Heyam duhkham anagatam - A Study of the Beginning of Chapter Two of the Yoga Sutra

Unless otherwise noted, I work from Edwin Bryant’s translation of the Yoga Sutras. I take these translations and interpret them as part of my yoga practice of study. This is one of the joys of the intellectual study of yoga - the ancient books and the volumes of writing on the subject are meant, in my opinion, to be digested, wrapped up by the experiences of the person studying them, internalized, compared against individual experience, and learned and re-learned as life is lived. That said, of course my interpretation is only that - my interpretation. As Rumi says, "Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. Unfold your own myth."

First, here is what the sutra says:

2.1 The path consists of self-discipline, study, and dedication. 2.2 This path is for bringing about samadhi (oneness) and for weakening the klesas (impediments to the practice). 2.3 The impediments are ignorance, ego, desire, aversion, and clinging to life. 2.4 Ignorance is the breeding ground of the other impediments, whether they are in a dormant, weak, intermittent, or fully activated state. 2.5 Ignorance is the notion that takes the self, which is joyful, pure, and eternal, to be the nonself, which is painful, unclean, and temporary. 2.6 Ego is to consider the nature of the seer and the nature of the instrumental power of seeing to be the same thing. 2.7 Attachment stems from happiness. 2.8 Aversion stems from pain. 2.9 Clinging to life affects even the wise; it is an inherent tendency. 2.11 The states of mind produced by these klesas are eliminated by meditation. 2.15 For one who has discrimination, everything is suffering on account of the suffering produced by the consequences of action, by pain, and by the samskaras (patterns of thought and action), as well as on account of the suffering ensuing from the turmoil of the vrttis (the fluctuations of the mind) due to the gunas (matter). 2.16 Suffering that has yet to manifest is to be avoided.

Once again, we start with a reminder that yoga is not just asana, or postures. Postures are merely one of the eight limbs that make up the practice. This yoga takes self-discipline, study, and dedication. Yoga is more about training the mind than it is about training the body. We study yoga to find oneness. This could be oneness of spirit and body, of mind and body, of the divine and body, or all of these, depending on your personal theological leanings. Personally, I vacillate between an agnostic outlook on some days and, on other days, a deeply spiritual faith in what I acknowledge is a nonsensical, unscientific, illogical affair. We also study yoga to weaken the impediments to practice. These impediments to practice run deeper than that. To me, they are impediments to ease, impediments to living. They are ignorance, ego, desire, aversion, and clinging to life. This is one of my favorite parts of the sutra, and, thus, it bears more study.

Ignorance, ego, desire, aversion, clinging to life? Some of my favorite things, some of my deepest patterns, things that I thought were personal struggles, being written about in a book that is thousands of years old? How comforting! The sutra goes on to say that ignorance is the fuel behind all of the other impediments. Ignorance, it claims, stems from our misunderstandings of our basic nature, confusing that which is pure and whole (the eternal soul, if you believe that way) with our physical self. Going further, the sutra explains that ego is basically this same confusion. With continued practice, one begins to see the connection, the wholeness, the unity of the self. Again, this could be of mind and body or of soul and body. Once that wholeness is felt, the fluctuations of the body, the discomfort in mind or body, can be seen as fluid, as things that come and go, as part of this experience, rather than something to be struggled against or fully identified with.

The impediment of attachment, or desire, stems from happiness. When something makes us feel good, we do not want to let it go. We cling to it. We grieve for it when it is lost and our minds are often kept busy searching for something that makes us feel that way again or scheming ways to get that happy-making thing back or reliving experiences with that happy-making thing. This affects mind and body. In the mind, this constant reliving of happy-making moments in the past can keep us out of what is happening in our lives right now. In the body, the clinging can manifest in very physical ways - in my own body, I have noticed patterns of tension and holding that I feel are the body's response to all of this grabbing and holding on. I have noticed changes in my breathing when my mind is running the tape loop of happy times long gone. In these times, my breath often becomes shallow and scant. Whenever I sit, most times when I sit and watch my thinking, the majority of the thoughts that come up are of desire, of want. After years of practice, I am still amazed by this. As I sit, a thought will pop up, and I will observe it, categorize it, and let it go.

