hṛdaye citta-samvit
“[By saṁyama] on the heart, full knowledge of citta.”

Twenty years ago, in an Iyengar yoga workshop in New York City, teacher Matthew Sanford declared, “Open the feet to open the heart.” By sensing our feet, articulating them in all their subtle fineness, by rooting through the feet to the ground, by feeling our weight penetrate down and the spring of vibration rise up through the arches–well, by feeling the feet, we might feel in the heart.

In many circumstances that are challenging or frightening, I remind myself to breathe and … to feel my feet.  And I do believe this connects me to my self, and I mean by that my authentic self, because it connects me to my heart.

Patañjali here tells us that, to understand the whole consciousness (citta), to fully understand (samvit) one’s mind, do saṁyama on the heart (hṛdaye)–or, as Rohit Mehta translates, do saṁyama in the heart. The threefold process of saṁyama, as outlined in III.1-4, is itself a way of coming to know one’s citta (III.2)–particularly the patterns of citta, habitual thoughts, ways of seeing, repeating concepts or perceptions. Yoga is a process of listening to oneself, hearing one’s own story,  so that one can let go, empty, see more clearly, as the Tao Te Ching puts it, “keep the deep water still and clear” (see Ursula K. Le Guin translation of ch. 10, in last post).

And so Patañjali makes clear that the citta moves and functions and is shaped by the whole body. To know ourselves, we must know our body, and–in a very particular way–know our heart. We must know in our heart.

The heart is the citadel of puruṣa, says Mr. Iyengar, and the Chāndogya Upaniṣad describes the “lotus of the heart” as containing all space. It is the anahata (“unstruck”) cakra, the midpoint in the seven-cakra system and, according to Anodea Judith, the central integrating cakra, the unifier and healer of our being.

Our culture seems to respect the heart as emotional center, and even celebrates love with a special holiday (as I write, this week, Valentine’s Day!) complete with heart emojis, love songs, romance. Yet there is  a way in which our culture seems quite heartsick. Our way of seeing the emotions as separate from our thoughts, seeing the brain as separate from the body, seeing the heart as separate from the mind, are indications of a divided and ailing consciousness.

Anodea Judith, who is both a Jungian therapist and a body worker, says that a basic need of our human nature is to love and be loved. Despite this, many, many of us experience love as elusive. We live in a scarcity of love. In her book Eastern Body Western Mind, a reflection on psychology and the cakra system, Judith looks to the cultural stories that we in the West collectively share, and asserts that, in these stories, we are children of divorce. The Great Mother, a fundamental archetype worshipped for 25,000 years of human history, has been all but banished from our origin stories.

She is archetypal ancestress to us all, her memory buried deeply in the collective unconscious. She mirrors our early childhood experience of our own mothers and embodies the archetypal imprint of the mothering source–nurturance, nourishment, containment, and connection.  –Anodea Judith, Eastern Body Western Mind, p.225

Judith says that our prevailing myths teach us that we are motherless children. We have a deity who is a sole protagonist, a Great Father who is strong and powerful but without wife or daughter and who is estranged from what the feminine archetype represents. In His house, mother “is not mentioned.” No wonder, she says, we have a yearning for romantic love.

According to Judith, we are living out a myth of separation. We view ourselves as separate from nature, as separate from each other, as divided by means of class, gender, age, race. We suffer from a ruptured fabric of connection. It is revealed in the terrible wealth gap, which increases every year, the fraying of the social safety net, our failure to provide housing, health care, and sustenance, the destruction of the ecosystems that the living world and our lives depend on.

Anodea Judith says that to heal the heart cakra, and to be healed by it, we must feel our grief. We must mourn our individual losses–and our collective losses as well.

