te samādhāv upasargā vyutthāne siddhayaḥ
te samādhau upasargāḥ vyutthāne siddhayaḥ

“These [are] the powers of awakening, [but they are] trouble in samādhi.”

Chapter Three of Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras is known as the Vibhūti-Pāda, the Book of Powers.  And today’s sūtra concerns power.

Te, “these,” refers back to the gains in insight and intuitive sensing of III.37. These abilities are powers (siddhis), says Patañjali, that come with awakening (vyutthāne). They may be wonderful. They may be delightful. They may be a way of helping others, doing good things. And they may cause trouble (upasarga). Specifically, they disturb the practice of the eighth limb of yoga, the aspect of yoga that is its end point, its purpose. Power disturbs samādhi, our sense of union with others, our connectedness.

The word for “trouble” here is upasarga, a noun derived from the verb upasṛj (formed by upa-, “to or near,” + sṛj, “to emit, to throw”). Upasṛj means “to let loose upon, to afflict” and one meaning of upasarga is “sickness, affliction, misfortune.” In Sanskrit grammar, upasarga refers to the prefixes added to verb roots or their derivative nouns. They alter meaning in sometimes unpredictable ways. Vyaas Houston writes, in his Sanskrit Atlas, that upasarga “can be thought of as forces, which may completely change, or modify, or intensify, or have little effect on the original word.”

Upa itself is an upasarga. Combined with sṛj, it transforms “emit, throw” into “let loose upon, afflict.” The image that I get from this is of a thunder cloud “letting loose,” rain or hail pounding down. Or of a virus spreading through an organism.

In the context of III.38, most translators interpret upasarga as “obstacle,” and this certainly gets across the basic idea of the sūtra–this is a warning, about the powers of yoga, about power generally. But perhaps there is more here: upasarga alludes to actual illness or misfortune, to a harm that is unlooked for, a force that can modify or change an original purpose.

A generally accepted maxim (attributed to nineteenth-century British historian Lord Acton) is that power corrupts. It is “corruption” that upasarga suggests. And it is useful to reclaim that word “corrupt,” both for our own personal paths and for the collective way forward. We are living through rising tyranny and a concentrated, oligarchic, exercise of power. Acknowledging corruption–and understanding that structures can be built to guard against it–is key.

Earlier in this chapter (III.30), we considered personal power in the context of the nābhi cakra (our navel or center) and Anodea Judith’s luminescent sense that so many of us suffer from injury there and from a lived experience of powerlessness. Personal healing that leads to individual empowerment, she believes, can lead to a healing of society. She speaks of developing power with, not power over. A good word for that might be samādhi, which is union and connectedness.

The first limb of yoga, let us recall, is the yamas (II.30), the rules for how to be in society. They are ahiṁsa/non-violence, satya/truthfulness, asteya/non-stealing, brahmacarya/walking with Brahman, aparigraha/not-grasping-everywhere. These rules are for the individual, and they are significant guidelines for society itself, for the possibility of an architecture that supports power with others and not over.

In the nineteenth century, the first unions of workers in the United States were formed. They taught their members how to build power in the face of overwhelming odds, and their ideas of worker solidarity and mutual interest played an important role well into the twentieth century. Following the depredations of the Gilded Age and the Great Depression, these ideas blossomed into major aspects of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. His administration created Social Security and formed the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), and other important regulatory agencies. In these years, Congress also raised tax rates on top earners.

I was born in 1956, and at that time, there was a steeper graduated income tax than we have today. Income in the top bracket, that is, every dollar made over $400,000, was taxed at 92 percent. My understanding is that, with deductions and other accounting maneuvers, few people paid that highest rate, but it still interests me that it existed. How amazing that we as a people, in 1956, were resolved to put a check on the accumulation of vast wealth. The 1980s saw a resurgence of the celebration of money, with a slashing of the tax brackets and a lowering of the top rate. Unions were also demonized in those years, by both political parties, and as a result we in the U.S. have lost a lot of our political savvy. We have lost a means to educate each other on where the levers of power are and how we can protect ourselves from the rise of a powerful few.

Today, tech companies and the individuals who own them have tremendous wealth. They are, in last year’s elections and in this second Trump term, blatantly asserting the power that wealth has brought. It is not an exaggeration to say we are in a coup of the federal government. Its functions, its structures, are being broken.

In a recent interview with journalist Mehdi Hasan, the economist and former Minister of Finance of Greece, Yanis Varoufakis, describes the unique powers exerted by the tech billionaires, and he says they are a kind of technofeudal overlord. Their wealth comes not from manufactured goods but from renting space on the cloud, and they are largely insulated from marketplace share and competition. To be clear, they have gained such wealth because they have gone unchecked. A viewer submits a question, “With creeping fascism, how will it end?” Varoufakis answers that we can’t know. We are not bystanders predicting the weather–we are part of what happens. “The result of human endeavors,” he says, “is human endeavor.”

Varoufakis hearkens back to the achievements of the New Deal as he articulates how a political party might move ahead:

“Here’s the deal. If you want to change the system which causes you pain, you need to attack the cause of the pain, not the symptom itself. This is not a question of palliative care. This is what we need to do. Firstly, we need to get rid of the financial power of Wall Street. You know, it has happened before. Franklin Roosevelt, essentially, socialized the banks. …. We need to socialize cloud capital. Ensure that people like Musk and Jeff Bezos and so on, that they realize there is a mass of people out there who are not going to stand for the public funding of their private, techno feudal empires. We are going to take our machines from them. They did not build them themselves, they are the result of collective human endeavor….They do not get to enslave humanity.” –Yanis Varoufakis, interview on Zeteo with Mehdi Hasan, April 2, 2025

I ask myself, how seriously do I take the yamas? Do I take them seriously enough to imagine a society where more of us can live them? Can I commit to the structures and work to defend the laws that provide a check on domination?

The corruption that comes with great power can be vividly seen in the tech billionaires, who increasingly are convinced by notions of their individual transcendence and entranced by visions of bunkered nations and private fiefdoms. A recent essay in The Guardian by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor paints a hair-raising portrait. The tech bros do not deny climate disaster nor the dangers of nuclear annihilation because they have a plan for the end of the world. They embrace “a monstrous, supremacist survivalism.”

The problem is not the money per se (though perhaps it is that too). But it is the power over people that money brings. That is the corruption. It is a deadly barrier to love and connection to the living world. Klein and Taylor write:

To move forward with focus, we must first understand this simple fact: we are up against an ideology that has given up not only on the premise and promise of liberal democracy but on the livability of our shared world – on its beauty, on its people, on our children, on other species. The forces we are up against have made peace with mass death. They are treasonous to this world and its human and non-human inhabitants. –Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, “The Rise of End Times Fascism,” The Guardian, April 13, 2025

As I consider this moment we are in, I am encouraged to locate my values. They are a way for me to thread through to the unknowability of what will be next. Why is it unknowable? As Varoufakis says, because you and I are what make it happen.

