This has been a long overdue post. My apologies. This is part two to Philip G. McLemore’s previous article titled Mormon Mantras: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation from Sunstone Magazine.
Like the last one, this is a long read, about 16 pages, but again, well worth it. In this one he goes more in depth about how the teachings of Christ really are like Yoga, and how you can use Yoga to live the teachings of Christ and to commune with God through them.
As his tagline reads: “Is it possible that the teachings of Jesus are so comprehensive they encompass the core spiritual principles of both East and West?”
Click the link below to download a PDF copy of the article:
The Yoga of Christ
In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali lists seven different practices that “settle” consciousness. One of them is reflecting on insights culled from sleep and dreaming. (I:33, 38)
I’d have to be pretty oblivious not to note the trend in my dreams the past couple of weeks:
- Driving into the wilderness on a familiar road, I find the way getting unexpectedly steeper and steeper. Finally, I have to stop and retreat to keep the SUV from toppling backwards and down.
- Practicing yoga, my poses are disrupted by some thing’s fingers and then hands pressing up, through the floor and the carpet, like weeds. As I continue, the weed-hands continue to emerge – arms, obstructing the poses, entangling my limbs.
-
Searching in the basement of a building for a way into the inner-most part. When I finally find the way, it is doll-house-sized, and absurdly smaller and more narrow than I could possibly fit. Nonetheless, I start trying to puzzle out how I can get in.
* * *
Yesterday, I read this, from a dharma talk by Adyashanti:
Ego is a movement. It’s a verb. It is not something static. It’s the after-the-fact movement of mind that’s always becoming. In other words, egos are always on the path. They are on the psychology path, the spiritual path, the path to get more money or a better car. That sense of “me” is always becoming, always moving, always achieving. Or else it is doing just the opposite – moving backward, rejecting, denying. So in order for this verb to keep going, there has to be movement. We have to be going forward or backward, toward or away from. … As soon as a verb stops, it’s not a verb anymore. As soon as you stop running, there is no such thing as running – it’s gone; nothing is happening. The ego sense has to keep moving because, as soon as it stops, it disappears, just like when your feet stop, running disappears.
When we really let it in and start to see that there is no ego, only egoing, then we start to see ego for what it really is. This produces a natural stopping of a pursuit toward or a running away from something. This stopping needs to happen gently and very naturally because, if we are trying to stop, then that is movement again. As long as we try to do what we think is the right spiritual thing by getting rid of ego, we perpetuate it. Seeing that this is more of the same egoing will allow stopping without trying.
Emptiness Dancing: Selected Dharma Talks of Adyashanti, Open Gate Publishing: Los Gatos, CA, 2004, p. 106
And last night I dreamt this: Driving through the red-rock deserts of western Colorado and eastern Utah, I’m trying to get to a destination, and my car breaks down at sunset. I decide to proceed on foot, but it’s moonless and dark. I go to store after store, looking for one that has flashlights for sale. I can’t find one. As I’m walking from one store to another, I catch sight of a man with a twisted, spastic body, lurching inch-by-inch across a parking lot on the knee of one leg, the heel of the other foot, the elbow of one arm, the hand of the other. He’s glistening with sweat. I don’t stop to help because, I think to myself, “he seems to be making decent progress.”
* * *
The truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.
–Tao Te Ching
This week brought me some new insight. My business partner at the Yoga Studio is both a marriage/family counselor and a Yoga Therapist. The philosophy of Yoga therapy falls right in line with my own experience; that the body speaks to us and that we have everything that we need inside of ourselves for our own healing and understanding. This method of Yoga Therapy as taught through Phoenix Rising consists of the therapist putting the practitioner in yoga postures and holding them physically at their edge while they talk about their experience. The experience consists of moving through the physical body, the prana/subtle body, the mind and the emotions. It is completely self-led, the most the therapist says is: “what’s happening now?” and occasionally repeats the last sentence you say, so you can hear yourself clearly.
