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Why Do We Practice Yoga and
Meditation?
CM Brown
- Highland Yoga Teacher - August 2005
Why do we practice yoga? Why do we practice
meditation? Why do we drag ourselves out of bed in the morning and onto the
cushion or the mat? Why do we rush out of work to make that 6 o’clock yoga
class? Perhaps it is because meditation and yoga give us something very
valuable, something we can’t quite explain. While we can obviously enjoy
the physical aspect of the asanas and the quiet sitting of meditation there
is an experience within the asana and within the sitting that goes deeper
than the body. These practices allow us to come into contact with our
life in a very profound way. They offer us an opportunity to ask some
very fundamental questions about this thing we call, “my life”.
One question we may ask is what do the words
“my life” actually mean? Is it the same as saying “my hat”, or “my car”?
Do we mean the span of time between our birth and now? When we look back on
this span of time we can see how we seem to have had several lives:
childhood, teenager, twenty something. Perhaps we have reached the stage of
middle age or senior citizen. We have been single. We may have come to
marriage and been divorced or widowed. There have been different jobs,
different priorities, and different pursuits. It is very reasonable to ask
the question, “Am I the same person now that I was twenty years ago?”
Yet, within the span of birth to now, within
the stages of life, within the changes that have occurred, there are more
subtle changes taking place moment by moment. If we take the time to stop
and watch this flow of one moment passing into the next moment, we will
begin to observe that there is a continuum of tiny changes taking place. We
may then begin to recognize that this moment right now is a temporary
condition that exists only within this specific moment.
We speak with great ease of changes taking
place within the weather and we can see these changes in the course of a
day. We are not averse to referring to these changes as weather
conditions. However, we do not recognize the change of conditions within
ourselves so easily. Nor are we as willing to recognize ourselves as being
a flow of conditions. We are more likely to say, “That’s the way I am”,
rather than, “That’s the way I am now.”
According to Buddhist philosophy, this
experience of life as a series of conditions is broken down into five
aggregates called skandas. They are form, feeling, perception, intellect,
and consciousness. It could be said that everything we experience falls
into one of these categories. There is the form our body takes as it grows
and changes. There are the cascades of our emotions and the way we relate
to our environment and our fellow creatures. There are the changes
occurring within our thoughts and the ideas that grow out of these
thoughts. There are the levels of consciousness that we experience from
wide-awake and energetic to sleepy and lethargic and all the places in
between or beyond. In this context, one begins to see life as a constantly
shifting parade of conditions and each condition is temporary, existing only
within a specific period of time.
If we accept this as a truth of our existence,
the questions that inevitably follow must be, “Is there anything that exists
within our human experience beyond this conditionality? Is there a thread
upon which these beads of conditionality are strung? Is the mind merely a
changing flow of conditions or is there an essence of mind beyond the flow
of conditions?”
An analogy that is often used to describe this
relationship between mind and conditionality is the ocean and the wave. The
wave is the condition of the ocean at a particular place and time. The wave
is not separate from the ocean. It is a form the ocean takes, a condition.
In this analogy it is easy to see that conditionality (wave) is with mind
(ocean) manifesting into a form, or condition, at a particular place and
time.
Another analogy can be that of a metal bowl.
The bowl is the form the metal is taking. The metal is taking the form of a
solid rather than a liquid. Likewise, the thought in your mind right now,
is a form the mind is taking at this moment. If one puts heat to the bowl
and the metal melts into liquid, it is no longer taking the form of a bowl
but something else, a pool of liquid. However, its essence remains the
same. It is still metal but now it is liquid metal. It still has the same
molecules but they are configured in a different way.
