Yoga of the Heart
Ten Ethical Guidelines for Gaining Limitless Growth, Confidence, and Achievement
by Alice Christensen
CHAPTER 2: MANY ROADS ALL ENDING IN ONE PLACE
This chapter will give you a broad historical overview of Yoga and a description of some of the many traditional types of Yoga, including Kashmir Shaivism, the philosophy that underlies the concepts presented in this book. This will give you a context in which to place the philosophical discussions in this book and, if you are currently practicing Yoga techniques, some idea of where the techniques come from.
This is not intended to be a scholarly treatise on Yoga philosophy. The subject is so vast that it would be presumptuous of me to try. In addition, I am conscious of the words of my great teachers, Rama and Lakshmanjoo, who cautioned me that the real secrets of Yoga can never be learned — or taught — intellectually. In fact, the intellectual approach can form a wall between you and the powerful, intuitive experience of the spiritual body. That is why, in this book, I have created a fantasy technique that will support a more practical approach to the ethical guidelines of Yoga that can serve you in any circumstance.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOGA AND RELIGION
Yoga is not a religion. It is a series of techniques that, when practiced daily, can be used as tools to add meaning and depth to your life, no matter what your religion or background.
We have all grown up with different social backgrounds, religious training, and familial customs, yet Yoga shows how even very simple techniques, practiced in small increments, can bring on the realization that within our outer physical being is a universal spiritual nature. One of the great strengths of Yoga is this premise that there is an underlying spiritual support that is the same in everyone, and there are many paths that lead to its discovery.
No one practices Yoga in exactly the same way as anyone else. Although some of the techniques may appear to be similar, each person’s experience is unique. Knowing this fact will smooth away the discordant, abrasive attitude adopted by some practitioners that demands that in order to practice Yoga techniques you have to think and practice only one way. In Yoga, you are not expected to blindly follow a particular path; you are always guided by your own experience.
The Question of Cults
Not everyone is comfortable with the self-motivation that is at the heart of Yoga. People who feel the need for religious rules and beliefs are easy prey for charismatic leaders, who seem to offer easy answers to life’s problems. Many people want someone else to tell them what to do, how to live, and how to be happy, and they often believe that a leader with a strong personality will be a type of savior. This kind of relationship has no place in Yoga. A true teacher realizes that your desires must be answered by you, and it is the teacher’s responsibility to point that out and show you how to do it. The teacher then provides the support and encouragement you need during your search.
The jewel of Yoga is that if you can find the courage to face that journey into yourself, you become your own savior. You have the ability to become strong, content, and fulfilled without depending on something or someone outside yourself. The knowledge of the spiritual body that you possess contains all the knowledge that you will need to reach the highest pinnacle of your life. Yoga techniques and philosophy form a bridge to finding yourself within yourself.
Because most Yogic texts were originally written in India, many people often sincerely believe that in order to practice Yoga, they must transform themselves into something resembling an Indian. During my long career in Yoga, I have often met people who have thought they must change their names, change their dress, and adopt Eastern religious customs. This would be a mistake. Yoga is a very precise discipline that produces very strong individuals who do not have to lean on any external factors in order to identify themselves as practitioners. Yoga will not interfere with your personal religious faith; in fact, many students say that Yoga strengthens their personal beliefs by providing a strong underpinning of confidence, self-awareness, and well-being.
Many dictionaries mistakenly define Yoga as an offshoot of the Hindu religion. Historical evidence of Yoga practice actually predates Hinduism by many centuries. Unlike religion, Yoga does not advocate rituals or creeds. Also, as any serious practitioner will tell you, when one attempts to approach the summit in Yoga practice, one is instructed to give up all ceremonies and creeds. One must go on alone, dependant only on the spiritual body that is now coming into view.
Throughout this book, I do mention terms that may have religious connotations for you, such as "God," "God consciousness," and "spiritual." No one can really know what the supreme consciousness is like; since any words become inadequate in the face of this immense concept, I decided to use terms that will be most familiar to most people. The best way to read these words is to give them a personal reference that means something to you.
