā (Chapter 2.55–57) presents discernment in a similarly elevated way. The Sanskrit word for discernment is prajñā. The Chinese is hui 慧.

13. Inquiry Traditional Indian and Chinese texts make reference to inquiry without saying much about what it means. Xuan Zang says only that it is the mind turning toward ideas and words in a “coarse” manner. See Three Texts on Consciousness Only, 211. In this chapter, I provide a more specific account of inquiry than can be found in any traditional text, but which corresponds to what we do when we first try to find something out. The source I follow most closely here is Xiong Shili, New Treatise, 246–47.

Although this chapter discusses inquiry as finding a single cause for a single effect, inquiry can also connect a single part to a single whole—it can see the hand as part of the human body, for instance. If I want to identify multiple effects of a cause, or a cause of an effect that is then the cause of another effect, or multiple parts of a whole, or a part of a whole that is then part of another whole, I need the more complicated specialized activity of investigation. The Sanskrit word for inquiry is vitarka. The Chinese is xun 尋. Ulrich Timme Kragh has a brief comment on it in “The Yogācārabhūmi and Its Adaptation” in The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 72–73, and especially note 140. Kragh translates vitarka, confusingly for us, as “discernment.” Jowita Kramer, “A Study of the Samskāra Section of Vasubandhu’s Pañcaskandhaka,” also in The Foundation for Yoga Practitioners, 998–999, translates vitarka as “rough examination.” Other English translations include “applied thought” (Cook) and “general investigation” (Makeham).

14. Investigation The story of the debate between the logician Gongsun Long and the Confucian Zigao is told in the K’ung-ts’ung-tzu: The K’ung Family Masters’ Anthology, tr. Yoav Ariel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 133. The developers of modern postural yoga have an ambiguous relationship with traditional yoga philosophy and, by extension, with the mental activity of investigation it requires. Krishnamacharya does not seem to have become familiar with the Yoga Sūtra until after he developed modern postural yoga. See David Gordon White, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 197–224. Once he did take up the Sūtra, he emphasized chanting it rather than studying it. White notes that the emphasis on the transformative power of chanting absolves Krishnamacharya “of any need to explain the meaning of the Yoga Sutra—something he appears never to have done, in writing at least” (215). Krishnamacharya’s student Pattabhi Jois is frequently reported as saying that “yoga is ninety-nine percent practice and one percent theory.” See Guy Donahaye and Eddie

Stern, Guruji: A Portrait of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois Through the Eyes of His Students (New York: North Point Press, 2010), 77, 203, 347, 387-88. When Krishnamacharya’s brother-in-law B.K.S. Iyengar published the now classic Light on Yoga (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), he devoted the first 35 pages to yoga philosophy, while the next 405 pages covered yoga practice. In his case, yoga is about ten percent theory and ninety percent practice! The Sanskrit word for inspection is vicāra. The Chinese is si 伺. Other English translations include “sustained thought” (Cook), “detailed analysis” (Makeham), “discursiveness” (Kragh), and “subtle investigation” (Kramer).

15. Body and Mind My discussion of sight as appearing to isolate the mind from the body relies on Leder, The Absent Body, 117–118. As Leder notes, he is himself reporting and building on the work of Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 135–156; Erwin Straus, Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 4–21, and The Primary World of Senses (Glencoe, NY: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), 367–379. Conscious proprioception is one experience that integrates mind and body, and it is the one I have chosen to highlight in this chapter. But yoga poses that challenge our ability to balance provide an equally useful experience of mind-body integration. When I am having difficulty balancing on one leg, for instance, my conscious mind cannot simply command my body to balance itself. Or, rather, my mind can give the command, but my body is under no obligation to listen. Instead, my mind must work with my body’s unconscious vestibular system, as well as reflex actions in muscles throughout the body, to maintain my balance. Neither mind nor body is in charge, but both are learning to interact with each other. The Yogācāra tradition has long been interested in the way the mind and body interact. For more on this topic, see Dan Lusthaus, “A Note on Medicine and Psychosomatic Relations in the First Two Bhūmis of the Yogācārabhūmi,” in The Foundation For Yoga Practitioners, ed. Ulrich Timme Kragh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 578–595.

