The Yamas & Niyamas Page 12
Week Two: This week notice what you project onto others. These projections are things you are unwilling or unable to acknowledge in yourself. Remember, you can’t notice something in another person if it is not already in you (both your pettiness and your magnificence). Grow into full responsibility for yourself.
Week Three: This week, discover some of the boxes you have yourself wrapped in. Do this by tracing all ripples of disharmony back to yourself. Notice what personal belief system caused the disharmony. Is your belief true? Are you experiencing reality or a box? Support your efforts with these words from Anais Nin, “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”
Week Four: This week grow the power of your witness by watching all your actions and thoughts as if you were watching a movie. Begin to experience yourself as “supreme strength, the fullness of wisdom, unquenchable joy.”
For this month ponder the words of Huston Smith and “unwrap” yourself.
*In the East, God “being” is considered masculine, while God “acting” is considered feminine.
Ishvara Pranidhana
Jump into your life
With your whole heart, trusting that
You will fly to God.
~ C.L.
Surrender
Ishvara Pranidhana
In the movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, two con men find themselves in the same lucrative area. Realizing that there is room for only one of them, they make a wager, agreeing to pick an innocent woman and con her out of $50,000. The first one of them to succeed in obtaining the $50,000 will maintain sole rights to “work” the area; the other will leave, never to return. The wager unleashes a comical set of events, in which each con man tries to out do the other. But the real surprise comes at the end, when it is the woman who swindles $50,000 from both of them! What is interesting to me are the reactions of these two men when they realize that all the time they thought they were doing the conning, in reality, they were being conned. In a fit of anger, one of the men reacts with what looks like a two-year-old tantrum. The other man, however, is very quiet and slowly begins to get a broad smile across his face. Then he begins to laugh in delight at the mastery of this woman who has outsmarted him and walked off with his $50,000.
There is a lesson for us here, I think. How often do we, like the men above, try to con life as if there is a prize waiting for us if we succeed? And when life doesn’t do what we want, we throw a tantrum. (Just think about how many times you tell yourself you had a “bad day” because it didn’t go the way you had planned.) We can be so busy feeling cheated or victimized when life doesn’t go the way we want it to that we often miss a new opportunity life is offering us in the moment.
Ishvara Pranidhana, the jewel of surrender, presupposes that there is a divine force at work in our lives. Whether we call it God, grace, providence, or life, this force is greater than we are and cares deeply about us. Surrender invites us to be active participants in our life, totally present and fluid with each moment, while appreciating the magnitude and mystery of what we are participating in. Ultimately this guideline invites us to surrender our egos, open our hearts and accept the higher purpose of our being.
We have had tastes of this jewel of surrender; we know it as being “in the flow” or “in the zone.” In the movie Bagger Vance, it is portrayed as your “one perfect swing.” Perhaps you were watching a sunset, hiking in the mountains, holding a baby, or caught up in something you love to do when suddenly time disappeared and you disappeared with it. Your actions, your thoughts, and the activity you were engaged in, lined up and became one entity of harmony and perfection. This is the rhythm of surrender. The yogis tell us that we can live this way all the time, unless we are getting in our own way.
Life wants to surprise, delight and grow us in ways far beyond our imagination. Jean-Pierre de Caussade understood the opportunity that hides in each event. In The Sacrament of the Present Moment, he writes about taking advantage of the “immense, certain, and always available good fortune” of every moment. He further states that there is a purpose hidden in each event, and if we trust this hidden purpose, life will always surpass our own expectations. De Caussade’s writing overflows with the joy of trusting and finding God hidden within each activity, challenge, and interruption life presented to him.
How do we begin to find this rhythm of surrender or the immense joy and trust that overflows in the writings of de Caussade? When we release our rigidity and our need to control, when we joyfully engage life as it comes to us, and when we place our egos in devotion to that which is greater, we can begin to taste the bounty of this jewel.
Releasing
The yoga posture called shavasana, or corpse pose, is a posture for practicing surrender. Putting ourselves on our backs, with our arms and legs stretched out at a forty-five degree angle from the body, signifies the death of the activity we have just participated in. It is also a practice for the ultimate surrender of our own death. In shavasana, there is nothing for us to do. We are asked to just lie there, releasing any tension in our bodies, letting go of effort, and trusting that the breath will breathe us and the body will renew itself. (If this sounds easy, it’s not.) This practice of shavasana is one of the most important practices we can do, for it is here that we begin to learn the meaning of letting go of all the ways we physically and mentally fight with life.
As we learn to stop fighting life, we can begin to act skillfully. Control makes us rigid and tight and narrows our perspective. Getting rid of our armor opens a world of possibility and makes us lighter and more comfortable for the journey. We can monitor our moment to moment surrender to life by watching the inner sensations of contraction and expansion. Contraction is a feeling of constriction, a pulling in. Expansion is an opening, a creating of space and wonder. When we find ourselves in contraction, we are fighting life or fearful of life. When we find ourselves in expansion, we are in the flow of surrender.
