Tuesday March 20th

At 10:15pm PDT last night the Sun was directly above the Equator, heading north, signaling the annual Vernal Equinox. Today was the first official day of Spring, and all over the planet there will be approximately equal parts of Day and Night (Equinox means “equal night”). It’s a time of perfect balance between the forces of darkness and light, and, by extension, a perfect harmony of the Ha (Sun) and Tha (Moon) of Hatha Yoga—the physical practice of yoga that includes both asana and pranayama. The primary goal of Hatha Yoga is to balance the opposing yet complimentary forces of Nature (Prakrtti) that are continuously acting upon us—expansion and contraction, extension and flexion, activity and passivity, etc. Patanjali says in Sutra II.46—“Sthira sukham asanam”-- the posture is both stable and at ease. The following sutra continues in this same vein: II.47—“Prayatna saitilyam ananta samapattibhyam”-- Through the balancing of effort and surrender in asana, one becomes absorbed in the infinite. To sum it up he says, II.48—“Tatah dvandva anabhigatah”—Then one is no longer disturbed by duality.

The practice of asana is a very concentrated experience of duality—the inhale and the exhale, the upward dog and the downward dog, the left side and the right side, forward bend and backward bend, standing pose and inversion, etc. In each asana, the challenge is to be both stable and at ease, to find appropriate effort and appropriate surrender. This is no easy task, and requires a great deal of attentiveness on the part of the practitioner. Amidst all the changing forms of the asanas, which could be called the dance of Prakrtti, what we are trying to do is connect to the thing within us that doesn’t change, the infinite self, or Purusha, the unconditioned awareness, which is our essential self. The Purusha is the Drastuh, the Seer that watches the dance of Prakrtti. In the realm of Prakrtti, everything is constantly changing. If we attach ourselves strongly to the manifestations of this realm, thinking that they will not change, then we are bound to suffer. The irony of asana practice is that we use a physical methodology to help us connect to a part of ourselves that isn’t physical, to teach us that, ultimately, “we are not the form we animate, but the force of animation itself.” (I came across this quote in a book I read many years ago, but I don’t remember the source)

Duality is certainly something that can be very disturbing—good and evil, darkness and light, stupidity and intelligence, cruelty and compassion, truth and falsehood, dharma and adharma, knowledge and ignorance, wealth and poverty, sickness and health, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, etc. The list is endless. Patanjali suggests that through our asana practice (we could think of all the asanas as metaphors for the different situations we encounter in life) we can begin to find the oneness that lies beneath the twoness, to discover that what we are looking for is the thing that’s doing the looking. As we begin to identify with the very source of consciousness within us it gives us a more balanced and detached perspective from which to observe the daily dance of duality. We can be in the world without being of the world, without being so reactive and stressed by the vicissitudes of day-to-day life. Many years ago when I was in Mysore, a Vedic astrologer told me, “Yoga will make you a human shock absorber.” Basically, what he was saying is that yoga helps us adapt to change.