It’s been a while since I’ve written here. After I stepped back from teaching yoga regularly, writing about the sutras and reflecting here in this format quickly fell down off the priority list. This will be a super quick update to tie up the loose end for those of you who were enjoying reading these letters :)

My wife and I are expecting our second kiddo mid 2026, and as a result I’ve been leaning hard into this new role as a father. Turns out there isn’t much energy left after chasing around a 15 month old psycho boy! Big surprise right?

Anyways, I’m now very aware of my own mortality and the fact I can only achieve so many things in my increasingly short remaining lifetime. Teaching yoga the way I was and writing like this will one day come back into a central role I feel, but for now I’ll be focusing on growing my business to support my growing family.

Here’s the fun synchronicity!

One of my new clients in these last months is an incredible yoga teacher named Josh Blatter. He teaches live at various studios in North County SD, but what I’ve been doing with him is supporting the growth of his new YouTube channel where he makes videos discussing yoga philosophy in a very grounded, candid, and deeply insightful yet practical way.

All I’ll say at this point is that I’m strongly aligned with his attitude towards this practice and the way he’s chosen to drive it forward with his channel is something I feel very good about supporting.

This is his latest video ↙️

If you enjoyed reading my letters here, I’m sure you’ll enjoy this video.

Final Recommendation ~

Josh does an annual online seminar on the sutras. Safe to say it’ll be much more detailed and clear than my own rather raw and random reflections I’ve written here.

The dude has been teaching for 20 years and has worked with the United Nations on yoga-related international peace initiatives. Super legit.

This is the link to sign up for it.

Starts January 8th.

And here’s the link to subscribe to Josh’s YouTube channel. I’m helping him write scripts, produce visuals, and optimize his growth from the backend. If ever there was a media format worth supporting, this seems to be it!

It meant a lot to me that you all took the time to read these writings and support me in all the ways you have. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, and I wish you strength, heart, and wisdom on the continued path of practice, however it turns out to be as life unfolds 🙏

Here’s my new website too, in case curious to see what I’ve been up to. The mobile version isn’t quite finished, but gets the point across still!

https://www.snapjackstudios.com/

प्रच्छर्दनविधारणाभ्यां वा प्राणस्य

Pracchardana vidhāraṇābhyāṁ vā prāṇasya

"Or by exhaling and retaining the breath."

This sutra is part of a sequence where Patanjali discusses different methods for calming the fluctuations of mind. The "or" (vā) in this sutra connects it to previous techniques mentioned in sutras 1.32-1.33, which include:

• [Mantras] ‘focusing on a single principle or truth’ (1.32)

• [Attitude] ‘cultivating friendliness to the happy, compassion for the suffering, joy towards the virtuous, and equanimity towards the wicked’ (1.33)

So when Patanjali says "or by exhaling and retaining the breath," he's adding this specific breath instruction as another option in his toolkit for stilling the fluctuations of the mind.

Hold up. Does this really belong on it’s own amidst the handful of techniques for achieving stillness of mind? Exhale, hold your breath. That’s it?

Breaking Unconscious Patterns

We are creatures of pattern and habit. Our nervous systems evolved to seek pleasure (bring in good), avoid pain (remove bad), and conserve energy by automating as much as possible (do it easier). This automation does serve us well in countless ways. Imagine if you had to consciously control each muscle contraction involved in walking or consciously regulate your heartbeat…there’d be no space in the brain for philosophy and definitely no art being made.

But this same automation becomes problematic when it extends beyond basic survival into our more complex consumption patterns. Even now, hundreds of years past the point where basic survival was no longer the primary driver for the majority of humans on the planet, we still generally are living in perpetual cycles of desire and fulfillment.

In many ways, even here (especially here?) in one of the wealthiest parts of one of the wealthiest nations, we can be found constantly chasing the next moment of satisfaction. Even in the aspects of our lives that seem conscious (career, family, studies) that underlying drive to repeat pleasure and avoid pain can quietly characterize the intention behind whatever action you take. This shows most gruesomely in our incessant drive to FILL every moment with something—food, information, entertainment, interaction, new experiences, etc. When was the last time you just sat and stared at the wall (without being hammered or otherwise under the influence) and didn’t come away thinking what a loser you were?

Patanjali's deceptively simple instruction about the exhale points to an alternative modality of existence. When we exhale completely and pause before the next inhale, we're practicing something that is subtly quite profound: the ability to be present with emptiness.

The simple act of exhaling completely and then pausing - even for a few seconds - before allowing the next inhale, is a radical departure from the typical pattern of existence. You’re making the statement: "I don't need to immediately satisfy this next ingrained urge."

Now that’s radical.

The Space Between Stimulus and Response

Viktor Frankl famously wrote: "Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response."

Discussions of free will aside, this is precisely what Patanjali is pointing us towards. When you exhale and hold, you're creating a visceral and extended experience of that space - a gap between the stimulus (the urge to breathe in) and the response (taking that breath). You're practicing the fundamental skill of non-reactivity.

In that gap lies probably the truest sense of freedom. Even if it’s just for a brief tiny little moment, creating that space intentionally helps us to develop what the yogis call viveka (discernment) - the ability to choose our actions rather than being driven by unconscious patterns.

At the end of the day we obviously need to keep breathing, eating, and engaging with life. I don’t recommend holding your breath for longer than is comfortable. I don’t recommend forgoing food indefinitely (although there is a growing body of research pointing to the benefits of less rigid food intake schedules). But given the way things are in the world, taking a conscious pause can:

(a) disrupt the automatic patterns we tend to fall in over time

(b) simply remind us who’s in command.

From Breath to Life

As Alan Watts points out in one of his more famous discourses: the breath is unique as an object of meditation because it happens either way. If you choose to do it, you breathe. If you don't choose to do it, you breathe.

This makes the experience of breathing into the perfect laboratory for developing presence and choice. The aim is simple really: do it consciously, for longer. The practice does not exist in a vacuum. Its a training ground to cultivate the capacity for sustained conscious attention. Take the format, and apply it to other areas of your life.

• Food consumption: be honest…when is it ever a rational decision to eat ice cream? Go ahead, eat the damn sundae. But notice how it makes you feel. Is the second bite as good as the first? Is the third?

• Digital consumption: real talk…do you really need to look at your phone while you poop? why is it so painful to sit at a restaurant alone and not look at your phone?

• Emotional reactions: instead of immediately honking and flipping the bird, watch what happens in your body when someone cuts you off and wonder how it is that you can even notice this sensation happening in your space of awareness.

The exhale and hold practice teaches us that we can survive - even thrive - in that space of emptiness. Just as our lungs can remain empty for a time before needing the next breath, we can still be present and deeply engaged with life without immediately satisfying every desire that arises in our being.

The Middle Path

It's important to note that this sutra isn't about excessive austerity. The Jainists go to extremes here, breathing super shallow and soft during meditation for fear of harming microorganisms in the air around them as they sit. The Stoics are so fascinated with delaying pleasure that the delaying itself becomes a pleasurable act. Wim Hof hiked Everest in shorts to prove that the cold weather didn’t need to force him into using sensible gear 🤣.

The yogic approach is to seek the middle path - not indulgence in every impulse, but also not complete denial of our humanity. You cannot hold that breath forever, nor will you manage to live forever by any result of these practices. It's about finding conscious engagement between the extremes of unconscious consumption and rigid self-denial.

The hardcore fasting and austere zen meditation retreats of the world can be super useful, don’t get me wrong. Much in the same way that getting back to the gym after a long absence can jolt you back into regular exercise, realizing on a hardcore meditation retreat that you actually can survive and function quite well without eating every 4 hours might just punch through the narratives of weakness and dependency that keep us all chained down to our precious routines.

Create Moments of Pause

Even without extreme practices, we can find these small moments of conscious pause throughout our day. The sutra's wisdom isn't in asking us to hold our breath until we turn blue - it's inviting us to notice the automatic nature of our existence and introduce just enough space to make conscious choice possible.

Like a dripping faucet that eventually becomes a steady stream, these moments of pause and presence can transform from isolated occurrences into a sustained state of awareness. With practice, what begins as occasional conscious interruptions to our automatic patterns gradually becomes our default way of being in the world.

By cultivating attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion for the unhappy, delight in the virtuous, and equanimity toward the non-virtuous, the mind becomes purified and peaceful.

This sutra might sound a bit like that modern post-Freudian pop psychology “relationship advice” you can get from any WalMart checkout line bookshelf, but it's actually quite different. It’s not about getting people to like you or changing how others treat you.

It's about maintaining your own peace no matter what type of person walks into your life.

Remember that this sutra is presented amidst a set of several sutras themed as discussing tools for calming the mind despite external circumstances, like breath focus and mantras. We live in an era characterized by densely populated urban centers where you can't go more than five minutes without encountering another human. Seriously, try it. Go and sit somewhere in north county on a bench and wait. I bet it won’t be more than 5 minutes, no matter what time or day or which day of the week, that another human comes through your space in some way. E-bikes whizzing by, planes buzzing overhead, people FaceTiming their mom on the sidewalk…there are bagillions of humans out here, all smushed into one area by the coast. We are bound to bump into each other frequently.

There are plenty of these “all types of people boil down to X categories, do Y and Z to master them all” sort of things. If you watched the new season of Severance earlier this year you may remember the ones Kier came up with 😁). This is not the same vibe here though, from Mr. Patanjali. Let me explain.

Why most “how to deal with people” advice misses the point

Most relationship advice treats interactions as means to an end: "Be this way or that way to get what you want." There are countless inspirational quotes about not being run over by others, and sure, many people need that support in this day and age. We do live in a world where the biggest people still win — just now it's financial and intellectual strength instead of physical that determines who owns the town.

But this sutra isn't about manipulating outcomes. It's not another "four types of people" psychology framework where you use the right technique to get good results from everyone.

This is about maintaining your inner peace regardless of what energy other people bring into your space. The way you do it is by determining your attitude towards them.

The Four Keys to Mental Freedom

The ideas in this sutra are often spoken of as “keys” to “unlock” the mental disturbances that different people create in our lives. When someone interacts with you, their energy shows up in your space one way or another, and whether literally or figuratively, it can "hook" it onto yours in some meaningful sense. Without the right key to unlock those chains, you'll get weighed down over time.

And this applies to positive interactions too, not just negative ones. Here are the keys:

1. Friendliness → Happy People

The Challenge: Happy people are generally unproblematic, right? But what about when you aren’t happy yourself? When you encounter happy people while you're not feeling great, comparison can kick in pretty hard. You might think "shut up, you're disturbing my dark emo vibe, there’s no reason to be so damn happy can’t you see how terrible things are?" or maybe you just start analyzing why they don't deserve their happiness or anticipating when it will end.

The Key: Stay friendly without needing to change your own state. Their happiness isn't your happiness. You don't need to match them, take from them, or give them more. Being friendly simply means you allow them to carry on as they are. A friendly neighbor waves at you when you walk by regardless of if they just won the lottery or if they just got back from their mother’s funeral. It’s established that we recognize each other and move on. Share in their vibe if you want, but you can just say goodbye to friends when you want to go back to your life, right?

What's yours is yours, what's theirs is theirs. Be friendly, but don't expect any uptick or downtick in your own happiness as a result. Happy people will usually respond with friendliness if you give them a genuine smile, but you're allowed to stay in whatever state you're in too.

2. Compassion → Suffering People

The Challenge: It’s sneakily easy to assume that if we witness someone's suffering, we are responsible for fixing it in some way.

The Key: Compassion. Sometimes people need to experience what they're experiencing. Help if you're truly capable without compromising your ability to stay afloat yourself, but don't let their suffering become a distraction from your own experiences. Compassion is an attitude, not an action. It does not require you to do anything about what you see, other than recognize it as suffering and have awareness enough to not add more, at least.

Consider the drowning person analogy: If you're not a trained lifeguard and someone is drowning, going to them is only likely to create two drowning people. Stay afloat yourself, offer encouragement from where you are, but don't let them pull you under.

The sneakier side of this is when seeing suffering people triggers mental loops: "It's stupid that people are homeless... I hate the government... I wish someone would do something..." In a literal sense, that's their existence becoming an inconvenience to you and a distraction from your own peace. Over time that can warp into disregard, disdain, and annoyance.

Accept the reality that they're there without understanding why, then move on or take pointed action later based on your capabilities.

3. Delight → Virtuous People

The Challenge: We love to see heroes rise and fall. When someone displays virtue or achieves something, we either mentally tear them down or become obsessed with worshipping them.

The Key: Celebrate virtue briefly and genuinely, then move on. If your mind gets pulled into their situation for longer than a quick "that's awesome," you've probably lost your peace / focus on your own work.

We're drawn to both success and failure stories — even anti-heroes and villains like the Joker have become quite popular lately because people relate to their taking action against big forces in life that they feel powerless before. But when you see someone displaying virtue or being recognized for virtuous action, recognize yourself that you truly don't know if they worked their whole life for that moment or just two minutes. You also don't know if they'll ever be noticed for it again.

Celebrate that there are people out there getting it right as human beings, then focus back on building those same characteristics in your own life and community. Don't spend your awareness worshipping someone else instead of developing yourself. It’s great that anyone, anywhere, anytime, ever actually “gets it right”.

4. Equanimity → Non-Virtuous People

The Challenge: This is hardest for us as Americans. Part of our national identity since World War 2 is thinking we need to fight every injustice, fix every wrong person, or get revenge when mistreated (traces back more to the honor-based societies of the South, and European fiefdoms before them).

The Key: Accept that non-virtuous people exist without letting them disturb your inner peace. Nobody is keeping score (at least no one we can be assured that we are in agreement with on that score in the logical Hamurabian way our rational minds tend to work). There's no cosmic debt that needs settling by you.

Someone cuts you off in traffic? React in the moment if needed — beep at them, let them know the infraction, then let it go completely. Don't think about it afterward, don't speed up to "make up the ground," and don't carry that energy forward. The moment you think "something is owed to me because of what they did," you've lost your peace.

You can't murder all the unvirtuous people. You can't be the vigilante Batman fighting all the bad guys. And even if you are Bruce Wayne, remember the sacrifices he ultimately bore as a result of his choices.

Peace is not passive.

This sutra isn't a formula for becoming emotionless or disconnected. It's about recognizing that you don't need to change based on other people's states of being. You can interact appropriately with whatever type of person appears while staying present in your own experience.

The goal isn't to master other people — it's to master yourself.

Take command of your own responses so that your peace remains unshakeable regardless of who comes through your door. In a sense, it’s the only piece of the whole equation you truly have any agency over at all.

Often instructors would sit there at the start of class talking about “the breath” as if it was some kind of sacred mystical force.

During class it would get even more abstract.

Feel the stretch in your hamstring, and send your breathe down into it.

— I’m like: ‘Wtf does that even mean?! How do you breath into anything but your lungs?’

Frankly, I’m still suspicious that teacher’s talking so much about the breath just means they don’t have anything else to say.

But truly, that’s ok. Because calling attention to the breath is the most elemental form of yoga instruction and practice. Plain and simple.

Training your attention down onto the breath first is the foundation for accurately perceiving any additional information you might witness during your practice.

This isn’t a hack or some form of esoteric wisdom. It’s just a really, really, really simple way to bring the spotlight of your mind’s focus into your physical experience.

The reason for doing that is also really simple: what good are the sensations that taking an asana creates if you aren’t paying attention to them?

Here are the sutras that brought this full-circle understanding out for me:

30

Vyādhi-styāna-saṁśaya-pramāda-ālasyā-avirati-bhrānti-darśana-alabdhabhūmikatva-anavasthitatvāni cittavikṣepāḥ te antarāyāḥ

The distractions of the mind that act as obstacles (antarāyāḥ) to yoga are:

• Vyādhi – illness

• Styāna – apathy or mental stagnation

• Saṁśaya – doubt

• Pramāda – carelessness or heedlessness

• Ālasya – laziness

• Avirati – craving or over-indulgence in sense pleasures

• Bhrānti-darśana – false or delusional perception

• Alabdha-bhūmikatva – desire to attain a stage of practice (and failing)

• Anavasthitatva – attaining a stage of practice, but failing to maintain

31

Duḥkha-daumanasya-aṅgamejayatva-śvāsa-praśvāsā vikṣepa-sahabhuvaḥ

Suffering (duḥkha), mental depression (daumanasya), trembling of the body (aṅgamejayatva), and irregular breathing (śvāsa-praśvāsa) accompany these distractions.

32

Tat-pratiṣedha-artham eka-tattvābhyāsaḥ

To overcome these, one must practice concentration on a single that-ness (object).

So…

WHAT’S THE ONE OBJECT PRETTY MUCH EVERY LIVING HUMAN IS GUARANTEED TO HAVE TO WORK WITH?

— the breath.

Boom!

In sutras 30 and 31, Patanjali lists out the different obstacles that might get in the way of yoga and the symptoms that arise from these obstacles being present for you.

Let’s take a few and make them relatable through one asana: headstand.

• Pramāda – carelessness or heedlessness

  • You figure since you’ve done headstand 100 times you can let your mind wander a bit, judging the other people you see behind you that aren’t doing headstand, and suddenly you fall, wrenching your neck.

• Ālasya – laziness

  • Headstand is doable for you, but you’re just not into it today and feel like hanging out in wide leg forward fold.

• Bhrānti-darśana – false or delusional perception

  • You can’t do headstand without hurting your neck yet because your upper body isn’t strong enough, but you plan to do it anyways because you believe you are the kind of person who does difficult poses.

• Alabdha-bhūmikatva – desire to attain a stage of practice (and failing)

  • You can’t seem to get headstand right, and are discouraged by it, consistently being annoyed when the teacher offers it during a flow.

• Anavasthitatva – attaining a stage of practice, but failing to maintain

  • You managed to do headstand once, but didn’t continue to strengthen your focus on using the upper body and core in other postures so it doesn’t come easily again.

