Routine.What do we mean by routine? When we want to make routine, we want to do something on a regular basis, do something we think of as ‘good’ for us, often. Eat healthfully with regularity, exercise at least 4 times a week, or get to work on time…everyday.
Routine is also the list of what we do. The progression of exercises, the perfect yoga sequence. We seek these routines sometimes as if you knew the ‘right’ thing to do, you would do it more regularly. If you knew the ‘right’ things to eat you would not want that cookie. Really? We often think if we got it ‘right’ we would settle down and make it regular…like marriage. If I got the ‘right’ guy, I could live with him forever. And our market based economy tries to lure us into thinking that is all we have to do. We just have to get it ‘right’. Marketers created one hundred calories packs of cookies because they are supposed to have the satisfaction of a cookie with the calories of an apple, so it must be right. And that would be easy to make that routine, right? Each new exercise machine or video is marketed as if all you needed to do was get the right one and you would do it.
The other side of routine is the boredom. Once we have succeeded, and something becomes ‘routine’ we often lose interest, we just go through the motions, it’s no longer fun and we want to change our routine…that sequence is not doing it for us anymore. Those 100 calorie packs don’t taste that good after a while, they are ultimately NOT satisfying. And that husband, … well I’m not going there. Then we want to change it and we start all over again. Once we change it You need to search the right one again and then struggle to make it regular. We are back at square one! Yikes!
So what is it that makes a successful routine if it’s not simply the right routine, yoga or spinning, apple or cookie, right guy, which makes a successful routine?
Importance. One major factor is whatever we want to stick with must be important and meaningful to inspire a high level of commitment, to make what the wellness industry calls a ‘lifestyle shift’. And that importance, the special-ness does not necessarily depend on which thing we do, but in the meaning we give it. And we are the ones who must cultivate and assign that meaning. How important is it to you to take care of your body? And what does that mean to you?
Yet even when we think things are important, when we think we are committed, our routines are fragile. I have seen thousands of students over the years, with the best of intentions, let their class cards expire because one day it snowed, (and we live in Rochester!) Or they got a phone call just before they got in the car, or the studio changed the teacher, and poof, routine broken. Any excuse becomes the excuse to break the routine. The meaning that motivated you was muster up the motivation, to direct the energy, if you are even conscious of what you’re doing. We want commitment to ourselves, and yet how conscious is that commitment? We want commitment to what we know is good for us but how?
Bringing the routine into the realm of ritual
When you hear TV pundits say that doing good things for yourself takes a ‘lifestyle shift’, what are they trying to say? This shift is a way of saying that we need to take routine into the realm of ritual. Ritual is a celebration, something done to self-consciously mark a significance or special relationship. Yet most of the things we do in our lives on a daily basis we consider routine in the sense of the mundane, rather than a ritual celebration. When it’s something we ‘must’ do, we can see that obligation as burden. Even our rituals can become burdens, longing to get back to our every day routines. Have you never heard someone say, I can’t wait til this wedding, bar mitzvah, party, etc. is over. Seeing our everyday lives as ‘routine’ is a recipe for, dissatisfaction, drudgery, and disappointment in us. Shifting the perspective on our lives, making that ‘lifestyle shift’ can be taking the routine and making it ritual.
So what does it mean to make something ritual? We are a culture of few rituals and we have reduced down our rituals to be few and far between. Douglas Brooks always says, Americans do only ‘4 wheel ritual’. Most of our rituals require a set of special wheels: baby carriage, limousine, ambulance, hearse... Birthdays, Anniversaries, Bar Mitvahs, Confirmations and a few holidays are the only things we ritualize. On these occasions particular rituals are performed marking a certain important significance. Blowing out the candles on a cake is part of the birthday ritual. If you look at this list, one of the hallmarks of our rituals is it’s rarity, something has to be very occasional for our culture to consider it a ritual unless you are one of the rare ones who still attends weekly religious service.