16. Physical Body Leder discusses the physical body seen as a corpse at The Absent Body, 142–148. He calls this the third-person experience of the body, and distinguishes it from the first-person experience, or the “body lived-fromwithin” (6). Leder’s first-person experience includes interoception, proprioception, and exteroception. I have focused on the first two of these, because I am only interested in how we sense our own bodies during a yoga practice, and it is easiest to maintain the first-person approach to our bodies by restricting our sensations to interoception and proprioception. Leder has a broader interest, which includes how we experience other things, and so in other sections of his book he explains how exteroception can also be undertaken as a “first-person” experience. The physical body is the first of the koshas in modern popular yoga, though kosha enthusiasts usually refer to it by the Sanskrit name annamayakosha. This name literally means the “made-of-food kosha.” The food you eat turns into the part of you that can be seen and acted on.

17. Qi There are many kinds of qi in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Zong qi (宗 氣) governs circulation and respiration. Ying qi (營氣) governs digestion. Wei qi (衛氣) governs the immune system and perspiration. The activities of the organs and meridians are also governed by their own kinds of qi. See Ted J. Kaptchuk, The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine (Contemporary Books, 2000), 50. The analogue to qi in the Ayurvedic medical tradition is prāna. There are many kinds of prāna just as there are many kinds of qi. The name prāna refers both to the unconscious bodily processes taken together and to the respiratory system in particular. Apāna refers to the excretory system. Vyāna appears to refer to the nervous system. Udāna refers to the levitation system —if you do not have the ability to levitate, then you do not possess this system. Samāna refers to the digestive system in so far as it absorbs nutrients rather than expelling waste. I draw this description from the Vasishthasamhitā (2.1–55). The relevant passage is translated by James

Mallinson and Mark Singleton in Roots of Yoga, 196. The prāna body is the second of the five koshas in modern popular yoga, usually referred to by the Sanskrit name prānamayakosha (the “made-ofprāna kosha”). If we understand it as the set of systems governing the unconscious activities of the physical body (activities such as respiration, digestion, and so on), we do not have to regard it as anything mystical or outside the purview of medical science. My suggestion that slowing down one’s breath rate may cause the nervous system to suppress anxiety is based on Yackle et al., “Breathing Control Center neurons that Promote Arousal in Mice,” Science 355 (2017), 1411–1415. My suggestion that applying pressure to a joint may stimulate the production of hyaluronic acid is based on T.S. Momberger et al., “Hyaluronan Secretion by Synoviocytes Is Mechanosensitive,” Matrix Biology 24.8 (Dec. 2005), 510–519. As the research in these studies was not performed on humans, it can only be regarded as suggestive rather than demonstrative of similar mechanisms in humans.

18. Sensory Consciousness I have focused in this chapter on the ambiguity of proprioception. But our sense of touch is also ambiguous when it is interoceptive—that is, when it is providing information about the organs and other tissues that lie behind the musculoskeletal structure of the torso. The touch receptors here tell me very little unless something is going wrong with one of the unconscious processes —digestion, respiration, circulation, and so on—that are regulated in this cavity. Some organs, such as the liver, have no touch receptors at all, and others report information that is vague or misleading about its location and content. My account of interoception here relies heavily on Leder, The Absent Body, 38–45. The aphorism, “although he sees form, he is like a blind man,” may be found in koans 80 and 88 of the Blue Cliff Record. See Cleary and Cleary, The Blue Cliff Record, 438 and 485. I have followed the Yogācāra tradition rather than the koshas of modern popular yoga when I divide the mind into the two levels of sensory consciousness and thought consciousness. The koshas of modern popular

yoga do not have a clear place for sensation, which is odd, given that so much of modern yoga practice is about cultivating sensations of the body. Instead, the third kosha jumps straight to thought consciousness, the manomayakosha (the “made-of-thought kosha”). So if you are only interested in following the koshas, you will want to skip this chapter and move directly to the next one, on thought consciousness.