Any of these may arise as a result:

• Suffering (duḥkha) — my neck is in pain

• Mental depression (daumanasya) — “I suck at yoga”

• Trembling of the body (aṅgamejayatva) — my arms shake in headstand

• Irregular breathing (śvāsa-praśvāsa) — I’m trying so hard to do headstand that I’ve lost attention to the breath and it’s no longer conscious.

So as you are moving through your yoga practice, the aim is simply to notice when these things are present.

Why? Because these obstacles are signals that point to underlying imbalances in your physical or mental makeup that, once made aware of, you can begin to change.

But there’s one key factor to remember in this equation!

👉 You must already be paying attention to notice when these things arise.

Of course, if you break your neck in headstand, you’re going to ‘notice’ it…

But yoga was constructed to teach us how to become aware of all the things that led up to the moment where the decision was made to attempt headstand and injury occurred.

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to state that few of the mistakes we make in life are impossible to prevent. So we can also conclude that the degree to which we are capable of preventing them is derived from level at which we are capable of maintaining our attention on the information that life provides as it unfolds.

So without that primary practice of calling attention down into the space where that information will be arising, what chance do we have of accurately perceiving the true range our hamstring can stretch, whether its a good idea to balance you whole body on your head, or any other aspect of the here and now?

Each posture is a mirror. Gaze into it and see what it shows.

But first, you have to remember to really look. That’s what calling attention to the breath achieves since the breath is always in the body. The experience of breathing cannot ever be experienced anywhere other than here and now because it’s fundamentally dependent on the continual giving and taking of air into the lungs from the surroundings.

You can only witness it one inhale, one exhale at a time.

Beyond ‘preventing mistakes’, this practice enables us to become the more the master of our outcomes, too.

It’s a bit ironic, isn’t it?

The more we learn to detach from the results of our actions, the more we become capable of owning the actions themselves.

And truly, owning the actions fully is the only way to actually do everything we possibly can to assure a given outcome.

It’s in the emoji library 🕉️, so that ought to be a clue of it’s cultural importance 😆

These days it’s the symbol for Hinduism as a whole. Which is pretty much like representing a grocery store with just 🍎.

The origin of “Om” stretches back to the Vedas (the scriptural bedrock of Hinduism), where it first appeared as part of the ritualistic chants in the Sama Veda. However it wasn’t until the Upanishads (written a few hundred years later) where Om took on the more spiritually symbolic sense that it’s taken on today.

In sutra 27, Patanjali mentions “Om” as the word that represents Isvara. Here it is with the two sutras before it:

25 त्रत्र निरतिशयं सर्वज्ञबीजम् tatra niratishayam sarvajña-bījam In Him is the highest manifestation of the seed of omniscience.

26 स एषः पूर्वेषाम् अपि गुरुः कालेनानवच्छेदात् sa eṣaḥ pūrveṣām api guruḥ kālenānavacchedāt Unconditioned by time, He is the teacher of even the most ancient teachers.

27 तस्य वाचकः प्रणवः tasya vācakaḥ praṇavaḥ The word representative of him is Om.

As I explored in my last post, “Isvara” is introduced in the Yoga Sutras as a personally relatable form The Supreme Purusha (ultimate consciousness). Patanjali continues to expound on this idea, finally stating that the word representative of it is “Om”.

Now, any religion or philosophy that posits a supreme being or an origin story for the material world must at some point grapple with the challenge of naming the ‘source of all things’. But something which is supposed to be fundamentally limitless cannot easily be contained by a few syllables.

Here are a few of the various names set down across world religions:

1. YHWH (יהוה) — Judaism

   1. “yahweh” meaning: “He is” / “He causes to be”

2. Allah (الله) — Islam

   1. Arabic word for ‘God’; unique, indivisible, eternal.

3. Brahman (ब्रह्मन्) — Hinduism

   1. “The Absolute” / “Ultimate Reality”

4. Big Bang (💥) — Modern Science

   1. Physics equivalent of a shrug ending the infinite regression to the origin of the cosmos 😉

But Om is not exactly a name

It’s better understood as just a sound, really. Names are made up of sounds, but do those sounds have much meaning beyond being understood as the name they make up?

If you ask me who I am and I say Jyuh-ahh-ckh…what does that tell you about me? Only what others call me. If you never met me and you were asked to guess my height based on my name — it’s a total shot in the dark.

So a name is only useful as a label to call a person’s attention to the raw information they already have about a given thing.

That’s what’s cool about Om. It’s both a label and raw information.

What the sound symbolizes is arguably more useful in directing a person’s understanding to what it represents than any name, because both the making of the sound and the sound itself allude to aspects of the “thing” it represents.

There are many ways to expound on this, some more magically-oriented than others. The simplest in my estimation is to think about how the sound is made by the mouth. To say “Om” you essentially pronounce the elemental syllables “A U M”.

The mouth opens wide letting sound out in the most basic “ah” sound. Then to make the “ooo” sound it begins to close, refining the resonance to a different tune, and finally closing all the way with “mmm”. Traditionally, when chanting Om you’d aim to balance all three parts equally.

But there is also necessarily a fourth part — the silence after.

A Symbol of Totality

Viewed this way, Om is considered as representative of the three common states of human consciousness, and implicitly that fourth one:

• A – waking

• U – dreaming

• M – deep sleep

• The silence after Om = Turiya (pure awareness)

Om encapsulates more than just the idea of the supreme Hindu God. Beyond being a name / symbol, it serves as a map of reality.

Not only is it symbolic in that regard, but it’s also tactile. When you “say” it, you generate (in your own body) the vibrations that compose it.

Imagine if someone saying “chocolate” could not only make you salivate (given that you know what chocolate is when you hear the word) but also make you taste it in your mouth. That’s the idea behind using Om as a mantra. ****

It is at once a representation of the universal vibration that animates all things, and also the vibration itself.

A Historical Inflection Point

The Vedas (where Om was originally written down) emphasized externalized rituals (with A LOT of chanting).

Years later, the Upanishads began emphasizing internal reflection and knowledge. Think: you can worship 24/7 if you want, but is that really “enough” if you don’t actually know anything about what you’re worshipping, or yourself for that matter?

In fact, the development of the Upanishads (where/when Om took on its conceptual & spiritual meaning) is seen as a major inflection point in the development of Hindu thought, and in many ways, the philosophical cascade proceeding from it resulted in classical yoga practice.

There’s a cool way to understand the role that yoga plays in the process by looking at this progression.

1. Vedas → Ritual-Based Religion, 1500–800 BCE

   • Focus: External rituals (yajña), offerings to gods, performed with precision by priests.

   • Deities: Agni (fire), Indra (storm), Varuṇa (cosmic law), etc.

   • Goal: Material prosperity, social order, access to svarga (heaven).

   • Core Texts: Samhitas (hymns), Brahmanas (ritual manuals).

   • Worship: Highly formal, communal, and hierarchical (Brahmin-centered).

2. Upanishads → Inner Contemplation and Nondual Wisdom, 800–300 BCE

   • Focus: Self-inquiry, meditation, realization of Ātman = Brahman.

   • Deities: Often symbolic or internalized; focus shifts from gods to universal spirit.

   • Goal: Moksha (liberation from samsara), not just heavenly reward.

   • Core Texts: Upanishads (Vedānta), esp. Brihadaranyaka, Chandogya, Katha, Mandukya.

   • Worship: Turns inward; ritual becomes psychological/metaphysical.

3. Samkhya → Rational, Metaphysical System, 600–200 BCE

   • Focus: Analytical dualism between Purusha (consciousness) and Prakriti (matter).

   • Deities: Atheistic or non-theistic; no central role for God.

   • Goal: Discrimination (viveka) between self and nature → liberation.

   • Core Texts: Samkhya Karika by Ishvarakrishna; older oral roots possibly pre-Upanishadic.

   • Worship: Not emphasized; focus on knowledge and detachment.

4. Yoga (Patanjali) → Practical Spiritual Growth, 200 BCE – 200 CE

   • Focus: Systematic discipline: ethics, posture, breath, concentration, meditation, samadhi.

   • Deities: Introduces Ishvara (personal God, supreme consciousness) as a helpful and optional focus.

   • Goal: Liberation via stilling the mind and realizing the true self (Purusha).

   • Core Text: Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

   • Worship: Can include devotion (Ishvara-pranidhana), but primarily emphasizes practice (abhyāsa).

This sequence isn’t just historical, it reflects a deepening of spiritual development.

From doing (ritual) →

      to knowing (wisdom) →

            to discerning (analysis) →

                  to being (embodied practice).

Do you see the pendulum swing there? It moves back from an extreme of blind externalization to balanced internalization, then continues past that point to another extreme of somewhat excessive intellectual analysis, finally swinging back to balance in embodied practice.

In my humble estimation, this is a typical progression for a human being aiming to touch the divine.

You start off simply moving towards it, taking whatever directions are given you along the way. Eventually you start to develop more understanding of what exactly it is you are pursuing, and yourself as well. Then maybe you start to wonder if its even possible to get there, as analysis only takes you so far.

Ultimately you are left with the task of embodying the ideas into the reality of yourself.

It’s a lot like a good mushroom trip.

You start with the somewhat ritualistic process of eating a specific plant. Suddenly the whole world is incredibly interesting (externalization — ahh). Then perhaps you shift into the mental experience, observing your thought patterns play out (internalization — ooo). Finally, you settle back into the usual state of consciousness, but you have new perspectives to examine and reflect on (discernment — mmm).

What’s the missing piece?

Integration.

You might enjoy going back around for a spin on that wheel a few or many times. But sustaining actual growth depends on the degree to which you can commit to integrating those new perspectives and experiences into yourself.

Following the progression above, Yoga is the integrative end point.

Isn’t that intriguing? We are reintroducing ritual — but with one key difference…we know why we are doing it. Not just doing it.

Conscious attention becomes conscious thought becomes conscious action.

And it is in conscious action we can truly devote ourselves to whatever experiences, tasks, and growth is presented to us.

क्लेश कर्म विपाकाशयैरपरामृष्ट पुरुष विशेष ईश्वर
Kleśa karma vipāka āśayair aparāmṛṣṭaḥ puruṣa viśeṣa īśvaraḥ
Īśvara is the supreme Purusha, unaffected by any afflictions, actions, fruits of actions or by any inner impressions or desires

Samkhya Influence

Samkhya is one of six schools of thought in classical Indian philosophy. It’s generally seen as the oldest, with roots tracing to the upaniṣads in the 5th century BCE.

It is a non-theistic and dualistic school of thought, positing two eternal realities:

1. Purusha: pure consciousness

2. Prakriti: primal matter/nature

Yoga is the second school of thought, seen as a practical means for achieving liberation, and it draws on Samkhya ideas in many areas, and is primarily concerned with the disentangling of these two aspects of experience.

Purusha (Pure Consciousness)

Pure awareness, consciousness, the eternal witness. It is unchanging, inactive, and formless — an ever present passive observer. It is the seer, the experiencer, not the doer.

• Function in Yoga: To realize Purusha as distinct from Prakriti, leading to liberation.

Prakriti (Nature/Matter)

The material world…all phenomena: including mind, body, senses, and emotions. It is mutable, dynamic, composed of the three gunas (sattva, rajas, tamas). It is the seen, the field of experience; it manifests the universe.

• Function in Yoga: Initially can be felt as a source of bondage; but ultimately, through self-awareness, it helps one transcend it.

Yoga essentially aims to disrupt the misidentification of Purusha with Prakriti. Ignorance (avidya) can cause Purusha to misidentify with the mind-body complex (Prakriti). Discrimination (viveka), developed through yogic practice, allows one to perceive the distinction and rest in the pure awareness of Purusha.

The Progression

There is an aspect of your experience that is simply pure awareness.

But there are many other aspects to your experience (thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires) that are less subtle, and they tend to fill the space of your attention.

Over time it can feel like these things are all that exist, and in searching for the “I” aspect of your experience, you might easily conclude that it resides in one of those more tactile things, since they are all you seem to see.

By practicing yoga, you can learn to discriminate between the various layers and facets of your experience, examining them distinctly.

Eventually, within that array of examined experience, you may re-encounter that simple pure awareness.

With sustained practice and discipline, you can spend more and more time residing in that space of simple pure awareness, until you learn to identify more closely with it (than with the contents of consciousness).

So what is Īśvara?

It is thought that Patañjali may have introduced Īśvara as a pragmatic concept to offer an optional focus for devotion (bhakti) in a largely non-theistic system.

Devotional traditions were apparently rising at the time, and presenting Īśvara as a more characterizable version of a God-figure would have been useful to anyone leaning towards those kind of spiritual journeys.

In this light, we can see classical Yoga as non-theistic but not anti-theistic — open to divine symbolism, but not reliant on it.

Nevertheless, in yoga philosophy, Īśvara is not a God who creates or intervenes. It is simply an ever-free exemplar of liberation — truly, a model to which the yogi can aspire.

Here’s a metaphor to help picture what Patanjali likely means by Īśvara:

The ocean.

Before you’re like: “meh, I’ve heard that before, doesn’t help” run through this line of thinking with me. Or you can extrapolate the idea further from “ocean” to just “water”:

What happens when you throw a rock into the ocean?

• There’s a little ‘kerplunk’, and maybe a splash, but any water displaced quickly finds it’s way back into the source.

What happens when you take a bucket of water out of the ocean?

• Is it notably diminished? Or does it look exactly the same as it did before?

Put your hand into the bucket of water —

• Assuming none spills, did you remove or add anything to the quantity of water by your action?

Scoop some out into your hands and cup them so it stays there —

• Can you willingly shape the water, or does it simply take the shape of whatever container that holds it?

There’s a lovely Christian legend I learned about when I was young in which St. Augustine describes a vision he had while walking along the oceanside pondering the nature of God.

As he was walking the beach, he saw a small child running back and forth along the sand carrying buckets of water from the surf and pouring them into a hole dug on the beach.

Augustine asked the child what they were doing, and they replied: “I’m putting the entire ocean into this hole.”

Augustine laughed and said: “That’s impossible.”

The child looked at him and said: “So is you fitting the nature of God into your head.”

In the Christian tradition, the story is meant to articulate the imponderability of Christian mysteries. In a yogic context, we can think of it it as spatially orienting for the practitioner — we are on the beach looking at the ocean. We are not the ocean, but we can, for some reason, witness it.

The “goal” of practice is not to comprehend the totality of consciousness, it’s nature, or it’s relation to reality — but to experience, firsthand, the aspect of ourselves that is that.

There’s a taoist maxim that states: “life like water”, which stems from this verse in Chapter 8 of in the Tao Te Ching

The highest good is like water. Water gives life to the ten thousand things and does not strive. It flows in places men reject and so is like the Tao. In dwelling, live close to the ground. In thinking, keep to the simple. In conflict, be fair and generous. In governing, don’t try to control. In work, do what you enjoy. In family life, be completely present. When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you

So, on the mat, we aim to make ourselves like Īśvara — unaffected by any afflictions, actions, fruits of actions or by any inner impressions or desires.

Borrowing from Ram Dass:

Quiet the mind, open the heart.

Move for the sake of moving. Breathe in, breathe out. When the thoughts arise, let them pass. You’re not here to master a handstand. But if mastering handstand helps you recognize the part of you that is eternal, rock on 🤘

They aren’t necessarily written with the intent of being read just one at a time, but doing so feels (to me at least) like it gives time to really dig deeper on the way some of these rather dense ideas can be examined in the context of modern life.

I think that, generally, moving slowly through the text helps it to feel more like studying a map than reading an instruction manual.

— when you look at a map, you’re just trying to get an overall sense of where you’re heading by noting certain landmarks or potential obstacles, and you know intuitively that you’re the one that needs to walk the path.

— when you read instructions, it’s much easier to slip into externalization, and you can end up spending more time worrying if you got it right “by the book” vs. building something that’s functional in your space/time now.

If that doesn’t make sense right away, think about the last time you put together Ikea furniture.

Maybe you’re the kind of person that just looks at the picture on the box and starts screwing things together. Kudos for being a motivated self-starter! But you’ll probably have to take a few things apart along the way. Totally fine if you expect some detours and are focused on learning from the process.

Maybe you’re (like me) the kind of person that separates all the pieces into different piles so you can see the numbers before you even look at the instructions. Kudos for being organized! But haven’t even those people run into times when the instructions weren’t quite right? The little drawings of the screws aren’t always to scale, and the technical writers (the people who write the instructions) do make mistakes.

They can give you all the tools you need and extra pieces of each part, but they can’t account for the weird slope in your floor or the custom baseboard on your wall that mean you need to leave some of the trim off that $100 dresser in order for it to fit in your house.

Anyways, the bottom line is that language is a limited form of conveying ideas.

It’s impossible to account for all the variables that influence the ultimate interpretation of a given idea. Speaking is truly like blowing seeds off a dandelion — despite even the best of conditions, you really have no idea where those seeds are going to land.

So I feel it’s valuable to approach language less literally.

Yah, I know that sounds like a paradox, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to state that we’ve collectively put a lot more weight onto the verbatim interpretation of text as a primary means for navigating the world than we should.

Stay with me on this —

All I really mean to say is that language can be seen as a map towards the ideas held in a human mind, which are themselves merely interpretations of some layer of the underlying energies circulating in the substrate of reality.

We live in a state of uncertainty all the time, whether we recognize/admit it or not. Our brains appear to be wired towards dispelling uncertainty, and we tend to fill gaps in comprehension with assumptions rather than hold them as they are (unclear & not fully understood).

Reading something as an instruction manual assumes exhaustive coverage and weakens agency. Reading something as a map assumes only the overview, and relies on agency for real-time navigation.

With that metaphor constructed, this week I’m going to bundle the next 5 sutras side-by-side since I think these 5 rely on each other for interpretation, more so than the others. Arguably, they all do — but taken alone, this set feels too short.

Think of them like 5 quick switchbacks on a steep trail. Each portion of the trail is, on it’s own, brief and doesn’t have much room for wandering. But together they string together a steep ascent.