Just making something more regular, more routine, isn’t the only thing we need to cultivate. Remember the Seinfeld episode where Elaine’s co-workers got a cake for every little excuse? They sang, with candled cake in hand, “Get well, get well soon, we want you to get well….”, because she called in sick the day before. Elaine got annoyed because of the dissimulation. They didn’t care, they just wanted cake… and then they got mad at Elaine for being the party pooper. In their desire for something special in their routine workday, they wanted to add ritual, but it was not a meaningful ritual, it was trying to establish a routine aimed at a particular goal…cake. The daily ritual of cake would supposed to get them through the drudgery of work!
The Fruit of our Actions. Going after the ‘fruits of our actions’, a main teaching in all yoga philosophies, will often fool you into thinking you are getting what you really want. Elaine’s co-workers didn’t want cake, they wanted some meaning and to feel the importance of their work. When we continually go after the fruits of our actions, all we get is frustration when that fruit does not deliver more than temporary satisfaction. It’s like going after the husband for the ring, and expecting the ring to give you the meaning, instead of the cultivation of the marriage. This gets really old when the ‘fruit’ is not as immediate as a cake or a present. We have turned so many rituals into the means for instantaneous gratification, rather than for the cultivation of meaning in our lives. Christmas becoming about the presents, is this same complaint.
This is what drives our economy. Yikes do we need a paradigm shift! But it is not the ‘fruits’ themselves, the presents, the ring, the cake, the husband, that are at fault. The shift that has to take place is in our thinking. They, as objects, cannot deliver things we simply hope they will. The objects, the fruit we aim for, the cake is not somehow inherently wrong or bad, but cake cannot, in and of itself, deliver a meaningful experience of your office job! The ring represents a promise. That promise is the opportunity to create a relationship of intimacy. That’s all marriage promises is the opportunity to create a deeper relationship. The ring does not give you the cultivated relationship. If you do yoga, you don’t get a different body, just the opportunity to have a relationship with the one you already have.
We must realize that if we are wrongly attributing our actions and their fruit. I spent years going from job to job hoping the next one would be the one that gave me satisfaction. I thought it was about finding a job I loved, then finding a noble job, then a fun job. All they were, was work…. Just jobs! There was nothing wrong with any of them when I looked at them as just jobs and not at the fruit of what I thought they were supposed to give. Instead of cultivating a relationship with what the job actually had to offer, I was focused on what I thought the job should offer. Jobs are an opportunity to explore your relationship with many things, money being a main one. In our culture, that’s what a job is essentially offering. But my dissatisfaction came from ignoring the essential relationship presented by what something is offering.
It is the same way in asana. If you go into yoga thinking it will give you a different body, slimmer figure, less stress, more energy, without cultivating the relationship with your body, all you’ll get is the desire to switch … to running, or spinning, weights, anything else. Anusara Yoga is the invitation, the opportunity asking you, “do you want to cultivate a relationship with your body” in ways other exercise systems are not, because they tend to focus on the fruit, rather than the relationship that is being offered.
Cultivation of a Relationship. Now let’s go back to thinking about the regularity, the idea of how to get to do it often. Instead of focusing on the need to do it regularly, focus on the fact that it is important to cultivate the relationship with whatever, in a healthful, regular way. I always tell new students to try to come to class at least 2 or 3 times a week to work your way into this new relationship. Once a week is not enough, and 6 times you will crash and burn. If you go on a date once a week for 6 months with a guy, you build up the relationship too slowly. You probably don’t really want a deeper relationship with this guy. If you don’t want a deeper relationship with your body, you may also only want to do yoga once a week for 6 months, But you’re already married to your body! Then sometimes you have whirlwind romances. You see each other almost every night for 2 or 3 weeks. Then one day you get a hold of yourself and see that you are completely exhausted, forgotten to pay the bills, you’ve lost yourself, and are being smothered.
In the body one way your relationship is cultivated is in the fact that your muscles build up memory. As you begin to imprint it on your body in the asana, your body starts to give back by remembering for you. You know when you remember how good it felt after that particular class? That’s your body reminding you it wants a relationship with you. And what happens is you will find yourself remembering to pay attention to your body, how you are standing or sitting at random moments of the day. Or you recognize the pain in your knee is a request to realign. As you nurture the relationship, the conversation grows, and you begin to understand what it’s trying to tell you.
