Writing from the Inside Out (8 page)

I stand in tree posture, feeling rooted, finding stability. Making the minute adjustments that keep me standing — the adjustments at my ankle, the arch of my foot, my leg and hip, my core, the swaying of my shoulders and arms — am I adjusting to the wind? Do external forces shift my stability? Or, is the wind and fluctuation coming from within? Is it a physical phenomenon — are my muscles learning their dimensions — or is it a cognitive phenomenon — am I adjusting to the unsteadiness of the storms of thought?

I draw my attention away from the search for stability and stretch into the rootedness I feel in the moment. As I stretch, I open my senses to feel more of the elements that flow through me. I imagine how much a tree with a hundred leaves feels the sunlight, and how a tree with ten thousand leaves feels the sunlight on each leaf. Everything that surrounds what I can feel is consciousness; the sunlight and blue sky are alive between the branches.

Yoga teaches me that I am a work in progress. Some self-improvement takes care of itself by going through postures with sensitivity and correct alignment. When releasing a yoga posture, I simply feel good — no thought required. As I become more familiar with the postures, the sensations are not “new” anymore — the same is true with language and vocabulary. I tend to say the same things to myself. Inevitably, the subconscious mind churns up challenging issues on the road to self-knowledge. Sometimes when moving through the same yoga postures, I feel lousy, perhaps even afraid, because a physical sensation threatens my self-concept. It is vital to make distinctions between the postures and language that serves me and stretch away from that which doesn't.

The Sanskrit word
asana
, taken to mean “seat,” is the term for the yoga postures that I do. Yet, wonderfully,
asana
can also be understood in a more general sense as one's place in the world. These distinctions are important because yoga practice trains the mind as well as the body. Becoming obsessed with how I look when holding warrior posture will affect my conduct in the world. Language yoga helps to direct my attention inside.

Even when yoga begins as a fitness practice, it is hard not to discover that it is a spiritual practice. Within a posture, emotions arise. Beliefs and feelings get stored in the body, and clinging to those that don't serve the greater good drains my energy. Yoga frees me to become more fully myself, which entails going through moments of negative capability. When practiced as a manifestation of union with the boundless imagination in the present moment, writing is a form of yoga.

My own introduction to yoga was a gradual one, and to be honest I looked into just about everything else before really moving forward with yoga. I began with the Christian Bible, then onto an interest in indigenous religion. I read books about Zen. I read about Mahayana, and I read the Dhammapada. For years, I looked into the Tibetan practice of Tantra and was particularly drawn to Dzogchen.

I only really came to understand the spiritual tradition of Hatha yoga when my wife and I attended an intense teacher training on the Hatha Yoga Pradipika taught by Yoganand Michael Carroll at Jacci Reynold's studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That class changed everything for me. No longer could I think of yoga as a sequence of stretches. Yoga can look like that, but it's deeper. Hatha yoga is an intense path toward realization. It has had a powerful effect on my writing.

The Yogic tradition holds the concept of Tantra. Most people have heard of Tantra in conjunction with sex, as in tantric sex, with the understanding that it's a kind of sex that is spiritual and lasts a long time. Tantra can be translated as many things, and is perhaps most accurately translated into English as continual, stretched through, or weaving. The tantric practitioner's practice does not start and stop on a yoga mat. Instead, the world is my yoga mat. The practice of Tantra, therefore, never lets me off the hook.

The alternative is to live and die with my song still inside. Tantric practice brings awareness into every activity and moment of my life. As a result, I experience union of mind and body, self and other. Witnessing myself connected to other beings naturally leads to feelings of loving kindness and
ahimsa,
or nonharming.

As a writer, I find this practice immensely helpful, because of the challenges I face when putting words onto the page. Writing challenges my sense of self, because only sometimes is it as simple as merely putting words — symbols and letter combinations — onto the page. I am exposing a vulnerable part of myself. Writing as a tantric yoga practice gets me to renounce my expectations. What emerges, I discover, is a truth of sorts, natural, as I am natural. My writing is most triumphantly natural when I pull out all the stops — both of self-criticism and of discipline — and perform as myself, openly, ongoingly, right now. In practice, this effort requires a kind of meditative work that does not begin and end at my intention; rather, all is an inevitable meditation.

I doubt, rationally, that I perform optimally, and so I prejudge — that is, based on a kind of aggressive fear, I try to prevent myself from acting. This struggle doesn't work, because trying not to act is itself a kind of action. Fear asserts that the present-moment articulation is insufficient. When I widen the flow of focus to the present moment, am fully attentive, activated and viscerally engaged, the world is open before me. I lose myself in the flow of craft. It becomes a wonder that words are not merely clumsy symbols after all.

Practicing even a little bit of Tantra is very good. Because life in general is an offering, my own life is best lived as an offering. The page is an opportunity to express and perform, no different than the moment before being confronted with the page. All that matters is that writers bring the truth of their entire being to bear in the performance of their words. Rather than being something difficult, the challenge of being true to myself is a task for which I am perfectly suited. Having the intention to write, I simply begin as I am, following a path set for me that I am gifted with the awareness to experience as it happens. Sometimes I would very much like to know where it all is headed, but that insight is just not for me to know until the moment is upon me.