Ahiṁsa is another word for love, says B.K.S. Iyengar (Light on Yoga, p.31).  I am encouraged by those who locate love at this time. who practise, as Klein and Taylor say in their essay, being loyal to the living world and each other.

we are a delight
we could be another’s blessing
with our brief and epic lives
where every day
we are given the option
of love
—adrienne marie brown

—–

“As the practitioner has developed sensitivity and intelligence, he experiences the effects of that sensitivity. These powers are normal, though they appear supernormal to people who have not developed that degree of sensitivity. But when you attain that sensitivity and these powers become normal for you, you have to be careful because that which you had not previously experienced becomes a temptation.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Tree of Yoga, p. 114

“The warning of the sūtra is traditionally taken to mean that the enjoyments of meditation can distract the yogi from the ineffable stillness of enlightenment. But I … steer this thread in in another direction. It’s not that I feel that wonderful sensations are obstructive to higher experiences, but that they may well seduce us away from the sacred normalcy of life.” — Matthew Remski, Threads of Yoga, p. 179 (commentary on III.38)

Questions:
• How are you grappling with the sudden political changes in the U.S.?
• Which of the yamas are important to you at this time? Do you see them in a new light?
• Do you seek to influence others? How do you handle responsibly the influence you have?
• What does it mean to you to be loyal to the living world?

tataḥ prātibha-śrāvaṇa-vedanādarśāsvāda-vārttā jāyante
tataḥ prātibha-śrāvaṇa-vedanā-ādarśa-āsvāda-vārttāḥ jāyante
“Then intuitive insight, hearing, feeling, seeing, tasting, living, are born.”

Patañjali’s language is condensed, for the most part using no verbs,* and he makes ample use of Sanskrit compound constructions, which are somewhat different than anything we have in English. Our English compounds are generally simple, the meaning transparent, like “automobile” or “homemaker.” In Sanskrit, compounds can combine many words together, and the relationship between the words is intuited, because the grammatical endings are dropped. This can be confusing but is also wonderful. Sanskrit compounds, as well as Sanskrit words, offer multiple meanings and can, paradoxically, hold more than one meaning at once. Commentaries provide context and tools to understanding but never do substitute for the original.

On this website, at the top of each sūtra entry, I write a transliteration of the Sanskrit in two forms, one as the sounds would be chanted (when Sanskrit is spoken or chanted, sounds combine, like the English “it is” becoming “it’s”–the complex rules for how to combine letters in Sanskrit are called sandhi rules) and the second with the elided letters restored (the sandhi removed). This is the first step in understanding any Sanskrit, to separate the combined sounds and locate the individual words.

In Sutra III.37, we have an adverb (tataḥ, “then”) followed by a long compound (prātibha-śrāvaṇa-vedanā-ādarśa-āsvāda-vārttāḥ) and a verb (jāyante “they are born”).

Tataḥ, “then,” is a connector word, referring back to sūtras III.36 and III.37, which describe how, through saṁyama, one gains knowledge of one’s own citta and personhood. As this knowledge grows and deepens, then [the compound] is born.

What is born? The compound has six elements: prātibha-śrāvaṇa-vedanā-ādarśa-āsvāda-vārttāḥ. The first word, prātibha, already introduced by Patañjali in III.34, is intuition. The next five refer to aspects of physical sensation.** The grammar of the compound can be interpreted as a list of six things or as a list of five things modified by the first word (prātibha). I have translated to include a sense of both. Thus,

“Then intuitive insight, hearing, feeling, seeing, tasting, living, are born.”

The senses themselves, in other words, become charged with intuitive ability, operate on a subtler level, go deep, are more tuned in. How we live is transformed.

The process of saṁyama is one of recognizing and releasing the patterns of our mind (citta).  The last sūtra, III.36, in particular, called us to differentiate our “own purpose” from “other purpose.” It led us to consider our own subjectivity, our own limitations, and the is-ness, the personhood of others. Rohit Mehta describes the release of reactive tendencies and the restoration of Unconditioned Mind as happening in a Moment of Discontinuity. It is not a permanent state. And yet the moment does interrupt habits, especially reactive and defensive tendencies. It connects us to the source of ourselves.

This is a profound experience of surrender and also connectivity. It may be, in the words of the Bhagavad Gītā, an experience of knowing one’s individual self to be the self of all beings: sarvabhūtātmabhūtātmā (a beautiful compound: sarva-bhūta-ātma-bhūta-ātmā , “all-beings-self-being-self”).

The above compound appears in the fifth chapter, in which Arjuna asks Krishna to tell him what is better–to renounce action and strive for knowledge only or to take action. Krishna answers that both ways are good, but that the one who takes action still does practice renunciation. The yogi, the one who is yoked to yoga, says Krishna, both acts and renounces the fruits of action, experiences self and surrenders self:

yogayukto viśuddhātmā
The one who is yoked to yoga, whose self is transformed,
vijitātmā jitendriyaḥ
whose self rejoices, whose senses are liberated,
sarvabhūtātmabhūtātmā
whose self is the self of all beings,
kurvann api na lipyate
acting even [this one is] not corrupted.

naiva kiñcit karomīti
“Not anything I do,” indeed,
yukto manyate tattvavit
the one yoked thinks, the knower of “thatness,”
paśyañśṛṇvan spṛśañjighran
seeing, hearing, touching, smelling
aśnan gacchan svapañśvasan
eating, walking, sleeping, breathing…
—Bhagavad Gītā, V.7-8

Ultimate reality is that we are connected to all living beings. How do we live with a sense of our individual personhood, and with collective personhood, with both the limits of our mind and its possibility? To surrender conscious control, to affirm connection to source and to community, can be a powerful experience.

Last week, two events surprised me with possibility beyond my ordinary sense of things. The first was the Hand’s Off rally held here on the Main Street of Bozeman, MT. I volunteered as a crossing guard. Between two to three thousand people showed up in this very small city, and there was a buoyancy, a kind of thrill of people recognizing their bonds with each other in this project of common interest that is self-governance. No Kings, said many signs, Hand’s off our bodies, off public lands, off Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, off our schools, off our speech, our courts, and our local governments. I felt viscerally, from the vibrations of the chants to the shine of people’s faces, just how collective this endeavor is. It is not my efforts per se that will change things and yet I am part of making the world.

The second was more small-scale. It was a conversation with a fellow worker about a difficult topic–an area of disagreement. I did not want to have a blow-up but I wanted to stand up for group principles. I went into the meeting deciding to practice my own self-awareness as best I could, to ask questions rather than make declarations, to listen more than I talked, to be curious about the other, which–and it seems funny to say–were the principles that I wanted to lift up. So, in a way, I communicated by doing what I wanted to communicate. I was curious about their  personhood, and therefore became more curious about their personhood.

At this time, most of us are experiencing threat and uncertainty. Norms of law, human rights, government agreements, are being broken. Going about our normal routines, we may be already activated, defensive, frightened. Yoga gives us tools both to recognize our own agitation and to discharge trauma patterns. May we as well, with increased sensitivity, create safety for others, grant respect, and provide care. May we proceed with a keen sense of the personhood of all beings.

————————————-

*There are only four verbs in the entire text:  in II.52 (“is dispersed”), III.37 (“are born”), IV.16 (“it should be”), and IV.12 (“it exists”)

**Vārttāḥ is generally translated as “smell,”  which makes logical sense, because it would complete the list of five senses. However, “smell” is not given as a translation for vārttāḥ in the Monier-Williams and Apte dictionaries. I have chosen to explore  the sense suggested by the root vṛt, “to be” and have translated vārttā as “living.”