19. Thought Consciousness The modern Zen practice of breath counting is described in many works. One of them is Robert Aitken, Taking the Path of Zen (New York: North Point Press, 1982), 23–28. The student’s question to the Buddhist teacher is recorded in Koan 80 of the Blue Cliff Record. See Cleary and Cleary, The Blue Cliff Record, 437. If you want to make sense of the teacher’s answer—“a ball in racing water”— you could take the ball as a symbol of the baby and the racing water as the symbol of the chaotic bath of sensations that forms the baby’s world. Or you could take the ball as a symbol of all of us and the racing water as the true state of the world around us, which is in a state of constant transformation. In this case, our true relation to the world is that of a baby, but we use thought to convince ourselves otherwise. Both interpretations say something true, but they both also reinforce our tendency to seek out bits of knowledge rather than transforming how we use our mind. Thought consciousness is the third of the koshas in modern popular yoga, known by its Sanskrit name, manomayakosha (the “made-of-thought kosha”). The fourth of the five koshas is also a form of thought consciousness, the vijñānamayakosha (the “made-of-wisdom kosha”). I have not included the fourth kosha in my sequence here, as no such independent form of the self is described in either the Yogācāra tradition or the Yoga Sūtra. Of course, traditional yoga has methods by which we can become wise, but these involve using the thought consciousness in a particular way rather than leaving it behind in favor of something else.

20. Principle

The story of the cook is told in Chapter Three of the classical Chinese Zhuangzi. See The Book of Chuang Tzu, trans. Martin Palmer with Elizabeth Breuilly (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 22–23. The Chinese character that means “principle” is li 理. The ancient Chinese dictionary known as the Shuowen Jiezi says that the original meaning of this character is “to carve jade.” The left side of the character means “jade,” and the right side indicates that the character is to be pronounced as li. Fung Yu-lan—A History of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 2, trans. Derk Bodde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 444—says that “the word li originally referred to the veins or markings in a block of jade.” The philosophical use of the term remains rooted in this idea. That is, principles run through reality like veins in a block of jade. This final level of the self is actually transpersonal, connecting me as an individual to the world around me. That is, it constitutes the cause-and-effect relationships, and the part-whole relationships, that both hold me together and connect me to all other things. As I learn to act in accordance with them, I feel myself connected to the universe as a whole. In this respect, my description of principle links up with the fifth kosha in modern popular yoga: the ānandamayakosha (the “made-of-joy kosha”). This final kosha is typically not understood as just any joy whatever, but specifically as the joy we experience when we feel connected to the universe as a whole, or to whatever it is that holds the universe together.

21. Flow and Constriction The concepts of flow and constriction come from traditional Chinese medicine, but the concept of loosening constrictions can be found throughout the Indian philosophical tradition. The Yoga Sūtra, for instance, speaks of “loosening the cause of constriction” (Book 3.38). The word “constriction” here is a translation of the Sanskrit bandha. In modern postural yoga, we intentionally take bandhas—binds or locks —as a way of applying pressure to different parts of the body. The Yoga Sūtra also uses bandha in this positive sense when it describes meditation as a bandha for the mind (Book 3.1). But these are intended to be temporary stresses that help to release constrictions that inhibit our action outside the

studio or meditation room. The pairing of “flow” (tong 通) and “constriction” (se 塞) occurs numerous times in the “Basic Questions” section of Huang Di’s Inner Classic, one of the source texts for traditional Chinese medicine. See, for example, An Annotated Translation of Huang Di’s Inner Classic—Basic Questions, trans. Paul U. Unschuld and Hermann Tessenow (University of California Press, 2011), 159, which says that if the body’s ruler is not enlightened, the body’s paths will be constricted and allow no flow. Unschuld and Tessenow translate this last bit as “obstructed and impassable.” Many actions involve more than just two components, so how do we decide which to call yin and which to call yang? To keep it simple, think of the yang component of an action as what initiates it prior to any or all of the tools that are used to accomplish it. If I am writing my name, then “I” am the yang component, even if I am using a pen as a tool. The yin component is the last thing affected by the action—that is, we would have to redefine the action if we wanted to include something that is affected later as the yin component. For instance, if the action is “moving a pen,” the pen is the yin component. It doesn’t matter if it is writing my name, because the action we are analyzing is not writing but moving. If we wanted to make my name the yin component, then we would have to redefine the action as “writing my name.”

22. Yin In this chapter, I use the language of physical exercise to describe two characteristics attributed to yin by the Chinese philosophical tradition. What I am calling “relaxation” is “softness” (rou 柔), and my “inflexibility” is “submissiveness” (shun 順), in Chinese philosophical texts. Chinese commentaries on the Book of Changes, for instance, pair softness and submission as characteristics of yin. See, for instance, Cheng Yi, The Yi River Commentary on the Book of Changes (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 87, and elsewhere. What does inflexibility have to do with submissiveness? If a bone is going to carry out the action initiated by a muscle, it must be inflexible. If you are using your quadriceps muscle to lift your leg, you need that muscle to