When thoughts aren't of want, they are often of aversion, and the sutra explains that aversion stems from pain. When the mind is not busy seeking out happy-making things, it is often busy avoiding pain-making things. Again, as the meditation practice develops, it becomes easy to catch the mind wandering off to a thought, observing and categorizing the thought, then letting the thought go. Sometimes the thought gets stuck, and it is okay to ask the thought to go and then watch it as it resists. This, too, happens in the practice, and it is merely another thing to watch in the never-ending stream of things to observe during practice.

Clinging to life affects even the wise; it is an inherent tendency. This is a basic, hard-wired thing. As with all living things, we have a built in need to stay alive as long as we can. As sentient beings who understand that our lives will, at some point, end, we have the added aversion, many of us, to finding out what will come after we die. So we cling. Personally, I experience great anxiety over dying and leaving things undone, leaving loved ones alone and grieving. Again, it is comforting to know that this is a natural state, and something that generations of people have experienced and worked with. This impediment, for me, looms large. The other impediments have become almost easy in comparison. I can laugh off thoughts of desire, aversion, and ignorance as they come up in practice. But clinging to life, which, for me, is closely tied in with ego, this is where most of the work of my practice takes place. And the sutra assures us that the states of mind produced by these impediments will be eliminated by practice.

"For one who has discrimination, everything is suffering on account of the suffering produced by the consequences of action, by pain, and by the samskaras (patterns of thought and action), as well as on account of the suffering ensuing from the turmoil of the vrttis (the fluctuations of the mind) due to the gunas (matter)." This takes some dissecting. A samskara is a pattern that we practice over and over in our lives. It can be a pattern of movement that manifests as tightness in a group of muscles. It can be a pattern of dealing with people. It can be a pattern in our thinking that gets repeated time and again. The practice helps us to root out these patterns, to find the patterns that are less healthy and to replace those patterns with newer, healthier ones. I think of the vrttis as the constant chatter in the mind. Here we see that it is all suffering. When I sat with Jon Kabat Zinn at Lesley University recently, he took questions from several people in the group. He sat in a meditative posture on a stage. There was a microphone set up in a sea of folding metal chairs. And a long line of people standing behind that microphone. Each one came up and asked Kabat Zinn a question about their own personal story. Each question sounded something like this: "Yes, well, I've been meditating for twenty years. But lately, it has been hard to practice because [fill in the blank] happened. Ever since that happened, I'm consumed by feelings of [fill in the blank] every time I sit, and so I was wondering what I can do to get back to my practice." After each person, Kabat Zinn would sit quietly, eyes closed, for a long time, and then he would say something to the affect of, "This, too, is suffering. When we suffer, we practice. When we are not suffering, we practice." Another of my teachers refers to the "pranic well", prana being life force, or breath, or spirit, again, depending upon your personal beliefs. She suggests that daily practice fills this pranic well so that there is energy there whenever we need it, whenever life throws us some new trouble, some new suffering, that we need to face.

For me, this part of the sutra ends with this phrase: heyam duhkham anagatam. If we practice, future suffering can be avoided. We practice, every day, so that future suffering can be avoided. It's like taking your blood pressure medicine or your Xanax. If you can do that every day to avoid future suffering, then you also can do a daily mind body practice, whether that be meditation or yoga or some combination. The science coming out on the mind body practices is showing that a daily practice of short duration - no more than fifteen minutes but even as little as five or ten minutes - is enough to make the positive changes that are being tied to this work - decreased stress levels, weight loss, decreased pain, uplifted mood, increased focus, and more. No excuses, no "I'll start tomorrow", just sit. Or do savasana, or legs-up-the-wall, or a sun salutation, or whatever your practice will be today. Go do it now, in fact.

Pranayama

Pranayama can be translated as control or regulation of the breath or life force. It is one of the eight limbs of yoga mentioned in the Yoga Sutras. Patanjali describes pranayama as an exercise that prepares one for the concentration of meditation.