Did you see the movie “50 First Dates”? Adam Sandler must woo Drew Barrymore into a first date every single day because she had an accident that prevents her memory from holding new information. This is what happens in your body when you come only once a week… or less. You have to start the relationship all over again! It takes years, but because Adam is so persistent in his desire for relationship, after a few years the memory of him begins to be established in her unconscious. In the end something in her knows that she loves him, but on the surface, she still forgets every day. This is our relationship with our bodies. Even though we are married, we can be so unconscious that it takes 50 first dates worth of commitment to establish the foundation for a good relationship. When we realize that our hearts desire is that relationship, we are willing to do what it takes to make it a relationship of conscious ease and recognition.
Yoga and Ritual. Now that we have established the importance of making the relationship the priority, let’s look at a different way to think of ritual so it we can open up what that word means to see how it can apply to our lives.
In yoga, rituals are not simply things you do at special occasions. Ritual is the self- conscious act of engagement, so that all occasions, each action is seen as an opportunity to be something meaningful. Ritual is the possibility of yoga. You can see any action as self-conscious engagement and in that way, marking it as significant. The idea of ritual is so primary in the Indian culture it is seen as the structure of life. Anything done routinely is important enough to be conscious of, to ritualize. Said another way, the significance of our lives comes from making self-conscious the things we do every day.
Unfortunately we tend to see ritual as the opposite of what we do everyday. The fabric of our lives is marked by the duality of the mundane vs. special. We see everyday dinner as mundane, and Thanksgiving as special. For cultures established in ritual, the creation of the everyday meal is an everyday ritual, and the Thanksgiving meal would be an occasional ritual, In this system, the Special meal does not make all other meals less significant, it is celebrating something else entirely. Making dinner every single day makes it more important, not less, and worth marking as significant. The meals we eat being the very fabric of our lives, and therefore sacred and worthy of conscious ritual.
When everything is ritual, everything is sacred and holidays are occasions for marking different significances, not the only important days in our lives. Categorizing the days of our lives into the mundane, the routine versus the ritualized special, is a set up for disappointment. If you see the everyday things we do as ritual, there is ‘special’ and ‘special’, for nothing is mundane in a world where everything is sacred. There is a difference when you see the underlying fabric of our lives as starting our special, sacred, an opportunity for ritual, for deeper engagement, rather than a series of routines marked only by the occasional occasion.
Starting from the premise that life is the opportunity to engage the invitations the universe has presented you, sets up being able to see the ritual in the routine. Recognizing what is special, important about what we do every day is the starting place for a deeper relationship with anything we choose to engage. If everything is sacred, we have to choose.
Yoga is engaging an action that allows you to create relationship. Ritual is an action that marks a particular significance, a particular relationship that can be cultivated. Yoga is the possibility of ritual, or making a conscious, special, sacred by marking significance and cultivating the relationship with that which you are engaging.
Asana is the ritual of the body. Yoga presents an opportunity for you to create a sacred relationship with your body. Why yoga is different than other exercise is in it’s premise. If the premise of life is that there are opportunities for engaging deeper in relationships, and asana is that opportunity in your body, regular exercise is often not that, in fact the opposite. Most gyms use music or television to actually distract you from your body so you just keep running on that treadmill! In a way it is the practice of dissociation with the body. Now I am not saying that everyone runs this way or exercises this way, not at all. There are plenty of people who seriously cultivate relationships with their bodies in a multitude of ways. But I pose to question so you can ask yourself.
