The Anusara Invocation Part I: The process of Invocation

om
namah shivaya gurave
sacchidananda murtaye
nishprapanchaya shantaya
niralambhaya tejase

Almost every week an Anusara Yoga student from another part of the country comes to my class. When they say they do Anusara, I’m certain of two things: First, they will know the Anusara principles. Every Anusara teacher has to go through rigorous training in the bio-mechanics of the body. Often I know their teachers personally, but I always know how they have been trained. The second thing I am sure of is that every student of Anusara, no matter where they are from, will know the Anusara invocation. We may have just met, but when we sit down together, our voices will blend – we know the same tune, the same words, no matter how badly we may mispronounce Sanskrit. As we chant we are a collective, part of a worldwide kula, a community, held together in the invocation. But at the same time, chanting the invocation is the most personal, private part of a yoga class. So why do we “invoke” and what do the Sanskrit words mean?

To explore the invocation we will look first at the word ‘invoke’. The very words we use to describe our actions contain a fullness of meaning. Words evolved as human beings assigned meaning to them. Exploring etymologies gives us an opportunity to see how meanings evolved. As we look deeper at the words we are able to contemplate our actions and our participation in them becomes meaningful.

So invoke – invocare in Latin. Literally it means to put into voice – in-voc – voc as in vocal, and as in the word for speech in Sanskrit, vac. More simply, it can mean to call. When you call, you are making a request, giving voice to a desire. But with ‘invoke’ there is difference. We wouldn’t use the word invoke when we are talking about phoning a friend, or ordering at a restaurant. We use the word ‘as’ when we mean material objects or specific actions to manifest. We use ‘invoke’ to mean the summoning forth of the power that enlivens or creates those objects or actions. You invoke the power of your breath to create the actions, the power of the law. And you invoke the power of clarification of ideas to understand the meaning of your actions.

In class, before we chant the invocation we pause and ask ourselves to form an intention, what we want to focus on for the class. We go into our hearts to ask how we want this class, this theme, to be meaningful to us. In this way, we can each have a very personal, individual meaning attached to the same theme, the same class. We then take our focus and bring it into our voice, from head and heart through our breath and into sound. The subtle becomes manifest. We put our own personal meaning into our voice as we chant and call for our intention to be manifest.

We use Sanskrit words as a vehicle for the meaning of our own personal intention. We can’t all call out our individual intentions simultaneously, that would be just a cacophony of noise. We chant together the same Sanskrit words with the same tune and our communal chant allows us each to call out what is privately in our hearts. The personal meanings and desires are carried in our shared voices.

The process of the chant: upasana and avahana
In Sanskrit, avahana is one of the words meaning ‘invocation’. Avahana means to send out for and to bring near. Avahana is the expression of your desire and your call for it to be manifest. As with “invoke,” it is you giving voice to your desire and expressing it from the inside out, asking for it to be drawn toward you. It is the same in our voices as it is in our bodies. Going inside to contemplate is like muscular energy, and then we organically express out with the sound of our voice. The drawing in is called upasana. Upasana is what comes before and after avahana. You draw inside to explore the nature of your desire, upasana, in order to express out, avahana. The avahana then presents the opportunity to muscularly draw in again in -- upasana. Yoga is about doing both, fully. Going inside to recognize what’s in your heart is just half of it. Expressing that desire out then creates a circuit, a connection. The sound in the avahana carries the power of your desire. The energy of your desire is turned into sound or speech, in this case in the form of mantra. So to invoke is to ask, to make a desire known, to initiate a conversation with the energy of your desire.

When I was a child I went to church every Sunday. I had absolutely no idea what I was singing at all. Nothing was ever explained, but the act of singing still had a huge effect on me – it still brought me to a place inside where I could feel my own heart. It was the remembrance of this experience that actually led me to yoga in the first place. The very first time I went to a chant, I was actually looking for a place where I could learn to meditate: I wanted to get back to my heart. A friend asked me to go with her to a chant, and it sounded like a good idea because I had always carried with me the memory of the feeling I got when I sang. I had absolutely no idea what I was chanting that night either. But when I first opened my mouth I went so deep inside. After a while, I was so at rest in meditation I couldn’t chant anymore and I meditated for the rest of the chant, about an hour. There is a power in chanting that has nothing to do with the meaning of the words. Just the desire for more meaning can give you an experience of the heart.

Then sometimes we can’t get in touch with what is in our hearts desire at all, and our invocation feels empty and meaningless. We are just going through the motions of speaking the words. In the same way, sometimes we don’t feel like coming to class, but by just showing up, just by chanting the words and going through the motions, whether it be in chanting or in asana practice, something happens and we are brought to a deeper experience of ourselves – we find the meaning is there waiting for us to recognize it. The avahana can come first and bring us to an experience of upasana. In other words, if you really can’t access the feeling of what it is that you desire, the act of expressing yourself, of chanting the invocation, can take you to your heart’s desire.