People often ask about the meaning of the huge pantheon of gods and goddesses pictured in the art of the Eastern world. These images are often misunderstood in the West. Actually these many different forms are used to represent the many emotional personalities of the great state called God consciousness or the Universal Body. They are the moods and expressions of one being, the supreme force that is the source and support for all creation.
These various images represent powerful emotional forces in this world that have no physical form. Consider love, for instance. Everyone has heard about love, and some people believe they can describe it. A great deal of money is spent in the corporate world to convince people that love can be attained through the right cosmetics, beer, greeting cards, perfumes, and other products. Although we are all influenced by these efforts, we know that, in reality, love cannot be packaged. Love has no form; it remains unseen, though it can be felt. The same can be said of any emotion: it can be felt, but it cannot be packaged.
Eastern art pretends that these unseen emotions can take form, and because of the enormous respect shown to emotions in this context, they are referred to in divine terms. These gods have been given a humanlike form in order to make them easier to relate to. They portray the emotions of the spiritual body in their purest, most subtle form and express themselves through the physical body.
Let’s return to the example of love. I believe that love can be experienced in its full depth only by quieting the physical body and inviting the clear expression of love to flow through you from the spiritual body. The joint efforts of your outer (physical) and inner (spiritual) natures are needed to bring this experience of love to its ultimate expression. By combining the forces of the physical and spiritual bodies in this way, you can experience the full expression and subtlety of not just love, but all emotions.
The Shaivite philosophy says that this entire divine pantheon of emotions lies within you, waiting for you to call them forth in all their beauty and strength. These forms of gods and goddesses, then, simply represent parts of you; they are what you have always been but have been unable to recognize. They are a picture of your spiritual body in all its power.
HOW YOGA BEGAN
The short answer is: nobody knows. The origins of Yoga certainly predate written history. Archaeologists have found seals with carvings of people in Yoga positions that date back more than five thousand years.
Even after the advent of writing, Yoga was usually transmitted by word of mouth, handed down from teacher to student. Only a few texts on Yoga remain from that early period, written in a sort of enigmatic code of aphoristic statements that have meaning only to the serious student of mystical experience. Of course, these documents have been extensively commented on by various prominent scholars.
I was fortunate in having two powerful teachers who introduced me to these great writings: Lakshmanjoo was well known for his translations of the writings of a great teacher named Abhinavagupta, who lived in the 10th century in Kashmir and was the author of a brilliant commentary on Kashmir Shaivism. Rama taught me the principles of Vedantic thought, a system of Yoga philosophy that teaches realization of the self through a systematic transformation of the "five sheaths" that hide the true Self in three states of consciousness:
STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS
The waking state:
The dream state:
The deep sleep state:
The Vedantist considers the entire material world, as expressed in these five sheaths, to be an illusion that cannot last, and so the practitioner attempts to refuse its entrancements. In contrast to Kashmir Shaivism, an "inclusive" philosophy, Vedanta is "exclusive." The practitioner constantly moves away from attachment to the world by saying, "Not this, not that" — in other words, "I am not a mother, I am not a father, I am not a child, I am not this ego, I am not this mind" — and so on until he or she is left with the only thing that is real, lasting, and unchanging: the true Self.
Classical Yoga and Patanjali
One of the great classical Yogic texts was written by the scholar Patanjali, who lived sometime between the 3rd century B.C. and the 3rd century A.D. He made a great contribution by observing the many different Yoga techniques and theories that people were practicing at the time and organizing them into a coherent form in his Yoga Sutras .
The system that is described as Classical Yoga has eight parts. These eight parts represent eight stages of consciousness, or states of awareness, that reside in both the physical and spiritual bodies. Lakshmanjoo called these eight steps "limbs," and he clearly told me that it was important to practice them simultaneously rather than one by one.