Ritual, Priority and the Cultivation of Your Heart. We ritualize the things that you want a deeper relationship with. Your life is an offering of relationships, inviting you to a deeper experience of yourself. Because there are so many, you must prioritize. The questions you ask yourself, in order to prioritize, is an essential part your primary relationship, the one you have with yourself. Cultivating your desire, asking what you want, what you love, what makes your heart beat, literally what turns you on, is one of the ways we get to know ourselves. Any ‘lifestyle shift’, any ritual or routine is about priority first. What is important? is an important question, and perhaps the harder because in the land of freedom, there are so many choices. Like in a Greek Diner, choosing what you want from an 18 page menu can be overwhelming. Many things in our lives are not very different from that. Choosing which relationships are important takes knowing yourself and your preferences, your upeksha in Sanskrit. You love cycling, but don’t like hot yoga. To make routine, ritual, a fulfilling life, cultivating your heart, part of the relationship with yourself is the foundation for all other relationships. Many routines get interrupted and rituals uncultivated because you try so many things without asking yourself what you love first.
Commitment to anything comes from love, priority and cultivated importance. There are consequences to not dealing with some primary important relationships, your dharma. You say, “Oh, I’d rather not go to work, or pick up my husband from the airport tonight, I’d rather go to the movies”…… indicates re-prioritization is called for.
We have so many things that are important that we acquired unconsciously, not realizing that the relationship with them required cultivating. Our culture offers so many invitations, marketers are bombarding us with choices. In a free market society with everyone competing for your attention, choosing is difficult if you don’t know what’s important to you, and ritual comes only to things you consider really important.
For some, cultivating the relationship with the body is more like an occasional ritual, rather than a foundational primary everyday ritual. This is why it is difficult to make it routine. One of the foundational relationships in your life is not considered important, loved or a priority. Sometimes taking care of yourself and getting to yoga class can seem as remarkable and occasional as a surprise party. You don’t have to turn the mundane into the special, but see what is already special, what is important and cultivate those relationships. If the body is an important relationship for you, you will end up making a ritual for it, cultivating a deeper relationship with it, in the way you choose.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Thursday, May 28, 2009
The Anusara Invocation Part II: Interpretation
om
namah shivaya gurave
sachidananda murtaye
nishprapanchaya shantaya
niralambhaya tejase
So now that we know the experience of chanting in the process itself can be enough, just for fun let’s dive into the Sanskrit.
om – Many have defined ‘om’ as “the primordial sound of the universe”. But what does that mean? First, the symbol of Om that we are all familiar with is actually the devanagari script of the Sanskrit letters of the sound om. The letter ‘o’ is actually a contraction of the ‘a’ and ‘u’. So spelled out it would be a-u-m, the symbol being the combination of those 3 letters. The whole Sanskrit alphabet is a materialization of the creation of sound as it emanates from us. The breath coming up from the lungs, vibrating within the throat from the vocal chords and then more precise articulation as it moves from the back to the front of the mouth. Vowels come first as they are created just in the throat without involvement of the tongue, lips or teeth. Then consonants are made when they are involved. The sounds of each letter are composed as breath moves against the obstructions occur by a contracting throat, lilting and hammering tongue, teeth and lips.
Let’s look at the separate sounds themselves. ‘A’ – think “AH” like when your doctor tells you to open your mouth wide. It is the sound that emanates from us with the least amount of obstruction or contraction of the throat, tongue and lips. Move to any other letter and you will see that you have to firm or close down the throat or lips or move the tongue to make the sound. Consonants are made as the throat constricts and the tongue flexes and hits different parts of the mouth or if the lips come together. Check it out yourself. The most closed sound is of the letter M. So if you sound through A-U-M you move through the different constrictions to the full closure of the mouth with sound still emanating in MMMMMM. Then of course there is silence after the closure. So if the universe is made of a range of densities of vibration, the sound om is sounding out the entire universe through the emanation of the full range of sounds from a totally open throat to the closed lips, infinite in its creative potential.
namah – Namah means to bow or bend. The word bow, as in bow your head, has the same roots as “to bend.” When you think of someone bowing to someone else, there is an acknowledgement, a meeting, giving, bending and yielding. The root of the word “salute,” as in salutations, is the same root as for the word solid, to make whole. In this way, namah is to bend, bow or put yourself with someone in order to join with them in that meeting place. This acknowledgement is a recognition of the other, a yielding and allowing their presence so that they can be in the same place as you are – the act of connecting.