Doug Keller uses the imagery of ice chunks to help us grasp this concept of expansion and release. He likens life to a flowing stream and we are ice chunks in that stream. We are the same quality as the stream; however, we are frozen in our tensions and fears. Our practice is to melt ourselves into the flow of the stream, becoming one with the flow of life. As we relax and release our rigid thoughts and muscles, we can begin to flow with life.
When my granddaughter Ashly was a toddler I used to tell her to “be careful.” In her delightful innocence, she mixed up the ending, and would always cheerfully reply, “Be carefree.” I thought this was cute, and began to playfully mimic her. But I noticed something important as I shifted my language. I noticed that being careful created tightness in me; fear and rigidity accompanied these words. I also noticed that speaking the words “be carefree” brought an immediate feeling of expansion and opened me to the adventure of my life. I was ready to trust the moment.
Engaging
Those of you who do white water rafting know the power of the rapids. To fight them is to lose. Instead, you must use the rapids to your advantage to navigate through them safely. Learning to surrender is as skillful as being able to maneuver a raft through white water rapids, knowing that the power is in the current and the rocks and your own skill to keep from capsizing or crashing. Like white water rafting, surrender is learning to skillfully ride with what the moment gives us, all the while enjoying the process, whether we glide through safely or tip over and get wet.
And yet, we can easily find ourselves waging war on the moment by demanding that it give us what we want, served just the way we like it. It would be like trying to make the current do what we want it to. That attitude is disastrous on a raft, and it is disastrous in life. When we need life to be a certain way, we get restricted and tight, rather than open to the current of life. But each time we ride the rapids, we become a more skillful paddler.
When discussing the first guideline of nonviolenc
e, I talked about little three year old Brooks who began to hold his stools, creating internal discomfort for himself and disturbance for the whole household. There is more to the story. Brooks had started attending a new day care and was uncomfortable with one of the child care workers, whom Brooks referred to as “crabby.” Brooks did not know how to handle the situation so he did the only thing he knew how to do at the time, hold his stools. But his mother Ann, aware of Brooks’ fears with the situation, was able to invite him to walk through these fears. She took Brooks’ courageous little hand, walked him up to an encounter with the child care worker, and stood by him while he came face to face with the person he feared. After this brave confrontation, Brooks was free, the childcare worker and Brooks became good buddies, and the house was back to normal.
The story above is an example of the power we have to meet life with courage and action. There was no denial of the severity of what was happening, nor was there a passive helplessness to the situation. Ann supported her son Brooks to meet life as it was, scary and overwhelming. And in the process, Brooks became more skillful in his relationship with life.
The story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer is another example of engaging the moment with integrity. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister during the time that Hitler came into power. While others chose to ignore what was happening, Bonhoeffer stayed present to the reality of the moment. As he witnessed the atrocities of racism and fascism, he felt called to surrender to his need to act upon the suffering he was seeing. In a gut-wrenching decision, he became part of a small group of people who planned an assassination attempt on Hitler’s life. The attempt failed, and Bonhoeffer was imprisoned. Just hours before Germany was liberated, Bonhoeffer was hung on the gallows. His writing during his days in prison while waiting for his own execution produced brilliant insights into the struggle, integrity and courage that life can demand of us. Surrender is not passive.
Engagement with the moment cost Dietrich Bonhoeffer his life. With Brooks, it demanded his courage. With others, such as William Wilberforce, whose passion and tireless efforts ended the British slave trade, surrender demanded his perseverance. History is full of great people who surrendered to the hardships and challenges of their time and engaged those hardships with creativity and skill. These inspirational people understood that surrender meant giving themselves to a higher purpose because that was what life asked of them. These people did not start out “great.” Like you and I, they were ordinary people. But with each challenge life presented them, rather than shrink away, they grew themselves up to meet the moment skillfully.
Accepting
This is not to say that we should go looking for greatness, but rather to pay attention to the needs of the moment. If we are aware of what is right in front of us, we will get clues into our own development and direction. When life needs us, it will come to us, but we will recognize it only if we are paying attention and if we are courageous enough to respond. It is as if we are partnered to life in a dance step. We do not lead, nor do we limply drag along like dead weight. As a dance partner to life, we are asked to be vulnerable and undefended, and yet so present we can follow the next move, wherever the leading step takes us, adding our own style as we go.
Life knows what to do better than we do. Our task is simply to let go and receive each moment with an open heart, and then dance skillfully with it. If we have been practicing the other nine guidelines, we are learning to find our compassion and courage, our boldness and contentment, and the knowledge of how we get in our own way. As we grow in all the skills that the Yamas and Niyamas ask of us, we will be able to greet each moment worthy of what it asks of us.