I decided it would be a fun thing to try. In the session, I picked an issue I wanted to work on, we set an intention, started with a simple meditation to center ourselves, and then she physically put me into postures. The fascinating thing was that I was bringing up intensely detailed memories of my childhood – things I hadn’t thought about since the time they happened. I didn’t bring up any memories of significant or huge events in my life, more simplicity, like the crazy 1975 wallpaper in my mom’s kitchen and walking home from school with my hair swinging in the wind. Memory after memory came up and they were all nice, warm and fuzzy. There was one key thread that strung all of those fabulous memories together – the Mormon church. Every memory had to do with my Mormon family, my Mormon friends, my Mormon way of life. I was left at the end of the session with a lot of insight – realizing that I often long for my own experience currently in the church to feel as real as it did for me as a child. I also realized how profoundly I love what the church provided for me in my life, and how that translates into the disappointment I feel that the gospel is not what I thought it was while growing up. The session was really positive.
Two days later, I trekked to Santa Cruz with a group of moms from my current ward. I haven’t had much of an opportunity to get to know sisters in this ward because we’ve only been here a year, and I’ve been putting more space between myself and the church. Working full time also puts me in the minority, leaving no time for group park days, etc. There was a nice group there, nice kids, beautiful beach. One of the things I love about the church is that it puts me in contact with people I would normally never be friends with. Such was the case yesterday. The other moms brought doritos, I brought wheat thins. The other mom’s are reading Star Magazine, I’m reading A Path With Heart. One mom was complaining about the weather, I was in the water playing with my kids. They all believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet, I don’t. For the most part it doesn’t bother me. I guess I’m glad for feeling of family I have with them, regardless of our differences. Sometimes, it just feels frustrating.
Backtracking to May when Greenfrog (fellow Mormon/Buddhist/Yogi, only labeled for the sake of the story) came to the yoga studio for a photos shoot. It was a very interesting day for me, being able to instantly talk with Greenfrog without having to interpret vocabulary or explain beliefs. The similarities of our backgrounds within the church, our periods with depression, the experiences with yoga, bhakti, meditation, even the books we’ve read lined up so closely. It seemed that there was this shared understanding – just as I felt with members of the church before my disaffection. He would say something and I would nod my head in understanding and vice versa. During this year due to my unique viewpoints of spirituality, I had come to the conclusion that I was on my own. I felt OK about being alone and that realization brought me a lot of peace along with a lot of inner-strength I didn’t know I had. So it was a real surprise and joy to meet Greenfrog through our blogs, and then again in person. Somehow talking to him was very comforting, confirming my own thoughts that I really am indeed sane. We prefaced the photo shoot with meditation, chanting and a short yoga practice. While sitting in meditation it was still and peaceful and powerful. Toward the end when my mind started becoming active again, two things hit me: #1 – imagine what the church would be like if we all put down our to-do lists and simply sat together in being. I can’t imagine anything more profound, it cuts right through to the heart of spirituality. #2 – this is what the pioneers felt like! How wonderful it is to find somebody who shares your experience in spirituality, and practice together. The Mormon terms of Brother and Sister seemed so easily felt in the simple quiet of doing nothing. No wonder the pioneers wanted to create zion and be around like-minded, like-believing people. It feels good.
I’ve always hated the word maturity. It seems a bit arrogant. As I go through my own practice and path though, that word keeps popping up for me, as if it is morphing into something more palatable for me to digest. I look at these experiences and realize that along with change and acceptance comes a maturity within the spiritual realm. For me, part of that maturity is learning not to resist what is right in front of me. Not to label it away, or disown it because of a simple aversion. Not to think that people should be any different than what they are, or that I should recreate my childhood, or that everyone should understand me. Certainly not that the church should hold everything for me now the way that it did through my 9-year old eyes. Finding acceptance for the way things are is helping me continue to grow and learn. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out where to put little pieces of myself, where I will invest it and where I won’t. As I accept the idea of spiritual maturity, I’m having an easier time listening to my instincts and deciding where I want to be.
I am left wondering though, will the dust ever settle?
Sattva brought to my attention a wonderful article that was written for Sunstone magazine titled “Mormon Mantras: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation” by Philip G. McLemore. She wanted me to share it with you all here as she felt that in this article he eloquently explained the differences between spirituality and Mormonism. I would have to agree with her. It was a wonderful read and very well written indeed.
It’s not a short article by any means (12 pages in magazine form) but well worth the read. Although I won’t post the entire article contents here due to it’s length, I will provide a link for you to download it directly from Sunstone. So please take the time, when you can, to give it a read and post your thoughts! Enjoy!