shivaya - When I first started chanting ,except for a few words, I knew no Sanskrit. The words I did know I learned from studying the art of India. I knew, or I thought I knew, who Shiva was – at that point he was simply the third god in the Hindu trinity, the destroyer…who comes after the creator, Brahma, and the sustainer, Vishnu. So when I looked at the translation in the chanting book and it said, “he was the auspicious guru who had taken the form of truth, consciousness and bliss,” and he was me, I was stymied. I could either dismiss this or look deeper. The word shiva literally means auspicious, favorable, happy, benevolent. How “auspicious, favorable, happy” can also be the “destroyer” is a very lengthy discussion for another lesson…so stay tuned. But Shiva is much more than these definitions. Shiva is the underlying, essential potential in everything, manifest and unmanifest. When Shiva is paired with Shakti, the energy of creativity, ‘auspicious’ things manifest. A simple example of this would be a river. Shiva is the water, the flow of the water is Shakti. Neither is possible without the other, but engaged in yoga, like your asana, you ,as Shiva are creating auspiciousness. Now go back to the invocation. The unmanifest essence of your desire would be shiva…the act of putting that desire into words would be the power of shakti, the manifestation, the creative power of the essence of things. Shakti is how that power manifests, infinite in form. Shiva is the upasana, Shakti is the avahana, weaving consciousness into myriad manifest forms.
gurave - this word is a form of the word guru which means heavy, weighty, great, large, venerable, respectable. The guru is the one heavy with knowledge. When you choose to learn something, you choose to learn from someone who is heavy with knowledge, the teacher. Think of the words gravitas , or gravity. So who is the teacher, the heavy? While we get knowledge from others, that knowledge does not ‘sink in’ unless there is something in us that recognizes it and receives it. When learning, we are presented with information, facts, concepts, formulas etc. We then take that information and in receiving it, we teach it to ourselves. We may take in some concepts more than others. We are constantly filtering what comes in and in that way everything we learn, we teach ourselves. We all have so many teachers, people we learn from or places we get ideas from. But the process of actual learning and recognition is dependent upon the degree to which we receive this information, hold it, let it sink in and become heavy with it. There is an endless diversity of gurus in our lives who come and go with different information, but ultimately we are always our own guru. And we are all each other’s teachers. You are a teacher, the one heavy with knowledge. What are you heavy in that interests you? What do you teach?
saccidnanada murtaye. First let’s look at murtaye. Murtaye means embodied form. Something that is murtaye is manifest, has shape. Statues of deities are called murtis in Sanskrit. This verse continues to describe Shiva and how the auspicious teacher, through yoking, or yoga, takes form.
sacchidananda – this one word is a compound of three words. The first is
Sat. When you look up ‘sat’ in the sanskrit dictionary it means ‘pure beingness, truth, true essence’. One way to think about the ‘essence of truth’ is like this: When you tell the truth, you speak what actually “is”. The veracity of your words is resonant with the true essential nature of your heart. The same frequency you feel in your heart is on the same frequency as what you are speaking. There is alignment. The farther you get from the truth in your heart, when you speak, the more dissonant the frequency. Like a polygraph test, the true essence does not resonate at the same frequency with what is in your heart and the distinction can be palpable. But this is also why we have different truths. The truth is what resonates with your heart.
cit. This word is often translated simply as ‘consciousness’. But what is consciousness? In the dictionary, consciousness is defined as, “to be capable of conscious awareness, to perceive, to fix the mind upon, be attentive, observe, take notice, to aim at, intend, care for, to be anxious about, to resolve, understand, comprehend, to form an idea in the mind, to be conscious of, to have the right notion of, to appear, be conspicuous, to remember, to have consciousness of, to shine, to treat medically, to cure.” Wow! The word conscious evolved from the root ‘skei’ which means to cut or split. Being conscious of something is to be able to separate it out from the morass of other things or thoughts, to distinguish one thing from another. This is how we learn. In the same way, to focus on something means that out of your field of perception, you are able to pick out one thing and become conscious of it. Out of the field of what do you perceive, what shines, what sparkles, what are you conscious of?
ananda means really delightful or bliss. This whole phrase, sacchidananda murtaye means the embodied ‘murtaye’ bliss of consciousness and truth. The bliss comes from the yoga of your consciousness mind with truth, your heart. Ananda becomes embodied when you make the yoga, when you weave the relationship between your mind, consciousness and your heart, your truth.