—–

“What is meant by imparting to sense responses the dimensional quality of intuition? It means that the senses become intensely sensitive capable of responding to even the subtlest vibrations. It indicates that they are able to respond to the subtle and the intangible in the entire field of activity. This shows that when intuition is born then the entire being is permeated with a new quality of cognition and response. There is a refinement and a sensitivity in all aspects of one’s living when the touch of intuition comes.” –Rohit Mehta, Yoga, the Art of Integration, commentary on III.37

Questions:
• Have you had the experience of acting not from your ordinary self but a self that is more connected to other beings, more sensitive, more in tune? Have you felt,  “It is not me who acts”?
• What is the difference between muscling your way through a conversation and allowing space for the other person’s views to unfold? Do you practise listening?
• How do you hold your own purpose and be receptive to the purposes of others at once? (How do you hold boundaries?)
• If you are a teacher or a leader, how do you stay sensitive to the needs of the group–and the individuals in the group?
• Is sensitivity a burden or a gift?

sattva-puruṣayor atyantāsaṅkīrṇayoḥ pratyayāviśeṣo bhogaḥ
parārthāt svārtha-saṁyamāt puruṣa-jñānam

sattva-puruṣayoḥ atyanta-asaṅkīrṇayoḥ pratyaya-aviśeṣaḥ bhogaḥ
para-arthāt sva-artha-saṁyamāt puruṣa-jñānam

“Experience does not distinguish between sattva and puruṣa, but the two are absolutely distinct.  Knowledge of puruṣa comes from meditation on own-purpose vs. other-purpose.”

In sūtra III.35, Patanjali declares we learn about our own citta (consciousness, mind, from cit, “to perceive”) by studying the heart. Today’s sūtra dives deeper into what that means.

Yoga practice teaches us about our minds, it teaches sensitivity and encourages us to embody fully, to connect within. The practice reveals the vṛttis, the grooves of thinking that obscure our sense of things, that may–when they are reactions to old wounds–trap us in habits that are harmful. Yoga is a process of removal, of thinning old patterns, reducing their hold on us. We may feel more free. We may become more adaptable and suffer less. But Patañjali here says that, as much as you may come to know your heart, as much as you may experience the quality of brightness, clarity, and peace that is sattva, know that you are not now beyond the material world. You are in it. The world has shaped you.

Today’s sūtra re-introduces the term puruṣa, and it sets up a contrast between sattva and puruṣa. The two terms are paired, in a compound with a dual case ending. Grammatically speaking, this is a lovely construction.The two are paired, Patañjali says, but–is there irony here?–they are “unmixed” (asaṅkīrṇayoḥ). Not just unmixed, but “absolutely” (atyanta) unmixed.

So what is sattva and what is puruṣa?

Sattva is the one of the three guṇas, the constituent forces of nature. Derived from as, “to be,” it is brightness, goodness. In this context, sattva can be understood to stand in for all three guṇas (sattva/tamas/rajas) and to also represent the most refined state of citta, the clearest state of mind. Citta is part of nature.

Puruṣa is the sāṅkhya philosophy (see I.44) term for soul or spirit. The word puruṣa in a non-philosophical context just means “person.” So Patañjali here is bringing us to the question of our personhood. Who are we?

Knowledge of puruṣa, Patañjali says, comes from contemplation (saṁyama) on the distinction between what is for the purpose of itself (sva-artha) and what is for the purpose of another (para-artha). That is a lot to take in, a complex formulation in just a few words. It describes an essential idea of the sāṅkhya system of thought, that nature is for the purpose of spirit, and spirit serves its own purpose–spirit is the one who experiences (see Sāṅkhya Karika, verse 17.)

I find the sāṅkhya concepts only get me so far, and to go deeper into meaning, I am indebted to Rohit Mehta’s way of describing puruṣa and of considering self-purpose and other-purpose. Mehta says puruṣa is the “unconditioned mind.” It is consciousness removed of all vṛttis, which are  conditionings. The unconditioned mind, according to Mehta, happens only in a “moment of discontinuity,” a moment when we as observers see the object for what it is, for “its own purpose,” not according to our “own purpose.”

The discontinuous moment is one in which, through increasing presence to the story of self, we also release that story. A self/not-self experience. Being/not-being. Patañjali’s warning here, then, is to not mistake these remarkable moments for an achievement that we have acquired, an egoless state that we can lay claim to. Everything we perceive is through citta, and as clear as we might make that lens of perception, as sattvic a moment as we may experience, it is the nature of nature to move and shift and for the lens to be affected by that, by the rolling along of life as it is lived. We can’t be other than participant-observers.

Thus the values and disciplines of the yamas and niyamas are so useful, so important. They help us ask ourselves, not just how is my yoga but how am I living?

I have heard, in many spiritual and psychological contexts, from church to 12-step-programs to psychotherapy to yoga practice, the recommendation to “surrender the ego.” This often hits my ear the wrong way, and I often hear members–some of whom seem to me to need more a sense of autonomy and choice–declare that they need to overcome ego. Do they mean pride, vanity? (see asmita, II.6) And yet many of these same members will look to leaders who are filled with ego, who are pumped up and pumping with vanity.  What I see are leaders dominantly asserting their egos and followers disciplining themselves to turn over agency to the leader.

I see this now in our larger culture. We are living through a rise in authoritarianism and are now under the threat of a white nationalist theocracy. Why do so many seek to turn their power over to another human being?

For me, it has been a journey to come into the sense of self, to live in a more authentic way in me. In working to make the ego “right-sized,” I have to correct in the direction of owning my needs and purposes, not surrendering them, as it were, but saying, Oh, right, yea, that’s true.

Author CJ Hauser describes their attraction to being “the lady with a lamp” (a reference to Florence Nightingale) in relationships:

Saving someone feels easy, compared to asking yourself who the hell you are and what you want and how you want to be loved and by whom. Compared to asking, How might I care for myself? In my life, the answers to these questions have never been clear. Back [then], the questions had never even been asked. — CJ Hauser, The Crane Wife, p. 125

I love the truth of this passage. I know my practice means I must ask, How am I? How might I care for myself? This is the beginning of centering, of moving toward authenticity and good boundaries. How can I make better boundaries in relationship if I don’t know myself better? What is mine? What is someone else’s?

This world is aching for us all to get better at relationship. What is my relationship to myself? Am I embodying self-worth? Am I practicing self-care? How about to others? Do I value and respect difference? Do I grant others their “own-purpose”? Do I give time to the larger purpose of helping to build a world that works better for us all? Do I know myself to be dependent on a fabric of mutual care?

Do I respect my own personhood? Do I respect the personhood of others? That is a good contemplation for today.

—–

“Sattva is the third and the most refined condition of guṇas or the conditioning factors of consciousness. Because it is the most refined, one is normally not aware of its conditioning factor. One regards it almost as the unconditioned state of consciousness. Its main role is to synthesize, but this effort to synthesize is motivated by the conditioning factors with which the sattvic-guna is impregnated….It is only by being aware of the activities and the movements of the observer, that there will come into being the unconditioned state of consciousness or the puruṣa.” –Rohit Mehta, Yoga, the Art of Integration, p. 348-9

“Those who forget the Self and attend to intellect, thinking that intellect is everything, forget the host, attend to the servant. Self is the cause, intellect only an instrument. You can know the Self through Self only.” –Shri Purohit Swāmi, Aphorisms of Yoga,  p. 69

“This aphorism describes a radical change of objectives within the personality. A human being who is not lucid, or a believer who does not perceive spiritual presence within, follows a host of outer objectives.” –Bernard Bouanchaud, The Essence of Yoga, commentary on III.36

Questions:
• Has honoring your own needs changed how you understand/perceive the needs of others?
• Has success or failure brought you to a truer sense of who you are?
• Has an increase of sensitivity increased your knowledge of yourself?
• Which of your roles do you most identify with? Is it possible to separate your sense of self from these roles?
• Has yoga brought you a sense of inner presence?

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?

prātibhād vā sarvam
prātibhāt vā sarvam

“Or, from the flash of illumination, [vision of] the whole.”

