I see this question everywhere. Spiritual teachers everywhere have been criticized as being pie in the sky oblivious because they’re asking depressed folks who can’t pay their rent, take a full deep breath into their lungs, or escape an abusive relationship, to just drop it and be happy. Advice in these situations can sound reductive, dismissive, obtuse.
For a little context on this, I’d refer you to the great teacher Ram Dass, now passed, who suffered a stroke which limited his mobility and ability to speak. He wasn’t sure he would speak again, and struggled a great deal with this, according to those close to him. It can seem as though spiritual teachers are urging folks never to be unhappy, to just ignore things like that. Far from it. The difference here is that Ram Dass had decades of new thought habits programmed in, different from the way society has told us to think and feel, and he was able to draw upon this deep well of wisdom and peace. That is what we are being asked to cultivate. A well upon which to draw – a surrendering to whatever is occurring in this exact moment. Ram Dass was able to find peace in his final days, despite being chairbound and having to be carried here and there.
“Yes, but he lived in Hawai’i, had a pool, and was getting carted to the ocean.” I guarantee you, in the typical mindset, if you had grown accustomed to such a life after a life spent in service to humanity and suddenly experienced deep impairment, you’d be bitter and resentful. This points to a common lacking in human mental functioning: the ability to truly consider another’s vantage point.
Spiritual teachers are human. In fact, a great number of them, just like psychologists, were drawn to their work because of their own personal trauma and their eventual ability to see beyond the situation they find themselves in, to revel in the marvel of a body that works all on its own, even if function is impaired and the mind is receiving signals of pain. So many people will respond to profound teachings with “it’s all well and good when you can live life steeped in bliss, but I’ve got real problems.” I guarantee you, your teacher has real problems. If they have attained financial wealth they may be free from that fight, but as is somehow the inescapable reality of being human, this typically don’t lessen anyone’s grief. Thousands of letters pour in from students wanting their time and empathy, individuals who haven’t yet learned that it’s their responsibility to work out their liberation for themselves becoming upset when a technique doesn’t work, a retreat resulted only in complete overwhelm over past emotions coming up, or two lines in a book didn’t resonate with them and they became upset as a result. They are criticized on the internet for their life’s work, and the more they are able to transcend their suffering, the less the average person can relate to the way they speak on a peer level. Right now unprecedented anger, anxiety, and depression are being put out into the world by prospective students who don’t yet have the skills to deal with them, and those who are truly tuned in, not numbing or checking out, are seeing it all, all the time. Teachers who have done their work are able to contain all of this by consistently making the choice to be happy and only focusing on the challenge of this individual moment, every single moment.
It’s also worth noting here the distinction between happiness and peace. It is possible to be grieving, for the body to be experiencing distress, or to just feel unhappy, all while maintaining an inner stillness, knowing that what has already occurred or is occurring in this moment is not reversible, and so there is no point in resisting the fact that it has occurred. That is peace, which can also be an effective facilitator for increased happiness.
Not so reductive, is it? Not so oblivious. When you see a teacher sitting placidly, giving you every ounce of their attention for the time you have with them, recognize they are still part of the world, they know what’s going on, and still here they are. They are engaged in helping others to find liberation from suffering, all while surrendering to whatever comes up in each moment. They are walking the path of the peaceful warrior.
So, how do you apply all this to you? We can look to the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism for this. Human suffering is inevitable; we suffer because we imagine ourselves to be separate from the whole (we don’t remember our divinity) and incomplete, therefore we toil to attain things (including people, experiences, etc) to add to ourselves to maximize pleasure and avoid the feeling of pain; and the way out of suffering is to release attachment to the quality of your experience. By this I mean to let go of clinging to pleasure and running from pain.
Pain is inevitable. It’s part of the human experience. We all experience it. There is a cameraderie in seeing all humans as divine beings who are suffering because of the experience they have been born into. There is a release in recognizing the causality of where you find yourself, and forgiving yourself for buying into the idea that you’re less than whole because of where you find yourself in this particular moment. This idea was born of many thousands of years of trial and error, and we clearly haven’t gotten many things right. So, give yourself permission to drop the human narrative that has been spun and added to. It’s not necessarily true. Animals adhere to no such narrative, and they are open to each moment in life, whether suffering habitat loss, constantly watchful of predators, or roaming free but short on food every single moment of life. In fact, animals and other beings in nature can be our greatest teacher as we strive to retain minds that think but not to be imprisoned in them. We notice our pre-thought friends, we see their liberation and ability to access their unprogrammed yet highly intuitive minds (notice a kitten who has been separated from its mother still knows to clean itself and will develop the urge to hunt on its own – it doesn’t linger on thoughts of abandonment and wonder how it will get through the month).