Psychologist Francis Weller, in his remarkable book The Wild Edge of Sorrow, says that what is often diagnosed as depression is actually low-grade chronic grief, and that that grief is not just personal. In other words, it is not just from individual circumstances or experience. “It circulates around us,” he says,  “coming to us from a wider expanse, arriving on unseen currents that touch our souls.” (p. xv)

Weller, like Anodea Judith, is trained in Jungian psychology, and so perhaps this gives him insight into collective experience. He says that, as human beings, we evolved to live in community, and we are meant to receive bad news–and to grieve–together. In our modern world, we do not have established rituals of grief, ways to express or share the great energies of loss and pain. Reading Francis Weller’s book helps me consider ways I might make ongoing practices of grief–and how I might share difficult news so that I am not alone in processing it.

Weller’s book has offered me, further,  an important way to expand my understanding of grief and to navigate what he might call the “work of sorrow.” He identifies Five Gates of Grief, summarized here as:

I. loss of someone or something loved

II. parts of oneself ignored, shamed, exiled–parts that never received love

III. harm to the living world–destruction of ecosystems, climate

IV. lack of an intact and loving community–sense of belonging

V. ancestral grief–the losses, suffering of our lineage

(see The Wild Edge of Sorrow, by Francis Weller, pp. 23-70; also thanks to Heather Cook for introducing me to this work)

I know I and many around me are experiencing the ongoing climate catastrophe in a powerful way (see Terry Tempest Williams, “An Obituary for the Land” — quoted in my post on III.23), and it is useful to identify this as a collective grief. For today’s purposes, and to tie back to Anodea Judith, I will call attention to the Fourth Gate: the lack of an intact and loving community.

We are all living–right now–in a society where there is a scarcity of care. We do not guarantee for each other that we will be cared for. Yet there have been cultures, through the millennia, founded on this basic value: You belong here. We care about you. We care about you not because of anything you have achieved or produced, but because, simply, you are here.

I stood in line the other day behind a man with a big sticker on his backpack that said, “Nobody cares. Work harder.”

This struck me dumb. Yet what more perfect expression of the values of capitalism: profit matters, not people.

Weller says his book is a prayer, “a plea on behalf of our beloved earth”:

I write to speak to the deepening sense of loss we are feeling as the life systems of our planet show continuing signs of strain and decline. The pain is intense and almost unendurable. I write for the sake of our communities and for the salmon, ospreys, monarch butterflies, grizzlies, and for the generations to come…. [This book] is a protest, calling us back to a life of connection and intimacy, of feeling and wonder. It is an invitation to feed the fires of our aliveness and coax us back to life. All this comes through the providence of grief. (p. xxii)

When we allow ourselves to grieve our losses, when we let ourselves feel our feet and open our hearts, we are in better shape to connect to others and to offer care. May we do that. This is a great time for that.

—–

“The citadel of puruṣa is the heart. It is anahata cakra, the seat of pure knowledge as well as of consciousness.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, commentary on III.35

“The fifth and sixth cakras (intellect and seat of the mind) might seem more likely objects for gaining knowledge of the mind-stuff; instead Sri Patañjali cites the heart, hṛdaye, as the way to attain knowledge of the mind-stuff. The mind is dependent for its existence on the ego, which is better approached through the heart. In this case ‘heart’ refers to the core of ‘feeling’ center of the individual, the place where motives and intent reside.” –The Reverend Jaganath Carrera, Inside the Yoga Sūtras, commentary on III.35

“Citta-samvit means awareness of one’s consciousness. And the sūtra says that it comes by mediation in the heart…. Here heart is not to be understood as a physical organ. It is the midpoint between intellection and action…. Action preceding thought is indeed the state of love.” –Rohit Mehta, Yoga, the Art of Integration, commentary on III.35

Questions:
• What does it mean to you to “open your heart”?
• Has yoga practice helped you recognize stuck places of grief in you?  Does physical movement help you process grief? Walking, running, dancing, singing, shouting, talking?
• Do you have any grief practices that you do by yourself or with others?
• Does body awareness bring you greater sensitivity to what is around you…to an understanding of others? To your own emotions? To your desire to connect?
• How are you practicing care?