Root down, to rise up. That’s a phrase we hear a lot around yoga studios during practice.
But for me the question arises: what are we rooting down into?
In the most literal sense, it’s a cue to press down into whatever points of contact you have with the ground (your feet, usually) as you reach up with another part of your body (your hands, usually).
In my teacher training at MOSAIC with Ryan, we learned:
Teach the asana from the ground up.
The idea is to ensure that the foundation is set before taking other moves.
It’s almost too logical to bother explaining in detail, but the reality is — we often fail at even this simplest of guidelines.
Living as if we are brains floating around in our head (identified with the mind), we tend to think of the body as either a convenience or a hinderance, depending on how well it serves the mind in acquiring whatever externalized goals it’s fixed it’s gaze on.
If you have a healthy body, great, you don’t have to think about it. You fix your eyes on the peak, and take for granted that your feet will navigate the terrain below on the way to it. If you have an unhealthy body, there’s nothing else you can think about. Even the smallest peak becomes out of reach.
Grounding in your physical body — that is, identifying more closely with your body — is where yoga practice begins for most.
Breaking that common misidentification with the mind is the first step. Even that word “have” above implies a form of possession, and betrays the nature of our thinking about the body. In a yoga context, the physical body is just one part of our practice.
Revisiting the 5 Koshas taught in the Upanishads (on which yoga philosophy is founded), an individual is made up of 5 layers, described as “sheaths” of self — from the outermost physical to the innermost spiritual.
As Shrek taught us better than anyone,
Ogres are like onions.
According to 3000 year old Indian texts, so are humans. LAYERS! I don’t think it’s even all that woo-woo to consider this. If you simply sit and watch, you can notice that there are definitely distinct and very real aspects to your experience that aren’t directly visible in the physical world. Cut open a cadaver and point to the courage in that person. Or try pointing to anger, even in a live person. You can feel it, or maybe even notice constriction in some parts of your or someone else’s body during the experience of anger — furrowed brow, clenched fists…you get the picture. The five senses perceive the effects or results of anger (actions taken because of it) but they don’t directly perceive its origins.
The key thing to recognize as a yogi is that you can’t skip steps on the journey inward, and each layer is interconnected. If you’re seeking experience with the innermost sheaths of being, you need to have fostered pliability and permeability in the outer ones.
The physical body, considered as the outermost, is the most accessible reference point for us to ground our attention in the present moment. The body is always there. Where else could it be? The mind wanders, preoccupied with past and worrying about the future. So we bring our attention onto the breath as the bridge between these two layers of our conscious experience. Then we explore the physical to mine for data that informs the process of building more freedom and balance in the physical self, making it strong but supple, able to move smoothly through the world or sit for extended periods without impeding one’s ability to focus.
When you take warrior 2, the first things we think about are:
Is the knife edge of my back foot on the ground?
Is my front knee over my ankle?
Are my shoulders over my hips?
This list of cues goes on. It honestly takes a while just to have all that sorted out, maybe weeks or months if your muscles need training to allow the hip to open or to build strength in the front leg. Maybe the left calf is very tight and it’s pulling your heel out of position which throws the hip off. Annamaya Kosha.
It’s not so much that we aim to get to a point where we stop working on the body, but that over time we come to an intuitive understanding in the physical space that integrates with the rest of our being, and does not impede inner examination. And we repeat the same process in the subtler layers as well.
I’ve heard it said:
Healthy people have 99 problems, unhealthy people only have 1.
We never truly escape the physical nature, but we can make sure it doesn’t overtly impede our ability to journey inward. Even the greatest Buddhist meditators eventually have to get up from their seat and eat something if they want to be able to sit back down sometime in the future.
In the zen school of Buddhism, the practice of Zazen reflects the understanding of this reality. Practitioners sit for 20 minutes, meditating, then they ceremoniously stand up, turn and walk briskly in a circle around the room for a short period, eventually returning to their seats to continue meditating. This is repeated three or four times, resulting in about 90 minutes of practice.
If that doesn’t make sense right away, try to sit perfectly still — and I mean PERFECTLY STILL — for more than a half hour. It might as well be an olympic sport. If you’re an arrogant yogi like me, you’ll start off thinking: “no problem, I practice yoga all the time, I should be able to sit for extended meditations”. Then after 10 minutes your back will be on FIRE with your knuckles going white as you desperately grasp at your posture, hoping that you don’t start visibly shaking.
In a long life, the body will always humble us. Some sickness is inevitable, and as we grow old things start to fall apart one way or another. And truly, we should not assume homogeneity in the body experience of the world at large. Most of us are lucky to be able to walk around the world, but we should not take that ability for granted. If someone is paralyzed for one reason or another, it might seem like yoga is not available to them. Certain asanas are definitely not possible if you rely on a wheelchair to get around. But remember that the point of asana is truly just to put the body into an intentional form to permit the examination and familiarity of those innermost layers.
At the end of his life, Ram Dass was wheelchair-bound. But you would not say that he was closed off from the innermost parts of his being, right?
Therein lies the recognition of what we are truly seeking to ground down into during a yoga practice.
Root down to rise up. It’s actually the coolest inversion we practice. Forget about doing handstands…have you felt into the bliss body? Even just for a moment? That innermost space in you that is always free, limitless, and is intrinsically complete.
Sometimes it’s completely by accident. You could be walking alone on the beach at sunset, watching the waves undulate on the shore. Or just cooking dinner with your family, seeing the smile on a young one’s face as they sneak another cookie, thinking no one notices…
Other times we arrived by diligent and disciplined practice. More often, I’d wager, diligent and disciplined practice are adopted by those seeking to revisit such states intentionally.
For me it comes in moments when everything seems to line up just right. Chills run up the spine and the eyes get a little misty. This is the well that never dries. It’s always there whether we recognize it or not. When we learn to draw from it, to permeate our conscious awareness down through the layers of our being into the deepest bedrock and ground our sense of self there, we begin to pour from a cup that overflows.
That’s why I titled this reflection: “Stay grounded — in what?”
To become truly unwavering in the way we show up in the world, we must strive to send our roots down deeper into the space that is by nature everlasting and undiminished by the fluctuations of greater reality.
The tree that is deeply rooted withstands even the wildest of storms, and continues to grow anew after the winds subside.
Yoga provides us a practical pathway towards that state of deep groundedness.
Start with the most accessible, the body. Are my feet firmly on the ground?
Connect with the breath.
Can I breath fully in this posture?
Reel in the mind.
Can I pay full attention to the breath?
Stimulate the intellect.
In this state, can I observe the true nature of my being?
Then when you see it, sit within that deepest space inside.
Remember how it feels, recognize that it is always available.
From there is where you can begin to move as one, integrated with all layers of your being.