Yoga: The Art of Balance

You are the World If we are violent, greedy and superficial, that is what we create, that is the society in which we live. Society is our relationship with each other. If you want to change society, you must start with yourself. You are constantly changing and so is the world. There is no path to truth or reality, because the external world is constantly changing and so is your internal world. You can only have a path between two fixed places. You are not a fixed place. You are replacing most of the cells in your body on a regular basis and exchanging your body with the environment with every breath. Following a path, a system, a “Master,” an old book, or even the truth that you found yesterday is not Yoga. Real Yoga is finding your truth right now; being attentive to what is right now, not what “should be” or what someone else said, or what you said last week. Real Yoga is being in the present moment, being truly alive. Yoga is self-discovery. “Should be” doesn’t allow the freedom necessary for self-discovery. Competition and Comparison People compare. People are competitive. When you are in a Yoga class and you compare your pose to the teacher’s pose, or the person next to you, or some ideal that you saw in a book, or the pose you did yesterday, you are being human. We humans do that. The important thing is to neither pretend that you don’t compare (because you do), or “try harder” so that your pose looks better in comparison (which is competition and focusing on the result instead of the process). The important thing is to simply observe. Once you see what is happening, without comment or condemnation, you are free to choose what you want to do about it, if anything. People are naturally competitive. Some people even compete to see who can be the most non-competitive! Comparison and competition are neither “good” nor “bad”. They are tools that we can use, or if we are unaware, they can use us. Remember, Yoga is balance and balance is an active, ever-changing state. Just hold a balancing pose for a minute and see how balance is active and ever-changing, not passive and inert. Internal and External Feedback Although it is important to have one or more Yoga teachers to learn the poses, you must develop the teacher within. You are your own best teacher as you cannot get self-knowledge from another. Listening to and reading what others say or have said is beneficial, but real insight, real self-knowledge comes from awareness, awareness of what is going on inside yourself. Rather than following the “experts”, use them as resources. In the end, you must follow your heart, but balance it against an educated mind, one that sees and understands various points of view. Yoga is balance. Balance between left and right, front and back, strength and flexibility, internal and external, control and surrender, the critical mind and the compassionate heart. Find balance each moment through your attention. You find balance by not taking sides; internally or externally. Once you take sides, you are no longer in balance and you cannot see the whole. External conflict is the result of internal conflict. Internal conflict is the result of being out of balance, taking one side against another, being attached to a part without seeing the whole. If you can let go of taking sides, you can relax and experience what is actually happening right now. Balance negates extremes. Extremes require force and force is violence. Peace is balance. It is active and energetic without force. Questioning There are many claims about the great antiquity of Yoga. Many of these claims are quite recent with little or no evidence. The point of this purported antiquity is: What I say has absolute authority because it is based on something, or is the exact thing, that was developed by “god/men” thousands and thousands of years ago. Therefore, who are you to question! The same is true of Yoga teachers and gurus who claim to be part of some unbroken chain of secret knowledge that was passed down from teacher to student for thousands of years. Let the buyer beware! Yoga is questioning. Questioning authority and questioning yourself. Questioning is healthy as long as it is balanced. Questioning in its extreme can lead to cynicism and a very negative attitude towards others, but a lack of questioning leads to manipulation by all sorts of self-appointed authority figures. Once you accept the authority of another person, book, or system, you stop thinking, stop growing, and give your own responsibilities to another. Self-discovery is the result of taking responsibility for yourself. As J Krishnamurti said, “Truth is a pathless land. There is no path to truth.” You cannot get truth from another; you must find it yourself in every moment. The first step toward learning is to acknowledge one’s own ignorance. Learning is a process of questioning not a process of knowing. When you say: “I don’t know”, you have allowed learning. No matter how much you learn, keep the cup empty, keep your mind fresh and open. Let knowledge and experience flow through you. Do not try to hold on to them. When you hold on to truth and repeat it, it is no longer truth. Use it or lose it Our brains are plastic and constantly changing to meet the current need, just like our muscles, bones and other body systems. If you are in weightlessness, you don't need bones to hold yourself up against gravity and therefore your body dissolves your bones and they are absorbed. If you don't use your muscles, they atrophy and are absorbed by your body. Your bones and muscles also get bigger and stronger with increased usage and increased demands being put on them. The more you use your brain and the more varied that usage is, the more neural circuits or pathways you create. A closed repetitive mind reinforces several circuits and lets all the other pathways die away. Our body’s cells are constantly dying and new cells are replacing those old ones. If there is increased need, the replacements will be stronger to fit that need. If there is decreased need, the reverse is true. This is why a mindful Yoga practice is so useful. It not only strengthens the muscles, it exercises the mind, breath, bones, nervous system, immune system and all the rest of the human organism. Yoga is a process Yoga, just like human consciousness, is a process, not a thing or a place or a belief or a set of practices or a set of rules. Already in the womb, the brain is constantly rearranging itself to deal with its new experiences. Your mind/body is constantly re-wiring itself to meet the current need and your body/mind is constantly dying and re-building itself to meet its current requirements. Consciousness, the mind and the body are not opposing states or things, they are one undivided process. All states are fluid so trying to hold on to a particular state is like taking one frame out of a movie and trying to play it over and over. Each frame has meaning only in the flow of the entire movie. Life itself is an electrochemical process. As long as we keep breathing in oxygen (the catalyst to this process) and keep breathing out carbon dioxide (the waste material of this reaction or process) we have life.