You can also look at them as 5 different paths to the same peak. One truth, many paths — right?

Ok! Enough metaphors for today (maybe). Let’s get into it:

1. ****भवप्रत्ययो विदेहप्रकृतिलयानाम् — bhavapratyayo videhaprakṛtilayānām Translation: For those who have been disembodied (videha) or merged into primal nature (prakṛtilaya), samādhi (absorption) arises as a natural process.

2. श्रद्धावीर्यस्मृतिसमाधिप्रज्ञापूर्वक इतरेषाम् — śraddhā-vīrya-smṛti-samādhi-prajñā-pūrvaka itareṣām

   Translation:

   For others, samādhi is preceded by faith (śraddhā), vigor (vīrya), memory (smṛti), concentration (samādhi), and higher wisdom (prajñā).

3. तीव्रसंवेगानामासन्न — tīvra-saṁvegānām āsannaḥ

   Translation:

   For those who have intense zeal and determination, realization is very near.

4. मृदुमध्याधिमात्रत्वात्ततोऽपि विशेष — mṛdu-madhyādhimātratvāt tato’pi viśeṣaḥ

   Translation:

   Even among those who strive, differences arise according to whether their practice is mild, moderate, or intense.

5. ईश्वरप्रणिधानाद्वा — īśvara-praṇidhānād vā

   Translation:

   Or (samādhi is attained) through devotion and surrender to Īśvara (the Supreme Being).

Pulling out just English is helpful:

For those who have been disembodied (videha) or merged into primal nature (prakṛtilaya), samādhi (absorption) arises as a natural process. For others, samādhi is preceded by faith (śraddhā), vigor (vīrya), memory (smṛti), concentration (samādhi), and higher wisdom (prajñā). For those who have intense zeal and determination, realization is very near. Even among those who strive, differences arise according to whether their practice is mild, moderate, or intense. Or (samādhi is attained) through devotion and surrender to Īśvara (the Supreme Being).

Now, in the version I’m reading, Sri Swami Satchidananda clarifies that videha refers to the concept of a living being that achieves a level of total absorption during a certain lifetime (but not full liberation) which allows them to transcend their body. Videha literally means “without body”.

Personally, I remain agnostic to the idea of reincarnation. A broad reading of the law of conservation of mass (matter cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system; it can only change forms) does leave room for reincarnation to be taken somewhat seriously, even if just in a boring modern scientific sense.

A friend once quipped to me on this subject: “I’m not interested in whether or not my atoms exist forever, I want to know if I will continue to exist after I die.”

There are plenty of scriptural texts that claim to have the answer to that question, and they get very detailed into the whitherto’s and wherefore’s around what has to be cosmic equivalent of a logistical nightmare. Let’s just hope that if it is the case (that we are reincarnated over lifetimes) that the guy running the delivery network is the videha version of Jeff Bezos.

Jokes aside — and I don’t really care if you think reincarnation is total crack or super obvious — either way, there’s a very practical allusion being made in this set of 5 sutras that shouldn’t be missed.

Remember that we are approaching the idea of samadhi, understood as complete and total absorption with [blank] << insert your preferred concept for the is-ness here (the divine, base reality, God, whatever works for you).

The last two sutras dealt with the idea that there are gradations for this approach, meaning that samadhi is not always an absolute value. It can be achieved gradually through cultivating pure presence first with the things that are most near and obvious (the physical) then taking that presence wider and wider through subtler and subtler aspects of experience.

But there are also several different “angles of attack” for this work. I’ll rewrite the translations briefly here to illustrate…

When thinking about samadhi, there are a few ways to occasion that state:

1. You can transcend your physical body.

2. You can (still being a body) achieve it through practices like faith, vigor, concentration, and wisdom.

3. If you try really hard at any of those, it might not take too long at all.

4. Even if you’re trying really hard, the intensity of your practice will determine the outcome.

5. Or you can just completely surrender to the Supreme Being.

I don’t know about you, but to me, 19 and 23 look like two extreme ends of a spectrum with the graspable ideas sandwiched between them.

What exactly would “transcending your body” entail? And how do you just “surrender” to a “Supreme Being”?

If those seem out of reach, grab whichever practice is most agreeable to you, and give it all you’ve got.

• faith

• vigor

• concentration

• wisdom

The key line is, for me, right in the middle (of course). If you try really hard at any of those, it might not take too long at all.

My simple suggestion today is to ponder whether or not that’s the whole gambit of samadhi, right there.

Whichever path you’re on, whichever practice you find yourself doing — give it absolutely everything you’ve got. Don’t hold back.

Isn’t that the long and short of samadhi? It’s TOTAL absorption. Not just the parts of you you’re prepared to give away, or the times you feel like it. ALL of you, ALL the time.

Perhaps it’s simply fear of loss that holds us back from this…

But what are we holding onto anyways? Can we bring any of it with us at the end of our days?

You can’t fill a cup that’s already full. So in the simplest sense, we can practice pouring out all we’ve got, over and over. When we get stronger and we can maintain the space that creates in our experience, let’s see what comes in to fill that space.

Whichever path you find yourself on, lean into it. And that doesn’t mean “rush”. It means feel every damn step along the way. Devote yourself to the experience. Call your attention back in to the task at hand instead of worrying about the end goal or whether you did the last movement with perfect form.

Now is always the time.

Now begins yoga.

विरामप्रत्ययाभ्यासपूर्वः संस्कारशेषोऽन्यः

Virāma pratyayābhyāsa pūrvaḥ saṁskāra śeṣo’nyaḥ

By the firmly convinced practice of the complete cessation of the mental modifications, the impressions only remain. This is the other samadhi (asamprajnata or non-distinguished)

This is the second type of samadhi that Patanjali talks about. The previous sutra introduces samprajnata samadhi, which is explained as “differentiated” states of total absorption — simply, one is completely present with a given object of attention, but there is still the sense of object/subject relation.

In that sort of differentiated samadhi, there’s still a felt difference between the observer and the observed. The yogi has become completely devoted in their consciousness to whatever aspect of their experience they are choosing to pay attention to, but they are still identifying it as an object in their field of awareness.

Patanjali offers four gradations to that differentiated samadhi, which can essentially be looked at as devoting attention to wider and wider bands on the spectrum of conscious experience.

1. The gross (physical things that can be touched and felt clearly — rocks, strong emotions)

2. The subtle (non-physical things that have clear character but aren’t as obvious — colors, quiet intuitions)

3. The bliss (sense of joy that arises when space has been articulated around the self and the mind is relatively quiet)

4. The I-am-ness (the fact of being itself, “Self” with a capital “s”)

The samadhi he’s talking about in this, the 18th sutra, is like step 5.

Here’s the process in basic terms, spread out over the course of a supposed lifetime for context:

1. Beyond simply reacting to physical sensations unconsciously (repeat pleasure, avoid pain) the yogi learns to devote attention to these things specifically (on purpose, as an act of will) — they can now learn from them and use the information they provide to create a sense of greater physical freedom in the body.

2. After years of practice, the yogi has built up a quality of steadiness and ease within the gross, felt experience of the body (they can hold warrior 2 for a few minutes comfortably) — so they begin to pay attention to the subtler appearances during their practice…thoughts, notions, and ingrained patterns that have quietly been influencing the way they move through the world.

3. After more years, the yogi has learned to let these mental fluctuations settle into the background of their conscious experience, and within the space that those fluctuations used to occupy is now just simply the experience of being itself — which is often experienced as joy / bliss as it balloons into the consciousness in lieu of the “stuff” that previously occupied that space.

4. When the yogi learns to maintain that spaciousness inside their conscious field of awareness, there’s only one object left to devote attention to — the space itself…still experienced from a “seat” of awareness, as if the yogi were an object within the space.

5. Finally, the yogi learns to relinquish the sense of being an object within that space, and begins to experience themself as the space, rather than an observer of it.

The sense of “I” gives way to just…”am”.

If that’s hard to wrap your head around, here’s a line of inquiry that I like to work with to guide my thinking mind towards these ideas (which don’t always slot comfortably into the existing library of experiences and ideas that my brain is busily sorting and evaluating) —

• If, in this next moment, all of my thoughts were to subside completely, what would be left?

Seriously, think about it. If this (seemingly) constant train of thought came to a stop for a moment, would the world around me continue existing?

What’s the first moment of that experience like? What about the second and third?

It’s easy just to charge right past that idea — “the train just keep moving of course, it never stops! mwahaha” — the mind can be like a madman shoveling coal into the engine even as it careens off the rails.

The bottomline is that the concept of cessation is hard (maybe impossible) to wrap your head around if you’ve never at least experienced the calming of those fluctuations.

That’s where the practice of yoga has been laid down for us by the sages as roadmap to these deeper spaces within our (perhaps illusory) selves 🙂

Every time you step into a yoga practice and take an hour to move through a flow is like letting that train pull into a station and make a stop on it’s wayward way.

I’m not saying your mind just stops the instant you step on your mat. There’s still a lot of movement going on, just like a train station though, right? Some thoughts get on, some thoughts get off. The train gets back up to speed, but then you allow it to stop again. Same thing happens.

It might still seem like it’s going to go on forever. Maybe for every thought that gets off, another 3 get on and the train becomes crowded with fluctuations and residuals hanging out the windows as it carries on.

But the more you choose to pull into station and present the opportunity for lightening your load, the more aware you will likely become of the state of this train. When, even if by seeming luck or happenstance, most of your passengers disembark at a station — the attentive conductor feels that sense of lightness. It’s easier to get underway again, with less weight.

And I think it’s that subtle feeling that can guide you back to those stations where the load lightens.

Eventually, with great patience, discipline and releasing the expectation of these pesky passengers [thoughts] to just get off already(!), maybe a day comes where the train is empty. It’s just you and the open rails ahead.

Nothing to carry, nobody to knock on your cockpit door and ask where the bathroom is — just you and the experience of being a train conductor.

But without all these passengers, what are you even doing driving a train?

Are you a conductor anymore, or have you become a passenger yourself?

Is there a difference now that it’s only you riding these rails?

Perhaps in that moment, you quit feeding the engine…

Over some time, the momentum subsides…

Wheels stop turning…

Doors open up…

At the final station.

Disembark.

Experience yourself as a part of the world that you thought you were just moving through.

As the 8th and final limb of the yogic path, the term is used to describe a state of “total absorption” that occurs after intense concentration and meditation.

But did you know there are different types of “samadhi”?

So, total absorption is set as the technical end point of yoga.

Of course, it’s not necessarily a linear path, and the 8 limbs are probably better thought of as a wheel / spiral staircase that — rather than a path traversing a distance — we more so circle the same principles at deeper and deeper levels over time.

Ok, total absorption…but, absorption in what?

And what exactly is the mechanism of absorbing? Am I being absorbed into something else, or is something else absorbing into me?

To a more classical read of yoga philosophy, it’s actually neither.

Following the Advaita (non-dual) tradition, samadhi is more accurately understood as when experience ceases to be defined by subject & object. There is nothing to fill because there is no difference between the container and the environment. The typical distinctions of consciousness (read: fluctuations of the mind) have been sufficiently softened so that one experiences purely from the preexisting space of awareness.

But that view of samadhi can feel a bit absolutist.

At first glance, there isn’t much room for progress along the way to that state of being, and I think for most of us living professional lifestyles, it can feel quite out of reach. That’s why I think the 17th sutra is one of the most practical in presenting yoga as an accessible path for spiritual growth.

Sutra 17

वितर्कविचारानन्दास्मितारूपानुगमात् संप्रज्ञातः
Vitarka-vichāra-ānanda-asmitā-rūpa-anugamāt samprajñātaḥ
Samprajñāta (differentiated/cognitive) samādhi is accompanied by reasoning, reflecting, rejoicing, and pure I-am-ness.

Patanjali states that this form of samadhi (samprajñāta: differentiated) includes reasoning & discernment alongside the everlasting bliss. Suddenly samadhi doesn’t feel so out of reach, right?

Likely the easiest modern comparison for what Patanjali describes in sutra 17 is the concept of “flow states”. If asked, you’d still know your name and address, but you’re really operating on a different wavelength where actions come fluidly and you’re not thinking about anything other than what you’re doing (the mind is clear in its presence with a particular object of attention).

Great musicians and athletes seem to describe these states of being during moments of peak performance. Years of practice and focus poured into a specific act translates into expression that transcends typical thought. Imagine being in Jimi Hendrix’s head during a show — I doubt you’d see him thinking “ok, B minor, E flat, put my finger there, strum twice” nor something like “I wonder what I’ll have for dinner after the show…” 😂.

Samprajñāta samadhi makes intuitive sense, and it’s culturally desirable.

Most great achievements in life seem to require this level of complete devotion and absorption in the present moment of whatever endeavor you’re taking on.

In a very basic sense, we practice the same elemental motions (of moving towards samprajñāta samadhi) in every yoga class. We train the attention onto a singular object (something very obvious in our physical experience like the breath or the sensations of movement). Then we try to use that focus to link together the various movements and postures as if they were one continuous flow.

Sri Swami Satchidanada presents 4 “gradations” that can be approached like steps for moving into this “differentiated” state of total absorption (samadhi). Basically, as we learn to train our focus onto a given object, this is meant to be the progression of where that focus lies:

1. The gross

2. The subtle

3. The space/joy

4. The I-am-ness

Of course, this is “gross” meant in the sense of what’s tactile and visible on the surface. The “subtle” is the non-tactile yet still possible to objectify in the mind (things like color, intuitions). The joy is meant as the feeling that arises in a clear mind that is somewhat aware of its own presence, and the I-am-ness is the fact of experience itself that can be witnessed with such a clear mind.

As an example, a basketball player:

1. Practices their shot form over and over until it becomes muscle memory

2. The more they play, they begin to learn to sense the right moment to take a 3 pointer

3. Feels the endorphin rush of being in action while on the floor and fully devoted to their task

4. Recognizes their experience as an individual that’s part of a team of players

As yogis, in every flow we:

1. Focus on the alignment of our bodies and moving attentively to our physical experience

   1. Think: Sun A & Warrior 2 — where is my knee?

2. Learn to sense the subtler aspects of our experience against the backdrop of revisited postures

   1. Think: Camel & Handstand — do I feel confident or vulnerable, why?

3. Watch the mind as it either settles into presence or is called away by distractions

   1. Think: Tree & Seated Forward Fold — “this pose is easy, when will we move on? … ooh this feels so good on my hamstrings” vs. “just this breath, just this moment”

4. Release all efforts and allow ourselves to simply be in the space

   1. Think: savasana — when all else is removed from my mind, what is left?

The beauty is that this movement (towards a tangible + somewhat measurable state of this total absorption/samadhi) is conveniently preparing us for non-differentiated states of samadhi, because:

You can’t just ‘let go’ of something you don’t realize you’re holding onto in the first place.

If someone says “release your grip on your ego, it’s an illusion!” how useful is that, really? It’s like telling a child “grow up!” or commanding a window to clean itself. Good luck! The truth is that it takes time and effort, and approaches that happen by degree are more likely to be maintained than steep climbs.

Said another way, a typical mind is like a person driving a car 60 mph down the freeway. The mind is cruising along, calling all the shots, and it’s presence carries both weight and inertia. If you want to get the person out of the car and you tell them: “get out of the car now!” they will simply not do it because it seems impossible in that moment. They’ll be killed!

Of course, it’s not impossible at all, but the immediacy of the request makes it seem so for someone who’s been traveling along as a passenger within it for so long.

Instead, you say:

— Slow down.

— Go to the right lane.

— Take this exit here.

— Missed it? No worries, take the next one.

— Find a quiet side street. Put it in park.

— Turn off the ignition.

— Take off your seatbelt.

— Open the door.

— Now, step on out.

Once they’ve arrived in the spot where relinquishing the container feels doable, they’ll try it. When you’re in a car that’s stopped, suddenly the motion is all on the outside. No longer are you an object moving through space, you are now part of the landscape, and you can see that it is itself, moving. Of course, they’ll get back in eventually (you’re in the middle of nowhere now and need to get back home). The mind helps us navigate the world.

This practice is about guiding ourselves back to that place over and over.

We learn to create the opportunity for release by training the focus down, through the gross, into the discrete, where the mind is reflected clearly, and the substrate of our conscious experience can be seen all around (and within) the object of our attention.

Once you’ve really noticed that object and have covered it fully with your attention (to the point that nothing else can occupy your mind), it’s just a simple shift of perspective to take that same absorption to the space in which that object seems to appear.

You can notice your inhale.

You can notice your exhale.

You can notice that both are part of one continuous breath.

You can revel in the experience of breathing.

You can even give breath to others.

But eventually you will let that breath go, one way or another —

What then, will be left?

We can realize ourselves as that, right now.

तत् परं पुरुषख्यातेर्गुणवैतृष्ण्यम् Tat Paraṁ Puruṣa Khyāter Guṇavaitṛṣṇyam When there is non-thirst for even the gunas due to the realization of the purusha, that is supreme non-attachment.

Ok, are you ready? This is where the sutras start to get esoteric.

These words like “gunas” and “purusha” are broad concepts with layered meaning depending on context. Yoga philosophy itself is a niche within the broader scope of Hinduism, and is not the only subset of thought to reference terms like “purusha”.

Before we go further, I want to pose a simple challenge to you as a reader/practitioner:

Leave it undefined.

It’s easy to Google the explanation of purusha and be like “oh, ok, I get it — grand cosmic consciousness…it means God”.

Try to approach these italicized words like literary mirages. When faced with something initially incomprehensible, the brain seeks to apply a form to it before it’s really sure what it is. And honestly that’s fine, so long as you’re willing to quickly let go of the synthetic applied comprehension.

Let me illustrate this point briefly…

— you’re looking up at the top of a steep, sandy hill

— if you try to go straight towards it, you lose your footing and slide back down

— so you find a foothold and shuffle sideways along the face of the hill

— you turn back and head the other direction and keep looking for the least steep sections

— repeat the process to work your way up the otherwise unassailable hill

It’s a switchback trail. Make sense?