Click the link below to download a PDF copy of the article:
Mormon Mantras: A Journey of Spiritual Transformation
After I wrote the below, it occurred to me that it addressed some of the why-have-a-teacher questions I raised in response to the Zen article Scotty posted. So I’m taking the liberty of posting it here to see if I can turn you all into my teachers, as well.
Dear [Teacher],
Thanks so much for yesterday’s practice.
I’m a little leery of binding the experience into the straitjacket of words, but I do want to capture a little bit of what happened and share it with you.
As we began by talking about prana and perception of it, there was a familiar feeling of basic honesty, of reality that I profoundly appreciate when I work with you. I think that that basic background makes a lot of perceptions possible that otherwise can’t happen. I think I remember that in our discussion, even though I was the one who brought up the topic of the jump forward from down dog to standing forward bend, I didn’t feel as though it was my idea. And when you suggested the jump-forwards be the focus of yesterday’s practice, I felt a little resistance arise in me. It started as a “this is just the same-old, same-old” response. But the basic orientation I have toward bhakti readily overrode the initial resistance to the practice.The important part was that shortly after I felt the resistance arise, I noticed it.
As we worked on position and jump-forwards, you described the flow from feet to hands to feet to hands, comparing it to those wave toys that some people have on their desks. That visual connected to our discussions about the experience of perception of prana. And so with a jump, there came the awareness of energy from feet into legs into buttocks, and what felt like the “end” of the energy at the spine, below the back ribcage. The energy sequence-flow just seemed to stop at that point, and the legs came back down to the floor, the hips never reaching alignment with the shoulders or the hands, the energy never reaching the palms. Through that practice I perceived the energy stopping, and the place where it stopped. I had not seen that before, though I’m not particularly sure why not, as once it was seen, it seemed obvious.
For reasons I don’t understand, there is a resistance that arises there. As we talked about it, instead of the word “fear,” you suggested the word “trust,” which resonated deeply for me. Here’s why: when I admitted to myself that I no longer held my the belief set of my religious tradition, I lost a lot of the experience of trusting. There seemed so many things that were not trust-worthy. That led, quite directly, to a kind of existential despair, suspicion, separateness. I lived that way for years. But during teacher training a couple of years ago, some experiences began to draw together.
At the core of those experiences seemed to be this: the more I looked squarely at my preoccupations and my obsessions, and my insistences, and my attempts to control – the more I pulled them into the light of day – the less solid they looked. But as I began to see past them, through them, what I found was not nothing, but a surpassing warmth. Love. Describing it, I wrote to a friend, “I have come to trust existence.” I no longer felt the fear, the need to try to control, existence. So yesterday when you said, “trust,” what resonated with me was a sensation that now, hours later, I can describe as the discovery of a residue of distrust.
Something else you said also fit into a slot my mind had open: talking about the energy stopping point, you said something like “once you’re aware of it, it isn’t a block any longer.” That sounded like a familiar idea to me when you said it, but my mind twisted it a little bit into an external description of my mind seeing resistance in my body. And once I did that with the idea, while I superficially agreed with it, I simultaneously made it not true. Not that what you said was false – rather, I took a statement about unity and turned it into a statement about duality.
Last evening, I was reading from Ken Wilber’s book, No Boundaries,” and he said the same thing you did:
What on the surface we fervently desire, in the depths we successfully prevent. And this resistance is our real difficulty. Thus, we won’t move toward unity consciousness, we will simply understand how we are always moving away from it. And that understanding itself might allow a glimpse of unity consciousness, for that which sees resistance is itself free of resistance. (p. 136)
And what I saw last evening is that your statement was right: a block seen is no longer a block, because the seer and the seen are not separate, and the understanding of the mind is not separate from the experience of the body. But then I constricted my perceptions from unity to duality, from a body/mind that dissolved a block by seeing clearly to a subject mind seeing an object body’s blockage. And once in that duality, the ego-stroked mind persuaded itself that it could “see” the body’s problem, as though it weren’t the ego’s own problem. And so it reinstated the block while deluding itself that it was superior to it.
What have I learned? I need to practice seeing the block while jumping forward. Drishti indeed.
[Teacher], thank you for guiding me. Sometimes it is easier for me to see clearly with your eyes than with mine.
Be well,
greenfrog
Help would be helpful! Greenfrog is helping me with a little project and I thought it might be fun to extend it to everyone.