In sūtras III.26-33, Patañjali has offered the sun, the moon, the stars, energy centers in the body, for contemplation–the macrocosm to the microcosm, the distant to the near. Sūtra III.34 takes a break from the pattern and leaves the ongoing emphasis on saṁyama (the threefold discipline of meditation, see III.4) with a short declaration.

Or, from prātibha, says Patañjali, sarvam (all, everything, the whole).

Prātibha derives from pra-, “forward,” + ati, “beyond,” + bhā, “to shine.” Literally, it is a shining forth and beyond and is translated by some as “flash of illumination.” Traditionally, translators have used the English “intuition,” which Merriam-Webster defines as “immediate apprehension or cognition.” We tend to relate intuition to feeling rather than reasoning, to insight in to something, to knowing though we don’t know how we know.

The Sanskrit prātibha suggests suddenness or completeness. Rohit Mehta describes prātibha as qualitatively different from analytical thought and from accumulated knowledge. It cannot be “ordered nor cultivated,” he says, but “arrives in the discontinuous interval of the timeless moment,” when “the thinker and the thought are not.” (See Mehta’s commentary on samādhi , which he says is a “moment of discontinuity,” Yoga, the Art of Integration, p.272.)

As I consider prātibha, I am struck by accounts of the creative process. Bob Dylan describes his early songs as being a kind of magic. You can’t “sit down and write something like that,” he says (60 Minutes interview, 2004, 2:20). And Mary Oliver, in an essay on writing, says, “the ideas in their shimmering forms, in spite of all our conscious discipline, will come when they will, and on the swift upheaval of their wings” (Mary Oliver, Upstream, p. 28).

Prātibha is not at our command, and so provides perspective on the twofold aspect of yoga: abhyāsa (effort) and vairagya (release), often called the “two wings of the bird” (I.12). This is such a beautiful metaphor. There is oneness in flight–but the two wings are opposed. There is ongoing tension that holds the whole. How much will-power do we use in practice? When and for how long and how well do we release? How hard do we fix our focus? What does the softening of non-attachment, perhaps a wider focus, give? Mehta describes saṁyama to be a wavelike flow, from setting intentions, to observation, to listening, to emptying.

I have been reflecting on effort and release, on concentration and dispersal. In recent years, I find I  have overused my will-power, taking on a job that demanded skills new to me, working for a good political purpose, and pushing myself to do a good job. It seems important to find a way to work that is sustainable. Our society does not give much support for that, for the softening, the letting go, the stopping.

Sūtra III.34 suggests extraordinary, marvelous, expansive possibility might come from doing less. Ch. 10 of the Tao Te Ching, here translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, likewise describes the mysterious power of not-doing, not-knowing:

Can you keep your soul in its body, hold fast to the one,
and so learn to be whole?
Can you center your energy, be soft, tender,
and so learn to be a baby?

Can you keep the deep water still and clear,
so it reflects without blurring?
Can you love people and run things,
and do so by not doing?

Opening, closing the Gate of Heaven,
can you be like a bird with her nestlings?
Piercing bright through the cosmos,
can you know by not knowing?

To give birth, to nourish, to bear and not to own,
to act and not lay claim, to lead and not to rule:
this is mysterious power.

—Tao Te Ching, ch. 10, translation by Ursula K. Le Guin

This week, Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time. We have four years ahead of us of an administration that is prioritizing cruelty and domination, harming people already marginalized and vulnerable. How do those of us already tired re-commit to resistance?  I have heard many  movement organizers speak of the importance of finding political community, of making connections with others, grieving together–and finding joy.

The Tao Te Ching–like Patañjali here–tells us that the flash, the transformation, the knowing, does not have to be in our control, will not be ordered by us. There is a momentum, a movement, to social change. Be like the bird with her nestlings, the above passage says. Keep them warm. Be with them, and watch, one day they will break the shell and be born.

May we nourish, bear, and not own. May we act and not lay claim. May we know by not-knowing. May the flash of illumination come and charge through this world.

(Special thanks to Moriah Williams for wisdom and help. “This world is our home, and we deserve to live joyfully together.”)

—–

“Intuition is the emancipator–it is the forerunner of discriminative Discernment, as the Dawn is of Sunrise. On the appearing of intuitional insight, the Yogin comes to know everything.” –Gaganath Jha, translation of Vyāsa’s commentary for III.34, Yoga-Darshana, Sūtras of Patañjali with Bhāsya of Vyāsa, p. 196

“Intuition … is neither emotionalism nor the cold logic of the intellect. … It is not rapid thinking nor is it abstract thinking. Its arrival demands a complete cessation of thought as well as the thinker. It is believed that intuition is erratic and therefore undependable. It is not erratic but comes in flashes, because it arrives in the discontinuous interval of the timeless moment. It can neither be ordered nor cultivated. It comes when the mind is extremely sensitive, and the sensitivity of the mind can exist only in the interval where the thinker and the thought are not. The mind that expects or anticipates is not a sensitive mind, for such a mind is burdened by the past, anticipating a future.” –Rohit Mehta, Yoga, the Art of Integration, p. 345

Questions:
• What do you consider to be intuition? What is an example from your life of a “flash” of insight?
• How do certainty and not-knowing balance out for you? Are there things you know for certain? Are you over-confident in your knowledge or under-confident? Does “You know what you know about what you know” have meaning for you?
• In what ways do you experience the rhythm of focus and dissolution? Effort and surrender?
• How are you adapting to this political moment? How do doing and not-doing balance out for you? Knowing and not-knowing?

mūrdha-jyotiṣi siddha-darśanam

“[By saṁyama] on the light at the top of the head, seeing like an accomplished one.”

Traditional commentators identify the “light at the top of the head” with the brahma-randhra, “the aperture of Brahman,” located in the skull at the crown, an opening where, it is said, the spirit escapes at death.

Focusing on the radiant light of this aperture, says Patañjali, one comes to have the vision (darśanam) of an accomplished being (a siddha).

Sūtra III.33 is the fourth of the group of sūtras in which Patañjali directs our attention to a location in the body. Commentators variously relate this location to the ājnā cakra or sahasrāra cakra, but since the Hatha Yoga system of cakras developed hundreds of years after this text was set down in writing, it is likely that a 1:1 correlation does not exist. Mūrdha refers to the head, skull, or the top of anything.  Jyotis is light, especially the light of the stars (see I.36, where Patañjali offers meditation on “that which holds the light,” jyotiṣmati, as one of the “or’s,” ways to overcome the obstacles).  Patañjali here names “the light at the top of the head” as the deśa, or location, for saṁyama, or meditation (III.4).

What is the light? Why is it at the top of the head? Saints are painted with halos, and this sūtra does reference the siddhas, perfected or accomplished beings, but I have not been attracted to the idea of sainthood or perfection, and the notion of a light in my head was off-putting. Then when I read of the brahma-randhra, an aperture, a crevice–in the skull!–I could immediately relate. We are born with a soft spot at the top of the head, the fontanel, and the four major sutures of the skull only gradually harden through childhood. The baby’s skull is malleable, moveable, which allows for growth and the passage through the birth canal. As the mother shapes her body around the baby after birth, so the baby shapes her way to be born, and learns her embodiment by being body to body. The skull hardens and becomes a strong container for the cerebro-spinal fluid, which connects down the spine to the tail and provides an ongoing inner rhythm.