Navajo Loop Trailhead

It’s perilous to go straight up, so you have to take an indirect approach. Another metaphor is looking straight into the sun. You never quite get to look right at it, but it’s in all things that you see, when you think about it.

The caveat is that you do, in fact, double back.

If you want to hold the concept of Purusha next to the idea of a Judeo-Christian almighty God, it’s not entirely wrong to do so, and it probably can help to understand the idea. But you’ll lose the nuance if you stop there. It’d be like continuing on a diagonal path past the switchback turn…if you do manage to reach the top of the cliff along that way, it’s not going to be at the same point.

In theory the view up there should be more or less the same regardless of where you ascended, but that’s another topic entirely.

For the sake of this discourse, let’s just aim to maintain a beginner’s mindset and approach each idea as a new thing.

So if you read the definition of purusha and are like “ok that sounds similar to what I think of when I think of God” — that’s totally fine, but try not to completely fill the space of inquiry with preconceptions. Leave it somewhat undefined.

In my opinion, the deepest beauty of yoga practice (and it’s deepest utility) is that it doesn’t rely on the acceptance of prescribed definitions for its parts.

It’s an experiential practice.

I could expound endlessly on this — but, said in the simplest way, the aim is not to comprehend purusha…it’s to experience it.

Where many philosophies and spiritual lineages say: “this is what XYZ is, here’s what you should do in light of that understanding”

Yoga says, simply: “here’s what you should do to see XYZ in your own conscious experience”

In other words, yoga says: find out for yourself.

It’s easy to forget that guiding principle (especially when we get into the nitty gritty here breaking down the texts associated with the practice), so I figured I’d put a callback here at this point.

With that said:

Sutra 16

तत् परं पुरुषख्यातेर्गुणवैतृष्ण्यम् Tat Paraṁ Puruṣa Khyāter Guṇavaitṛṣṇyam When there is non-thirst for even the gunas due to the realization of the purusha, that is supreme non-attachment.

Sutra 15 explains that an enlightened mind is one that does not get attached to the various thought forms that arise in consciousness. But there’s an even deeper level of non-attachment to consider:

Supreme Non-Attachment

Basically, there’s first the level where you’ve trained the mind to be disciplined.

— a sensation arises, and you feel the urge to follow the thought form it creates.

— you smell apple pie, and you think “I ought to go get a piece, I love apple pie!”

Practicing non-attachment means you have that thought, but you basically just think better of it.

— you smell apple pie, and you think “I ought to go get a piece! No, wait — I’ve already eaten plenty. I’m watching my blood sugar. I don’t really need pie.”

Whatever your reason, you basically decide not to follow that immediate urge.

Now, you guys probably know I’m generally suspicious of the idea of hierarchical thinking in a yoga context. I try not to use cues like “take the fullest expression of the pose” because it implies an additive attitude — as if the things you do combine to create a desired end state / goal.

For me, yoga is more so an reductive practice.

You’re looking to reduce the amount of things in your mind by focusing purely on the breath and movement. We do that in order to come closer to the raw momentary experience of the substrate of life (breaking the illusion of separateness from the world at large).

So rather than attempting to use the practice as a means for whatever ends you desire (doing headstands, feeling better) I try to think of it as the ends itself. The goal is already reached — you are intrinsically here, now. The means is learning to notice that more sustainably.

However, there is something fundamentally different between a body that can reside in Warrior 2 for two minutes without any visible signs of effort, and a body that begins to tremble after 10 seconds.

And as we know, that difference is the result of a function of time and repeated effort.

So it is with non-attachment vs. supreme non-attachment.

Returning to the apple pie metaphor —

A simply unattached mind has the thought: “I should have pie” but decides not to.

A supremely unattached mind doesn’t even have that first thought.

When there is non-thirst for even the gunas

In a yoga context, gunas refer to the three fundamental qualities that make up all of (physical) nature.

They are thought of as the underlying energies that influence our physical, mental, and emotional states. These come from Sankhya philosophy, one of the six classical schools of Indian thought, and are foundational in yogic and Ayurvedic understanding.

The three gunas are:

1. Sattva – Purity, harmony, clarity, balance

   • A sattvic mind is calm, clear, and content.

2. Rajas – Activity, passion, restlessness

   • A rajasic mind is driven, distracted, or anxious.

3. Tamas – Inertia, darkness, ignorance

   • A tamasic mind is clouded, depressed, or resistant.

Yoga practice generally aims to cultivate sattva—not by denying action or rest, but by creating balance between these three forces. Over time, as the mind becomes more sattvic, it becomes a better tool for meditation, self-inquiry, and ultimately liberation (moksha).

So Patanjali is saying that a supremely unattached mind isn’t influenced by these underlying energies.

To a supremely unattached mind, the smell of apple pie may be experienced purely as an appearance in consciousness. It need not be considered pleasant (if you like apple pie) or foul (if for some psychotic reason, you don’t like apple pie) — it simply is. A mind that has transcended the push/pull of the underlying energies (gunas) isn’t beholden even to the arising urges that external stimuli cause.

The question is…

How the heck does a mind transcend being affected by physical nature?

Ok, I warned you it was going to get esoteric.

The way an individual answers this question can be, in many senses, a determinant factor for what religion they follow or what spiritual practices they spend time on during life.

When there is non-thirst for even the gunas due to the realization of the purusha, that is supreme non-attachment.

Patanjali states that this supreme non-attachment arises due to the realization of the purusha.

Simple enough, right? Just tell us what purusha is so we can “realize it” and transcend the bonds of physical reality + become enlightened.

Side note: in a way, it is really simple. And I think it’s the simplicity that results in this becoming such a complicated topic / branching off point for practitioners that are studying the deeper levels of yoga philosophy.

In yoga texts, you’ll often see the idea of small “self” (lowercase {s}) vs big “Self” (uppercase {s}). This is one of the simplest ways to describe the idea that the individual ego/consciousness/being (small self) is either an illusion or just a small part of a much larger entity.

Additionally, Purusha is often cast against it’s supposed opposite — Prakriti. Here’s a table to break down the two concepts as they are typically presented in yoga texts.

So, where are we on this spectrum?

As a matter of experience, the answer depends on what aspects of your conscious experience with which you’re currently identifying.

Usually it’s somewhere in the middle.

Think: are you the sum total of your thoughts, feelings, emotional tendencies, and neurological patterns? Or are those just appearances in the space of your conscious awareness?

As far as I can tell, that’s basically the question the first yogis sought to answer. If we sit still long enough and the fluctuations of thought eventually subside (or become stable enough that they can be looked past) — what’s left?

It’s not all that complicated, really. It’s freaking hard to achieve (thoughts just keep coming no matter what you do! That’s why you basically have to ‘do nothing’ to watch them subside.), but as a matter of theory we can approach this easily…if the things that tend to fill the space of your awareness evaporate or become transparent enough that they no longer obstruct your field of ‘vision’, what will you then ‘see’?

According to Patanjali, once a yogi “sees” this (realizes purusha) the thirsting mind can be forever satiated.

Sri Swami Satchidanada describes the notion like this:

The moment you understand yourself as the true Self, you find such peace and bliss that the impressions of the petty enjoyments you experienced before become as ordinary specks of light in front of brilliant sun. You lose all interest in them permanently. That is the highest non-attachement.

Be careful, though. For us westerners, this attitude can easily lead to seeking shortcuts.

Though Satchidanada and Patanjali seem to imply that all you need is a glimpse to be stable forever, I doubt they think of attaining that glimpse as anything other than the result of long and sustained practice. In fact, that’s Sutra 14 😉

Practice becomes firmly grounded when well attended to for a long time, without break, and in all earnestness.

One of the most elemental aspects to yoga practice is learning to break your engagement with the externalized thoughts that we tend to define ourselves by.

Simply, the mind might believe that the body is capable of more than it is.

We test those assumptions when moving through a flow to find out where the underlying reality truly is. And the way we do that is, in effect, by sitting back in the seat of awareness that underlies all of our conscious experience.

Maybe you’ve been a fit person all your life, and one day you bend your knee into warrior 2 and a painful sensation arises. You have a choice to make. This information runs contrary to the story that’s been built up in your mind that you are a fit person and you don’t experience the same discomfort as the saps in the back row struggling to hold poses.

— you can ignore it, demanding that your body take a shape that your mind believes it to be well suited for.

— you can fear it, backing away and never attempting to bend your leg again to avoid the discomfort it might cause.

— or you can observe it, back away for a moment, and attempt to find a way towards the posture that doesn’t cause pain.

Do you see how this practice encourages us to sit back in that primary seat of awareness over and over?

Whether or not experiencing yourself as that awareness constitutes experiencing purusha, or whether there even is a difference between purusha/prakriti (non-dualistic vs. dualistic schools of thought) is something that’s likely better evaluated after having visited that state of being.

So, like everything in this practice ought to be — find out for yourself.

Stay with the breath and let it guide you back to the present moment again and again. Whatever arises there will be a much better teacher than any person ever could be.

Perhaps you will notice that the things which used to drive you subside with time, and it becomes easier to stay steady in the face of challenging moments.

The consciousness of self-mastery in one who is free from craving for objects seen or heard about is non-attachment.

Interpretation of this sutra hinges on the last word, vairāgyam.

In more classical / literal translations, the English equivalent is dispassion.

In modern translations, non-attachment is used, and I feel it’s a lot more directive / descriptive. It also avoids a common pitfall I’ve seen when westerners too quickly adopt eastern philosophies.

Here’s how it reads using dispassion instead in two alternate translations ↙️

The consciousness of perfect mastery over desires for objects seen or heard is dispassion. Sri Swami Sivananda

Dispassion is the consciousness of mastery over desires that arise from contact with visible or invisible objects. B.K.S. Iyengar

Taken out of this context, “dispassion” sounds/feels a lot like our conventional notion of depression.

A state where nothing gets you excited anymore. The fire in you is extinguished. Life’s sweetness no longer motivates you to get out of bed in the morning. Passion is gone from your experience.

It’s also close to apathy, which I think is often easily conflated with the practice of non-attachment (within the scope of self-mastery). Not giving a shit if someone near you is suffering is much different than training your mind to be steady and calm at all times.

Why is dispassion a weird concept for us?

If, like me, you grew up in the 21st century version of the United States in a relatively stable socio-economic subset of the nation, you probably were told that you can do anything and be anything you want to — so just find what excites you. Find your passion, right?

After four years of passionately drinking cheap beer at one of our wildly overpriced universities, we walk into job interviews at fast food chains, and are expected to tell the manager crap like “making coffee is my passion I just love everything about it, the smell, the warmth, the feeling of the first sip — I was meant to make $15/hr as a barista it’s my soul’s mission”.

We are trained to respond to passion — thus we are trained to feign it, too.

If you instead found your way into the corporate world, you probably end up hating your job after a few years, but already took on a mortgage and maybe had kids too so you suck it up and keep going to work, starting up a passion project on the side to keep your spark alive.

The success stories of our culture, Steve Jobs for example, are reiterated over and over as proof that following your passion is the only shot we have at happiness and legacy. Just find that thing, grab hold tight, and blindly follow where ever it leads you. Here’s to the crazy ones, right?

There’s one big problem with that attitude: it’s completely externalized.

Let’s change the world!

These days, if you aren’t aiming to change the world with your software startup / 3D printed organs / sourdough bread making YouTube channel, are you even trying?

In our culture, we are obsessed with making our mark — doing such great things that monuments are built to commemorate our deeds and little kids can stare up in wonder at a great big pile of stone and concrete as they feel the magnitude of our impact on human history.

But we spend pretty much no time thinking about the way we feel our own thoughts.

With our preferences such positioned as magical oracles that purport to point the way towards happiness and legacy, practicing dispassion in our culture looks like outright rejection of life.

But according to the yoga sages, it’s actually the path to true freedom (which includes the ability to do great things deserving of monuments).

I can follow that instruction on the outset, but upon closer examination, dispassion is simply not intuitive for (at least my) western brain. Even if I’ve become generally friendly towards the idea, there is still a lot of quiet inertia built into my mentality from growing up in this “follow your passion” era of society that makes it hard to passionately engage with dispassion as a practice 😉

Dispassion vs. Non Attachment

That’s probably why non attachment feels so much more directive and clear for describing what we are aiming to work on when studying this sutra.

Non attachment implies that there is something that attaches and there is something that is attached to. The state we want to create is where the thing that attaches does not get attached to the things that are attached to. Simple enough, right?

If you’re a hot skillet (passionate person), you can still fry an egg. The question is whether or not it’s the only egg you can fry before someone has to scrap off the remnants.

As you sit in the seat of awareness, whether in an asana or just moving through your day, within that field of awareness “things” arise. The smell of pancakes on the griddle, the sound of cars passing on the street, the butterflies fluttering in your stomach as your crush walks by.

This kind of sensory information is constantly being provided to your brain. Even if you close your eyes and lay in a sensory deprivation chamber, the information has simply changed from a mosaic of color and sounds to blackness, and likely the internal dialogue still rambling around in your head.

The question to confront as a yogi is whether or not that information causes noticeable changes in your state of being.

If it is, you are not changing the world at all — the world is changing you.

When you smell the pancakes, your brain probably processes that information as an indicator that eating will soon occur, and your stomach starts to grumble as it prepares for food to enter and to break it down into digestible nutrients. That might seem inevitable or out of your control, right?

But think for a moment.

The brain is simply an information processing unit. It’s job is to help you make sense of the raw data and identify patterns / trends that it can recognize and elicit new states in the body to prepare for the environment at large.

With the pancakes, it has formed an association that when pancakes are smelled, eating occurs — likely because that’s what happened most of the times that that information has arisen before. Seriously, has there ever been a scenario where your mom was making pancakes and you smelled them and didn’t eat them within the next 15 minutes?

So what would happen if you willfully interrupted that cycle of seemingly subconscious reactivity?

Here’s a better example to illustrate this point:

When you’re driving home from work, someone cuts you off in traffic and flips you off. What happens?

Maybe you honk your horn and begin preparing a list of obscenities to hurl at them, should you be lucky enough to inch your way up beside them amidst the sea of other vehicles. There was reaction and now rumination.

What about in the body? Your muscles may be tense, your adrenal glands secrete cortisol preparing your body for a physical confrontation (that is unlikely to occur).

Even if you’ve studied a little pacifism (or are just generally not a Masshole like me that’s prone to vindictive actions on roadways) you may not outwardly react (no horn honking, no gesticulating) but inwardly there are still changes in your system. Tension in the belly. Grip the wheel a little tighter. Grind your teeth a bit.

They can be subtle signals, but if noticed, they provide a new form of information for your 2-4 lbs of gray-matter to process — I’ve been reacting.

When you notice that happening, you create the chance to interrupt the cycle (and create a new one).

After cultivating this mental resilience, the smell of pancakes is simply the smell of pancakes. It need not be the reason your mouth begins to salivate.

Over time, the more data points you give yourself to reference where a stimulus (pancakes, traffic incident) is not engaged with — the more easily you’ll be able to stay steady, calm, and unaffected.

Dispassionate, in a sense, yes. But more usefully: unattached.

Those moments no longer hook into you, pulling you off your center.

You can get cut off, beep your horn, and swerve a bit — but your heart rate stays the same, and you don’t end up thinking about the incident for the rest of the day.

It’s a practice that takes time. If you’re 10 years in to reacting, that’s a lot of data points you need to slowly chip away at with consistent practice of non attachment.

We work on this during a yoga class by aiming to stay centered on the breath throughout the flow.

The poses (asana) are like mirrors to the internal state of being.

Adjust your body into the posture, and watch. What arises? If you’re taking a full bind in extended side angle, but notice you’re taking short, quick breaths, that means your airway is compressed and your body wasn’t ready at that moment for such a scenario.

So you back out, move in more slowly, and find the sticking points.

Leaning into those sticking points is where the practice drives us towards self-mastery. But identifying them first requires that we bring an attitude of non attachment to our movements.

You can take warrior 3, peek in the mirror and see “yes this looks right”. But if you aren’t focused on feeling the sensations that the posture is creating in you (locked knee in standing leg, rounding shoulders) then you are missing the chances to use that information towards creating greater states of freedom in your being.

Whichever speaks to you, dispassion vs. non attachment —

Recognize that the aim is to become unbothered by the fluctuations around you.

The world is always changing, and it will take you along for the ride if you can’t let go of the thoughts that it creates in you.

So go ahead, beep your horn, let the other person know you exist. But don’t let them (or anyone else) take away your peace.

I’ve only been “doing” yoga for a handful of years. So what the hell do I really know?

When I was 15, my sister taught me a basic Sun A as a way to stretch before school, so I’ve known the basic movements for about half of my life at least. But the underlying philosophy is one I only began learning about in 2017 when I first started going to MOSAIC in downtown San Diego and did my initial teacher training.

I haven’t read every book about yoga, and I honestly don’t plan to, either. There are moments when learning someone else’s perspective on a thing is useful for figuring out how to make a skillful approach towards it. But there is also just “the thing” underlying those thought forms, and time to be spent with it, instead of thinking about it.

That being said — if there is just one book about yoga that you read in your life, make it these Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Sri Swami Satchidanada.

Structured as “threads” (which is a literal translation of sutra) these short lines of wisdom weave together to encapsulate, to the best degree possible, the profundity of what we just call yoga in the modern world.

And yet, each stands on its own as a guide down into the heart of this practice.

Herein lies a beautiful metaphor for understanding yoga:

Studying the sutras or doing a vinyasa flow is less about the totality of the work, and more about finding individual moments that bring you back to the core of who and what you truly are.

• There are 500+ sutras. Good luck memorizing them all.

• There are 24 hours in a day. Can you do it the whole time?