More often this phrase is explained that Brahman, Shiva, or your higher or ‘real’ nature, has a triad of qualities ‘truth, consciousness and bliss’ that need to be realized. But rather than thinking there is this ‘higher’ self and an enlightenment, this is the nature of yourself that is happening all the time. When yoked, cit, your minds consciousness, and sat, your hearts desire, bliss is there in the seam. The playful delight that we experience in myriad manifestations is the blissful dance of Shiva, ananda tandava. Bliss happens when your heart’s desire is woven you’re your consciousness.
nishprapanchaya means never not present. Prapancha is to be broken further into pieces. Most translate this idea of omnipresence as a part of us that self so essential to us that it cannot be broken down, taken away or in any way separated from us. Some call it the witness, the atma, Shiva, that is there no matter what, is never not present. But another way to think about it is this. Nisprapancha meaning unable to break down any further, our ‘essentialness’ is more like the fullness that is you, you cannot break apart. Think of all your emotions, every one. They are all always there. It’s not like you could separate them to not be part of you.
shantaya means full of peace. This goes with the nishprapancha part. So first because all the parts, they cannot be broken off, are Shiva are you. Every part of you is always there. The radical acceptance of your fullness, all of it every thought, action, emotion you have ever felt. When you get that it cannot be broken off, and embrace it all as part of you, this is peace.
niralambhaya – Siva, you, are self-supporting. This does not mean you don’t need anybody! What niralambhaya means is that the universe weaves itself out of it’s own power in the same way that your own body creates itself. Like I always say in class, you may have come here to get bigger or more flexible muscles, but it’s not like you pick them out and have them installed – you create them yourself. This is niralambha The very process of your own being creates and sustains itself. You create you.
tejase means the vital essence of illumination. The word tejas means the sharp edge of a knife, the tip of a flame, the glow or rays that emanate from fire. It means the brilliance of light that is emanated from things that shine. Fire emits light and heat – tejas is the light part of fire. You also burn emitting 98.6 degrees, and tejas! Shine on you crazy diamond!
om – I open up to all that is possible
namah shivaya gurave - I honor the benevolent and auspicious teacher
sacchidananda murtaye - whose form is the bliss of heart and mind aligned
nishprapanchaya shantaya - whose essential nature is peaceful in it’s fullness
niralambhaya tejase – who is self-creative and brilliant!
Yoga has so much to offer. It promises to give us the opportunity to recognize our identity, to cultivate our desire and to empower ourselves in the process of engagement. It freely invites us take in how much ever we want to receive. The invocation is a chance to take a moment in your day to recognize your practice of getting better at becoming yourself.
namah shivaya gurave
sachidananda murtaye
nishprapanchaya shantaya
niralambhaya tejase
So now that we know the experience of chanting in the process itself can be enough, just for fun let’s dive into the Sanskrit.
om – Many have defined ‘om’ as “the primordial sound of the universe”. But what does that mean? First, the symbol of Om that we are all familiar with is actually the devanagari script of the Sanskrit letters of the sound om. The letter ‘o’ is actually a contraction of the ‘a’ and ‘u’. So spelled out it would be a-u-m, the symbol being the combination of those 3 letters. The whole Sanskrit alphabet is a materialization of the creation of sound as it emanates from us. The breath coming up from the lungs, vibrating within the throat from the vocal chords and then more precise articulation as it moves from the back to the front of the mouth. Vowels come first as they are created just in the throat without involvement of the tongue, lips or teeth. Then consonants are made when they are involved. The sounds of each letter are composed as breath moves against the obstructions occur by a contracting throat, lilting and hammering tongue, teeth and lips.