What caused these changes to take place? Heat
melts the bowl and gravitational force creates waves in the ocean. But,
what lies beyond the heat and the gravity? Perhaps we could say that it is
energy that creates the change, but should we be so bold as to concur that
energy is the thread upon which conditionality is strung? We could, but
that would be too easy. We still must ask, “What is energy?” Because we
are human beings, our conceptions are based in language. This is how we
attempt to understand ourselves, and the universe. We use, not only the
language of words, but also the language of mathematics. We know deep down
inside that words and mathematics can only go so far in describing the truth
of what really is. So, while we can say that energy is manifested in
everything (you and I and trees and dogs and cats and rats and flowers and
bacteria and stars and viruses and alligators) this brings us no closer to
the visceral understanding of what this “everything” is. It is just giving
it a name. Just as my saying, “ I am C.M. Brown”, gives me no deeper
understanding of who I really am or if, in fact, I really exist at all.
Yet, while we are in the deep relaxation meditation of yoga nidra in the
Hatha Yoga practice or when we sit in meditation for any length of time we
may come into this wordless knowledge. This understanding, this knowledge
may come in a flash and disappear just as quickly as it came. And, it is
essentially indescribable.
That is why we practice yoga and meditation.
We have a vague sense that this thing we call myself is a fraud, a
pretense. We know there is something more. We know that yoga and
meditation are a means of helping us return to this something that IS.
It takes a lot of courage to acknowledge that
this thing you call, “me”, does not exist. It takes courage to exhale and
let go of this notion of “myself”. Going deep into the yoga and meditation
practice is an act of bravery. It is facing our greatest adversary -
delusion. The first steps toward facing this adversary are recognizing and
realizing. Recognizing means seeing intellectually that it may be true that
you don’t exist. Realization means knowing in the deepest depth of the
heart that it is true. This means knowing that there is something
that is beyond our limited conception of ourselves as a little ego-self
that is always on the treadmill of seeking affirmation of its own
existence. This little ego-self is simply a condition, no different from
the wave or the metal bowl. What you are in this moment is just what you
are in this moment. There is nothing that you can hold onto as a permanent
fixed entity of “me”. You and I and trees and dogs and cats and rats and
flowers and bacteria and stars and viruses and alligators are all in a
constant state of flux, moment to moment, day to day, and year to year.
Nothing exists in a permanent state, because all that we refer to as,
“existing”, even “myself”, is really just a part of the great flow of
everything.
Since there is no thing that exists in
a permanent state separate from everything, it follows that there is only
everything. That which we call separate is really an integrated
part of one. You and I are no thing. Because we share the
essence of the flow we are everything. There is no, “other”.
“This is me and that is you”, is a false statement. We share a commonality
with everything we mistakenly refer to as something separate from
ourselves.
Could it be that in this delusion of
separateness, this disconnect from our essence that causes conflict and
destruction? Just as the right hand and the left hand are part of the same
body, you and I are a part of the same essence. Just as it is absurd to
think of your right hand fighting with your left hand or your left hand
stealing from your right hand, it is equally absurd, when we recognize the
reality of our shared oneness, to conceive of one human being fighting with
another, stealing from another or destroying one another, or we, as human
beings being a part of our environment, destroying the environment. One
hand in conflict with another is a body and mind severely out of balance.
Living with the delusion of separateness is a life severely out of balance.
All of this may be a concept we can understand
on an intellectual level and that is a good beginning. However, until we
get beyond the intellect and into a visceral experience of this
understanding, we will always be tempted to fall back into our pattern of
deluded and painful isolation from the essence of our true self. Our
experience of this essence is the experience of peace because we are no
longer compelled to define ourselves as separate. That is the struggle of
the ego. When we practice meditation, when we practice yoga (which means
union in Sanskrit) we can begin to see how anxiety, anger, fear,
confusion, and greed grow out of this ego that is always looking for
approval and affirmation of a separate self which, in truth, does not
exist. We see that all of our actions and responses are conditions of a
moment in time and reflect only the “wave” aspect of being. We see that
there is a truth within us that is connected to the truth of everything.
When we practice yoga and meditation we begin to tune the mind into this
truth and that is what can help us deepen our understanding of this thing we
call “my life”. We unite “my life” with the all-encompassing flow of LIFE.
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