1. At the yoga studio, I have a big wall up high over a wall of windows that is perfect for a yoga quote or a word or two of inspiration. Imagine you’re in the middle of a very intense class and your mind is wandering. You’re holding warrior B and gazing at the wall. What words would help pull you back into your breath and body and out of your mind? …Breathe …Be Here Now …It’s not a big deal. Unless of course – you want it to be….. What would work for you?
2. I love quotes and words of wisdom. I keep a little collection tucked away and I know they will be useful as I produce newsletters, etc. What are your favorites?
This one is befitting to me at this moment in my life:
“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.” *Patanjali
I’m a bit of a nut when it comes to such things, so I’ll restrain myself a bit. But I thought I’d offer this for those who are interested: the (so far) most influential translation of the Yoga Sutra for me has been this one by Chip Hartranft.
The Yoga-Sûtra of Patañjali
He’s kindly made it entirely available for download, so I keep a pdf on my desktop. That allows easy text searches, even when I’m not on line.
for those of you who don’t know me…
I’m a yogi and have been practicing about two years. I have had a few fleeting times on my yoga mat where I seem to enter a different place of consciousness. I’m not sure how it happens. One time in particular, while doing a flow sequence of Sun Salutations (Surya Namaskara A/B), I seemed to enter a state where I was witnessing a conversation taking place between my mind and body. I did not hear words or anything, but I sensed the conversation taking place. I was in a moving meditation – just watching it happen. It was pure peace. That’s when I knew “I” wasn’t my mind or my body; that, along with yoga, sent me on a quest in search of the real me. I was the “witnessing presence,” as Eckhart Tolle describes in his Power of Now. This sounds so unreal and illogical to some, especially to church members. They just can’t understand it. It’s like they can only relate to one type of spirituality – the kind they get in church mostly. This type of experience is completely out of their realm of awareness.
I don’t discuss experiences like this very often, but I’m longing to do so with people whom I think can understand it or have had similar experiences. I’m hoping that people on this blog can relate to what I’m saying. I’ve been searching for a place where I can discuss events of this type with others who are or have been Mormon. Being Mormon and then having experiences like I just related turn your world upside down. TBMs don’t understand it, but neither to NOMs or PostMo’s. It is b/c it usually takes yoga or some form of meditation to get to this place. Does anyone relate to what I’m saying?
I don’t have these experiences as often as I’d like. I’m working on that. However, when it does happen, it recharges my batteries so to speak, in a way that nothing else ever could. This experience I just discussed also seems to resonate with an eastern view of spirituality rather than a western view (i.e., awakening). The two views aren’t completely incompatible, but they aren’t the same either. Having been on both sides, I like the eastern view better.
I welcome any thoughts you may have.
Yogaman.
Namaste!
sthira-sukham asanam
This is my favorite verse from the Yoga Sutra:
The place/posture from which we view the world should be one of steadiness and ease.
I benefit from the frequent reminder that I do not need to sit in a place/posture of discomfort, contortion, and churning, that there is a still point where I can stand, from which I can perceive my existence.
I think it will be fun to explore the world with others through this blog.
greenfrog
“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great, and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”
This quote by Patanjali is one of my all time favorites. It really resonates with my own personal experience of finding personal liberation by questioning my entrenched thought patterns. The world I once viewed as being antagonistic and negative has been slowly transformed into a friendly place and the brightness within myself spills out everywhere.
In yoga there is a concept called maya. It means illusion – the inability to see the truth that is right in front of us. I used to relate this to the Mormon concept of a veil over the earth, keeping us from our memory of a pre-existence. In a sense, that concept of a veil is actually true – we are fogged over of our memory of the fact that we are pure consciousness. That there is something beyond even the concepts in religion.
The most effective way to move through maya is to simply embrace it’s existence, be aware that we are all deluded in some form and start questioning thoughts. Pulling on the thread of “Is that really true?” on every level is the beginning of true freedom and liberation. A breaking of the bonds that limit and a transcendence to a completely friendly universe.
When Patanjali discusses discovering that you discover yourself to be a far greater person than you ever dreamed yourself to be, that is the delusion of maya and the embracing of our true divinity.
Welcome to Lotus Liberation and all of it’s many incarnations soon to come. Please join in…
**by Sattva