The thing to recognize is that we are ultimately limited beings. We can only be in one pose at a time! Our words must be spoken one-by-one to be coherent, and the only way to get anywhere really is putting one foot in front of the other.

The problem is that it’s really easy to fall into patterns of thought and action where we forget these aspects of our human experience.

We spend a lot of time picturing our idealized lives…visualizing what it’ll be like when we’ve finally graduated, been promoted, gotten married, had kids, sent them to college, retired financially secure, traveled to every country, read through the whole library of congress, and are famous on every social media platform so that everyone has to listen to us every time we speak.

How realistically do you tend to estimate the time it will take to achieve all the goals in your life?

I know I’ve personally had to spend some time unraveling my tendency to wildly underestimate the time it will take me to achieve something, whether in work contexts or in the scope of my life plan. I’d see some attractive new skill, topic, or project beckoning to me, and quickly forget about all the other unfinished ones sitting on my metaphorical (or sometimes literal) desk.

Goals are great, and so are new ones (most of the time). But we ought to remember that the elements needed to achieve them are only ever encountered in the present moment.

You might be saying: “I don’t see a paid off mortgage in front of me right now, so how could that be in the present moment?”

But the reality is that the time is always now. It’s “now”, now, and when you are looking at a paid off mortgage in front of you, it will also be “now”, then.

It’s a irony we must all confront at some point that in terms of reaching your goals, the better question to be asking yourself is not “how do I get there” it’s “how do I make the most of what’s here”.

Even if that crucial moment hasn’t arrived, like the ball being thrown to you at the three-point line as the clock approaches zero, the best way to prepare for it is cultivating the mentality that you expect to need in that moment, right now.

Spoiler alert: it’s total absorption. Full presence. No preoccupation with result.

The player that hits that shot isn’t the one that worries about missing it, it’s the one that doesn’t think twice. They just shoot. Of course they care about whether or not it goes in, but they’ve spent so much time refining their shooting motion that when the opportunity arises they don’t have to consciously think, they simply do.

I’ve said before that I don’t feel good about using the term “yoga teacher” since I really don’t think of what I’m doing as teaching…but “yoga guide” or “some dude talking to you for an hour” doesn’t quite have the same ring, I guess.

I remember during yoga teacher training many students, including myself, expressed insecurity about getting up in front of a class and “teaching” yoga. How does one go from complete rookie to that teacher up there speaking as if they know what they are talking about? It felt like a chasm, impossible to cross except for those with little social anxiety or those willing to look like a complete fraud.

But our instructors simply said: “we teach from where we are at” — meaning, everyone has something to teach.

It really doesn’t matter how long you’ve practiced asana or known about yoga philosophy…if you’ve been alive on this planet for more than a few years, you know something about being human. And that’s all this practice is really about.

It’s not about accrual. You don’t get a ribbon for finishing your first flow, and you don’t instantly become an expert when you finish your thousandth.

In fact, it’s about holding onto less.

The breath and the movements serves as objects to train our attention on for a period of time. So we simply try to preoccupy ourselves with just those things for a while.

Whether or not you end up being able to touch your toes is beside the point. Can you take that mentality of pure focus and presence with what you’re doing to the other areas of your life? That’s the real question to be asking.

When your toddler is screaming at you for taking away the crayons they were eating, how resilient is the recognition that your true aim is to love and care for them? It’s easy to forget about being a channel of peace for the world when someone cuts you off in traffic. If someone you love is diagnosed with cancer, does fear and anxiety chase away the calmness and grounded you could otherwise have provided in service them?

The mindset that keeps you present with the most important and challenging moments in life is more likely to be a subtraction than it is a sum.

So when you read Patanjali’s words:

Practice becomes firmly grounded when well attended to for a long time, without break and in all earnestness.

Remember that nobody is keeping score on how much yoga you do.

Mastery necessarily takes time. There is no shortcut to be found, because there isn’t really even a path.

One of my favorite quotes is from author Kahlil Gibran in his work, The Prophet

You are the way and the wayfarer.

Try to think of yourself less as someone practicing yoga, and more just as someone.

The more consistently you choose to show up to that underlying substrate of your human experience, the less your patience will seem like an imposition.

Stop waiting for something to happen, or wishing you were better at life than you seem to be — just start living it.

We work from where we are at, right? If a posture is taking you out of your breath, you back out, adapt the form, and then get back to work.

From that space, in which we can be fully present with the challenges that arise come as they may, is where the roots begin to drive down deep.

तत्र स्थितौ यत्नोऽभ्यासः

Tatra sthitau yatno’bhyāsaḥ

Of these two, effort towards steadiness of mind is practice.

Expanding further on the concept of how “practice” & “detachment” comprise the whole of restraining the fluctuations of the mind (which is yoga), Patanjali tells us that effort towards steadiness of mind comprises the first part of that equation.

Effort.

There’s a subtlety here that’s very informative to the way we approach time on the mat.

Normally, you might think of effort as something that’s “given” as a means to an end. It’s the thing you generate in order to make, arrange, or become whatever is needed. You could read this instruction blithely, like, “yeah obviously you have to try to steady the mind in order to steady it — so what do I need to do to get there?”

But approaching yoga that way can leave you totally missing the point.

There’s a great metaphor/visual laid out in Iyengar’s Light on Life that I tend to return to when confronting this somewhat paradoxical idea (of bringing about stillness of mind through effort) — the rippled lake.

I’ll adapt it a bit here ↙️

— imagine you are walking out into a lake looking down at the water’s surface.

— the surface is disturbed by your legs as you move, and ripples are bouncing all around.

— you’re looking in the water, but your reflection is distorted by the movement in the water.

— you think, if only it were smoothed off, I could see my face clearly.

— so you reach down with one hand and pass it over the water side to side, attempting to remove the ripples.

— but your hand only causes more ripples…

So too can our “efforts” to steady the mind simply perpetuate the fluctuations.

It’s kind of comical, isn’t it?

We tend to approach yoga with the idea that “steadiness of mind” is something we can achieve through some combination of postures, good instructions, and time. But more often than not, the things we “do” to work towards this state become their own form of ripple and disturbance.

We live in an additive-focused culture. The prescription to solve any problem tends to be “more” of something. If it doesn’t work, you just need to find another option and keep trying until something works…

• 5 am club. Cold plunges. Hyperbaric chambers. Meditation retreats. Magic mushrooms. Traveling to India. Learning an instrument.

  • In San Diego, you definitely know someone who can’t stop talking about their newest bio-hacking / optimal performance / I’m better than everyone else routine.

  • All of these can totally be good things, but which combo, sequence, or specific one reliably works to steady the mind people of all backgrounds and capacities?

    • None.

      • So what is the effort that Patanjali is talking about?

Side Bar:

Speaking of comedy, my fellow Massachusetts-raised Bill Burr just put out a new, surprisingly wholesome, standup. Everyone’s favorite perpetually angry, piss & vinegar filled/Bostonian has evidently been turning inward, and I can’t recommend watching it highly enough.

To cut to the chase here — the common/easy take away is that this practice (yoga) isn’t so much about what you’re doing, as it is about what you’re not doing.

…but, wait —

It’s impossible to try not to do something.

The classic example is telling someone: “Don’t think about cats.”

What do they always end up doing?

— they think about cats.

Try telling yourself to “steady the mind”, what are you really doing?

— thinking about steadying the mind (which is itself a mental fluctuation).

It’s ultimately like waving your hand over the surface of the lake water. You’re probably just adding more ripples.

Returning to that rippled lake metaphor, what do we need to do to see clearly?

Wait.

For real, it’s just wait.

The only real chance you have of a clear surface is activated by stopping your movement and allowing the ripples to subside. You can only mess it up, really. You don’t make it happen — you just create the conditions for it to occur.

So the better question to ask is, how should I wait?

Keeping with the metaphor of standing in the lake, how would you ensure that you aren’t swaying around by accident (and making more ripples) as you attempt to stand still?

Same way we stay balanced in tree pose — find a reference point in your field of awareness that isn’t moving and fix your gaze on it. You’d look across the lake at a tree, or a dock, staring at it intently, using it to steady your stance by the power of your proprioception (sensing your body within space). Unless you have vertigo, this is a reliable method for keeping your physical body still.

So when you step on the mat to practice, what’s the reference point to fix your attention on to steady the mind? The breath. Sure, the breath “moves”, but we aren’t trying to actually be frozen or inert — we are really just aiming for steady.

The breath is constantly in the present moment, and logically cannot be anywhere else. That’s why it serves as our first reference point to train the focus on as we aim to restrain the mind from wandering into the past or future.

As you focus your attention on the breath, the ripples in your mind-stuff do not immediately subside. But over time, the energy that was in the water dissipates and the surface becomes more clear / reflective. Eventually you can see right down through the water to the bottom.

Effectively, the effort you give towards focusing on the breath is the practice.

Here’s why:

When you try to focus on the breath, you’re directing your attention willfully towards a particular appearance in your field of conscious awareness (which just so happens to be always grounded in the present moment).

In directing your focus that way, you are effectively excluding the other things that might normally grab your attention (ruminations, imaginations, speculations) — ripples that, if you try to grab them or smooth them out, create more ripples.

effort towards steadiness of mind is practice.

But remember, let’s avoid the trap of assuming that “focusing on the breath” is the cure-all thing we “do” to really “do yoga”.

The breath is a convenient reference point. But there are many more!

As you deepen in yoga practice, the idea is to begin extrapolating that core practice (of focusing wholly on the breath) to other appearances in your field of conscious awareness.

So similarly, it’s not a matter of how perfectly aligned your warrior 2 posture is — it’s a matter of how wholly you give your attention to performing that pose.

In a vinyasa flow, we are frequently reminded of impermanence as we visit each pose for but a moment, fluidly moving from one to the next without major changes.

Yet we aim to maintain the effort as our constant throughout the series.

No matter how many times you’ve “done” warrior 2, there is always a little more depth to explore. Even if your knee is at a perfect 90 degree angle and your shoulders are within a micrometer of the point directly above your hips, you can deepen the posture by opening your shoulders/heart, holding it longer, or maybe coming halfway out and holding there instead.

There’s literally a never ending amount of variations you can explore. In this light, the practice becomes a matter of simply picking one, and going as far as you can within it.

So there should never be a point at which yoga becomes easy.

It’s always supposed to be “hard”.

If it isn’t, that’s a signal that you aren’t giving your full effort. If you are quietly reserving a portion of your attention capacity — let’s say 80% of you is focused on warrior 2, but 10% is anticipating the next pose, and 10% is congratulating yourself for how much better your pose looks than the sorry saps in the back row — then you leave it up to chance where that energy flows.

Don’t leave it up to chance.

Exercise the one muscle that’s really worth flexing: agency.

Every time you notice that your focus has shifted or you aren’t giving 100%, bring it back, make another rep.

1. Right knowledge

2. Misconception

3. Imagination

4. Sleep

5. Memory

So now, how do we get those fluctuations to subside and “be restrained”? That is essentially the stated aim of yoga practice, given in sutra 2. The restraint of the fluctuations of the mind stuff is yoga.

Here’s Sutra 12 ↙️

अभ्यासवैराग्याभ्यां तन्निरोधः Abhyāsa-vairāgyābhyāṁ tat-nirodhaḥ. These mental modifications are restrained by practice and non attachment.

Practice, and non-attachment.

Try really hard, don’t hold on to the results.

It might seem a bit obvious, and honestly, kinda bland (as far as deep meaningful mystical spiritual instructions go 😆). Like, that’s it? We bring the mind into a state of union with the present moment by…trying really hard?

And we’re supposed to give this effort without caring about the results…

Let’s unpack.

This is one of those simple instructions that seems a bit too obvious at first.

But through time, it becomes something a yogi refers back to over and over with new understanding as their perspective broadens.

Practice has become something of a “dead word” in today’s language. It’s used so often that we don’t really think about it’s true meaning when it’s said. And rarely, if ever, is it decoupled from the concept of obtaining something we want as a result of doing it.

But it’s overuse alludes to the very thing our culture seems not to understand as it throws this word “practice” repeatedly into the maw of our collective discontentedness with this life.

So let’s pull back and simply define practice as:

sincere effort

Holding aside all the typically associated concepts (such as goals, intentions, and expectations), the difference between a practice and a simple action is the level of effort and inspiration behind it.

If you go to soccer practice and just poke the ball around with your toe, you wouldn’t say that’s practicing the sport, right? If you’re practicing—you run as fast as you can, you try using the inside or outside of your foot to pass, you aim to make every shot a little harder, every pass a little more accurate.

Sincere effort (practice) is doing whatever you’re doing unto the edge of your capacity.

That’s why it ultimately helps to expand our abilities for a given skill or activity.

There’s a simple physiological truth behind this idea — to build a muscle, you have to load it with greater and greater weights so that it is pushed slightly beyond it’s capacity, literally tearing in some places before being repaired and reformed into a bigger version of itself.

If you can run 5 miles at 5 mph pace without stopping, how do you “practice” distance running? You can run longer distances at slower speeds, run shorter distances at higher speeds, or try going further after stopping. Simple enough, right?

But remember, it’s “practice and non attachment”.

Not just practice.

Not ‘practicing non attachment’, either.

That’s what makes this instruction so brilliant as a remedy for the state of dis-ease that plagues the modern mind. Give sincere effort, don’t hold on to the result.

We tend to want “more” of whatever it is we are practicing, and we think of the practice as the necessary effort required to obtain something of value (a skill, ability, or desired end state).

That’s where modern yoga tends to go way off the rails, in my opinion. When we bring that attitude into a studio and hear the word “practice” over and over as the teacher is speaking at us from inside some impossibly challenging posture of bodily contortion, it’s easy to assume that we are practicing to be able to do that kind of stuff with our body.

However, you can’t keep any of that kind of “achievement”.

Even if you diligently maintain your body, eat healthy, and take every pharmaceutical drug ever made (or embalm yourself in herbs 24/7, whatever you prefer) — you will eventually be incapable of doing a handstand. That’s a guaranteed fact.

It would be amazing to reach your deathbed by walking over to it on your hands…but is that kind of absurdity something worth striving for?

Indeed, one of the ways yoga is sold to people is with the image of the 80 year old yogi, long white hair and tanned skin, exhibiting movement patterns that are typically thought of as impossible for an American 80 year old.

“Do yoga and you can feel good forever”

It’s a good sell because there is a lot of truth within that idea. You probably will have more relative sensations of ease in your body over the course of a lifetime if you maintain your body.

But you won’t live forever, so there’s necessarily a stopping point to that idea of individuated progress. At the very best, you get lucky and die of a heart attack suddenly at 81 right before you lose the ability to do a handstand.

If we need the result to justify the effort, the very best we can hope for is being spared the pain of confronting our own diminishment.

So if it isn’t the end result we want, what are we doing all this yoga for?

To figure this out, I think we need to step out of the cultural attitude of perpetual accrual we were all born into.

Do x + y, achieve z end state.

With z end state, now able to do a + b + c.

There’s always something more to add. Every action is part of a value evaluation that enables the next level of whatever it is we are chasing.

But doing more yoga should actually leave you with less.

Less distraction.

Less rumination.

Less confusion.

It’s clarity we are after. Clear and direct perception of reality. Awareness that is not muddied by intervening mental fluctuations. Right knowledge.

Now here’s the subtlety:

We aren’t trying to clear the mind so that better things can come in. We are just trying to clear it. Period.

Forget about the {so that} clause.

We’ve all heard the phrase:

I think, therefore I am.

Remove the {so that} clause…

I think. I am.

So what’s left if we a practicing the restraint of the mental fluctuations (the act of thinking)?

I am.

It’s expansion through reduction.

I think we tend to avoid this work because we rightly notice that it is reducing the image of who we are, or at least, the portion of our conscious awareness that that image takes up.

Yoga slowly chips away at the underlying mental narratives/storylines we live by (from which misconceptions often arise) by continually calling our attention back into the present moment.

Whatever posture/asana you’re taking, try to cover all aspects of it with your attention.

Feel the way your feet are engaging with the ground.

Notice any unintentional tension being held in your hands.

If a movement restricts the natural flow of your breath, back out, and find a new way into the pose.

Think of your attention like a muscle.

The asanas in yoga practice are like the weights you use to strengthen and refine your attention. Of course there’s an aspect of getting stronger or more balanced or more whatever to moving through an asana, just as there can be an aspect of mindfulness to any form of exercise or movement.

But the point is not how many things (or how few) you can hold in your field of awareness — it’s experiencing yourself as that state of awareness. The you are. The I am. The basic fact of existence underlying all the different ways you may define yourself.

And we already are that. It’s not an end-state to be achieved after years of practice.

Indeed, it might takes years of practice to recognize it in a stable, reliable way that isn’t easily interrupted by the million things that can easily grab your attention and send it off into spirals once again.

That’s why it’s called a practice. It requires your sincerest effort, repeated over and over through time.

Just give it your all! That is the whole task at hand.

In the most practical sense, it’s not trying hard to obtain any particular thing. It’s just learning to devote all of your attention to one particular thing.

Maybe you think you already mastered warrior 2 so every time you get there you just wait for the next poses, wondering which ones will challenge you this time.

But that’s missing the point of yoga! Each time you take warrior 2 is a new time. Even if you’ve done it 2,000 times before, this time is now, and it deserves your full attention as you practice.

Not 50%, not 90%. 100% of your attention.

We start doing this with postures because they are easily visited, measured, and universal. But once you’ve strengthened your attention such that it can fully cover the appearances in your awareness that arise from an asana without being distracted, what’s to stop you from doing that with the base layer of the reality in which those things appear?

Only attachment. Wanting the things that appear to last longer than they do.

Hence the instruction — these mental modifications are restrained by practice and non attachment.

Try hard, let go.

Pūrvānubhūta-viṣayāsampramoṣaḥ smṛtiḥ

When a mental modification of an object previously experienced and not forgotten comes back into consciousness, that is memory.