Let’s look at the separate sounds themselves. ‘A’ – think “AH” like when your doctor tells you to open your mouth wide. It is the sound that emanates from us with the least amount of obstruction or contraction of the throat, tongue and lips. Move to any other letter and you will see that you have to firm or close down the throat or lips or move the tongue to make the sound. Consonants are made as the throat constricts and the tongue flexes and hits different parts of the mouth or if the lips come together. Check it out yourself. The most closed sound is of the letter M. So if you sound through A-U-M you move through the different constrictions to the full closure of the mouth with sound still emanating in MMMMMM. Then of course there is silence after the closure. So if the universe is made of a range of densities of vibration, the sound om is sounding out the entire universe through the emanation of the full range of sounds from a totally open throat to the closed lips, infinite in its creative potential.
namah – Namah means to bow or bend. The word bow, as in bow your head, has the same roots as “to bend.” When you think of someone bowing to someone else, there is an acknowledgement, a meeting, giving, bending and yielding. The root of the word “salute,” as in salutations, is the same root as for the word solid, to make whole. In this way, namah is to bend, bow or put yourself with someone in order to join with them in that meeting place. This acknowledgement is a recognition of the other, a yielding and allowing their presence so that they can be in the same place as you are – the act of connecting.
shivaya - When I first started chanting ,except for a few words, I knew no Sanskrit. The words I did know I learned from studying the art of India. I knew, or I thought I knew, who Shiva was – at that point he was simply the third god in the Hindu trinity, the destroyer…who comes after the creator, Brahma, and the sustainer, Vishnu. So when I looked at the translation in the chanting book and it said, “he was the auspicious guru who had taken the form of truth, consciousness and bliss,” and he was me, I was stymied. I could either dismiss this or look deeper. The word shiva literally means auspicious, favorable, happy, benevolent. How “auspicious, favorable, happy” can also be the “destroyer” is a very lengthy discussion for another lesson…so stay tuned. But Shiva is much more than these definitions. Shiva is the underlying, essential potential in everything, manifest and unmanifest. When Shiva is paired with Shakti, the energy of creativity, ‘auspicious’ things manifest. A simple example of this would be a river. Shiva is the water, the flow of the water is Shakti. Neither is possible without the other, but engaged in yoga, like your asana, you ,as Shiva are creating auspiciousness. Now go back to the invocation. The unmanifest essence of your desire would be shiva…the act of putting that desire into words would be the power of shakti, the manifestation, the creative power of the essence of things. Shakti is how that power manifests, infinite in form. Shiva is the upasana, Shakti is the avahana, weaving consciousness into myriad manifest forms.
gurave - this word is a form of the word guru which means heavy, weighty, great, large, venerable, respectable. The guru is the one heavy with knowledge. When you choose to learn something, you choose to learn from someone who is heavy with knowledge, the teacher. Think of the words gravitas , or gravity. So who is the teacher, the heavy? While we get knowledge from others, that knowledge does not ‘sink in’ unless there is something in us that recognizes it and receives it. When learning, we are presented with information, facts, concepts, formulas etc. We then take that information and in receiving it, we teach it to ourselves. We may take in some concepts more than others. We are constantly filtering what comes in and in that way everything we learn, we teach ourselves. We all have so many teachers, people we learn from or places we get ideas from. But the process of actual learning and recognition is dependent upon the degree to which we receive this information, hold it, let it sink in and become heavy with it. There is an endless diversity of gurus in our lives who come and go with different information, but ultimately we are always our own guru. And we are all each other’s teachers. You are a teacher, the one heavy with knowledge. What are you heavy in that interests you? What do you teach?
saccidnanada murtaye. First let’s look at murtaye. Murtaye means embodied form. Something that is murtaye is manifest, has shape. Statues of deities are called murtis in Sanskrit. This verse continues to describe Shiva and how the auspicious teacher, through yoking, or yoga, takes form.
sacchidananda – this one word is a compound of three words. The first is
Sat. When you look up ‘sat’ in the sanskrit dictionary it means ‘pure beingness, truth, true essence’. One way to think about the ‘essence of truth’ is like this: When you tell the truth, you speak what actually “is”. The veracity of your words is resonant with the true essential nature of your heart. The same frequency you feel in your heart is on the same frequency as what you are speaking. There is alignment. The farther you get from the truth in your heart, when you speak, the more dissonant the frequency. Like a polygraph test, the true essence does not resonate at the same frequency with what is in your heart and the distinction can be palpable. But this is also why we have different truths. The truth is what resonates with your heart.
