The Essence of Yoga

A little girl runs down a street. Warm air caresses her skin, and the pounding of feet and earth bring an intoxicating counterpoint to the expanding of her heart. Her body unravels like threads of light into the surrounding space, and in a moment out of time, she surrenders into its open embrace. The liquid dancing world anoints her vibrating body with its loving substance…

We all remember or experience blessed moments in which our true nature of pure undivided and universal Awareness, echoes at the emotional, tactile, and sensual levels of experience. Our body then is almost transparent, without borders, suffused with a subtle quality of vibrating openness and sensitivity. It is impersonal yet shares its substance intimately with all that is experienced.

For most of us however, the body has been deeply and lastingly conditioned by the belief that “I” refers to an individual person, limited in time by birth and death and located inside a body, separate from other bodies and from the world out there. Corresponding and echoing this belief in separation, the feeling of the body has become a set of repetitive psychosomatic habits, creating feelings of solidity, density, emotional inertia, and contraction designed to perpetuate the projected image of the “I” that seems to live at its centre, with his or her past and future on either side. Such a body’s dynamism is ruled by the complex and restrictive impulses to protect, defend or affirm itself.

In this way, the body-mind seems to become the envelope or the cage in which “I” appear to live in and the stuff that “I” seem to be made of, whilst the real “I” of undivided Awareness seems to have shrunk itself into confinement, limitation, and fragmentation.

When we awaken to our true nature of Awareness in the presence of a teacher or of a teaching, we submit our thinking rational mind to the pure light of intelligence that is its source and substance.

With open limitless Awareness as our invisible reference, we hear and understand that the ordinary awareness that is perceiving whatever is perceived in this very moment, “I”, is not contained within a body or located in time and space. We hear and understand that “I” is the Open Awareness in which all experience arises unfolds and dissolves, including thoughts, sensations feelings, and perceptions, (mind body and world.) We hear and understand that this Awareness is not a perceived experience, yet is that which perceives all experience, and is not an object, yet is found at the heart of all experience as its only and invisible substance.

My identity fits not in any name or form. Nor am I held captive between birth and death.

I am not the blood that runs through my veins or the warm breath that flows through my nostrils or the mouth that breaths.  I am not the memory of myself or the hopes that skips like stones into the future.  Past and future ripple through me as the wind of time, whilst space is the echo of my infinity.  I am not this I am not this I am not this, yet I am the lover of all things and find myself at the heart of all that has a name and form.

During the yoga of non-duality sessions, we deepen our exploration to include the level of feelings, tactility, and perception. Taking our stand as the field of open Awareness in which all experience arises, we begin to listen to our experience of the body directly, as if for the first time, free of any labels, without any mediation from the past or any agenda for the future. We take our time, descending below the threshold of rational experience, allowing thought to relax in the background whilst opening to the flow of tactile sensation that is our actual bodily experience. We are invited to see and feel that the body flows through myself, Awareness, as does all experience.

When the welcoming of the body is open, uninvolved, and global it is as if the body like a frightened animal feels an unconditional invitation to come out into the open space.

In this friendly loving field, the body stands naked and naturally begins to liberate what it had been holding in and as itself:  the crystallized energy of separation that lives as layers of contraction and tension in the cellular, muscular-skeletal, and nervous systems of the body.

As the body unravels in this way, the “me” charge that lives embedded in its layers is returned to the openness of Awareness. Gradually the body is left free to open to, relax into and reunite with the openness that surrounds it.  It is as if each feeling and sensation like an offering, gives itself back to the invisible altar of Awareness, telling its true story on the way. In time this allows a gentle and natural realignment with the felts understanding that the body’s essential nature is this very openness.

When I make of my body a thousand paintbrushes dipped in gold

Everything takes on the form of you

And buries itself in my heart to make it bigger and softer

So that the world can overflow from it endlessly and everywhere

Returning ordinary days to infinite life

Over and over in this exploration, using guided meditation, postures, visualizations movement breath, we are led to see and feel that in truth we cannot say that a sensation appears in ‘my body, just as a sound does not appear in the world out there and thought is not to be found inside a head. We see rather that sensation, thought and sound all appear in myself, un-located open Awareness without any separate individual existence of a body-mind or world.

Over and over again we realize that like sounds and thoughts, the bodily feelings and sensations are subtle in nature. They are not solid or tangible cannot be held or measured.  Rather they are like vibrating ripples appearing on the surface of myself, intimately one with myself, made of my own invisible substance. We feel and know that the body is the openness that I am.

Unlike most of the conventional yoga practices that are taught in the world, these non-dual sessions are not pragmatic endeavours intended towards the physical or energy body, to increase well-being, strength flexibility, or even encourage expensive states of consciousness. 

They are rather sacred devotional practices that surrender the body back towards its source of Open Awareness: what we only and always are.

Every time the offering is made, the body is returned as it truly is, limitless, transparent, relaxed easeful and loving. It is realized as the very breath of the universe.

(originally published in the magazine Inzicht, Fall 2016)