be attached to inflexible things—tendons, ligaments, and bones—that will not deform when force is exerted on them. Tendons and ligaments will bend, of course, but they do not lengthen. The pairing of relaxation and inflexibility is one way to understand the famous line from the Yoga Sūtra on postural practice: “one’s poses should possess ease and stability” (Chapter 2.46). It would not be out of place to think of ease here as relaxation and stability as inflexibility. The Yoga Sūtra would then be advocating a postural practice resembling Yin Yoga. In the United States, yin has become the name of a style of yoga (Yin Yoga) that focuses on the experience of being stressed from outside, by gravity for the most part. The one essential feature of a Yin Yoga practice I do not mention in this chapter is the long time over which each pose is held. Whereas most yang styles of yoga hold poses for less than a minute, most Yin Yoga poses are held for three to five minutes. The primary evidence for the effectiveness of this longer approach is “Duration and Magnitude of Myofascial Release in 3-Dimensional Bioengineered Tendons: Effects on Wound Healing,” Thanh V. Cao et al. in Journal of American Osteopath Association 2015:115(2): 72–82. This research did not consider the practice of Yin Yoga or yoga generally. It studied bioengineered tissues in a lab setting, so it is more suggestive than conclusive about the benefits of longheld poses.

23. Yang The Chinese philosophical tradition associates two characteristics with yang: firmness (gang 剛) and vigor (jian 建). In the language of physical exercise, “contraction” is a way of talking about firmness, and “flexibility” is a way of talking about vigor. But the two concepts are inseparable. Muscles are flexible so that they can contract. If they were inflexible, like bone, then they would break rather than shorten. Firmness and vigor occur together as characteristics of yang in Chinese commentaries on the Book of Changes. See Cheng Yi, The Yi River Commentary on the Book of Changes, 89, and elsewhere. When we apply stress to ourselves, as we do in yang poses, that stress is spread out over the muscles (as they contract), the tendons (as the contracting

muscle tries to pull its tendon away from the bone), and the bones (as the tendon pulls the bone in its direction). Gravity and the floor are both tools that we use to generate the action (that is, the stress) of a yang pose. They do not constitute either the yin or yang component of the pose. For instance, when I lift my legs in Upward Foot Extension Pose, the yang component is my hip flexor muscles and the yin component is my upper leg bones, but I use the pressure of the floor against my hips and the pull of gravity on my legs as tools to increase the stress of the pose. I could make the same motion while floating in space, but there would be no comparable stress, because I would not have the proper tools. In a yin pose, gravity becomes the yang component, but the floor is still a tool, used by gravity to apply stress to my body. Instead of the two elements of yin and yang, the Indian philosophical tradition works with three elements, known as the three gunas. The guna known as tamas does not really correspond to either yin or yang, since it is inert and motionless, whereas both yin and yang are active and mobile. The one connection between yin and tamas is that yin is inflexible, like tamas, so that it can carry out the action initiated by yang. The two gunas known as rajas and sattva both correspond roughly to yang. Rajas is what initiates action, just like yang. The third guna, sattva, really just means the application of attention to any activity. To “sattvicize” an activity, pay attention to it! Though many actions we initiate are unconscious, and so yang is sometimes rajas without sattva, the act of awareness has attention as its yang component. And so, anything we do consciously has attention as one of its yang components.

24. Inversion I have presented inversions as cases where a part of us that usually plays a yin role suddenly plays a yang role, and vice versa. Using the concepts of yin and yang to talk about inversions requires that we work with the Chinese tradition rather than the Indian tradition. The best Chinese text for thinking about inversions is the Book of Changes, which describes many cases in which something suited to a yin role must act as yang, and vice versa. In these cases, something is “not proper” (budang 不當). Note that many

commentators on the Book of Changes do not regard being “not proper” as a good thing. And, when there is a task to be accomplished, they are right. If you need to type a message, for instance, you will have a harder time if you use your toes or try to write while your laptop is behind you. For those who wish to work with the Indian tradition instead—using the Sanskrit concepts of tamas, rajas, and sattva instead of yin and yang—the Sanskrit phrase for inversion is anyonya vritti. The Chinese is genghuqi 更互 起. See Takakasu, La Sāmkhyakārikā, 995, where the phrase is translated as “intervenir l’un pour l’autre.” The example found in this passage of the woman who is a source of pleasure to her husband but a source of pain to her peers can also be found in Sāmkhya Kārikā of Īshvara Krishna with the Tattva Kaumudī of Shrī Vācaspati Mishra, trans. Swami Virupakshananda (Mylapore: Sri Ramakrishna Math, 1995), 47.

