Yoga & The Art of Listening

One of the classic texts of the Yoga tradition, along with the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, is the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Within these teachings, Patanjali lays down a quintessential definition of “yoga” that has become a bedrock of modern Yoga practice. In Verse 2, the Sutras read:

YOGAS CITTA VRTTI NIRODHAH

Which can translated in various ways:
“Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuation of consciousness”
“Yoga is the restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff.”
“Yoga is the stopping of the turnings of the mind.”

Well, what on earth are the “fluctuations of consciousness,” “modifications of the mind-stuff,” or “turnings of the mind”? And why should we be concerned with them coming to an end?

The turnings of the mind are our habitual mental chatter, the interior monologue running through our brains almost every moment of every day. It is the voice that constantly proclaims its like, its dislikes, its judgments, and its comparisons. It is what carries on our inner autobiography; our feelings of being a good or a bad person, beautiful or ugly, a success or failure, worthy of love or deserving of contempt. It is what worries and obsesses about the future, as well as lives in pride or shame over the past.

Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with this mental chatter. But it tends to create a problem when we habitually identity ourselves with this stream of thought.

Ask yourself this question: where do you most strongly experience your sense of “I”? If you were to say “I exist”, where do you most feel that coming from? Your big toe? Your arteries? Or perhaps your spleen? No, most people (at least in our culture) would answer that “I” is most strongly located somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears. Located ourselves primarily in the head, we connect our identity with the stream of thoughts passing through the mind. This forms our most basic sense of who we are.

From the time of some of our earliest records of human history, human beings have sought through various contemplative practices to bring this mental stream to a stop. Meditation, yoga, tai chi, breathing exercises, ascetic practices, drumming, dancing, and singing can all become paths towards turning down the volume of our inner chatter so that something else, something deeper, might be heard. Why? Is it a form of intellectual suicide? Does it mean becoming a mindless bump on a log? No, not at all. By such an attempt, human beings have sought a way to peace, profound happiness, and liberation from suffering.

They realized that the reflective nature of our thoughts – our ability to think about our thinking, and even think about our thinking about our thinking – leaves us in perpetual anxiety about our lives and actually creates an illusory barrier between ourselves and the world around us.

When we give all our attention to this constantly critiquing voice in the head, we subtly disconnect ourselves from what is happening right in front of us. If you are in the midst of an experience and are busy the entire time judging and commenting to yourself on everything – the warmth or coldness of the room, the quality of the company around you, other things you could be doing at this moment – then you aren’t really living in that present moment. You are “stuck up in the head,” too self-conscious to fully be engaged with the experience you are having. It is a little like constantly checking your phone for missed calls or texts while on a first date – it shows you aren’t really interested.

There are days when, feeling a little blue or tired, I can walk through the entire day in a sort of “blah” feeling, wrapped up in whatever crummy feelings I’m going through. If someone were to ask me later how my day went or what I did or saw, I might draw a blank on the contents of the day. I was so wrapped up in my mental “stuff” that I didn’t really notice the beautiful park I drove by on my way to work, or the smell of the rain during the afternoon, or the way my cat stretched himself as I opened the door coming home. This mental chatter keeps us from, in the words of Ram Dass, “being here now.”

Awakening to life therefore involves turning down the volume on this inner noise and instead listening more deeply to what is really going on.

For instance, if you are in a conversation with someone and you’re the one doing all the talking, you aren’t really connecting at all with the other person. You aren’t really having a conversation; you are having a monologue in someone else’s presence. It also means that you probably won’t learn or grow much from that conversation, because you’re just repeating what you already know. But when you become silent and listen, allowing the other person to speak, you expose yourself to new perspective and points of view. You grow, you evolve, you expand.

Well, life is the same way. We could think of our every day lives as a conversation with the world. If we are the ones doing all the talking, by means of our constant internal judgments, comparison, and commentary, then we aren’t really listening to what life may be trying to tell us. Even in prayer, when we are supposed to be seeking answers from God, most people in our culture pray by talking the whole time. Thus it has been said that whereas prayer is talking to God, meditation is listening to God.

So, let us try a meditation of deep listening. You may want to read this first and then go and experiment.

Find a comfortable seat, whether in a chair or sitting in meditation on the floor. Close your eyes and place your hands comfortably in the lap or on the knees.

Bring all of your attention to your sense of hearing. Imagine that you are one giant ear and your only purpose is to hear. Listen to the sounds around you. Maybe you hear a bird chirping outside, or cars driving some distance away, or the sound of faint music in the background.

Whatever it is, just listen, with no judgment, commentary, or interpretation. As Alan Watts once said, “The sound of the rain needs no translation.”

When thoughts begin to arise in the mind, treat them as just another thing to listen to. There is just a deep listening.

What you may begin to notice is that within the quietness of mind, the most ordinary sounds of every day life take on a staggering quality of beauty. The sound of the wind becomes a music just as beautiful as those played by orchestras. The flowing sounds of ocean waves become poems for the ear.

