Unity out of Diversity - Inner and Outer Yoga

News Flash: Ireland has a new government. From Euronews:

"Fianna Fáil leader Mícheál Martin has been elected Ireland's Taoiseach or prime minister after rival parties in Ireland voted to endorse a coalition government. Memberships of three parties in Ireland agreed to work together putting centre right party Fianna Fáil, centre party Fine Gael and the Green party in coalition with each other."

This is huge, these very different parties agreeing to work together, to join together to get things done and also live and let live.

What countries go through in attempting to build coalitions that unite many different subcultures, we also go through as individuals. This process is called yoga. Union. The aim of yoga is to make a fertile communion of all your divergent parts. The word anga, used in yoga, refers to the limbs of the body and also the limbs, or departments, of your inner life, all the "characters" in your internal play. Within yourself, you may have an area that is an Agnostic, and does not go to Church. You may have a Pagan, who worships nature. And you may have a part that identifies with one of the great religions such as Tibetan Buddhism (that denies being a religion).

Within ourselves, everyday, we have to work out a team of our inner people - the Worker, the Farmer, the Warrior, the Lover, the Healer, the Hunter, the Mother, Father, Sister, Brother, Magician, Trickster, Artist, the Student, Gambler, Clown, Priestess, Shaman, Comedian.

I don't think this work is ever done. In each moment, the energy of any archetype may rise up in us, as needed. These energies are just tonalities of the overall current of pranashakti. 

Here are two practices. One for the beginning of meditation, and one for the end.

At the beginning of your meditation time, wonder within yourself, "Which of my inner energies have been pushed to the background and would like to come into center stage to be included, and give their gift of energy, instinct and insight?" Then just notice what happens in the silence and with your breathing and bodily sensations. Your energies may speak to you in sensations, as words, as images, as a current of feeling, or as a space between. A curious silence.

At the end of meditation, sit there for a few minutes just attuning to the needs of your outer life. What are the demands on your time and attention? What are your priorities? And if this is so, then what configuration of your internal team is best for this job?

You may find each day is different, or different times of day are different. If you have a teenage boy in the house, you may have to have the Father energy at hand, in alliance with the Mischief Maker so you can keep track of all his adolescent rebellion and not suppress it too much, just give the right amount of steadiness and rule structure. 

If you are dating, you may be in the Lover for awhile and then switch to more of a Warrior energy to set boundaries, and then in your own sweet time reveal the Magician in you, who is a wizard at lovemaking. Every day is different, each moment is different, and we change over time as we age. This is what makes the Path of Intimacy so challenging and interesting.

As you wrestle with your inner work, have sympathy for what countries are going through as they attempt to make a union out of many millions of people. The principle is the same, whether it is the inner configuration of your archetypal energy to meet your daily life, or the governments that make some kind of a compromise that hundreds of millions of individuals can live with.

Countries

Hundreds of languages are spoken in India. It is said that 23 of these are mentioned in the Constitution of India (I haven't read the Constitution). Some are classified as Indo-European, some are Dravidian, and some belong to the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan language tree. There are others. 

Geneticists think that humans have been living in the area we now call India for more than 55,000 years. Over time this area has been divided up into many different countries and then some of them been unified, and then divided again. Please do your own research and don't quote me here, this is not my field. The point I would like to suggest here is that India is now a unified country of one billion, two hundred million people. They speak to each other in about thirty individual languages, if you only count those that have more than a million native speakers. If you count the smaller language groups, the individual languages are in the hundreds. 

According to the 2001 Census of India, they have 122 major languages and 1599 other languages. The reason for the different numbers is differences in the definition of what is a "language" and what is a "dialect."

How do you unify a country that is made up of so many individual states (each a sort of country unto itself, with an ancient and noble history) and so many language groups?

This calls for the kind of intelligence that invented yoga in the first place. 

To create and govern an integrated India, the politicians and managers have to work the magic of compromise.

I only know about this from incidental reading, but I heard that Sanskrit was not selected as the national language of India because this would be oppressive to the language groups that were not derived from Sanskrit, such as Tamil. On a theoretical level, Sanskrit would have been great, but in practical reality, it was thought, it would be a disaster. Less than 1% of the population spoke Sanskrit. 

So English is used as a national language. 