25. Integration The analogy of the lamp comes from the Sāmkhya Kārikā, Section 13. The meaning of the analogy in that passage is that the different components of reality—sattva, rajas, and tamas, in Sanskrit—come together to produce things even though they are opposites. This joining together is known in Sanskrit as anyonya āshraya. The Chinese is genghuyi 更互依. This phrase is used in Sāmkhya Kārikā, Section 12. See Virupakshananda, Sāmkhya Kārikā, 44, where the phrase is translated as “mutually supporting.” See also Takakasu, La Sāmkhyakārikā, 995, where it is translated as “dépendre les uns des autres.” If we are using yin and yang to talk about the components of action, the Chinese Book of Changes provides a useful way of thinking about their integration. What I am calling integration is there called “correspondence” (ying 應). Two independently existing things, each with its own action to perform, can correspond to each other in a way that brings them together to produce a larger action. For instance, the action of a state official can combine with the action of a national leader to do something at the national level. Note that the texts I have mentioned here do not make a distinction between components working together to produce one action and several

smaller actions being put together harmoniously to form a larger action. What I call integration is only the latter: not one combination of yin and yang (or one combination of sattva, rajas, and tamas), but the harmonizing of several different combinations to produce a larger action.

26. The Kleshas The list of seven emotions from the Chinese tradition contains desire, which may seem confusing if you have read chapter five of this book, where I present desire as a mental activity that is different from an emotion. The difference between desire as its own mental activity and desire as an emotion is that one is the wanting of something and the other is the feeling we get when we want something. Wanting something by itself does not require any intense feeling. If someone tosses a softball to me, I reach out and catch it, which requires that I want to make the catch. But I may not even be aware of my desire. On the other hand, if I am a fan waiting on the field between innings to participate in a contest, and to win I must catch the softball that is tossed to me, I may experience a feeling of desire throughout my body and mind—it is a feeling that is only indirectly related to the impulse that actually sets my body in motion to catch the ball. I present the five primary kleshas here in the order given by Xiong Shili in the vernacular edition of his New Treatise. In the classical language edition, he also included fourteen secondary kleshas. In Makeham’s translation, they appear on pages 274–280. Xiong left them out of the later edition, not because they do not exist, but because there is no need to study them one by one. Solve the problem of the primary kleshas and the secondary ones disappear as well. The Sanskrit word klesha has become so well-known in yoga circles that I have not translated it here. The Chinese is fannao (煩惱). English translations include “passions” (Cook) and “afflictions” (Makeham).

27. Delusion It is the Sāmkhya school that identifies the five kleshas (the ways of increasing and sustaining painful emotions) as forms of misunderstanding.

See the Sāmkhya Kārikā, sections 47–48. The commentary of Vācaspati Mishra is helpful in understanding these five kleshas and how they relate to the five kleshas of the Yoga Sūtra. See Virupakshananda, Sāmkhya Kārikā, 97–99. In the earlier, classical Chinese edition of his New Treatise, Xiong Shili put delusion third in the list of kleshas, which is the traditional ordering in Yogācāra Buddhism. But in his later vernacular edition of his work, he put delusion first, as the Yoga Sūtra does (though the Yoga Sūtra refers to delusion as avidyā rather than as moha). The Sanskrit word for delusion is moha. The Chinese is chi (癡). Another English translation is “ignorance” (Makeham).

28. Craving The Yoga Sūtra defines craving as the desire that comes from the memory of a past pleasure (Book 2.7). If craving is a klesha (that is, a way of increasing and prolonging our painful emotions), then this definition does not make much sense. Wanting something today because I enjoyed it yesterday does not have to cause me any pain at all. I can, for instance, remember that I enjoyed the grilled cheese sandwich I had for lunch yesterday, and this memory may prompt me to want another one today. The amount of suffering this causes me is zero. Suffering arises not from desire by itself, but from an overcommitment to the object of that desire, which the Yoga Sūtra does not discuss. The Yoga Sūtra also makes craving for one’s own existence a separate klesha. The Yogācāra tradition treats it simply as a subset of craving. See Xiong, New Treatise, 256–257. It is possible to crave more than one thing. In fact, you can make everything you desire into a craving by isolating it from the rest of your desires. I can crave every yoga pose I take, in which case, any time I am unable to take any of them I will feel a painful emotion. Maybe I was able to take Wheel Pose, but the instructor did not include a Crow Pose in the practice. My inability to take Crow Pose nullifies the pleasure I would otherwise have gotten from the other poses I took. When we crave multiple things, we are only happy when we attain all of them.