The top of the head, in āsana practice, is significant. In sukhāsana (sitting with simple crossed legs), I locate the top of the head as I come into alignment and awareness. I balance the head over the tailbone, and feel a settling and an inner organization unfold. The practice of headstand provides a powerful stimulus to the point at the top of the head, and to our vestibular system. The tail now balances over the head, and the arms and legs must actively root down and reach up. Headstand demands such active engagement with gravity. Upside-down, like in the womb, but not held by embryonic fluid. Can we float in the air, as we would in water? What containment, what structure, is demanded for that?

Chinese medicine offers an amazing perspective on the aperture, this hole in the skull, as well. In this system, the brain is classified as an “extraordinary organ,” meaning it is yang because considered hollow, but with a function that is yin, more passive. If the brain organ is hollow and the aperture of head allows for filling (the radiance of the stars entering here), then there must be an emptying too. My own experience of sitting is a sensation of emptying, a flow perhaps through cerebral-spinal fluid down.  I experience grounding and a presence of body, body-mind. It is like combing out the hair, downward strokes smooth the nervous system. The top of the skull as permeable fits with this. There is a movement in, down, up, out. Āsana practice takes the head-tail to different orientations to gravity. Perhaps it sensitizes us to radiance, to gravitational pulls, as well.

Traditionally, commentators have read sūtra III.33 to mean that the practitioner will have visions of perfected or accomplished beings. I have followed Rohit Mehta’s lead in interpreting the aphorism, instead, to mean we will begin to see like an accomplished being, in other words, we will see with clarity. Yoga is a process of un-doing, of releasing patterns, concepts, conclusions from our consciousness. Thus Patañjali describes the powers as obstacles to the ultimate destination (III.38). Yoga is a process of emptying.

That said, a power of clarity of sight, an experience of radiance–this is needed, now. I am writing on the winter solstice, a month and a half since the general election in the United States has ushered in a dark period.

Daniel Hunter, activist and author of “10 Ways to Be Prepared and Grounded Now that Trump Has Won,” confirms the grim outlook of what the next administration will bring. Hunter writes, “Trump has signaled the kind of president he will be: revengeful, uncontrolled and unburdened by past norms and current laws.” The ex-president’s first term, the plans of Project 25, make clear an authoritarian and kleptocratic intent. It is easy for those of us opposed to this agenda to go in to overdrive on responses and reactions.

Hunter takes a pause before he moves to recommending strategy; he connects the personal and private to the community and the communal:

Trump is arriving at a time of great social distrust. Across the board, society has reduced trust in traditional institutions. Yes, there’s more distrust of the media, medical professionals, experts and politicians. But it extends beyond that. There’s reduced trust in most community institutions and membership groups. Whether from Covid or political polarization, a lot of us have experienced reduced trust in friends and family. Even our trust in predictable weather is diminished. … Distrust fuels the flame of autocracy because it makes it much easier to divide.

So what are the strategies? How do we prepare for this coming administration? What do we do?

First, Hunter writes–and I love this–practice trusting yourself. Trust “your own eyes and guts,” build protection from crazy-making that can throw you off or confound you. Also, become trustworthy, look within and know yourself, including your emotions. If you are afraid or grieving, how do you hold those difficult states?

Second, find others you trust.

In extreme cases [of totalitarianism], like Chile in the 1970s and ’80s, the dictatorship aimed to keep people in such tiny nodes of trust that everyone was an island unto themselves. At social gatherings and parties, people would commonly not introduce each other by name out of fear of being too involved. Fear breeds distance. … We have to consciously break that distance. In Chile they organized under the guise of affinity groups. This was, as its name suggests, people who shared some connections and trust. Finding just a few people who you trust to regularly act with and touch base with is central.  –Daniel Hunter, “10 Ways to Be Prepared and Grounded Now that Trump Has Won”

Since the election, many of my friends and family are aghast, the wind knocked out of them. A number, who have been politically engaged, are exhausted. Others have asked me for suggestions on actions they might take. Hunter urges  us to engage in a way that personally fits and to consider as well how effective the approach is. Where are the levers of change? Hunter has real-world experience to help with that analysis.

We are living in transformative times. The old ways are passing, slowly and with violent resistance. This present catastrophe is an ending of the status quo. What comes next? Where are we in the dying/birthing process? Is this dark the birth canal? Feel the rhythm of contraction and expansion, soften, spiral, find your way toward the next world.* Feel the radiance.

*Thanks to adrienne marie brown for this image.

—–

“Siddhas are those who have perfected themselves in the field of enlightenment. Mūrdhajyoti represents the ājñā cakra of the yoga texts. A yogi can develop a balanced head and a poised heart.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, commentary on III.33

“The perfected being refers not just to a physical body but to a state of consciousness….Our perceptions, normally, are diffused and therefore vague. A clear perception is that where one is able to have a total view of things. In the light of this radiance, spoken of in this sūtra, one’s perception becomes so clear that one is able to see the totality of things.” –Rohit Mehta, Yoga, the Art of Integration, p. 340

Questions:
• Where in your life do you experience radiance?
• What is the balance point on the skull in your practice of headstand? Has it shifted over the years?
• How does experience of one part of the body help locate the rest? (For instance,  the head to the tailbone, tailbone to head.) Does focus on one cakra teach you of other cakras?
• How are you preparing and grounding at this political moment?

kūrma-nāḍyām sthairyam

“[From saṁyama] on the tortoise channel, steadiness.”

In III.32, Patañjali describes a channel (nāḍi), named after the turtle or tortoise (kūrma), that is related to breath, to posture, and to the emotions. Contemplation on this channel, says Patañjali, brings steadiness.

B.K.S Iyengar describes the kūrma-nāḍi as starting below the throat and traveling to the tailbone. In the Core of the Yoga Sūtras, he calls it “the nervous system of the alimentary canal,” and he says it corresponds to the first cakra, the muladhāra  (“root”). Commentators differ on how they locate the  channel, and while I have relied on B.K.S. Iyengar’s exploration in understanding it, it is valuable too to consider the various symbolic meanings and the shape, aspects, being, of the tortoise.

In Hindu mythology, the world sits on the back of a tortoise that swims in the ocean of existence. The image is reflected in other cultures as well. Here, in North America, we live on Turtle Island, the name the Ojibwa and other First Nations people call the land. The tortoise (all tortoises are turtles but not all turtles are tortoises) symbolizes earth, endurance, sustenance, healing, truth. In the context of yoga practice, the tortoise’s ability to withdraw its limbs, its head and tail, into its shell, correlates with the fifth limb of yoga–pratyāhāra, withdrawal of the senses. In the Tree of Yoga (pp. 115-16), B.K.S. Iyengar invokes a tale from the Purāṇas to describe the role of the diaphragm in the breath of the body. There is a war between the angels and demons, the story goes, and Lord Viṣṇu incarnates as a turtle to support the churning of the oceans. The diaphragm is like the turtle, says Mr. Iyengar, supporting the inhalation and exhalation, supporting the lungs, the lift of the chest, the frame of the thoracic spine. (Jaganath Carrera also refers to this story in his commentary, see below.)

In my own contemplation, I track the kūrma-nāḍi inwardly, from below my throat down the front of my spine to the tailbone and the first cakra, which connects to earth. I feel the shape of the tortoise in the curves of my spine, and I know the spine itself to be like a shell, the support of bone, structure. I lengthen the tailbone down and lift my side ribs up. Energy ripples along the channel. I feel the roundness of the diaphragm, 360 degrees,  rimming the lower rib cage, touching front, sides, back. Its long tendrils extend down the sides of the spine, intersplicing with the psoas muscle fibers. I connect down to the root of my seat, and from the earth, a rebound current moves up. Is there a place I fall, push forward or back–do I squeeze or collapse that current? I seek to find the openness of the front body, the broadness of the back, without shortening or hardening.