Swami Rama used to say, “Do what is yours to do; don’t do what is not yours to do.” How simple these words may sound to our ears, and yet they are profound to our understanding of surrender. As we are able to let go of what we can’t change, we are able to grow more and more into our unique gift and contribution to life itself. There is something that is ours to do, and whether it is large or small, it is our contribution to the whole of humanity. As we discern where our path lies and then surrender to that awareness, we will begin to taste freedom and joy in a way we never dreamed possible.
There is an image from the East that portrays the invitation of the tenet of surrender. The image is of a serpent so strong and balanced that it holds the entire earth on its head. Yet, it is soft enough for royalty and babies to be pampered as they lie comfortably on the coiled body. This is an image of strength and softness at the same time. Surrender asks this of us. To be strong enough to engage each moment with integrity and at the same time to be soft enough to flow with the current of life.
Devotion
A friend shared a vivid dream that had impacted her greatly. In this life-like dream, a woman appeared to her and, popping out her chest, boisterously proclaimed, “The way to have a good day is to open up the door and LET GOD IN!” What a profound way to start each day in the remembrance and rhythm of surrender.
Surrender is ultimately a stance of devotion that takes place in the heart and permeates all of our attitudes and actions. In its deepest sense, Ishvara Pranidhana is the surrender of the ego to a higher purpose. Or, as Richard Rohr says, “It is the prayer of Thy kingdom come; my kingdom go.” As the ego surrenders, the heart expands. As the ego stops working so hard to get its own way, life begins to take on an ease and rhythm. As the ego stops fighting to be number one, life begins to nourish and feed us in amazing ways.
As we grow ourselves into the fullness of what this jewel has to teach us, we begin to understand the magnanimity of what guides, protects, nourishes, and cares for us. We begin to understand that there is something much greater which is “doing” us, and we begin to give all of our actions, as well as the fruits of our actions, into the arms of the Divine. Surrender is knowing ourselves to be a part of this Divine Oneness and then giving ourselves over to this greater whole. We find in the process that we do not lose ourselves, but instead become part of the greatness itself.
Questions for Exploration
Living with these questions, taking time for reflection and journaling will give you new insights into your life and the practice of surrender. For this month, frame your exploration in the following statement by Swami Chetanananda:
Ultimately there is nothing I can tell you
about surrender except
Having nothing and wanting nothing;
Not keeping score,
Not trying to be richer,
Not being afraid of losing;
Not being particularly interested
in our own personalities;
Choosing to be happy,
no matter what happens to us.
These are some of the clues.
The rest we learn with practice and grace.
Week One: This week watch your attitude and responses to the moment. Are you fearful, trusting, fighting, judging, or annoyed? Notice if there is a pattern to your attitude.
Week Two: This week notice any tension that arises in your body when you need the moment to be “your way.” Consciously choose to relax your body and shift your attitude to curiosity. Notice what happens.
Week Three: This week practice welcoming each moment and growing yourself into the opportunity of what is being offered and asked of you. When you find yourself shrinking away, trust that life is giving you a chance to step into a fuller, more skillful you. Support yourself with these words from Pablo Picasso, “I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” Become a skillful, worthy student of each moment that life presents to you.
Week Four: This week wake up every morning and “let God in.” Believe in something that is greater than you are and let your actions, your mind, and your heart line up with that greatness.
For this month ponder the words of Swami Chetanananda and learn about surrender through “practice and grace.”
Re
viewing the Niyamas
Several years ago I made a major change in my life. Events came together in such a way that I asked myself the question, “Just how good can I feel?” I began to wonder if every year I could feel better and have more vitality and clarity. At the time, this question felt radical to me as I looked around at the American expectations of aging. But I decided it was worth the experiment and that I would make choices in diet, activity, and thinking that would support this exploration.
The Niyamas, or observances, are an invitation into a radical exploration of possibility. Just how good can you feel? Just how joyful can your life be? We will never know unless we consciously make choices to support this exploration. The five Niyamas outline the shape of these choices.
There is not a “right and wrong” to this exploration, nor is there a “better and worse.” Like the Yamas, the Niyamas point us in the direction of something better than we are now aware of. It is as if we have five seeds to plant and care for in our inner being. They are the seeds of Purity, Contentment, Self-discipline, Self-study, and Surrender. We tend these seeds by:
• Cleansing our bodies, our speech, our thoughts (Purity)
• Falling in love with our own life (Contentment)
• Consciously choosing discipline and growth (Self-discipline)
• Knowing the Self (Self-study)
• Paying attention to what life is asking of us (Surrender)
As these seeds begin to bear fruit, we will become unshakable as we experience an inner essence of deep harmony and strength and access to joy that bursts forth with every breath. The Niyamas are both the invitation and the guideline for this exploration.
Moving On
As a child, I loved pretending I was a horse. Not just any horse, but a beautiful, black, fast horse, freely galloping over open countryside and taking giant leaps over anything in my way.