cit. This word is often translated simply as ‘consciousness’. But what is consciousness? In the dictionary, consciousness is defined as, “to be capable of conscious awareness, to perceive, to fix the mind upon, be attentive, observe, take notice, to aim at, intend, care for, to be anxious about, to resolve, understand, comprehend, to form an idea in the mind, to be conscious of, to have the right notion of, to appear, be conspicuous, to remember, to have consciousness of, to shine, to treat medically, to cure.” Wow! The word conscious evolved from the root ‘skei’ which means to cut or split. Being conscious of something is to be able to separate it out from the morass of other things or thoughts, to distinguish one thing from another. This is how we learn. In the same way, to focus on something means that out of your field of perception, you are able to pick out one thing and become conscious of it. Out of the field of what do you perceive, what shines, what sparkles, what are you conscious of?
ananda means really delightful or bliss. This whole phrase, sacchidananda murtaye means the embodied ‘murtaye’ bliss of consciousness and truth. The bliss comes from the yoga of your consciousness mind with truth, your heart. Ananda becomes embodied when you make the yoga, when you weave the relationship between your mind, consciousness and your heart, your truth.
More often this phrase is explained that Brahman, Shiva, or your higher or ‘real’ nature, has a triad of qualities ‘truth, consciousness and bliss’ that need to be realized. But rather than thinking there is this ‘higher’ self and an enlightenment, this is the nature of yourself that is happening all the time. When yoked, cit, your minds consciousness, and sat, your hearts desire, bliss is there in the seam. The playful delight that we experience in myriad manifestations is the blissful dance of Shiva, ananda tandava. Bliss happens when your heart’s desire is woven you’re your consciousness.
nishprapanchaya means never not present. Prapancha is to be broken further into pieces. Most translate this idea of omnipresence as a part of us that self so essential to us that it cannot be broken down, taken away or in any way separated from us. Some call it the witness, the atma, Shiva, that is there no matter what, is never not present. But another way to think about it is this. Nisprapancha meaning unable to break down any further, our ‘essentialness’ is more like the fullness that is you, you cannot break apart. Think of all your emotions, every one. They are all always there. It’s not like you could separate them to not be part of you.
shantaya means full of peace. This goes with the nishprapancha part. So first because all the parts, they cannot be broken off, are Shiva are you. Every part of you is always there. The radical acceptance of your fullness, all of it every thought, action, emotion you have ever felt. When you get that it cannot be broken off, and embrace it all as part of you, this is peace.
niralambhaya – Siva, you, are self-supporting. This does not mean you don’t need anybody! What niralambhaya means is that the universe weaves itself out of it’s own power in the same way that your own body creates itself. Like I always say in class, you may have come here to get bigger or more flexible muscles, but it’s not like you pick them out and have them installed – you create them yourself. This is niralambha The very process of your own being creates and sustains itself. You create you.
tejase means the vital essence of illumination. The word tejas means the sharp edge of a knife, the tip of a flame, the glow or rays that emanate from fire. It means the brilliance of light that is emanated from things that shine. Fire emits light and heat – tejas is the light part of fire. You also burn emitting 98.6 degrees, and tejas! Shine on you crazy diamond!
om – I open up to all that is possible
namah shivaya gurave - I honor the benevolent and auspicious teacher
sacchidananda murtaye - whose form is the bliss of heart and mind aligned
nishprapanchaya shantaya - whose essential nature is peaceful in it’s fullness
niralambhaya tejase – who is self-creative and brilliant!
Yoga has so much to offer. It promises to give us the opportunity to recognize our identity, to cultivate our desire and to empower ourselves in the process of engagement. It freely invites us take in how much ever we want to receive. The invocation is a chance to take a moment in your day to recognize your practice of getting better at becoming yourself.
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.
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.
Thursday, November 27, 2008
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