“But if I stop worrying, my life will fall apart. I can’t lust lay around enjoying life.” Your programmed mind has learned to think itself quite important – the only one holding it all together. Your body is currently being run, including thousands of chemical processes each moment, by a force with intelligence and capacity far surpassing that of the human mind. Your mind couldn’t run your body for a second. So what is that force? How much do you really know about it, and how much time have you actually spent being quiet enough to look? This process includes placing less importance on the thought intrusions which will gain in intensity as your mind begins to recognize it is going to be put in its place.
This process of quieting the mind and regaining awareness of a higher consciousness within each of us is where the potential of humanity lies. In being quiet, in accessing this part of us, the real us rather than the constructed trial and error version. The us that is interconnected, that helps us lift a car when someone’s under it, or enables reflexes far faster than the human mind can process. We are smarter than we think we are, our overdeveloped minds are just overchattering the inner voice of reason and strength.
So how do you get quiet enough to hear that voice, you ask? Well, there’s no quick fix. You’ve got a lifetime of programming and trauma to work through, and while it’s possible for some to experience spontaneous enlightenment, for many it is a progression of forming new habits. So, we look to yoga as a holistic practice to see how it will facilitate this. We first form the structure of life we want to live by – we get rid of all the junk, societal priorities, and we strive to live a life within a moral and disciplinary framework – the yamas and niyamas. These include hygiene rituals, compassion practice, and the practice of self-study which will be instrumental in regulating energy and guiding you through the other limbs, so they’re not to be skipped or sniffed at. Then, we get in the habit of getting all the excess energy in our bodies either out or aligned – we do the physical part of yoga, asana. We incorporate breath to move the energy, pranayama. During practice as well as outside of it, we begin to focus our attention on our breath and a single point of visual focus in order to withdraw from the senses, pratyahara. Mindfulness and insight meditation are how we can practice this when we’re not on our mats. When we incorporate these practices, we can gradually attain more focus over time to reach different states of absorption – dharana and dhyana – until we reach the stage of continuous absorption in the divine, samadhi. This we call enlightenment, and it is a place of unshakable peace where you are experiencing wholeness. As we practice, we may occasionally get glimpses of this bliss, only to be overtaken by our thinking minds again, and we learn to cultivate patience as we cling to the experience we had, wishing it would stay already. If we are only ever able to attain consistent states of dharana or deep concentration of the mind, most of our lives will still be irreversibly transformed in a way that brightens the world around us.
You will inevitably find great hurdles on this journey, as most people aren’t capable of simply dropping into problem-free bliss and that can be very frustrating, to realize that your own mind is currently attached to its process of problem-making. This is where a competent teacher comes in, to remind you of perspective and the teachings at a regular interval so that meditation remains productive and you don’t spend weeks, months, or years getting more agitated at not being able to stop a train that has been gaining momentum in one direction for as long as you’ve been alive. A mindfulness-based coach is someone who, while helping you to attain your heartfelt desire, is also helping you to refine that desire, or work with you as you may realize a shift in your priorities. Guiding you through the meditation process, or simply walking you through the goal setting process informed by mindfulness, can become a great source of support as you grapple with the long-neglected recesses of your mind. Coaching is typically short-term, mapped out in 6-12 sessions, whereas your yoga practice, with all its eight limbs, is lifelong.
Making new friends will likely be helpful as you embark on this journey, as you will notice that the other human minds around you also do not typically embrace change. Having a supportive group in which to learn, a sangha or kula, in-person or online, will make your growth exponential as you share or take in new ideas and these become part of your personal culture. Rather than the old Western model, where yoga takes place on the mat and leaves out most of the practices, we are embarking on the new yoga, which is everywhere and always. This is yoga as it was intended, and this is the practice powerful enough to uplift a society from bleak to liberated.
Heather Ralston 