Tantra Hatha yoga practice has three main practicable facets:
asana
, postures, the way one is in the world;
pranayama
, breathwork, the way one works with
prana
or aliveness; and
dhyana
, contemplation (traditionally, seated meditation that the body was made ready for through asana practice). It may be significant to note that when the practice of dhyana was brought to China, it was called Ch'an, and when it made its way to Japan, it became known as Zen.

Tantra Hatha yoga was originally practiced as the fast way to self-realization. Monks would follow very specific guidelines interpreted by their guru (the hope is, correctly) from their experience and the
Hatha Yoga Pradipika
, build a small hut in the woods, and practice full time, having set aside the material world, except for what was necessary for them to practice.

The way yoga was practiced by the ancients is very different from the yoga commonly practiced in studios nowadays. For one thing, it was solitary. Without any self-conscious social expectations, the experience was more introspective. Yogis went into the woods to discover who they were, devoid of any context. Renouncing everything, practicing yoga, yogis came to know the natural self.

I practice something similar as a writer, and as artists, we have the path before us. Life in the woods at Walden Pond changed Henry David Thoreau's life in a yogic way. I can live each day more monkishly by freeing myself of preconceived notions about what the finished product looks like — whether that's a particular kind of success, precision about where my work is headed, or a way of being received. I let go of these things, because when I cling to them, I'm not free to live to the utmost, as I am. This freedom allows the road to success to contain at least some measure of fulfillment each step of the way.

True Tantra Hatha yoga is exclusively for those who have renounced the world, and contains no code of worldly conduct. Those practicing yoga who still live in the world would follow a different path, such as the one put forth by Patanjali, often called the Eight Limbs of Yoga, in which the external world is not taken to be illusory. The renunciate's path is strictly internal.

Language is a wonderful medium for yoga practice, because the act of writing is one of sustained attention, and writing creates a record of how I present my thoughts as words and phrases.

 

 

The reverberation of an image is its felt effect on the surrounding language. Reading, listening, writing, or thinking, as I move from image to image, word to word, each symbol uniquely affects me, and these effects are colored by my experience and the surrounding language. Life is the context of resonance.

In tantric yoga, the word
nada
refers to the unstruck sound. In nature, all sounds are produced as the effect of two things striking or rubbing together. To experience
laya
, or dissolving into oneness, nada yogis direct attention to the constant sound of the inner ear.

The word
poetry
, insofar as it stems from the ancient Greek verb meaning “to make,” signals a kind of attention that can make things that give the reader an experience of true being.

Image precludes meaning. Resonance conveys individuation. Image resonance is a lens, a clear lens, through which attention is paid, as the stuff of life flows into supportive and musical structures.

Sound
as a verb becomes personal because it always resounds
with
and
against.
Within the undulations of oneness is individuation. The represented image is the true lie and the shape of truth.

A significant image reopens to my awareness that I am living, and that it is living. A significant image unites noun and verb at the moment of emergence — such as “I am,” for example, or “God loves.”

 

 

Hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.

You have seen the three monkeys that embody this phrase: Sitting side by side, the first monkey with covered eyes, the second with covered ears, and the third with covered mouth. The image of the three monkeys carries symbolic insight — that we have an animal nature. We might think of this animal nature as the energetic, uncontrollable monkey mind, ruled by the need to satisfy the senses.

The antidote to a mind tethered to unstable senses is directing attention into the depth of one's nature. Within the mind, beyond all sensation, is the source of instinct. Paying close attention, we tune into the truth of which our cells are aware. The peace of attentiveness opens into the bliss of being.

We see metaphors for the self-liberating force of instinct at play in the animal world. Baby turtles hatching on a beach know which way to go to find the ocean. Within moments of hatching, they head straight for the rolling, crashing waves. As a first sight, this — their only path — must look daunting. Yet, the turtle's instinct is that beyond the churning of the waves lies their true home. You won't find a sea turtle just giving up and trying to make a living on land. Though it may not look tempting to the turtles, the sea draws them by instinct. Following this path, the turtle sees life on land as a thing of the past — and the land dissolves.

Because living true to your deepest nature requires overcoming the desire to placate the mind with sensations, we imagine alternatives, and so another story is useful here. I have heard of a simple yet effective trap used in some parts of the world to catch monkeys. Hunters put roasted chickpeas — which monkeys love — inside a hollow coconut, and then they wedge that coconut underneath a large stone. The coconut has a hole in it just large enough to fit the monkey's hand through. In theory, a monkey can simply stick its hand into the coconut and take the roasted chickpeas. However, the holes aren't large enough for the monkey's clenched fist to exit, thus the coconut forms an effective trap and an elegant symbol for attachment. Even a smart monkey will not want to let go (after all, as the logic goes, who would want to let go of a sure thing?), and all the hunter has to do is walk over and grab the monkey.

We use logic to justify our position, even in the act of tethering the self to a snare. As a result, we can hold liberation in our hands without being able to enjoy it. It is wonderful to know that meditation can be a path to achieving liberation. Whether liberation manifests in life as greater freedom of emotion, a more relaxed mind, or more ethical conduct, meditation frees us into higher modes of experiencing everyday life.