As an article in the Indian Express explains,

"One of the reasons for Sanskrit being limited to a small circle of people was the narrow outlook of pandits. They never allowed the language to reach the common people. So, India today does not have Sanskrit as its first language, like French in Francophone countries and Arabic in West Asia. When a language is not used by common people, it dies a natural death. If Sanskrit is not made popular among Indians, it is likely to become an endangered language in its country of birth."

From a BBC article:

"But Sanskrit is now spoken by less than 1% of Indians and is mostly used by Hindu priests during religious ceremonies.

It's one of the official languages in only one Indian state, Uttarakhand in the north, which is dotted with historical Hindu temple towns."

"According to the last census, 14,000 people described Sanskrit as their primary language, with almost no speakers in the country's north-east, Orissa, Jammu and Kashmir, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and even Gujarat."

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/sanskrit-language-india-persian-6294457/

also

https://www.firstpost.com/india/why-hindi-isnt-the-national-language-6733241.html

The Desire Scan

In addition to any Body Scan practice you do, or as a modification, you might explore what could be called The Desire Scan.

Almost all of the meditation traditions have come to us from monastic enterprises, where the overall intent is quietude and the abandonment of personal desires. For monks and nuns, this can be beautiful. It is their path. This is also the path sometimes when you are 70 or 80 or 90 or earlier, if you have a disease and are close to death. You go through a process of abandoning desires.

But if you are in the beginning of your life or midway, meditation will harm you if you practice in a way that stifles the flow of desire. And just everyday living is so hard that we don't even have to practice repression, just the daily grind makes for enough suppression.

As a counter action to all that, and to make sure that your body with all its nerves and senses is continually nourished by your own life essence, you may want to incorporate a Desire Scan into your day. At first this may take a few minutes, and over time you will internalize it so it takes a few seconds.

To begin, notice how universal desires are. We all want the same kinds of things, even though we have our particular mix, our own preferred menu and sequence.

Here is the practice.

1. Think of the whole spectrum of desires.

2. Breathe with each desire, in turn.

3. Notice where in your body you feel the sensations and energies that go with each desire. Enjoy the motions your body makes when you are in the midst of fulfilling that desire. 4. Savor it all.

5. Inquire into the desires you know so well, and spend a little time with the ones that you have not been able to explore lately, or ever.

6. Finish by attending in a loving way to the overall feeling and sensation of your body.

7. Sit there for 3 minutes with your eyes open, just integrating, before jumping up to go do stuff.

Learn to tolerate the weird sensations that go with entertaining a desire that you feel is forbidden. If, for example, you have a secure home and steady relationship, but are attracted to danger, are secretly in love with someone at work, give yourself a chance to feel those forbidden feelings. You are safe in meditation to do so. This will let your body be nourished by the erotic flow and you will in fact be way less likely to wind up in bed with some stranger. Meditation is a private internal space, a temple. A party. An internal Mardi Gras. What happens in meditation, stays in meditation.

If you have not been able to Speak Up and Hold Your Ground in a close relationship, then you will find this repressed strength coming to you while you are meditating, if you allow it. The sensations may be terrifying. OMG If I ever spoke my mind!

If you are a person that says YES a lot, it can feel taboo and death-defying to say NO to people. The reverse is true. If you like to say NO, then surrendering to a YES can feel like a fate worse than death. "Once I let down my guard, a catastrophe will happen."

Meditation is the place to let your body-heart-mind-senses have free play, so they can all practice the motions of life in a safe circumstance. All your chakras, so to speak, can practice flowing together, supporting each other, combining in combinations to enrich your outer world of action

The Basic Desires

- Food. Delicious to us. Nutritious. At the right time.

- Clothing that fits, serves our purposes. Looks good. Keeps us warm.

- Restfulness. Sleep.

- Activity and exercise. To use our muscles.

- To speak up, say our piece.

- Power and some control over our life.

- A home or nest or spot to call our own.

- Desire for a sense of safety and to feel protected and peaceful.

- Exploration, novelty, satisfy our curiosity, learn new things.

- Communication with other people, the desire to exhange information.

- Teamwork, the desire to join up with others, form relationships.

- Justice, to protect the righteous and punish wrongdoers and thus keep people safe.

- Close, long-lasting relationships that feel like tribe or family.

