Practice, Practice, Practice and Non-Attachment

Abhyasavairagyabhyam tannirodhah, sutra 1.12, was the topic of the very first yoga class I ever taught. I always liked this simple recipe. The restraint of this mindstuff (referring back to 1.2 and the last sutras with their descriptions of the fluctuations) happens through practice (abhyasa) and non-attachment (vairagya). You have to work hard and at the same time not be attached to the outcome. So, for instance, I now have a yard and I get to plant things. I have spent a lot of time digging and weeding and picking out plants, knowing full well that they may or may not do well. This is going to be a learning process. My mind wouldn’t be calm if I were attached to having a beautiful garden on the first try—every time a leaf turns brown or a plant looks wilty, I would get upset. I also don’t think my mind would be calm if I decided not to work in the yard at all because I don’t really know what I’m doing. There is a lot of frustration in not taking action. (Plus, really this isn’t really non-attachment because I still have an expectation of how things should go and that’s what I’m basing my decision on). To take action and not know is practice and non-attachment.

There is another sutra at the beginning of the second chapter that is very similar to this one. It lists three ingredients instead of two: tapah (effort), svadhyaya (self-study) and ishvara pranidhana (surrender). I have always thought that Patanjali put an extra step in, in case we weren’t getting it with just the two. What occurred to me recently is that really this is a clarification of practice. Practice is not just working or putting in effort. What actually makes it practice is the inclusion of self-study. Practice is something we do over time, observing what happens, so that we can make adjustments and improve. So if I plant the garden and everything dies, I look at what I did and see what I can do differently and then I try again. (Effort + self-study = practice)

I was recently at a Vedic chant training and there was a lot of abhyasa and vairagya. Vedic chanting is very precise and there are a lot of things to pay attention to—the notes, the vowels, the double consonants, the tongue position, the way the phrases link together, etc. So it is all about practice. We chant and listen and refine and listen and do it again and again—we practice. For me the non-attachment is about not getting attached to the idea of being “done” with a chant (“oh, I’ve got that one now, I don’t need to work on it anymore) and not attaching meaning to whether or not I did it well or made mistakes (i.e., it doesn’t mean anything about me if I was the “best” or “worst” one on a certain chant). And guess what? Non-attachment takes practice! For me, the practice of non-attachment on the training was harder than the practice of the chant itself.

So, speaking of chanting, you can hear me chanting this sutra on SoundCloud. Once you are there, you can find all the other sutras before this as well.

For more info about therapy and yoga with Stephanie, go to www.seattlesomatictherapy.com

Is It Real or Is It Memorex?

EEGADS!  It has been longer than a long time since I have posted. I recently moved and I had forgotten how much of an interruption it is to a person’s regular life. Between the packing and the moving and the unpacking and the building of IKEA furniture, it takes a while. We are still not even close to done, but I have now spent quite a while with sutra 1.11 and am ready to move on, so I am making time today.

Anubhuta vishaya asampramoshah smrtih translates roughly as “An experienced object not lost is memory.” So the fifth mental activity is memory, quite a thing to be contemplating during a move, I’ll tell you. As you know, moving is a good time for getting rid of stuff. For me, this time around, it’s books and clothes. Sometimes, I am able to take a top out of the closet and say to myself, “I am never going to wear this again.” That would be pramana, correct perception or right knowledge—that is the truth of my current experience looking at the object. That always feels good and makes action easy. Sometimes, I take a top out and visualize a situation in which I would wear it—that is imagination. I am looking at the object, then creating something in my mind and then I base my actions on something not really real. Sometimes, I take a top out and think about the period in my life or a certain event when I wore it—that is memory. I am looking at the object and then going in my mind to something in the past that is not actually present and, again, base my actions on something not "real."

When we get confused between the actual object in the present moment and our associations to the object, that is a form of viparyaya or misperception. This is one of the big things that makes it hard to let things go and in its extreme form can lead to hoarding. This week, I have been trying to set up our bookshelves. We got rid of some shelves, so as I unpacked more and more books, I started to see there might not be enough room for all the books (though I did get rid of a few bags of books as well) and I started looking around to see where we could put more shelves. Then my husband brought home a whole bunch of books that had been in our storage unit. When I saw those, I suddenly had a moment of pramana and said to myself, “Enough is enough, I just need to get rid of some of these books.”

When I look realistically at the books, many of them are there because of memory. I have a large number of poetry books from my poetry days. When I look at them, I think of my writing teacher and father figure, Jack Grapes, and that whole period of my life, the formative experiences in class, doing readings, my friends and fellow poets. That’s memory—I am recalling something that is not present right now. And I have a feeling that if I sell the books, I am letting go of all that also. That is misperception—I am mistaking the objects for the memories. The truth is that while there are some books on the shelf that I refer to over and over, like Raymond Carver or Robert Hass, there are others that I’m not sure I have ever read at all. I think separating memory from the books themselves is going to help me let go of a lot.  That part of my life will always be part of my life and part of who I am, but it is also in the past. It is okay for that to be in the past.

So, just like the other mental activities, memory is not good or bad in itself. It can be really helpful—how would we even live if we couldn’t recall things we learned or experienced before? Who would we be without memory? And when we aren’t aware of when the mind is participating in memory, then it causes difficulty. 

I have had a lot of other thoughts about memory in the last couple months, but the one other thing I'll say now is something I heard my SE teacher, Steve Hoskinson, say: memory is personal not historical. We don't remember things as they were, we just remember them how we remember them. Now that's a good thing to remember!