I have written before about my love of the Sutras. Patanjali is my guy.
I have a now slightly beat-up copy of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali translated by Sri Swami Satchidananda (a famous guru dude), that I cherish. There is a picture of Satchidananda on the front of the book, in pink robes, sitting cross-legged on a bulk-head in front of a river. In the picture he's laughing and looking somewhere just off camera. He's got a long white beard and curly dark hair and I like to pretend that he IS Patanjali. He seems so sweet, like if I met him somewhere, he'd hug me instead of shaking my hand. He'd pull me into those pink robes and he'd just hug the fearful right out of me. Sometimes I forget, altogether, that it's the smiling Swami on the front of the book and not Patanjali, and I look at that picture and I think, "Patanjali...you're my guy." And then I realize that Patanjali lived THOUSANDS of years ago (well, at least 1400 years ago, depending on who you ask), and they didn't have photos back then. So, it would be more accurate to say, Satchidananda is my guy.
Neither one is alive, so hopefully there isn't going to be a wrestling match in the cosmic soup for my devotion. I love you both, okay guys? I love you both.
Anyhow, this morning has been a sutra visiting morning. Of all the texts of yoga (many of which I still have yet to read) this one is my hinge-pin. Maybe it's because the sutras are so like poetry, that they get right into my bloodstream the way poetry does. Maybe it's their succinctness, their flexibility, the way that they build, one on top of the other, to form a complete picture. When I was young and first studying acting, I used to love the way a line of Shakespeare could be endlessly dissected. You could take it apart and take it apart, image by image, even word by word, and every time you dug deeper, the meaning changed, just slightly. Or got brighter. Or weightier. The sutras are like this. Some of the sutras (or so says the smiling swami) are so deep and multi-layered, they actually contain the whole meaning of yoga, and thus the meaning of all the other sutras, within them. Meaning, if you can just really GET even one of the sutras...you get them all.
I love that.
The sutra I was re-reading this morning was Sutra 1:2, the second sutra in the first book of the sutras. (There are four "books" of sutras, each one on a different aspect of the practice of yoga. Book 1 is "The Portion on Contemplation"...it contains the philosophical foundations for the rest of the books.) Sutra 1:2 reads:
Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah.
Which means, as translated by the Swami, "The restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff is Yoga."
I'm about to nerd out on this...are you ready? Get ready!
It would be easy to read this sutra and think that it said, essentially, "the restraint of the mind-stuff is Yoga". Which would make some sense...we hear so much about clearing our head, about living from our heart instead of our mind, about choosing our thoughts...it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that the practice of yoga is about restraining the activity of the mind. But, if you look closer, what it actually says is:
The restraint of the MODIFICATIONS of the mind-stuff is Yoga.
Meaning, what we're being asked to stop doing, if we're practicing yoga...is the modifying of what's in our minds. Meaning, what gets in our way is not the stuff in our heads, intrinsically, what gets in our way is all the attempts to change or control or modify that stuff. And I think, if one were to look really closely at what's happening inside the mind, there would be a whole lot of unnecessary activity that could be characterized as "modifications".
Isn't that...liberating?
That means, that our nature isn't flawed. It means that--and this is the little experiment that is constantly being conducted in yoga studios and meditation studios and massage parlors and places of healing all over the world--that if we just leave ourselves alone, then...there we are. Done. Enlightened. At one. Peaceful. That is the natural way of things. And by leaving ourselves alone, I of course don't mean just zoning out and filling up on food or drink or sex or television or phone-calls or whatever...I mean the radical, courageous, deeply humble act of allowing whatever is there to be there. No exceptions. THAT, according to Patanjali (and the smiling hugging swami), is yoga.
And what that also means, and the deeper implications for all of us engaged in any kind of spiritual practice (whether you know you're engaged in it or not, you artists, dancers, mommies, chefs, gardeners, and all manner of makers of things), is that IF you are using your practice to fix or alter or control the natural movement of your mind...well, then you're not practicing.
This is the big trick of it...you can sit down and meditate. You can go to yoga every single day. But if you're using those practices to modify your sense of your self, to inflate or punish yourself, to prove something, to run away from something, or just to wall yourself in to the space you consider right or safe...those aren't the actual practices. They might LOOK just like them. They might SOUND just like them. But, from a standpoint of spiritual growth, they're like...holograms. You could reach out and stick your hand right through them.
So, the big challenge--the gauntlet that's been laid down by Mr. Sutra himself is--are you using your life and the practices of it, to open...or to close? Are you, moment by moment, sloughing away all the impulses to make things right, or are you caught up in the constant cycle of improvement? One is Yoga. One is not. And isn't that a relief, to know that Yoga is not some goal attained through some number of years of practice, or some thousands of sun salutations...it is actually the thing that is there when you stop getting in your own way.
It is, what already is.