Remember (hah) that Patanjali is laying out categories to characterize the different types of fluctuation we experience in our minds. Literally, modifications of the mind-stuff.

Now that we have all five let’s have a look at them together.

1. Right knowledge

2. Misconception

3. Imagination

4. Sleep

5. Memory

Does it feel complete? Actually think about it for a moment.

— do you look at this list and think: “yes that is the totality of what happens in my mind”?

I have to admit that personally, when I see that list, I don’t immediately relate those categories to my own mental experiences. There’s just no strong visceral connection to them that conjures up clear examples of what each is like.

On the other hand, tell me that there are 7 days in a week and they are called Sunday, Monday, Tuesday through Saturday…I totally get it. Each day has it’s own feel and set of associations. Sometimes a Saturday feels like a Sunday, sometimes Wednesdays are insufferable and Thursdays are occasionally thirsty.

So why aren’t these 5 categories of thought more intuitive?

Most of the time we are thinking, we don’t realize we are thinking.

If we are in “typical” states of mind, naming the thought forms is like being inside of a box and having someone tell you the color of the box’s exterior. Easy to see from outside, but not super useful from inside.

That’s why practices like yoga were devised — to allow us to examine the thought forms more objectively, begin to perceive them clearly, and become generally more aware of their nature.

And it is a practice.

It’s something that has to be repeated over and over to be sustainably impactful.

Repetition is the reason why I have a steady idea of what “Wednesday” is, can describe it to you, and could probably guess when it’s Wednesday even if I hadn’t seen a calendar in a while.

I’m 30 years old, which is approximately 11,000 days. If I only count from 10 years old (which is when I was probably beginning to be acutely aware of which day of the week was which) that’s about 7300 days. That means I’ve experienced each day of the week at least 1,043 times while being more or less aware of it’s name.

So here’s the question:

How many times have you experienced a memory while being aware that it was a memory?

Probably way less than 1,000 days worth.

There are the times you actively seek to remember something, forming a new thought or action based on what you can recall from past experience:

• where you left your keys

• which house has your friend lives in

And there are times a memory is triggered by some present experience, suddenly re-experiencing aspects of the past during the present moment:

• the smell of seaweed reminds you of beach trips as a child

• the taste of pistachio ice cream reminds you of your first date

But there are also all the times the mind turns over past events, ruminating on what was said / done, mentally replaying scenarios, or just repeating something that got lodged deep in your brain:

• how the blue Subaru that cut you off in traffic

• how weird the last episode of Severance was

• how did that song go? Da da duh duh…

Seriously though — the amount of time I’ve spent in my 11,000 days singing a song over and over in my head…

I can’t put a number to it of course, but here’s the nut-kicker: would it be more or less than I’ve spent thinking about love?

• ask me what the soup nazi says in Seinfeld? I can tell you line for line, no problem.

• ask me what my wife told me to get at the grocery store this morning? Nope…crickets.

I’ll come back to this. Anyways, here’s where this gets interesting from a yoga perspective —

How can you tell when what you’re experiencing in your mind is a memory vs. imagination?

The answer might feel obvious, like: “well I just know…memories actually happened and imagination didn’t”.

But when it really comes down to it, can you describe what aspects of a memory you are noticing that make it distinct from something you completely made up?

— think about right knowledge vs. misconception again…

The example is seeing a snake coiled in the grass. If it’s a snake, you are in a state of right knowledge. If it’s actually a rope, you are in a state of misconception.

However, in both scenarios, your mind is experiencing “snake”.

And there are measurable results to this experience. The pulse may quicken, adrenals begin firing, pupils dilate, muscles tense — preparing to run or otherwise evade the perceived threat.

So we can conclude that, regardless of accuracy, our perception of reality has a meaningful affect on our experience of reality.

In asana practice, we are aiming to experience our movement and bodies as they truly are.

During a flow, memory (and it’s effects on the present) can surface many times.

Maybe you tore your ACL in your right knee 10 years ago, and even though you had surgery and did all the rehab, you still tend to put more weight on your left foot and avoid deep lunges on the right.

As a result, perhaps you subconsciously go deeper on the left lunges to compensate for what you perceive as “lack of ability” on the right, instead of patiently matching effort on both sides. Perhaps you end up straining your left knee in too deep of a lunge since you expected it to have more capacity than it did.

Maybe you used to rock at headstands and could chill in a tripod headstand for a couple minutes, and even though you haven’t done one in a long time you decide to zip right into the pose without preparing.

As a result, perhaps you hurt your neck! Or, crash into your neighbor, hurting their neck. Maybe you try and can’t quite get your legs up, so you end up feeling frustrated and embarrassed moving into the next poses.

The simple cue to follow for your practice is to bring a beginner’s mindset.

You’ve done warrior 2 hundreds of times. But this time, try to experience it as if for the very first.

In an absolute sense, it’s obviously impossible. Your current experience is always going to be somewhat intervened upon by past impressions (unless you’ve totally escaped the mind and become a yogic sage). Even the first time you did “warrior 2” you had some prior experience holding your body in some form of posture that you probably compared it to, one way or another.

But in a practical sense, you’ll find that it’s quite possible.

Think about the characteristics of the beginner’s mindset, and invite them into your own experience. For me, all it really boils down to is whether or not you carry expectations with you into the moment of experiencing.

The first time you bend that knee and raise those arms, you don’t really know how it’s going to feel, so you just feel it (at least to a much higher degree than you might once your thoughts about how it ought to feel start to calcify over your perception of how it does feel).

When you do bring a beginner’s mind to your practice, the flow becomes one big reference point for becoming familiar with the 5 vrittis.

If you try to simply be aware of the breath, you can see the moment when that catchy song impinges on your consciousness.

Inhale, exhale, inhale — “sing us a song you’re the piano man!”

When we are still in the box of the thinking mind, maybe you continue on — “sing us a song, toniiiight!” and suddenly you’ve been breathing for a while and had no attention to it.

But if you catch that moment, notice it, and come back to the breath — now you’re outside of the box. You can see the color and texture of it, and mark it with a pen: “memory”.

The same goes for the other 4:

• I feel steady in my extended side angle, I think I have more space to explore, so I’ll try for a bind — can I breathe? Yes. Ok, right knowledge.

• I’m in warrior 3, my leg feels like it’s parallel to the ground — take a peek in the mirror? Nope, too high. Ok, misconception.

• I’ve never put my foot on my head before in dancer’s pose — I’m picturing myself with my foot on my head, straining to get it closer, instead of noticing how my hamstring feels like it’s going to tear. Ok, imagination.

• At the end of the flow I’m settled in corpse pose and I let me breathing come naturally, aiming to just be in my space passively without engaging — suddenly I’m startled awake. Ok, sleep.

The more time you spend being aware of each kind of thought, the more familiar you’ll become with their unique qualities.

As a result, you’ll become more able to recognize which is which during your daily life.

That’s where the power of this practice becomes clear…

If our perception of an experience (whether clear or not clear) is itself a determining factor for the quality of that experience, then we are literally learning how to determine the nature of our memories (accurate or inaccurate, empowering or oppressive).

Generally, I’ve heard memory addressed in yogic contexts mainly in terms of identifying/interrupting intrusive thoughts or rooting out present misconceptions formed by basing decisions off memories that are no longer correlated to reality.

Super useful, don’t get me wrong.

But I want to close this reflection by considering the other end of that spectrum.

When we look back on our lives, the things we remember very well often feel quite absurd. Why can I, to this day, remember the exact channel that Barney was on local TV — but not remember the exact last words my mother said to me?

As a result, I think most of us tend to throw up our hands in defeat, thinking “well it’s a crapshoot” or “hindsight is 20/20”. You never seem to know the core memory while it’s forming.

But the truth, as usual, is much more blunt.

Where you choose to place your attention determines your experience of reality.

Duh.

But think about this in the context of memory.

If, as I’m walking down the beach with my wife and our son, I’m lost in thought ruminating on my recent memories of how work went that day — that becomes my primary experience of the moment.

Sure, the sand is there. I can vaguely sense the sun on my shoulders. The sound of her voice is there, and the mischievous look in his eyes when he grabs at my sunglasses is too. But if my attention isn’t on those things, they are probably beneath layers of “I wish that project had gone better” or “I need to hire a new editor” or “sing us a song you’re the piano man!”. Then its no surprise when that beach walk fades into the void of the innumerable lost experiences cast from the limited amount of gray matter memory space I have in my skull.

Perhaps we should give just as much effort towards noticing the things now that are becoming memories as we do towards noticing when memories intervene with the present.

And I’d argue that the things worth having as memories are always found right in front of you.

I think we all know that certain eras or periods of our lives end up having a “feel” to them when we look back to remember them.

You are, right now, determining how that experience will be.

Memories are made now.

So learn to be here, now.

Here it is directly (in English),

The mental modification supported by cognition of nothingness is sleep.

The Swami provides some (brief) additional commentary referencing the idea of deep sleep, where you rest so fully that you have no memory of what was happening in your mind.

Remember that this is the 4th type of mental fluctuation (out of 5) — these are the first three:

1. Right knowledge (clear perception of reality)

2. Misconception (warped perception of reality)

3. Imagination (thought which has no direct correlation to reality)

In a sense, it’s super interesting that sleep even makes this list.

We are listing out the main variations of thought, right? Memory is the 5th. So if sleep is to be understood as the absence of conscious thought (cognition of nothingness), why not just leave it off the list?

Thinking about “nothing” isn’t really possible, nor is completely shutting off the brain (while alive at least). So this feels like something you either have to read into super hard to sort of invent insights, or just brush off entirely.

Instead, I’m going to reflect on the idea that it’s an “inadequate” piece of these “yoga instructions”, and in so doing, hopefully illustrate a more useful way to look at this Sutra (and other scripture-type texts) — maybe we’ll find that it’s more “adequate” than appears at first glance.

I’m not going to do the typical “with what we now know in modern science” blah blah blah thing. There is certainly plenty of neuroscience to dig into if you’re interested in the (now) easily measured aspects of what’s going on in the brain during sleep (of any kind, deep or not). To my read, that kind of reductive writing is primarily indicative of either a superiority complex (trying to look smart by stepping on/over things that have been well regarded in the past), and/or dogmatic thinking (if it isn’t 100% true then it’s 100% false).

Nor am I going to do the apologetic’s dance with the “here’s what they really meant” or “language is limited” angles. I’d bet that sort of response usually comes from the other side of the spectrum (inferiority complex) — and in most cases, it’s wholly inadequate. Trying to reinvent someones intentions based on what they wrote is like trying to put the scattered seeds of a white dandelion back where they were on the stem after they’ve been blown off.

Let’s think about it like this — if there was a machine that could transport your consciousness across space and time and somehow install it as an observer within the consciousness of Patanjali back in the 2nd century BCE, maybe we could claim to know what he meant by every word.

But even if that machine did exist, you could be certain of your knowing, but could anyone else?

You telling them with whatever oblique awareness of modern neuroscience you might individually have could perhaps be more convincing. But ultimately, they’d need a machine to install themselves within your consciousness when you journeyed back to creep on Patanjali…and so would the next person they tell…and so would the next…

Side bar — watch Being John Malkovich for a weird, wild depiction of this concept. It’s one of those 90s films that you probably didn’t know exists but is actually really cool.

As far as I know, there is no such machine. And even if there was, you might want to think about the teleportation paradox before jumping in.

However!

There is a technology that, if used diligently and correctly, permits you to experience firsthand exactly what Patanjali was experiencing when he wrote the Sutras. And you don’t have to travel through space and time (at least in a literal sense).

It’s called yoga.

Yeah…I know…that was kind of…lame. But at least in my head this morning, taking that little detour through imagining if we could transfer our consciousness into Patanjali’s was informative for one key reason — you can’t remove his consciousness if you want to see his thoughts, but you can see and experience just the same as he did.

Let’s unpack:

…permits you to experience firsthand exactly what Patanjali was experiencing…

This looks like a contradiction to what I wrote earlier, but it actually depends on if you’re thinking about experiencing as ‘that which fills conscious awareness’ or as the awareness itself.

That is to say, there is:

1. a thing (noun) we call “experience”, meaning something one experiences [a ride on a roller coaster],

2. and there is a thing that it is to (verb) experience one of those things (noun 1) [the feeling of riding the roller coaster]

3. but there is also the fact of experience itself (noun 2)…[the space in which the feeling of riding the roller coaster occurs].

If I had said there was a machine that could replace your consciousness in the exact space and time where Patanjali existed 2200 years ago, all you’d have is your own ‘experience’ of whatever precise external stimuli were present for him. That’s not necessarily going to inform you about why he wrote what he wrote about sleep. The degree to which your experience is still layered over by misconceptions and delusions is the degree to which it will differ from the base level of raw information presented by the world at large in that space.

Generally, we default to thinking about “experience” as the contents of consciousness.

The sensations, notions, and feelings that bubble up within the space of our awareness are usually the sole focus. In order for someone to know exactly what it’s like to be you, they’d need to ‘walk a mile in your shoes’ — what the 19th century German sociologist Max Weber called verstehen.

The thing is…it’s literally impossible.

Now, there’s definitely a level of cross-cultural understanding that can be achieved through traditional travel and poignant experiences. I spent 6 months living in Chile while learning Spanish and my level of understanding for what it’s like to be a Chilean is definitely non-zero at this point.

However, it can never be complete.

Even if I did decide to spend the rest of my life living in Chile and after 20 years I had completely eradicated my American accent and foregone that part of my identity, am I really Chilean? Even if you wanted to argue “yes”, there are still an infinite number of other realities that I’m effectively choosing not to live as a result. What’s it like being Dutch? Australian? Young in the 90s vs young in the 50s? Married with kids vs. single with dogs? Seat 18D vs seat 18E?

No single person can aggregate the totality of human experience into one consciousness in one lifetime.

You’d be God if you could. We are temporally bound beings — there’s only one country I can visit at a time, and only one seat on one roller coaster than I can sit in.

Our bodies eventually die, bringing our memories back down into the earth with them. Even if we wrote them all down and collected everyone’s memories into one massive Google Doc then asked ChatGPT to analyze it and write us new laws for how to be nice to one another, by the time it finished writing its reply (even if it only took a millisecond) the world would have changed again, since it’s constantly changing, and we’d technically have to reevaluate.

Maybe that’s why it seems so impossible for us to root out racism, sexism, ageism, and all the other divisive -isms. We are still generally convinced that the important things to think about are the superficialities that fill the space in which our conscious awareness manifests. And we use those superficialities to construct the identities such as nationality, class, and social status that we use to differentiate (for better or worse) betwixt one another.

Yoga teaches us to find the substrate beneath all those fillings.

When we practice, we dial the attention down into the thing that necessarily resides in that space at all times — the breath. By its own nature, it can’t be anywhere other than here and now. You can’t keep it in the past, you can’t save it for the future—you can only experience it as an experience appearing in the space of your experience.

Over time, the aim is to use that observance as a guide to help you learn to reside in (or more correctly, as) that space. Simply noticing what arises as you move through the various postures, aligning and re-aligning your structures to positions of relative balance based on your observances.

So yah, maybe if you’d already become a yoga sage and were somehow transported into the instance of Patanjali where and when he decided to write Sutra 1.10 you’d be like “Ok I totally get it, sleep is the mental modification based on the absence of content, I see what he saw.”

But here’s the beautiful thing about yoga — once you’re a yogi, you already see it.

There’s no need to be teleported 2200 years back with some neuroscience books to write an “improved” version of the Sutras (that probably never gets read by people in its own era because it’s referencing information that would sound insane to them).

All we are trying to do is observe the same basic facts of existence that are available to everyone, no matter where, when, or how they lived.

Over time, with practice, awareness of those facts permeates your being and becomes more stable. In the same way, the first time you try balancing half moon you might be there for a moment, but must soon leave and revisit over and over before your muscles have the strength to remain for longer periods of time.

So for me, the point is not whether or not we comprehend Patanjali’s words, nor even if they are fully accurate or not to whatever advanced understanding of brain wave activity we have at the moment. The point is whether or not we are trying to create the same clarity of perception in our own consciousness.

That’s why I consider yoga as a technology — if we learn to use it well, we have no need for the user manual.

It’s still useful to have on hand from time to time, of course — and with the amount of “updates” modern life is pushing out on us, it’s important to have some reference point for re-learning the motions every time the damn buttons move on you 🤣

On the other hand, instruction alone is definitely useless.

When you move through a flow, the instructor is your guide and visual example…but if you just watch them, what good is it? The idea is to be moving your body, noticing your thoughts. Injury tends to occur when you leave your focus on the externalized shapes concepts and ignore the sensations/realities in your own body.

Yoga is teaches us to focus on primary source information.

And to start, we pay attention to just one primary source — our own experience.

So instead of dismissing Sutra 10 (or writing an unnecessarily long reflection about it like I did) maybe just contemplate the nature of sleep and compare it to your other experiences. At the end of the day, a feeling of tiredness arises, and after a few hours of Netflix, somehow you fall asleep.

Sometimes you remember what happens in your mind during that period, sometimes you don’t. But even if you woke up in a pitch dark room, you know that time passed.

Your awareness wasn’t filled with the same stuff, but it was still there. That, more than anything, seems like something worth realizing.

The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.

Kahlil Gibran

But some words are really just words.

शब्दज्ञानानुपाती वस्तुशून्यो विकल्प Śabda-jñānānupātī vastu-śūnyo vikalpaḥ Imagination (vikalpa) is knowledge based on words without an actual corresponding reality.

This, the third of the five vrittis (mental fluctuations), can be boiled down to one “just word”: vikalpah.

The simplest way to translate it is “verbal delusion” or “imagination”.