There is a Somatics awareness practice (as taught by adrienne marie brown, see her website here) that takes one through the three axes of space, feeling length from our head to feet and naming that our dignity, stretching width-wise from arm to arm and identifying that as our connection to others, taking our attention to the space behind us and to the people who came before, to the space in front and to those who will come after.

I like this centering meditation because it places me in myself but also in relation to the world around me, and that means to my responsibilities too. My stability, my welfare, must be related to those beside me, those who came before and who will come after.

For two years, I have taken on a role of political leadership (I am the chair of a local political party). I don’t know that I fit this role especially well, or that the role fits me, particularly because politics seems nonstop, emergency cascading on emergency. Where is the time for pratyāhāra? Our politics operates like competitions rather than collaborations, and seem to be driven by the worst aspects of ourselves, demand for money first and numbers second. Every political action demands numbers–more is better.

In this context, I have felt supported to hear of Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry and to learn from her book Rest Is Resistance: a Manifesto. She draws an explicit line from our economic system to our drive toward busyness. She draws upon her experience of community care in the Black church, is influenced by lessons of the Black liberation movement, and forms her values from Womanism. She articulates the price that our capitalist, white-supremacist culture demands. Her manifesto is that rest is resistance to that system.

At its root, capitalism in the United States was slavery; it was founded on treating human beings as machines. The culture of American capitalism–called by Hersey “grind culture”–has grown out of that. Hersey describes how hard her parents worked, at multiple jobs, and how she was raised to attempt to always do more, be more. She locates in her ministry today the importance of Enough.

In the work I am doing, I am hearing, ringing in my ears, knocking on my heart, Not Enough, Not Enough. More is needed. For a period, I was in a heavy, chronic depression and my sleep had become fragmented and sketchy. I have had to develop patience and humility about my abilities and capacity.

For the group that I lead, I have had visions of the progress we might make, how we might connect with each other more, engage better, in a local way, in the big choices of government. I have come face to face with how limited people’s energy and time are, with the jobs that pay the rent and put food on the table, the children or parents to be cared for, the main necessity. Volunteers often apologize to me when they say they need to drop back or drop out, that their life demands it. I have repeatedly said, of course, respect that. I know that what Barbara Hersey is teaching is right. Doing demands not-doing. It demands down-time. It demands dreaming.

The tortoise arrives and says, Look, I am swimming in the most difficult of waters. There is earth here for you. Abide. Ground yourself. Regulate your emotions. Rest.

Let our rest be a resurrection. Let the veils be lifted so we can feel, see, taste, and smell the power of our rested selves. May we realize a full mental shift must be made to reimagine and reclaim rest as holy. May we be excited by the impossible and move through any cynicism or hopelessness to emerge on the other side steady with love, persistence, and hope. Rest can save, sustain, and prop us up when we feel weak and our backs are against the wall. Our greatest hope to thrive and disrupt is to rest deeply and intentionally. The rest is the work. It is how the portal for liberation and a reckoning will emerge and remain open. May the portal of rest be our refuge. May we go there often. — Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, p. 88

—–

“The nervous system of the alimentary canal (kūrma-nāḍi) controls it from the throat to the anus. It is kept clean through āsanas and prāṇāyāmas so that the faculties of hearing, touch, vision, taste and smell remain healthy and able to experience the faculty of spiritual perception without hindrance.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Core of the Yoga Sūtras, p. 153

“The tortoise channel is a subtle energy duct, assimilated with acupuncture meridians, that covers the front part of the trunk at the level of the sternum. This zone symbolizes courage in the face of adversity. Straightening the posture enables us to face aggression and difficulties. Emotion and fear, likely to show in the chest, give way to strength, energy, and stability through mental discipline or the practice of backward postures (opening postures).” –Bernard Bouanchaud, The Essence of Yoga, p. 184

“A tortoise is able to withdraw its head and limbs into a protective shell, just as a yogi is able to withdraw the senses from day-to-day concerns, allowing the mind to become still and quiet and preparing it for meditative practices. In the mythology of India, the world was said to be supported on the back of a cosmic tortoise as it swam through the universe. The tortoise would be understood to represent a powerful, steady foundation. There is a story of Lord Viṣṇu, who incarnated as a tortoise to support Mount Mandara, which was needed by the celestial beings to stir up the ocean of life in order to recover the nectar of immortality. The ocean represents the citta that is churned by the practice of meditation. The Lord’s incarnation as a tortoise represents the Divine as unyielding support. The nectar stands for Self-realization.” –The Reverend Jaganath Carrera, Inside the Yoga Sūtras, commentary on III.32

Questions:
• Does your practice bring you steadiness? In what ways?
• How does support of the body affect support of the emotions? The lift of the chest? Length of the spine? What effect comes from forward bends for you? Standing poses? Backbends? How do you experience the kūrma-nāḍi ?
• Do you deliberately build rest into your life? What form of rest is key for you?
• Are you able to turn toward inner resources in times of trouble? Are there times when it is important to “come out of the shell” and ask for help?

kaṇṭha-kūpe kṣut-pipāsā-nivṛttiḥ

“[By saṁyama] on the hollow of the throat, a return of healthy rhythms of hunger and thirst.”

Kaṇṭha is the throat, the neck, the voice. The word derives from kaṇ, “to sound,” and so the hollow (kūpa) of the throat is intrinsically related to vibration. It is where we vibrate our meanings and intentions. This is the realm of the fifth cakra, called viśuddhi, which means purification (see II.28).

Patañjali draws attention to our relation to food and drink, saying that contemplation of the throat  cakra brings nivṛtti of hunger and thirst. Vrtti means movement or patterns of movement and is a key word in Patanjali’s definition of yoga in I.2–Yoga is the removal of the patternings of the consciousness. Though classical commentators translate nivṛtti here to mean cessation, the ending of movement, the word does suggest return, leaving (from ni-, “down, into” + vṛt, “to move, to turn, to condition”; nivṛt, “to turn back, return”).

I am uncomfortable with the promise that yoga, a practice of body awareness, brings a cessation of body needs. I follow the lead of Matthew Remski, who says that control of hunger and thirst is  “an unfortunate temptation to a culture prone to disordered eating.” (Threads of Yoga, p. 177 ) I translate kṣut-pipāsā-nivṛttiḥ instead as “a return of healthy rhythms of hunger and thirst.”

I hope this resonates with any who have suffered from disordered eating, from a starve/binge pattern or an obsession with weight and body image that can alienate us from our own internal hunger cues. Yoga–and particularly, work with the cakras–is about integration of the parts of our selves.

The throat cakra is of particular interest when we consider integration. Anodea Judith, in Eastern Body Western Mind,  writes that the fifth cakra‘s primary function is communication. It is both “a gateway between the inner world and the outer” and “an internal gateway between mind and body.” The narrowest cakra in the body, it is a kind of bottleneck and can literally function in that way, stopping the thing that cannot be said, the place that blocks the feeling that cannot be felt. A dissociation of mind and body can be seen in the head out of alignment with the body, the neck and shoulders tight.

Sounding in our throat, through chanting, speech, singing, resonates through us. Those vibrations resonate out to others as well, and can powerfully connect us to community in group activities of movement or song. They connect us through the cakras as well, from the root to the crown of the head.