The development of bony growths on the vertebrae, which most people experience by the age of forty, is called spondylosis. Bernie Clark discusses this condition (which he refers to as spondyloarthritis) in the context of backbending in Your Spine, Your Yoga (Sechelt, BC: Wild Strawberry Productions, 2018), 23. The Sanskrit word for craving is rāga. The Chinese is tan (貪).

29. Aversion The Yoga Sūtra identifies aversion as one of the kleshas, but it does not have anything helpful to say about it. This may be because the author or compiler of the Sūtra expected teachers to explain its meaning orally. But there is something misleading about the highly compact account it provides: “aversion is the result of pain” (Book 2.8). Yes, in the case of aversion, a past pain prompts the mind to generate more pain in the form of a persistent painful emotion, usually anger. But a past pain can also do the opposite, reducing our future pain instead of increasing it. When I remember the thing that caused me pain in the past, I can avoid it in the future. That is not a klesha but an anti-klesha! The quotation from Zhuangzi, the philosopher who visited the court of Zhao, is from Chapter 30 of the Zhuangzi, where it occurs twice. See Palmer, The Book of Chuang Tzu, 276 and 278, where “eyes of aversion” is first rendered as “they look about them fiercely,” and later as “they stare about them fiercely.” The Sanskrit word for aversion is dvesha. The Chinese is chen (瞋). Other English translation include “hatred” (Cook) and “antipathy” (Makeham).

30. Pride Pride is different from caring what other people think about you. If you feel that what you are doing will make your friends ashamed of you, then you may feel embarrassed when they see you doing it. But this embarrassment is not by itself an expression of pride. Pride requires an additional step: you have to want your friends to think that nothing you would ever do is

shameful. When it upsets you that your friends think you have done something shameful, then you should at least suspect that you have pride. You not only care what your friends think about you, but you want them to think that you are right about what is shameful and what is praiseworthy. For a graphic representation of how much the different parts of the spine can twist, see Kaminoff and Matthews, Yoga Anatomy, 2nd edition (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2012), 34. They present the lumbar spine as twisting five degrees and the thoracic spine as twisting thirty-five degrees. They also provide the important note that “these ranges are averages established by measuring a wide variety of people” (33). The Sanskrit word for pride is māna. The Chinese is man (慢). The Chinese character for pride (roughly pronounced “mahn”) is unusual in that it both means pride and sounds like the Sanskrit word that it is translating. Often, when Chinese characters are chosen because they sound like the Sanskrit word they are translating, their meaning in Chinese is wholly unrelated to the meaning of the Sanskrit.

31. Harmful Perspectives Readers familiar with the Yoga Sūtra will expect to find “clinging to life” as the fifth of the kleshas instead of harmful perspectives. But clinging to life is just a particular form of craving—the craving for one’s own existence— and so it does not need its own klesha. It is already covered under craving. See Xiong, New Treatise, 256–257. Among the many harmful perspectives mentioned by the Yogācāra philosopher Xuan Zang is the positing of a god or īshvara. The problem is that gods are eternal, and if something is eternal, we begin to expect that there is something we can hold onto without ever having to let go. As not letting go becomes habitual in us, we become more likely to increase our own painful emotions, because, in fact, we do have to let go of everything, sooner or later. See Three Texts on Consciousness Only, 187, where īshvara is referred to by the phrase “master of the world.” Does the Yoga Sūtra advocate the harmful perspective of positing a god or īshvara? David Gordon White surveys the possible answers to this question in his chapter on īshvara in The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A

Biography, 172–181. The Yogācāra tradition also rejects the positing of a changeless self or purusha, and this certainly puts it at odds with the Yoga Sūtra, which advocates just such a self. For the arguments against a self, see Three Texts on Consciousness Only, 11–13. Positing anything as eternal, whether the self or a god, runs the risk of leading to mind/body dualism. We can see that bodies are not eternal, and so, if we posit anything as eternal, it will have to be mental in character and radically different from the body. For a brief list of the many harmful perspectives that result from mind/body dualism, see Leder, The Absent Body, 154–155. The Sanskrit word for harmful perspectives is kudrishti. The Chinese is ejian (惡見). Other English translations include “wrong views” (Cook) and “pernicious views” (Makeham).