So we have:

1. Right knowledge — thought that is based on an accurate perception of reality

2. Misconception — thought that is based on an inaccurate perception of reality

3. Verbal Delusion — thought that is not based on reality at all.

In examples:

1. You see a snake coiled in the grass and you think, “oh shit, a snake!”

2. You see a rope coiled in the grass and you think, “oh shit, a snake!”

3. You see nothing but grass, and you still genuinely think, “oh shit, a snake!”

Now, there are several ways to approach this idea of vikalpah, and I could very much get lost in the weeds here batting around the idea that all words (and the thoughts they represent) are forms of delusion, being mere derivations of the reality they are formed to (often inadequately) represent.

But I’m going to try and take the most practical route here since yoga is meant to be a practical practice for practitioners to practice being practical in terms of their spiritual growth 😉

And remember that Patanjali is laying these vrittis out for the sake of our being able to distinguish type from type.

Thoughts arising is an inevitability — the idea is to get comfortable with knowing their nature and become more and more able to sit in the seat of the observer while thoughts are arising, instead of being carried away or having your awareness completely obscured (being totally lost in thought).

So here’s the first assumption to hold in mind:

Thoughts have real consequence in your life.

We tend to think of consequences mainly in terms of tangible, physical occurrences.

• if put hand on hot stove, be burned, feel pain

• if step on snake, be bitten, feel mortal fear

Our emphasis is generally on the if/then dependent end states (burned/bitten) & the sensations/emotions that arise as a result of those states of being (pain/fear). We think primarily of the physical effects, and the cause is considered the action that was taken (intentionally or unintentionally) to create said effects.

But unless you’re in a blind rage or you’re a zen master, there were probably some thoughts that happened before those actions were taken.

• “I’m just a little baby and I’ve never touched a hot stove before, so I’m going to try and see what happens”

• “I’m out for a nice walk in the woods, I’ve been by here before and nothing bit me, so I don’t need to watch my step”

Those are obviously not verbatim thoughts, but they describe the mindset of an individual about to experience physical consequences for an action they are choosing to take, and that mindset is composed of the thoughts with which we choose to engage.

The point is to remember that before the moment of action & consequence occurs, there are chains of thought that effectively determine the choice being made.

We might sometimes convince ourselves that choices are “spontaneous” or “intuitive”, but truly they depend on at least some form of thought, either conscious or subconscious. It’s ok to characterize them as spontaneous/intuitive, but those decision making models are really just drawing on information that isn’t explicit (not occurring in the pre-frontal cortex).

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to act on thoughts that aren’t based in hardcore reason. There are some fun studies / books out there that explore how to differentiate between these, and how we could actually leverage both forms of thinking in our lives.

For the sake of being practical, I’ll cut right to the TL;DR —

Becoming more familiar with the different types of thought gives you more agency over the eventual consequences of your action.

Given that the actions you take are based (either consciously or unconsciously) on the mindset in which you find yourself when the moment of choice arrives, we should recognize that engaging with thoughts that are not based on reality (vikalpah) can only lead us into mistakes, further delusion, and pain.

For those of you that are thinking: “what about creativity? that’s based on imagination, surely that isn’t a mistake”, I’ll return to this objection later on.

Returning to the examples of action/consequence with the baby and the woods walker,

1. The first is an example of simple ignorance — the baby just doesn’t know that the stove will burn them.

2. The second is an example of two-fold ignorance — the person walking in the woods doesn’t know if there’s a snake in the grass, but they believe that they do know (that there isn’t one).

As our lives unfold, a lot of time is spent on exploration, particularly in childhood. We go and do new things and as a result, we learn. Usually it only takes a few repetitions to acquire the knowledge that “if put hand on stove, hand hurt”.

Again, those kind of physical consequences are easy to track (and remember). But there are also less tangible scenarios where you may find yourself experiencing the same consequences over and over (due to actions you take or fail to take) without understanding why.

Think of the young man who can’t seem to commit to a relationship. Repeatedly, he dates a new person, develops a connection with them, then runs off when things get serious. For a young man, it’s easy to dismiss such behavior…”he’s just young, doesn’t know what he wants”. He’s also easily distracted by the next chase, and doesn’t dwell for long on the pain of breaking up.

However, when this behavior extends into middle age (as we can observe often happens in our society) the results can become quite painful for both sides of the equation. He knows he wants intimacy and commitment, but always ends up running away at the last moment. As a middle-aged man, it becomes harder and harder to find new romantic partners, and the consequences of his inability to understand the reasons behind his repeated reaction of “running off” become more harsh.

So what’s going wrong?

If even a baby can learn “I don’t put my hand on the stove because it’s hot and it will hurt” then surely an adult can learn “I don’t feign romantic commitment when I’m unsure because I will eventually feel trapped, and breaking off relationships hurts”, right?

It’s easy to assume that some people are just “dumb” or “selfish” and are either incapable of piecing together this kind of reasoning, or simply proceed despite awareness of the consequence (they feel the benefits are worth the suffering, for themself or others). But I think there’s a deeper failure to examine, and it is present in us all to some extent.

The problem is more likely to be that we are basing our decisions off of thoughts that have no correlation to reality.

We all, to some extent, have an image of what the ideal life would look like. A snapshot of a happy family walking on the beach holding hands, or of a business tycoon toasting his sons as they take over the family business.

Whatever it might be for you, consider that it’s entirely falsified. You can choose to believe that your life is taking in you that direction, but you can’t possibly know. Furthermore, unless you are physically inside that snapshot yourself at exactly this moment, you can’t truly know the totality of what those idealized people are feeling, what they passed through to be there, or where their trajectory is taking them next.

In the most real sense, those ideas are figments of your imagination. Full stop! That’s what they are.

Yet we tend to treat them as if they had determining impact over our moment to moment happiness.

We see the way our life turned out and figure that if we had been able to “dream a little bigger” we could have achieved more. Or we find ourselves in a pleasurable moment and suddenly are lost comparing the experience to what we assume the “better” one will (hopefully) soon be like.

Just the other day I was chatting with my wife about how awesome it is having our son and becoming parents this year. We were both congratulating ourselves on making it through the infancy phase — “that wasn’t so bad!”, and cheerfully lauding the years to come — “this has been so good already, and it’s gonna get even better!”.

I obviously hope that’s the case, but I don’t actually have as much control over how the next years play out as I might believe. If it needs to be “better” than what I’m experiencing now in order to continue being at least as happy as I am now, I’m setting myself up for misery in the years to come.

What I do have control over, however, is the level of awareness I bring to my thinking as I navigate the decisions of life and parenthood. But it can be challenging to do so, and I think many of us actively avoid looking at that too closely.

Perhaps on some level we understand that an awareness of the nature of the thinking that determines our actions necessarily implies responsibility.

And who wants responsibility?

This understanding that awareness implies responsibility is reflected in our legal system.

• First degree murder is “premeditated” meaning that someone thought it through and decided to do it despite understanding that it entails grave consequences. It usually carries a life sentence (25+ years) because, simplistically, said person has demonstrated that they do not view themselves as beholden to the agreed upon societal norms and laws we’ve collectively set down.

• Second degree murder is “heat of passion” meaning that someone was essentially not in a reasonable state of mind when they did what they chose to do, meaning, they weren’t considering the consequences due to the circumstances. If they had, they likely wouldn’t have committed the crime. These instances usually carry shorter sentences (10-15 years) because, simplistically, said person merely transgressed societal norms due to circumstance, rather than innate malice.

• Third degree murder (depending on the state, can be defined as “voluntary or involuntary manslaughter”) is “accidental” meaning that the intent was not to end someone’s life, but it did occur as the result of willful or unwillful recklessness. These instances sometimes don’t carry jail times at all, and if they do only a few years is typical.

Sorry, here’s one more Seinfeld clip 🤣 last one, I swear.

At the end of the day, nobody can be responsible for our actions other than ourselves. So it should behoove of us to thoroughly examine the origins of those actions, shouldn’t it?

I said earlier that engaging with thoughts that are not based on reality (vikalpah) can really only lead us into mistakes, further delusion, and pain.

This assertion is based in the Buddhist tenet (from the Four Noble Truths) that the source of all suffering is “craving”, or wanting things to be other than they are. And it stems from avidyā — ignorance of the true nature of reality.

Here is where I personally tend to break with hardcore Buddhists. There’s a level of apathy that can occur when you approach the idea that you shouldn’t wish for things to be different (without a holistic view). Smarter people than I have driven more meaningfully into that schism and articulated ways that you can still be a Buddhist and also be willing to take action to make the world a better place.

The key point that I want to highlight within this context is centered on creativity. I think people often fall into the trap of thinking that creativity is the process of making things that are entirely new, with a healthy imagination being the fuel for those inspirations. Many artists describe the notion that something else is channeling through them when they are making transcendent art. Regardless of the origins of inspiration, there is still always the factor of medium that, in one sense, limits the art…but in a more practical sense, facilitates its existence in the first place.

You can paint whatever you want, but you can’t paint a new color.

There exists only more and more complex combinations of the wavelengths of light that we can see. So on a core level, the artist’s imagination simply rearranges what already existed. Their creation does not actually add to or detract from the pre-existing substrate from which it arises.

That’s what we’re practicing the ability to perceive in yoga. And from practice, what tends to get most in the way of that perception?

Thoughts. Delusions. Desires.

So this practice can understood as a way to learn how to perceive each form of thought as it is, so that we aren’t making decisions based on notions with no relation to reality.

The image of me doing a forearm stand that I hold in my mind when I want to either inspire myself to try harder (or ridicule myself for not being “better at yoga”) is an example of vikalpah. I’ve never once done a forearm stand before, yet I can picture myself doing the pose and generate the feelings of either contented or discontentedness as a result.

Now, there are plenty of people who seek to wield vikalpah to create results in the opposite direction (of pain and suffering). I’ve not studied these modalities closely yet because, honestly, they set off my BS alarms too quickly. But basically, to my understanding, the thinking is if you persistently imagine yourself in a desire state, you’ll put yourself in the mindset needed to achieve it, and make the “right” decisions at every juncture to arrive there.

It’s the people that say “manifest” as if they were magicians or conjurers. There is, of course, some logic to that way of thinking. But to my humble analysis, the results of such thinking rely entirely on confirmation bias. In the most blunt of terms, I think it’s merely a way to justify (and take a false sense of agency over) pure good luck.

Of course the place you end up is exactly where you’re “supposed to be” because you’ve had your mind fixed on your goal and you’re trusting it to guide you through the twists and turns along the way. But we have no real capacity for comprehending if the end state we achieve is actually the most optimal or desirable that was possible from whatever circumstances we passed through.

If you were too busy picturing yourself in that penthouse apartment with a million dollars (or a million chihuahuas, I don’t judge 😏) you might have missed a multitude of other paths along the way that could have been equally or even more satisfying.

I’m not advocating for complete nihilism or trying to say that setting goals is inherently bad — merely pointing out that it’s far better to focus on goals that are within reach that reasonably might lead to the end results we think we want, but remain open to all possibilities (instead of obscuring our perception with a blanket presumption of what success looks like, which can only be based on what we now (myopically) perceive).

When I’m working on forearm stand, I need to recognize that vikalpah for what it is before it misleads me. The image of me floating on my arms does not include the feelings of adequate strength in my shoulders or proper engagement of my core. Those are the things that ultimately inform the expression of the pose.

So sure, I can imagine myself in a forearm stand and start by putting my forearms on the ground. But from that point, my focus must be trained exclusively on the information that arises in my awareness that determines whether or not I can physically lift the rest of my body above me in that position.

Do I feel strong or weak in my shoulders?

Are my hips actually above my shoulders?

Is my tailbone tucked or is it flaring out, compromising my low back?

Where am I looking and how does it affect my neck?

Manifesting is literally just bringing something about that wasn’t there before. But nothing can come from nothing. Far more valuable it is to see the materials you are working with in the moment for exactly what they are.

So with all that said, how do you recognize vikalpah for what it is?

Instead of trying to name vikalpah while in the midst of a storm of various forms of thought, I think the easier and more practical route is to work on filling the space with right knowledge first.

That begins with tuning into the raw sensations of being.

Instead of starting from “when I place my foot forward into warrior 2, is it under the knee?” start from “when I place my foot forward, I feel the mat beneath it, my toes are all flat, my ankle is steady, my calf muscle is engaged by not straining”…then think about how it aligns with other parts of the body.

I was taught to:

Cue from the ground up.

Which, as a yoga instructor, means that I call attention to the base layer first so that practitioners are setting a solid foundation before moving into any asana.

So my suggestion is to start by focusing on what’s right in front of you and identify the ways you can come into better balance right now, as you already are, before trying to fly.

By all means, I want you to fly. Just figure out if you really have wings first.

Misconception is false knowledge that is not based on the true nature of an object

It’d be easy to think: “misconception is the opposite of right knowledge” and be done with it, but there is value to be found by digging deeper into this idea. Maybe we can clear up any misconceptions we quietly have about misconception itself…ha.

— also, what tf is the “true nature of an object?” 👋 I’ll see you in the 🐇 🕳️

The first thing to recognize is that right knowledge and misconception are not a binary.

Both are forms of perceiving, one is clear and accurate, one is warped by some form of illusion or delusion.

Imagine gazing out your car’s windshield as you’re driving. Hopefully you aren’t looking at your phone like 90% of the world seems to prefer doing while operating heavy machinery. If so, your eyes are scanning the roadways for key information that informs the way your brain moves your arms and hands around to keep your vehicle moving in a way that (a) gets you where you need to go (b) doesn’t kill anyone in the process.

Now imagine that the windshield is super dirty and the sun is slanted right into your eyes. The roadway, and the information that viewing it can provide, has not changed. But the image of it being sent to your brain is different. You’re simply operating on worse information, and your decision making will necessarily be different.

You can squint and “look past” the obstructions, but really what your brain is doing in that situation is replacing the gaps in your perception with presumed information.

Now, the tricky thing here is that it’s totally possible to operate with high degrees of assumed information. Sometimes we operate on completely assumed information.

You can get away with it for a long time without running into issues. Even if you do get dinged now and again, it’s easy to make concessions like: “well, I didn’t see that coming!”

No shit! How could you have seen it if you were preoccupied with a literal figment of your imagination? That’s ultimately what presumed information is — what your brain imagines will happen based on whatever came before.

If you were seeing clearly before, and suddenly can’t for some reason (it’s dark, your view is obstructed) you have good odds at being right.

But your chances start to go down exponentially the longer you exist in a state of misconception.

When I first moved to San Diego, the windshield wipers on my old Volvo were already on their last legs. But since it rarely rained, I went months without noticing. Occasionally it would rain a bit and I could see how badly they were working, but as soon as I got out of the car I forgot all about it, and another few months would go by without a reminder.

Finally a good rain shower was on, and I found myself driving down the freeway at night not being able to see much of anything, despite my wipers whipping back and forth.

Since I’m a self-centered jerk, instead of pulling over and waiting for the rain to stop, I decided to risk my life, and the life of anyone unlucky enough to be in the way of my top-safety rated steamboat of a station wagon, should I end up losing my way.

I tuned into the information that was still available (some of which I previously ignored when I had full sight). Looking past the smudges, I could see the reflective lane markings on either side and red tail lights from the car in front of me. So I just kept myself between those markings on either side and focused on keeping the tail lights a few car lengths ahead.

It worked well enough, and I made it home. I wish I could say I changed the wipers right away, but being young, broke, and stupid has a way of delaying reasonable actions well past the obvious “do it now” moments.

The degree to which our lives follow set routines can help obscure misconceptions for long periods of time.

In today’s world, for long stretches of time all we really need to achieve in order to keep existing (earning money for food, at the most basic level) is moving our physical body out of bed and into some other context where we perform one task or another for a while. Driving is probably the most dangerous part of modern life, and even so we eventually feel completely unbothered by it since we do it every day. Why care if we carry around misconceptions about the way the world works?

Compare that to the hunter gatherers of yesteryear who had to make well-informed decisions on a daily basis in order to ensure their whole tribe wouldn’t freeze in the winter time. Seeing clearly on a moment to moment basis was crucial for basic survival.

Now, you could certainly point out that ancient peoples often made decisions based on things that we would call myth and misconception like “the sun god” & “prophecies” — or even believed they could influence the outcome of natural events with things like “rain dances”.

I’m definitely not here to present myself as a regressionist that thinks everything was better back in the good ol’ days of subsisting on berries and hunting down wild animals with sharp rocks.

It’s probably net better for the world that we aren’t constantly in a state of stress related to survival…but, oh wait…constant state of stress, you say?

Sounds a lot like what we’re currently discussing on a societal level about the impacts of technology and social media on the human psyche.

Either we’ve gone totally soft and are being unraveled by forces that our ancestors would theoretically have withstood, or maybe just not that much has changed about the way we perceive the world, while the world has changed significantly.

Perhaps the human condition in 2025 (localized to modern western societies at least) can be summed up simply as:

• Brain complexity + Attention capacity 🟰 Similar or Somewhat Less

• World complexity + Demand for attention 🟰 Exponentially More

Likely the best way to conceptualize our brains is as sense-making machines. Raw information arrives from the sense organs, and the brain arranges it into associated patterns, making predictions about what it perceives.

As you’re driving down the road, arguably you’re never actually “seeing everything”. Since your brain is busy processing the new information that’s arriving (based on the pace you’re moving) it quickly shifts focus to areas that haven’t been processed yet, leaving areas determined as a “not a threat” to pass by.

Overall, it’s a good thing that our brains function this way. Filtering through all the raw information we receive is a very good thing for being able to move through the world and determine what’s food and what’s not, never mind do things like drive. If you had to individually process every unit of information that arises in your field of awareness, you’d probably spend most of your life learning how to move one finger.

I think the thing to consider is that, over time, two inter-related things have happened/not happened:

1. We’ve collectively become much better at predicting the world (i.e. weather algorithms, Google Maps, grocery store supply chain)

2. Individually we remain trapped in our subjective experiences of the world (I do not personally know how to predict the weather)

We “know” the weather because we move our thumbs on a piece of glass in our pocket and it shines symbols that carry agreed upon meaning to our prefrontal cortex.