The Sanskrit names for the eight limbs (or centers of consciousness), along with their usual English translations, are:
The words yama and niyama describe the ten ethical guidelines that I am presenting in this book in Chapters 4 through 13. The next two, asana and pranayama, are the exercises and breathing techniques that most people are taught in Yoga classes in the West. Pratyahara is the beginning stage of meditation, where you learn to turn your attention from the outside world to the internal. Dharana, dhyana, and samadhi are three stages of meditation, where the student learns to focus on one point for longer and longer periods of time, until, in the final stage, the student attains the ability to remain in that focused state for as long as he or she wishes and to move in and out of that state at will.
TYPES OF YOGA
There are over a hundred different schools of Yoga. Some of the most well known are:
Hatha Yoga: The physical movements and postures, plus breathing techniques. This is what most people associate with Yoga practice.
Raja Yoga: Called the "royal road," because it incorporates exercise and breathing practice with meditation and study, producing a well-rounded individual.
Jnana Yoga: The path of wisdom; considered the most difficult path.
Bhakti Yoga: The practice of extreme devotion in one-pointed concentration upon one’s concept of God.
Karma Yoga: All movement, all work of any kind is done with the mind centered on God.
Tantra Yoga: A way of showing the unseen consciousness in form through specific words, diagrams, and movements. One of the diagrams that is used to show the joining of the physical and spiritual bodies is two triangles superimposed upon one another. The downward-pointing triangle represents the physical body, or the female aspect of work, action, movement; the upward-pointing triangle represents the spiritual body of support, energy, vastness.
Yoga is unique in that, in the beginning, each person experiences something different, although as practices progress, everyone ends up at the same ultimate point. The different types of Yoga briefly outlined above are broad categories only; most practitioners choose from among them according to their needs, desires, and, of course, what they have been taught.
Four Types of Students
The Bhagavad Gita describes four types of students who come to Yoga: "the sufferer, the seeker for worldly goods, the seeker for knowledge, and the man of wisdom." In other words, most people are drawn to Yoga by an underlying need or desire. That need may be an unresolved hurt, a strategy for health and success, or a drive for completeness. Even if you are not a student of Yoga, you can probably see how your deepest desires determine the course of your life and the efforts you make to obtain those desires.
As a teacher, I see all types of students in my classes, and usually they practice Yoga until their underlying need is met; then they stop. Everyone cannot have the same goals or move toward them at the same pace. The tools of Yoga can be used as long as they are needed. If you are lucky enough to have a teacher who can show you how to practice correctly, anything is possible.
As I mentioned, I practice Kashmir Shaivism, a philosophy that intrigued me from the very beginning of my study of Yoga. (See the Foreword for a more complete description of Kashmir Shaivism.) Both my teachers instructed me in this school. To review, according to Kashmir Shaivism, everything in the universe is both male and female. Some words that can describe the male principle are heat, dryness, energy, mind, and potentiality. The female principle can be described in terms such as cold, wetness, movement, and form.
Many Yogic philosophies recognize only the male principle, saying that the female aspect — that is, the manifest world — is unreal; that is why you often see pictures of ascetics attempting to negate their body through suffering and self-denial. They are attempting to prove to themselves that the world, or the female aspect, is not important. This external austerity, or an outward practice for show, is a clear picture of false ego. In this book I am attempting to describe the opposite: an internal observance, in which practice is done within yourself, for yourself alone.
Kashmir Shaivism recognizes that the male and female principles are equal partners; they are interdependent and cannot be separated; they are, in fact, one thing. The feeling of attraction between them creates the immense complexity of the universe that we enjoy and celebrate.
In summary, Kashmir Shaivism is an approach that is inclusive, rather than exclusive. The entire universe and everything in it is considered divine and composed of this male/female principle, the two aspects of which are always longing for union with each other. This picture of the universe is represented in us by the image of two bodies: spiritual and physical. Both are equally powerful, and both are necessary for a complete world — and a complete individual. Kashmir Shaivism observes the total world as part of yourself, and none of it is to be rejected. You are taught to observe and learn from everything. In this way, you are able to make a choice about how to live your life.
From Yoga of the Heart: Ten Ethical Guidelines for Gaining Limitless Confidence, Growth, and Achievement, by Alice Christensen (Daybreak/Rodale Books, 1998).
Copyright 2002 by The American Yoga Association. All Rights Reserved.