32. Limbs of Yoga The story of Bhagīratha is told in the Mahābhārata (Chapter 108). When yoga teachers are learning the limbs of yoga, they typically study the list of limbs found in Book 2.29 of the Yoga Sūtra. There is nothing wrong with this, so long as we understand that, even in the Yoga Sūtra, there are other lists of limbs. There is, for instance, a list of limbs in Book 1.20 of the Yoga Sūtra that overlaps more with the one I am presenting here. That list is composed of trust, spiritual progress, mindfulness, samādhi, and discernment. To get a sense of just how many different lists of limbs you can find in classical yoga texts, see the two-page chart in Mallinson and Singleton, Roots of Yoga, 9–10. Yogis are not always careful to distinguish the different disciplines that go by the name of “yoga.” The discipline of modern postural yoga, the yoga that flows from pose to pose, did not develop until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Elizabeth De Michelis coined the term “modern postural yoga” in 2004 to distinguish this practice from many other forms of yoga, including the yoga of the Yoga Sūtra. See A History of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Western Esotericism (London: Continuum, 2004), 187–89. Modern postural yoga did not develop directly from the yoga of the Yoga

Sūtra. Three new forces—the contortionism of traveling performers, the importation of European physical culture, and the Indian medical tradition of hatha or “force” yoga—combined to produce it. The most thorough study of these origins of modern yoga is Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). The Sanskrit phrase for good mental activities is kushala caitta. The Chinese is shan xinsuo (善心所). Another English translation is “wholesome mental associates” (Makeham).

33. Spirited Progress The phrase “dry wood and dead ashes” comes from Chapter Two of the Zhuangzi. See Palmer and Breuilly, The Book of Chuang Tzu, 8, where it is translated “a shrivelled tree” and “cold, dead ashes.” I have focused in this chapter on spirited progress as consciously making the effort to find something pleasurable. At one point, the Yogācāra monk Xuan Zang says that those who follow the highest way experience “delight” and “pleasure.” See Three Texts on Consciousness Only, 177, which reads in Cook’s translation: “those in the ultimate path of the two vehicles delight in great awakening, and those in the ultimate path of Buddhahood delight in benefitting others.” There are, however, other meanings of spirited progress that I do not address here. In the Yoga Sūtra, for instance, it is something that one attains through celibacy (Book 2.38). The Sanskrit word for spirited progress is vīrya. The Chinese is jingjin (精進). Other English translations include “vigor” (Cook) and “sustained effort” (Makeham).

34. Samādhi The name of the wandering scholar in the story is Mencius, one of the most famous of all classical Chinese philosophers. This story appears at The Book of Mencius, 1A6. See Legge, The Chinese Classics, vol. 2, 136. Not everyone agrees that samādhi is always a good thing. The Yogācāra monk Xuan Zang locates it among the specialized activities rather than the good mental activities, presumably because one can enjoy paying attention to

something destructive. I can hold my attention fixed on one of my cravings, for instance. In such a case, I have samādhi without correct discernment. See Three Texts on Consciousness Only, 169. Some Buddhists refer to this samādhi without correct discernment as “deluded samādhi.” See Chih-hsu Ou-i [Ouyi Zhixu], The Buddhist I-Ching, trans. Thomas Cleary (Boston & London: Shambhala, 2001), 125, where Cleary translates deluded samādhi as “ignorant concentration.” It is still the case that, if I can distinguish the pleasure of steadying my attention from the pleasure of satisfying the craving that has drawn my attention, I reduce the power of the craving. Xiong Shili locates samādhi among the good mental activities, as I do, but he attributes to it the power of recovering our original nature, something far beyond what I have in mind here. See New Treatise, 281–282. Because the Sanskrit word samādhi is relatively well known among yogis, I have not translated it here. An English translation is “concentration” (Makeham).