Anodea Judith calls our attention to input of sound as well. Modern life clangs and roars with noise of combustion engines, machines, sirens, and piped-in background music. Our world is very noisy, and we might consider how that input of loud sound affects us. In our efforts to filter those vibrations out, do we become dull to internal soundings?

The fifth cakra governs input/output in a general way. I consider whether my daily routines allow me enough time to process all the input–including the massive amount of information from headlines and news reports. When in a day do I pause? Am I in a quiet place? Can I make time to be quiet and sense internally?  I need to consider, too, as a person with a history of disordered eating, whether my eating is jangled or ravenous because I have not processed, because I am overwhelmed by events and experience.

In the Spring of 2022, as the shut down of the first two years of Covid began to lift, I attended a live performance of Parable of the Sower, an opera written by Toshi Reagon and her mother Bernice Johnson Reagon (founder of the renowned singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock). The work is based on Octavia Butler’s dystopic novel, and it tells the story of a world on fire, of a young woman who survives apocalypse and starts her own community of faith whose central tenet is

All that you touch
You Change
All that you Change
Changes you
The only lasting truth
Is Change
–Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, p. 3

Parable of the Sower has had a powerful hold on my imagination in the Covid era–it has helped me process my sense that we are in an apocalypse, not because of Covid but what Covid revealed.

The opera was wonderful and beautiful, and after the performance, there was a talk-back with Toshi Reagon. She was asked about her own practice of staying well at the end of a world. She said, “I am black. I am here because my amazing ancestors passed on technology to live. My body is the home I have. They passed on to me how to vibrate my body and be at home.”

Toshi Reagon considers music a technology to live. Her practice is to vibrate her body.

Today’s sūtra offers us a technology. The fifth cakra teaches to tune in to the vibrations of our selves. Sound in Hindu tradition is the subtlest of the senses. Sound takes us to what is most true. Listen. Make sound. Vibrate.

—–

“Communication is the essential function of the fifth chakra. As self-expression, it is a gateway between the inner world and the outer. Only through self expression does the outer world get to know what’s inside of us…. The throat chakra is also the internal gateway between mind and body. The narrowest passage within the whole chakra system, the throat is literally a bottleneck for the passage of energy. We can think of it as a kind of relay system, sorting through messages from the body and connecting them with information in the brain. Only when mind and body are connected do we have true resonance.” –Anodea Judith, Eastern Body, Western Mind, p. 296

“The kaṇṭha-kūpa is the throat-pit. This is a meeting place of the movement of vital breaths passing through the channels of the nose and the mouth…. It is said that this Chakra governs the externalizing mind, or in other words, it controls the expressional activities of the mind. Now hunger and thirst have much to do with these externalising activities.” –Rohit Mehta, Yoga, the Art of Integration, p. 337

Questions:
• What poses have brought you more awareness of the throat and the neck? Where do you feel sound in your body?
• Do you make sounds in your practice–playing an instrument, chanting, singing? Do you have a writing practice? How is listening part of that practice?
• Are your surroundings noisy? Where are places of quiet that you can go? Are there places you can listen to nature sounds? Do you set limits for yourself around news or social media?
• Has yoga practice affected your relation to food and drink?

 nābhi-cakre kāya-vyūha-jñānam
“[From saṁyama] on the navel cakra, knowledge of the organization of the body.”

In Core of the Yoga Sūtras, Mr. Iyengar states, “Many think that cakras are the subject of Haṭha Yoga and that Patañjali does not speak of cakras. I would like to bring to your attention that Patañjali does, in fact, deal with the cakras.” Mr. Iyengar correlates the seven major cakras with the following sūtras: muladhāra, III.32; svādhiṣṭāna, III.34; manipūraka, III.30; anāhata, III.35; viśuddhi, III.31; ājña, III.33; sahasrāra, III.37. (See Core of the Yoga Sūtras, pp. 162-3.)

Mr. Iyengar’s yoga practice is founded on and develops profound appreciation and respect for body experience. It is not a practice that endorses denial of body sensations but considers those sensations to be opportunities for learning and growing in awareness and understanding.

It is exciting to me to come to the next group of sūtras in that they are, as Mr. Iyengar points out, explicit examples of Patañjali directing the yoga practitioner’s awareness to the body. Here, in III.30, Patañjali says that from saṁyama on the nābhi cakra, the practitioner gains kāya-vyūha-jñānam, knowledge of the organization of the body. Patañjali here echoes III.28, in which, by focusing on the moon, the practitioner gains knowledge of the organization of the stars. Patañjali tethers the cosmic to the personal.

Nābhi is the Sanskrit word for the navel, or belly button. It is cognate to “navel,” and like the word for navel in many other languages, it has a secondary meaning of center.  It comes from the root nabh, “to burst,” and is related to nābh, which means “aperture.” Through the umbilical, the mother’s body nourishes, cleanses, regulates the growing embryo. That symbiotic connection to mother remains perhaps an aperture, an opening; the navel is a center of our life force.

The nābhi cakra is called, in Haṭha Yoga texts, the manipūraka (“lustrous gem”), and it can be considered as well to be the realm of the solar plexus. The element associated with it is fire, and that fire relates to our sense of identity, to the movement of our energy, and to our experience of power.

In her wonderful book Eastern Body Western Mind, Anodea Judith explicates the Haṭha Yoga and Tantric understandings of the cakras and she frames this traditional knowledge in the context of modern psychology. She cites Jungian approaches, practices of somatic therapy, and child-development theory.

In considering the third cakra,  Judith reflects on what she sees as our milieu’s distorted fascination with power:

Immersed in our own feelings of powerlessness, we are fascinated by the triumphs of others, and glean a perverse satisfaction from following the continual struggles for supremacy and control–over ourselves, other people, other nations, and Nature herself–but always power over something. … Raised into obedience by parents and teachers, trained for cooperation with larger corporate, legal, military, and political power structures, we have become a society of victims and controllers.  –Anodea Judith, Eastern Body Western Mind, p. 168

Judith believes that many of us suffer from injury at the third cakra, and that healing here can be a nexus of transformation for the whole being.

She quotes one of my favorite psychologists, Alice Miller (see II.12), in describing how much of our child rearing and education is authoritarian, seeks to “break the will” of the child through shaming and punishment. It is, in Alice Miller’s words, “poisonous pedagogy.” Shame, Anodea Judith continues, collapses the third cakra, interferes with the child discovering her own natural rhythms, developing confidence in her own impulses and actions. The child develops either deficiency at the third cakra level, identifies with being powerless, a victim of others; or she compensates with excess, learns bullying compensations, seeks control over others.

She asks how we might gain a sense of our own empowerment, a power that would be a power with, and not over, others.

Ego is the Latin pronoun for “I.” Our use of it today is similar to the Sanskrit term ahaṁkāra (from aham, “I,” + kṙ, “to do”). It is the experience of oneself as separate; it is the experience of agency. Anodea Judith says the ego is like a house. To have a sense of power from within is to have a sense of ownership of oneself, autonomy in one’s life and choices. Anodea Judith insists that we must develop this healthy autonomy–our inner authority–in order to be in healthy, interdependent connection with others.

I ask myself about the state of my third cakra. Iyengar practice has taught me much about my own postural tendencies. I tilt my tailbone back and push the sacrum forward. I am well-muscled in the shoulders and back, and I roll the shoulders forward, like armor, and I drop my chest. This presses my front ribs down. When I lift my chest, my low ribs lift too.  I seem to spill out to the front. In some ways, I present as a person with both excess and deficiency at the third cakra. This expresses pretty well my inner struggles–I oscillate between bursts of energy and periods of depression and doubt. I compensate for low vitality with pushing forward.