In Elemental Yoga, we practice pranayama at the beginning of each class. For beginners, a good first step is just being aware of the breath - this is an inhale, this is an exhale. Then begin to control the length of each - inhale to the count of one, two, three, exhale to the count of one, two, three. One can play with lengthening both inhale and exhale as a next step, then experiment with making the exhale longer than the inhale, particularly if one's mind tends toward agitation (not to rat myself out or anything, but this is my go to pranayama - the 1:2 breathing I mentioned in an earlier entry, where the exhale is twice as long as the inhale).

I just read this passage in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna is describing all of the various ways that yogis can come to know him. Just by being aware of your breath, you can come closer to a relationship with the Divine.

Still others offer
The incoming breath
Into the outgoing breath,
Likewise, the outgoing breath
Into the incoming breath.

Having restrained
The movements of incoming
And outgoing breaths,
They are wholly focused upon
Control of the life-breath.

In Elemental Yoga, we also practice a type of pranayama called Climbing Breath, where you increase lung capacity on each inhale, expanding the rib cage, feeling the fullness of the lungs in all directions. Since I have been more dedicated to a daily practice, over the past two years, my primary care physician has noticed a change in my lung capacity. None of my doctors have figured out why, but I have the lung capacity of a ten year old child all the time, and I tend towards asthma whenever I do any rigorous physical activity. But lately, my lung capacity has been registering at low normal for my height and age. My doctor was amazed the last time she checked. She asked what I had been doing differently, and she was surprised that the answer was just yoga. Low normal may not seem that great to a normal human, but for me, this is an incredibly big deal.

Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah or What the Duff?

I have been doing yoga for decades. At first it was just exercise, then it was exercise that felt good, and then I noticed that it did something good to my mind. It slowed it down, calmed it. It could even bring me out of full-blown panic attack if I remembered in those moments to do it. I remember wondering what the heck was going on ... How could stretching slow down my mind?

My understanding of the process of yoga has grown considerably since then. In a weekend long intensive study of the Yoga Sutras with Edwin Bryant, I learned, in fact, that I was experiencing what yoga was supposed to be doing and had been designed to do thousands of years ago. Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah. Yoga stills the fluctuations of the mind. Yoga was designed to get the body out of the way so that the mind could be brought into stillness.

I'm reading and thoroughly enjoying the book It's So Easy by Duff McKagan. I thought it would be light reading for distraction, but it turned out that Duff has a pretty compelling story to tell. He went through dark times in GNR and turned his life around. He drank heavily during his GNR days to deal with panic attacks. Avoiding panic became a big factor in his life, and he only began to be able to deal with panic in a more healthy way after he started doing these really intense workouts. He found that his mind could still and he could come to a safe room he had designed for himself in his mind but only after he had worked himself to true physical exhaustion. Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah. He didn't practice yoga, but he could have. He was experiencing the same stilling of the mind that comes when you get the body out of the way with yoga.

Duff's story pre-enlightenment is very sad and all too familiar. He drank to quiet his mind. It took more and more booze to get to the quiet place until eventually he exploded his pancreas. Yes. Exploded his pancreas. In his book, he quotes Hemingway, "of all men, the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in his own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol."

My teacher, Bo Forbes, has written an excellent book called Yoga for Emotional Balance, where she talks about different poses for anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. And in her classes, she discusses something even more relevant - it is not what you practice - specific poses or exercises - but how you practice that matters. For people with panic and anxiety issues, practicing slowly and mindfully is the key. You slow the body, the nervous system, the emotional responses down by going through slow motions, and the quality of your mind follows. With practice, your body can slow itself without a full yoga practice, and you can achieve stillness just by tuning in. For those who are interested, a good first practice, a great start, is to listen to your breathing. Practice breathing through the nose. Practice making the in breath and the out breath the same length. Then, to calm an anxious mind, make the exhale longer than the inhale. This little trick, which Bo calls 1:2 breathing, has saved me from many a panic.

Yogas citta vrtti nirodhah.

During the yoga sutra training, Edwin made us repeat that phrase over and over again until it was really in our heads. At the time, it felt odd and unnecessary and annoying. It sinks in there, though, and the sounds of the words bring a stillness all by themselves. I think I understand what he was up to now.