If you listen deeply enough, you may notice that in the midst of such beautiful sound, there is no sound of one listening. That is because there is no real separation between the knower and the known, the experience and the one having the experience. This lack of separation, which was only an illusion in the first place, is the experience of “yoga,” which literally means “yoke” or “union.”

Yoga is a practice of deep listening, turning down the volume of our mental noise, so that we may hear the wisdom of the Universe more clearly.

~ Matthew Foley

Ishvara Pranidhana: Surrender To God

This fall, I've been a part of a yoga teacher training program at the Blue Turtle yoga studio here in Charleston. During the program, we've studied the classic yoga text The Yoga Sutras of Patajali. I'm not in agreement with everything Patanjali says, but the Yoga Sutras are undeniably a huge part of what has become modern-day yogic practice and philosophy. In the Sutras, Patanjali outlines 5 Yamas & 5 Niyamas, which are observances concerning how you treat others and oneself. They include non-violence, non-stealing, self-study, contentment, and other ethical and spiritual practices.

As a part of the teacher program, we had to choice one yama or niyama, reflect on how it influences or impacts our lives, and then write an essay on our reflections. I chose the 5th Niyama, Ishvara Pranidhana, which is translated as "surrender to God" (I'll get to what I mean by the word "God" in just a moment...). This is the essay I wrote, which I thought would be interesting for my readers on this blog. Hope you enjoy.

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My choice of Ishvara Pranidhana really began several months ago. It didn’t start as any formal practice or any adherence to Patjali’s eight limbs. It simply began as a period of my life when I’ve been doing a lot of letting go: letting go of out-dated ideas about who I thought I was, letting go of worry about how I may appear in the eyes of others, and letting go of a lot of mental habits that weren’t very healthy for me any longer. In place of all the anxiety and self-doubt I felt about all these things, there began to emerge a peaceful calm within me that I had only experienced before in very fleeting moments.

When it came time to pick a yama or niyama to file all this letting go under, I was a little stumped. I thought Aparigraha (Non-clinging) might be appropriate, or maybe Santosa (Contentment). Then it just clicked for me that “surrender to God” was the best way to express what has been happening in my life.

I guess that it’s important for me to explain first what I mean by “God”. Though I was raised in the Christian church (the Southern Baptist Church, to be exact), I no longer believe in God as an elderly white man with long beard who lives in the clouds. My vision of the Divine is much more flavored by Taoist, Buddhist, and Yogic worldviews. I try to see God in the laws of nature, in the still silence of meditation, in the brightness of people’s eyes. To me, God isn’t the big scary law-giver or even the protective father figure, but is a force that is within and throughout all the beings in the Universe. The Universe itself – Life itself – is God. As a spiritual mentor of mine likes to say, “surrender to God” simply means “surrender to what IS.”

So, if my practice recently has been to surrender to God, what had I been surrendering myself to before? It was a collection of memories and self-spun stories that I carried around in my mind all day long, the monologues I silently performed while brushing my teeth or while stuck in traffic, all the worries I had about where I was, where I was going, what I’m doing with my life. It with the thin layer of projections, judgments, fears, and fantasy that I placed on top of everything and everyone, keeping me from seeing things and people as they really are. It is what Hindus and Buddhists refer to as maya, the great illusion.

All this sounds a little philosophical, but as I’ve tried to put this surrender into practice, I’ve felt myself so much more at peace with myself and with others. Instead of spending my morning shower time worrying about what I have to do at work today, I try to focus in on the leafy green trees I see through the bathroom window and the sound of the water rushing down. In yoga class, I try not to compare myself to the students around me, but instead try to really feel what it is like to move in and out of poses, to listen to the music of my breath coming in and out. These may sound like simple things to surrender to, but I’ve been finding that God can be found in all sorts of simple things: like sunsets, the purring of a cat curled up in your lap, the smell of wild flowers, the moments we share with the people we really love.

As I’m learning to enjoy these simple pleasures, I find that I’m enjoying my life so much more than when I was desperately trying to “figure out” my life - trying to nail it down, pin it down, sum it up. God, Tao, Reality, What Is – whatever you call it – is a constant state of flux and can never be given a final definition. Since we are a part of God/Tao/Reality/What Is, we too can never be given a final definition. When I surrender to these simple joys, I get the feeling of flowing with the current of Life’s river, getting carried away by the flow of the Tao. When we’re in that flow, when we stop trying to swim upstream, it gives us the amazing freedom to live each moment of our lives without the constant intrusion of the past or the future. Instead we can live in the present moment, the moment where God lives.

This practice is obviously a work-in-progress. I’m still figuring how to live in the present moment while still making appropriate plans for the future. I still obviously get stressed, get frustrated, get worried, get depressed, get lonely, and all of that. But just as with seated meditation, when you learn to come back to the breath after getting caught up in a train of thought, I think I’m learning to come back to Reality, back to God, whenever I get caught up in a story or an illusion. Ultimately, that’s the practice: to keep coming back, no matter how many times we get distracted by maya, to the truth of What Is and the truth of who we really are.

~ Matthew Foley