- Pair coupling or mating or sexually charged relationships that might lead to children.

- Accumulation, the desire to horde some food or money or supplies so you have some stuff saved up.

- Organization, the desire for your stuff to be where you can find it. Each thing in its place.

- The desire to share what you have with others.

- The desire to be seen as valuable by your tribe or team.

- The desire for freedom and autonomy.

- The desire to feel ethical, that you are honoring a code of conduct.

These desires all emerge from the instinctive matrix of the body-mind system that has been keeping us alive.

The instincts appear to us as impulses that we call desires.

Inside each desire is an impulse of life seeking to renew itself, keep the game going, repair itself, learn the lessons of today and get ready for tomorrow.

The flow of desire wants you to be ready for anything, ready to dance into the next phase of your life.

When we have a desire to meditate, or to learn a new way of meditation, this is life in you seeking to evolve itself.

In essence, we go inside to contact our inner riches so that we can go out into activity and give more of ourselves to the world. Then we are open to receiving more from others in return.

In the yoga texts, the purpose of life is stated succinctly as

Kama - sensual pleasure

Artha - wealth

Moksha - freedom

Dharma - duty, obligations

These are the purusharthas.

पुरुषार्थ

puruṣārtha

the four objects or aims of existence

Yoga and meditation exist to help us fulfill these aims of existence.

It is interesting to consider meditation as a way of fulfilling desires.

If you are going to practice meditation and you want it to enrich your daily life, then you need to continually be fine-tuning your attention so that it allows the energetic richness of every desire to flow in your nerves. This is what creates the sense of "readiness to live" that is such a delightful gift of meditation.

This approach is actually fundamental to the whole sensibility of the classical yoga world. It is not exclusive to what we think of as Tantra. It's right here in the Sanskrit language.

Moment-by-moment in meditation and in our day, we have to improvise with kama, moksha, artha and dharma, to find ways for them to support each other. This is a great game and a fresh discovery every day.

Make your own list of say, your favorite 8 desires, and add a couple that you are scared of or have an aching yearning for. Just have a page in your journal. Over time, make sure that your meditation practice is welcoming to YOUR flow of desire, so that inwardly you can be practicing the Yoga of Desire, the integration your inner life with your outer life of action.

Pro tip:

Find a way to dance, even alone by yourself. Just dance freely. Also learn some Tai Chi or QiGong moves. These Taoist arts embody an appreciation of all the instinctive energies of life and have developed ways to honor them and set them free to circulate in a healthy way.

Svatantra - Your Own Army

One afternoon at Kripalu, a young woman yoga teacher who had been paying attention, said:

"I feel like I am on my own side."

She said this with a sense astonished delightedness.

She explained later that what she was getting from our teaching was the sense that meditation is *being on your own side*, commander of your own forces, with all the energies of Prana and Pranashakti as your allies, as your team, as being on your side, having your back and your feet, both propelling you and surrounding you with blessings.

She was standing as she said this, for we often stand when we are expressing our relationship to The Radiance Sutras.

*Svatantra: *Independence, self-will, freedom, one’s own system or school, one’s own army, free, uncontrolled, full grown.

*Tantra: *A loom. Metaphorically, a framework or network of interconnected threads. A system. From the root *tan: *to extend, spread, be diffused (as light) over, shine, extend towards, reach to, to stretch (a cord).

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Geek alert, a note

Historically, yoga and meditation have been presented as the opposite of svatantra. "Give up your selfhood. Grovel before me." This is a path for certain people, the joy of submission. There is such beauty in it. But it is unskillful and harmful to present yoga and meditation as having anything to do with submission and bowing down.

Both bowing down and standing tall are beautiful postures or asanas. In the modern West, the whole trend of what our ancestors died for and lived for was the chance to explore what it is like to taste freedom, to have the freedom to stand tall and be an individual.

So both submission, which is subordinating ourselves to a greater good, and standing free, are valuable.

When we love someone, we joyously submit ourselves to taking care of their needs - this is one of the greatest joys in the whole world. Ask any parent or dog person or horse person. This submission is totally different because we have chosen it from a position of freedom. We willingly take on this journey of relationship.

There is an interplay between the two asanas, that of taking care of other people's needs, and then recovering your sense of self.