I have learned how the cakras interrelate in me, how grounding in the first cakra–feet and legs to pelvic floor–supports the flow of life that brings a softening and supports the third cakra, which must be mobile and integrated, kindled as it were, to support the fourth cakra, the heart and breath. I find strong movement–walking, running, and abdominal work–especially important for that kindling. It integrates my energy, discharging disturbances, affirming an experience of “I am,” “I do,” that I am the authority of me.

The third cakra is an area of processing, of feeling experience, of digesting–both literally and figuratively. Is the abdomen hard or tense? What am I feeling there? Lying supine on the floor is always a good baseline beginning to practice for me. What is the state of myself here on the floor? How does my back release down? How is my belly?

I am considering the third cakra anew in recent years because I have become active in politics. Yoga practice teaches me that yoga is about more than the mat. It is about my connection to the world around me. To me, that means politics. I am not necessarily comfortable in the role I am in or doing the tasks I have taken on. In the last election, I knocked on many doors, and at quite a few, the resident who answered, quite politely, told me she did not like politics. I felt, immediately, “I don’t either!” And yet I am persevering with my discomfort, with my doubt, with my uneven bursts of energy and with my own ongoing developing sense of “I am,” because I am here, and politics is more than the games of a chosen few.

People often say, with pride, “I’m not interested in politics.” They might as well say, “I’m not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.” … If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics.  –Martha Gellhorn, “White Into Black,” in Granta (1984)

To come to a sense that politics might be possibility–not power over, as Anodea Judith says, but power with–is a profound thing. To connect with another person about what we need to make the future livable, what our common interest is, gives a critical sense of community. Locating ourselves in ourselves is an important first step. I am here. I do.

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“By saṁyama on the navel area or nābhi cakra, also called manipūraka cakra, a yogi can gain perfect knowledge of the constitution of the human body. He knows the activities of his each and every cell and therefore becomes a master of his own body. According to yoga texts, the navel is known as kandasthāna (kanda=egg or bulb; sthāna=region). The root of all the nerves is in the navel. From the navel, 72,000 root nerves (in haṭha yoga terminology, nāḍīs) branch out. Each root nerve is connected with another 72,000 nerves. These 72,000 multiplied by another 72,000 branch off into various directions, supplying energy to the entire system. The navel is considered to be the pivot of the sympathetic, and the brain of the parasympathetic nervous system.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, commentary on III.30

“The navel is the source point from which we develop in the womb. Oriental medicine teaches that on the energetic level, we continue to be recreated from the navel after birth. From this knowledge there evolved a detailed system for the assessment of the health of the organs and systems of the body by visual and palpatory examination of the abdomen.” –The Reverend Jaganath Carrera, Inside the Yoga Sūtras, commentary on III.24

Questions:
• What poses and/or exercises have brought you more awareness of the nābhi cakra? What is the effect on the region of backbends, forward bends, twists, abdominals (for you)? Do you sense this cakra in movement: when walking or running, lifting, climbing? How is it a center of movement for the body?
• Have you experienced tightness or hardness of the abdomen? Laxity or disconnect? How is the area an emotional center (for you)?
• Consider how cakras teach about posture. What have you learned about how you stand, where your energy is, what tends to collapse, what pushes forward, what disconnects? Specifically, how does the nābhi cakra help you locate yourself?
• Do you experience yourself as a victim? Do you act in controlling or bullying ways?
• Has knowledge of your body, working with the body, changed your sense of yourself in the world? Has it helped you be more effective, changed your sense of your role or your responsibilities?

dhruve tad-gati-jñānam
“[From saṁyama] on the polestar, knowledge of their [the stars’] motion.”

If the moon is changeable, rising and setting at different times each day over a 28.5-day cycle, appearing big or small based on where it is on the horizon, dhruva, the polestar or north star, is constant. Focus on this fixed point, says Patañjali, and you will understand motion.

B.K.S. Iyengar often taught to hold a fixed point in āsana, and he would use the pole star as an image. In trikonāsana, for example, he taught to make the top hand the polestar and to find the integration of the pose, the back foot, front foot, side body, back, shoulder blades, all the other parts in space, from there.

The name for the pole star, dhruva, derives from dhṛ, to hold, to carry, to support. This is the same root as dhāraṇā (fixing the attention to a place), the sixth limb of yoga and first part of samyama, (see III.1), and dharma, what we each do to support the world. The adjective dhruva means firm, often used about the earth or a mountain or a pillar. Dhruva in music is the introductory verse of a song. It is also generally used, as the English north star is, to express aim or purpose. This still, constant star, then, is a support, a kind of pillar of the sky.

The word for motion here is gati (from gam, to go). The stars move, they “go,” and their movements can be tracked over the course of the year. The universe is in motion.

The interplay between stability and movement, the realization of transformation and change, threads in and out of the Yoga Sūtras.  In chapter one, the definition of abhyāsa (practice) is tatra sthitau yatnaḥ, the effort to be steady there (I.13). Abhyas̄a works inseparably from vairagya (non-attachment), steadiness and stability intertwining with letting go, with acceptance, with satisfaction.

There is a recognizable process here. We can be in so much motion or turbulence in our own minds that we do not understand motion. We are disassociated and alienated from natural cycles. Our cultural norms teach us to fix things that cannot or should not be fixed. We find steadiness in crop production by mass applications of pesticides, security of place in massive steel and concrete structures, assurance of daily food and shelter in pursuit of wealth. These norms are Capitalist. We believe we must have more to be ok. We are hyper-vigilant to maintain what we have.

The planet bears the price of our anxiety. In the grave words of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, “With our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.”  —Al Jazeera, Dec. 7, 2022

How do we, raised in a culture of more, come to accept loss, change, having less? How do we come to experience enough?

In III.27-29, Patañjali has directed us to the cosmos. Rhythm, repetition, rising, setting, ebb and flow, are there to be seen.

In the following beautiful verse, Krishna teaches that the one who practices saṁyama comes to experience night and day differently from others:

yā niśā sarva-bhūtānām
In that which is night of all beings,
tasyām jāgarti saṁyamī
in that, the one who practices saṁyama is awake.
yasyām jāgrati bhūtāni
That in which beings are awake,
sā niśā paśyato mūneḥ
that is the night of the seeing sage.
—Bhagavad Gītā, II.69

Night and day are metaphors here, certainly, but we might also consider how–literally–by setting our attention on the sun, the moon, the north star, we find a more settled way of being, an inner stability. Enough.

—–

“Observing the sun affords global knowledge of a system, and the moon, understanding of a system’s internal organization. Observing the polestar allows us to grasp the movements that animate the different elements within a system. The polestar of the Little Bear constellation (Ursa Minor) is the fixed point that allows for observation of the heavenly bodies. It is also a guide for the observer’s movement, for example, navigating at sea. This aphorism leads to the search in society of a fixed point, remarkable for its stability: a wise person, a counselor, or some such person, who by his or her unwavering vision, permits observation of movement as a whole.” –Bernard Bouanchaud, The Essence of Yoga, commentary on III.29

Questions:
•What is a stable point of reference in your yoga practice? In your life?
•What are practices that give you stability? What do you do to keep mobile, adaptable? How do you experience the interplay of mobility and stability in creating resilience?
•Observe the sun, the moon, and the north star over the course of a month. What is your experience?
•Are there ways that the practice of saṁyama has shifted your perspective or values so that you feel out of the social norm? What does night is day mean for you?