35. Trust The Rāmāyana describes the land of Uttarakuru in Book Four, Chapter 43. The translation given here is by Ralph T.H. Griffith, The Rámáyan of Válmíki, vol. 4 (London: Trübner and Co., 1873), 215. I am using the word “trust” in this chapter to refer to a mental activity, which is how the word is used in the Yogācāra tradition. But “trust” can also refer to belief in traditional religious practices and texts, such as those that speak of Uttarakuru. In this latter sense, trust is no different from faith. And, as Xiong Shili notes, faith is not a mental activity of its own, but a form of certainty (see New Treatise, 282–283). If you practice chakra meditation, visualizing energy centers in your body, and you think that chakras actually exist, you are using recognition (to imagine the chakra) and certainty (to act as though it exists), but not trust. Xiong Shili identifies the principles of things as the primary objects of trust. In this chapter, I have focused not on the principles of things generally, but only on the principles at work in our own bodies. There is a kind of mad scientist version of this trust, in which we take pleasure in experiencing the

laws of cause-and-effect even while they cause us injury. For instance, I experience the laws of cause-and-effect by pulling so hard on a muscle that it tears. I assume in this chapter and elsewhere that we are not trying to hurt ourselves, but there is nothing about trust that absolutely requires us to avoid injury. The Sanskrit word for trust is shraddhā. The Chinese is xin (信). Other English translations include “faith” (Cook) and “conviction” (Makeham).

36. Non-Delusion The local magistrate in the story of the farmer and the tiger is the philosopher Cheng Yi. This story appears in Wing-Tsit Chan, A Sourcebook of Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972 [1963]), 551. Yoga authorities do not all agree on whether non-delusion is a form of discernment or not. Xuan Zang says that it is (Three Texts on Consciousness Only, 176). Xiong Shili says that it is not (New Treatise, 295–298). He thinks that Xuan Zang agrees with him, though this is not actually the case. Xiong acknowledges that both non-delusion and discernment make distinctions and can lead to certainty. But he observes that discernment always has the potential to distract us from ourselves, whereas non-delusion is a form of self-realization. He also claims that discernment is always based on the way things appear to us, whereas non-delusion is based on what they actually are, not just how they appear. The Sanskrit word for non-delusion is amoha. The Chinese is wuchi (無 癡). Another English translation is “contra-ignorance” (Makeham).

37. Non-Craving If you need to find something pleasant to compensate you for the loss of what you desire, why not drink alcohol instead of practicing yoga? Like the hormone release from any strenuous exercise, alcohol is difficult to find unpleasant. But there is an important difference between alcohol and exercise as tools to develop non-craving. Alcohol may add a pleasure to your experience at first, but it will eventually become the only thing you

experience (as you get drunk). Instead of integrating different pains and pleasures, you have replaced everything else with one all-consuming but temporary pleasure. The pain of not having the thing you originally craved then comes back later, when the drug has worn off, and you are no better than you were before. So you drink more alcohol, and it eventually becomes one more thing that you crave. The Sanskrit word for non-craving is alobha. The Chinese is wutan (無 貪). Another English translation is “contra-craving” (Makeham).

38. Non-Aversion The Yoga Sūtra does not include non-aversion among the limbs of yoga, but it does say that the five “yamas” or restraints are the first of the limbs, and the Sāmkhya text known as the Suvarnasaptati says that non-aversion is the first of the yamas. See J. Takakasu, La Sāmkhyakārikā, étudiée à la lumière de sa version chinoise (suite et fin), in Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient 4 (1904), 1008, where the Chinese phrase for non-aversion is translated as “ne pas se mettre en colère.” The Sanskrit word for non-aversion is advesha. The Chinese is wuchen (無瞋). Other English translations include “nonhatred” (Cook) and “contraantipathy” (Makeham).

39. Non-Neglect Pratinidhi’s advice to put a picture of “something or someone of significance” on the wall in front of you while you practice occurs on page 36 of The Ten-Point Way to Health, written with Louise Morgan (London: Dent, 1938). He seems to be promoting some form of non-neglect by stressing that the image should be of a person who is significant to you, but he says only that the purpose of the image is “to aid concentration.” Even a circle painted “in a vivid colour” will do the job. The Yoga Sūtra does not include non-neglect among the limbs of yoga, but the first of its limbs are the “yamas” or restraints, and the Sāmkhya text known as the Suvarnasaptati says that “non-neglect” is the fifth of these yamas. See Takakasu, La Sāmkhyakārikā, 1008. Takakasu translates the

Chinese phrase for non-neglect as “ne pas s’adonner à la licence.” The Sanskrit word for “non-neglect” is apramāda. The Chinese is bufangyi (不放逸). Another English translation is “vigilance” (Cook and Makeham).