We “know” the fastest way to get to work because the little arrow on the piece of glass in our car shows us the way.

We “know” that we’ll have enough food because Google Maps knows where the grocery store is, and we have a credit card.

Generally, all we seem to “know” now is the “user experience” of life.

That’s just a layer installed over the base.

We can obtain such incredibly vast amounts of second and third degree information on just a whim, that tuning into the raw information underlying it all just seems boring and unimportant.

And we simply accept whatever new form of interface is presented to us from modern manufacturers. The highest cognitive load we face is figuring out where they moved the damn back button.

In these spaces (which, mind you, we do have to occupy to participate in the development of the world/society), we have a deluge of these “things” vying for our attention at all moments of every day.

Ding! Earthquake in Taiwan.

Ding! High school ex got pregnant.

Ding! Trump blinked.

Ding! Trump blinked, again.

Ding! Boss needs something.

Ding! Kids need something.

Ding! Ding! DING!

— I totally get that people just want a way out of this state of harassment.

Drugs work for a short while. Imagination and projection can too. Nihilism, hedonism, and stoic acceptance of our condition come and go.

We tend to look without for our solutions…

But, to borrow phrasing from a musician I support,

The way out, is in.

When those ding ding dings begin to overwhelm, drive your awareness into their true nature.

It’s actually just a sound happening near you.

The information it can convey, should you choose to engage with it, is secondary.

The sound exists in your field of awareness in the same way a soft breeze arrives and departs by its own accord. The same way your breath does.

It can feel impossible to clear the muddied windshield of our awareness, especially when we notice that the moment after we move the wiper across it, another obstruction arises. And over time, the wipers stop working well.

So practices like yoga can be approached like a chance to change out those old wiper blades and reset the awareness down into the substrate of our experience. To drop out of the state of misconception that we quietly ignore most of our lives, and improve your odds of making better choices.

Find the breath, follow it, and stay with it. When practicing, all the things that try pull you away from it simply serve to strengthen your mental discipline and capacity for discernment.

Ultimately, your experience of life will be a function of which appearances with which you choose to engage.

If free will exists, certainly it is on the mat that we can cultivate it.

These are the five forms of vrittis (thought/mental modifications) that Patanjali tees up in Sutra 5. Last week I focused on the overarching dichotomy he draws between all forms of thought — painful/selfish vs. painless/selfless.

The first of these five, “right knowledge”, is laid out in the 7th sutra.

Sutra 7: Pratyakṣānumānāgamāḥ pramāṇāni — Direct perception (pratyaksha), inference (anumana), and reliable testimony (agama) are the sources of correct knowledge (pramana).

This beautifully concise sutra is, in a nutshell, why I think yoga is (at least as I’ve learned it) worth championing as a way of being — especially in the modern era.

Calling this current time period of human history the information age is probably the best way to characterize the unique aspects of experience that we have, as compared to humans who lived in the years before the mid-1900s. The proliferation of the internet (and widespread access to it even in the most remote regions of the planet) has created an unprecedented level of availability to quality information for human brains.

However, the baseline capacity for interpreting that information has stayed relatively the same.

1️⃣ We have what we perceive firsthand (information that is conveyed to our brain by the senses)

• I see a large black and white mammal

• I hear a “moo” sound

• I smell farts

2️⃣ We have what we can infer from those observations

• The black and white mammals of this kind I’ve seen before expelled a white liquid from their underbelly, so this one probably does too

• People drank it and seemed to enjoy it, so if I drink it, I probably will too

3️⃣ And we have what we can choose to believe from what others tell us about their firsthand experience and inferences

• These things are called “dairy cows”

• The one I’m seeing has been raised humanely and fed organic grass

• If I pull on one of the pink dangling things in the morning, milk will come out

• If I drink the milk, I will have big strong muscles and Beyonce will look at me like this ↙️

Seriously though…what a weird ass ad campaign 🤣

Holding all of those things equal, you could assume that Patanjali’s right knowledge is a lot easier to come by during this “information age” since agama, reliable testimony, is much easier to come by via internet.

Previously (think like, middle ages) all a given human had to work with in terms of understanding how the world worked (why their crops died, why their kid got sick, why the King declared war) was what they could directly perceive, what they could infer about those perceptions, and what literate people decided to tell them verbally from what they had read in scribed forms of reliable testimony from other literate people.

They might very well figure out that the reason the crops died and the kids got sick was because both had been given water from the same poisoned well, a safe inference made from noticing that neighbors (who use a different well) hadn’t experienced the same calamities.

The degree of certainty in that conclusion obviously is still suspect, of course. But the true problem is that even with knowledge of the cause, finding the best solution requires understanding.

In other words, knowing that the well is poison just implies the conclusion “don’t drink that water”. It doesn’t imply “dig another one here vs. there” or “the reason the water was poison is that the King’s castle started to dump its sewage nearby”.

These are layers to understanding that, ultimately, we always have to rely on some form of reliable testimony to comprehend. Individually, we could spend a lifetime inventing a microscope, then another lifetime studying microbes, then another politics, and another…you get the point.

Third degree information isn’t really the problem here. It’s what happens when third degree information is all we think about.

The problem seems to be that we’ve become incapable of distinguishing between direct experience, inference, and reliable testimony.

Truly, they’ve all sort of blended together into this current form of composite digital experience that (most of us) are living in. Put bluntly, I think the Information Age paired with Big Tech companies’ mastery of dopamine manipulation (to keep our minds constantly engaged with the third-degree forms of information that populate their apps, amidst advertisements) has created a layer of distraction and obsfucation in our collective consciousness.

We don’t even see what’s right in front of us anymore because our direct experience is hidden behind this layer.

I’m talking about the never ending stream of thoughts, feelings, urges, and notions that surge through our neural networks every time we glance at a screen (or any form of modern stimulation) during the day. It truly seems that once that stream has reached a certain pace, simply looking away isn’t enough to stop it. If you’ve ever tried to do a digital detox up in the mountains and found yourself deeply relieved to check your email at the end, you know personally what I’m providing (somewhat reliable) testimony to here.

Call it a coincidence, call it a calcified pineal gland, call it idiocracy, call it Chinese psy-ops to degrade our youth…call it whatever you want. The bottom line is that each of us is individually responsible for shedding that layer of misapprehension from our conscious experience.

If that hasn’t happened, how could you possibly be capable of correctly diagnosing the nature of the grander issue? Can you see everyone’s pineal gland? Do you know the thoughts of every politician in DC? Have you called up Xi Jinping and chatted about his plans for world domination lately?

When we begin conflating testimony with direct experience, that’s when dogmatic thinking seems to arise.

The symptoms of dogmatic thinking are somewhat subtle in today’s world, since we all have at least an oblique awareness of the scientific method and the idea that we need good sources for our conclusions. It’s common to hide a lack of true understanding behind links, quotes, and citations — or just to simply never put yourself out there for fear of being whacked in the wildly chaotic world of internet (and real life) trolls. Fair enough by my standards.

To see what I mean, picture the people posting on Facebook about how stupid everyone else is for not thinking the same thing they do about vaccines or about Zuckerberg’s new content moderation policies or about the things Trump says. Question them, and you’ll get something like “I believe in science” or “do your own research”. Both of those statements are oxymoronic. Science is a process of slowly discarding reason for doubt by repeated observation of a given subject. You don’t have to believe in it. And unless you’re following that process, then “doing your own research” probably just means reading what research other people have done and drawing conclusions based on (likely) inadequate understanding of the observations they had.

And yet we base major life decisions — what college to attend, what car to buy, what presidential candidate to vote for — almost entirely on third degree information. Which is truly fine, but only so long as we remain capable of evaluating/modifying those choices based on our first hand experience.

This is why yoga is so valuable. It provides us with a format for practicing our ability to return to that direct experience and for improving our ability to engage with it when we “arrive”.

It starts simply with letting the breath inform the movement.

The durations of your inhale and exhale are forms of information that allude to underlying realities in your body (lung capacity, posture, strength of diaphragm). Being able to breathe in a challenging pose basically means you’ve successfully paid close enough attention to your movements to align your skeletal system and strengthen your muscles so as to experience ease despite some contortion of the normal state.

When you aren’t able to breathe naturally, or notice that you aren’t paying attention to the breath and were distracted by one thing or another, you have a choice:

• Ignore it, continue engaging with whatever idea you have of the idealized posture (forcing yourself into a pose)

• Notice it, back away from the concept, pay attention to the substrate of experience again

Asana is not the only way to practice this process of detaching from the magic act that our thoughts seem to play in front of our eyes.

As I’m sitting here moving my fingers, shapes are appearing on the screen that are made visible by tiny little light bulbs under a piece of glass lighting up in different colors (I think? 🤷 — that’s an inference I’m not sure of, honestly).

As you look at this post, the little light bulbs under whatever screen you have with you now are lighting up, reproducing the same shapes and symbols. Probably hours after I wrote this.

The symbols represent commonly held ideas (language) that more or less conjure similar images and notions in the minds of anyone who perceives them. When you read it, you think some things, maybe feel others, and then it’s over and you might move on to another email.

The thing is that we tend to get quite caught up in that illusion.

How often, when you’re looking at your phone, do you see it for what it is? I’d bet my left arm that 99.99999% of the time we are seeing the ideas it presents to us, not the glass, nickel, and cobalt.

So it is with the body.

When you place your foot forward to take warrior 2, how much do you really experience that act for what it is? There are usually thoughts — “ok it’s about where it normally goes, so when I bend my leg my knee will be aligned over my ankle” or just “ouch my ankle hurts”.

Truly this practice is about dropping back from those composite forms of experience, and learning to perceive the raw data for a while. The foot landing on the ground is an appearance of sensation in the field of awareness that you’re perceiving.

Perhaps that is yet another form of composite thought which I’m attributing to something that’s really indescribable. I likely wouldn’t argue if you made that point.

But I do maintain — at the behest of Patanjali’s reliable testimony, inferences based on observations of other yoga practicioner lives, and my own personal experiences — that doing this work (dropping out of all perceptions and trying to simply experience the body existing in space, as it is, without judgement) is deeply valuable for informing how one moves through the world and forming right knowledge.

It’s the ground layer to forming the opposition to the mindless compliance that characterizes today’s world.

We are working to become mind-FULL.

It’s not about losing your mind or escaping your troubles.

It’s about making the mind sharp, clear, and discerning.

From that space, when you see clearly and can trust your direct perception, all other forms of knowledge can proceed with solid foundation. We’ll never know everything on our own. But if we know for damn sure what we know, then together with other people who know what they know, we can collectively shine the light on sources of imbalance and oppression within the world at large.

Yoga is a radical act in today’s world.

So stay with your breath, rebels.

So love, though it appears to be a painless thought, ultimately ends in pain if it is based on selfishness.

The fifth sutra is where Patanjali’s work starts to get into the details.

If you combine 1-4 you can read it like maybe the briefest accurate intro paragraph to yoga practice possible to write.

1. Now begins yoga.

2. Yoga is the restraint of the fluctuations of the mind-stuff.

3. Then the Seer abides in its true nature.

4. At other times, the self appears to identify with the fluctuations of the mind.

What we’re doing in a traditional yoga practice is learning to restrain the attention from being caught up in the fluctuations of the mind (thoughts, feelings, judgements).

When that occurs, the “Seer” (read: seat of attention, consciousness, that which perceives) bears witness to itself. Ask yourself: when the attention is not distracted and the mind is clear, what do you then become conscious of?

That is the same as ones true nature, according to Patanjali.

So whatever our consciousness is made of, it’s the same as what makes up everything.

If that sounds too obvious to be profound, sit down and try to pay attention to (a.k.a. — be conscious of) only your breath for 2 minutes. Then let me know if you can confidently say that you know what consciousness is like when it isn’t layered over with thought.

Unless you were raised in monasteries or have spent years in meditation or just live under a rock, chances are that you’ll fail to count to 10 breaths without seeing some form of thought rise in the background.

1. At other times, the self appears to identify with the fluctuations of the mind.

May I suggest an amendment for the modern era?

4 Most of the time, we are completely lost in thought and (mis)identify with the story we keep telling ourselves about our experience.*

But don’t be discouraged.

In the next sutras, Patanjali begins to typify thought, which is meant to help us begin to become at least more aware of the lenses that color our perception of the world.

Imagine finding out you’ve been wearing dark sunglasses all your life without knowing. If you can’t take them off, it’s at least useful to know what color tint the lenses have. If you know you tend to have green lenses, you’ll think twice when you see a stoplight.

However, before listing the five types of thought, Patanjali conveniently gives us a simple dichotomy to work with. He says:

The mental modifications (vrittis) are fivefold and are either painful or painless

Painful or painless — simple right?

The Swami’s commentary is useful here:

Instead of these terms “painful” and “painless” we might be able to understand this point better if we use two other words. Call them “selfish” thoughts and “selfless” thoughts. The selfish thoughts ultimately bring pain.

In my humble estimation, this is why most major religions and the more redemption-oriented philosophies emphasize a focus on selfless thoughts. It’s useful from a utilitarian perspective because, simply put, when you’re thinking first about others, and seeing to their needs before your own, you necessarily disengage with the idea that you are lacking or worse off.

Try feeling bad about yourself when you’re handing out food at the Salvation Army on Christmas…you might feel pain through sympathy, but you certainly aren’t going to as preoccupied with the state of your bank account, whether or not your team won last weekend, or whatever generally occupies your mind. Those are, statistically speaking, likely to be the main causes of your personal suffering. As we all know, even the richest among us can suffer deeply under the tyranny of a mind preoccupied with its own subjective problems.

Problem solved?

Thinking = suffering, but can’t stop thinking, so just think about others >> be better off.

In an ideal world, with everyone thinking about everyone else, how could needs go unmet? While you see to the needs of 10 others, surely someone out there would see to yours.

But we all know this isn’t how it’s playing out on this shakespearean stage.

Thoughts are like water in a water balloon. Press down on one spot, it rises up on all sides to surround it.

The trouble is that its super, super, super easy to end up with selfishness sneaking its way into what we think are selfless thoughts.

In social groups where these values of selflessness and charity are upheld, we tend to reinforce behaviors that display them with praise and other tangible or intangible rewards. The child who helps up a fallen comrade on the playground within the view of parents knows on some level that doing so improves their likelihood of being accepted and cared for within the social unit. What happens when we remove the “watchers” though? Go read Lord of the Flies if your school system didn’t already force you to in 6th grade.

Beyond in-group / out-group dynamics and survival instincts, there’s the commonly held notion that by being a good person in life (read: being unselfish, giving to the poor) you are rewarded in whatever form of afterlife to which your geographic & cultural heritage tends to subscribe. This is obviously problematic for anyone looking to act with complete selflessness uncomplicated by ulterior motives of any kind.

Even on a molecular level, the dopamine surge one might receive from handing a dollar to a pan handler is suspect for marring our true intentions, keeping us coming back to “do good” like some kind of altruistic drug dealer. Maybe that’s natures way of creating harmony amongst beings inevitably prone to conflict.

I’d like to suggest a simpler way to think about it.

Thought is thought.

         Self is self.

              Selfish thought is thought that the self participates in.

                   Selfless thought is thought that the self does not participate in.

When you first begin meditating in the Headspace App, the instructor teaches you to picture the thoughts like a train passing you by. The goal is to create a little separation for the practitioner so they can simply recognize “I am here. My thoughts are there. Therefore, I am not my thoughts.”

A fun practice that proceeds from that one is to try and trace each thought you become aware of back to its origin. “I noticed I was thinking about pumpkin pie…where did that come from? I was imagining Thanksgiving dinner last year…picturing how full I was…ah, right! My stomach rumbled and I realized I’m hungry.”

However the more we chase the thoughts, the more we tend to find that there is no clear beginning, nor reason for them. They are simply there. Whatever thought you are having now, try to trace it all the way back to it’s origin. You might find points where new trains begin (like the stomach rumbling), but the tracks actually continue way on back into the obscured and convoluted recesses of memory.

I’d be willing to posit that there isn’t a single thought in the history of humanity that, when traced fully back to whatever theoretical beginning it has, is completely free of at least some form of self regard.

So don’t bother.

A simpler aim to work on is differentiating between the thoughts that really take you for a ride, and those that pass on by like cars on the train.

This applies to thoughts you want to have and also those you don’t.

We’ve all probably had the experience of being criticized and having the person’s words rattle around in our heads for the rest of the day (maybe week). We’ve also all probably spent some time basking in the mental portraits of our idealized futures — those glory days after we’ve finished building passive wealth, having kids, being mad at our parents, and learning every fact on the internet. Then we can be happy and free.

But as the first sutra states: NOW begins yoga.

The moment to unite with, well, the moment — is always now. The time for presence is already here. The idealized future never comes. Even if you mark it on the calendar, when that day comes, you’ll still just be in another passing moment like this one.

So our practice is designed to provide us with many opportunities to recognize when the attention has become caught up in the fluctuations of the mind.

As you take an asana, the core aim is to keep the attention focused on the breath, and let the breath flow naturally. That’s really it.

Sometimes there are physical barriers that obstruct the breath (tightness, injury, having a normal skeletal structure and not being a freaking contortionist like the 100lb girl up in the front) — but remember to hunt for the non-physical barriers too (being pissed your muscles are so tight, being arrogant and doing postures that harm the body, or being preoccupied with what the ex-gymnast is doing that seems better than what you can do).

It is in witnessing those moments, when you recognize that you’ve become lost in thought again, that the opportunity to practice liberation arises.

That’s why we return to the same postures again and again.

Don’t worry about being able to touch your toes, as nice (and arguably healthy) as it is. That’s a by-product of the more important work.

Each time you revisit the work an asana entails, there’s a way to deepen into the things the posture illuminates. There’s always another layer to encounter, and perhaps begin peeling back.

There’s always going to be another thought arising.

Let it be.

Let it pass.

Sit back in the seat of awareness in your natural state of equanimity.

Make the thoughts selfless by not making them anything at all.