A Brief Awakening

In 2006 I traveled to Tucson, Arizona for the Anusara Advanced Intensive. This is an annual event where John Friend, the founder of Anusara Yoga, combines the teachings of a profound Hindu text with radical asana practices. It is a gathering of 150 teachers in a three-day exploration and celebration of the body, mind, and heart. That year the text chosen was “The Splendor of Recognition”, a commentary on the Pratyabhijna-hrdayam by Swami Shantananda of the Siddha Yoga lineage. It is comprised of 20 sutras, written by Kshemaraja, a tantric scholar from the 11th century C.E. This was the first year I attended the intensive, and I dove into the reading of this text with a fervor. Swami Shantananda clearly and sequentially lays out foundational elements of the tantric Shaivite teachings with both eloquence and humility, while offering many examples of how to utilize these teachings in our day to day existence. I arrived at this event having read it through twice. I believe Swami Shantananda`s words reconfigured my intellectual and emotional energetic body to receive the experience I was gifted with.

It was the end of the second day, and we were in meditation. John asked us to feel the energy of one another, and allow ourselves to open into that pulsation. As I softened, I felt a stirring deep within my belly that became an enormous wave rising up into the center of my chest where it expanded without end, as if my heart were growing bigger and bigger with each breath. Within that wave arose a powerful gratitude. The names of everyone at the gathering I had interacted with that weekend, along with the exact moment of interaction, blossomed in my mind one by one. Each name was followed by a silent “Namaste” and a feeling of bowing in to the infinite expanse that had arisen within me. When I ran out of names, faces manifested, and after that, an offering to any I had not connected with yet. As this went on I began to feel tears of joy, like a warm spring rain, emerge from my eyes and flow down my cheeks. This indescribable joy and sense of being joined inextricably with every being I met continued into the evening. As I walked through town, every shadow, brick, and plant seemed more defined and richer in color and tone. Even the stars above seemed more crisp and sharp in their luminosity. I moved with lightness and ease, with a sense of following a natural rhythm. I drank each moment in as if it were the sweetest nectar. It was a state of ananda, or divine bliss. This experience engendered a powerful shift in my perceptions of the world that I have carried with me since.

Yoga is a process through which we seek to unite with the divine. The powerful feeling of intimate communion with all that is around us is a step towards this unity. In the tantric Kashmir Shaivite teachings, there is the idea of the hrdaya, or heart. In these teachings, The Great Heart of Consciousness is that place where the unbounded pulsating stillness of the divine, represented by Lord Shiva, comes into perfect union with his consort, Shakti, who symbolizes the raw potential energy of creative manifestation in every shape and form. This place, however, is not one location, but every point in time and space. It is not one being, but every form of life. It is everything, both animate and inanimate, that we experience. There is nothing in the entire universe that is not composed of this vibrational energy. Ultimately, the yogin will steep his or her individual consciousness in this Universal Heart. In this place the yogin realizes that he or she is the Great Heart of Consciousness, and everything seen, heard, tasted, smelled, and felt is also a part of this One Great Heart. To then abide in that place permanently as the yogin interacts with the world is the highest state of embodiment, called jivanmukti.

Practice 1: Asana

A foundational element of the yoga practice, used to create the platform with which to launch ourselves towards this perfect union, is awareness. We cultivate awareness in stages, the first of which is a more refined experience of the physical world of our body and environment, and our relation to time and space. The next level is our breath, which is a wonderful bridge between the tangible and the intangible. We can feel our breath flowing through our nostrils and filling our lungs in the form of air, but the breath also has an energetic component that can be felt in other areas of the body as we inhale and exhale. This is why asana, or yogic poses, are a great entry-level way to begin the cultivation of awareness.

My own yoga practice began with feeling my relationship to body and breath. In my first two years of practice, I began to feel subtle awakenings of awareness in deep muscle tissue, and became more sensitive to my own energetic body. This gradual refinement of awareness was accompanied by a feeling of sweet release and revitalization following every physical practice. I was hooked! Even as we cultivate awareness, there has to be a corresponding joy in what we are doing. This then feeds into the desire to continue the practice, and is an essential element of tantric yoga. It is not about subjugating your body, mind, or heart. It is not about forcing your evolutionary process. We are each at a different point of our evolution when we come to the yogic practice, and need to honor where we are so we may actually grow into great spiritual beings in the most beneficent and benevolent way.

Practice 2: Seeing The Big Picture

A practice my teacher John encourages is to see the Big Picture. This is a practice of allowing your awareness to open to everything that is before you. When we take in the widest possible view of a situation, it is like standing atop a mountain to gaze out over the entire valley below. Within this “eagle eye view”, as John calls it, there are many possible vantage points.

Often, when we are challenged, we contract. We lose this wider perspective. In that place, the possibilities become limited. When we open to receive the challenge as if to embrace it, the way to engender the best possible outcome becomes clearer. This takes patient practice, and goes hand in hand with the refinement of awareness. At first, it is like receiving a list of possible responses to the challenge. This, in and of itself, shows progress is being made, and you are seeing the Big Picture. Then, through the steady refinement of awareness, the best choice becomes clearer and clearer. In the beginning stages, it will be more of a guessing game as to which choice is best. Over time, the choice that will produce the best results becomes apparent more and more readily. Eventually, the challenge appears, we see all of the possibilities, and instantaneously realize exactly which one is the best choice for that particular situation in that moment.

Practice 3: The Play Of Spanda

Of course, there are times when we are faced with an overwhelming personal tragedy or grief where contraction of our heart is the only thing we are able to feel. Our view narrows to that one event, as if we have leaned in close to the valley floor to examine a single tiny blade of grass. When faced by a devastating emotional experience, instead of opening our awareness wide, we plunge into the challenge with a sharp discernment that is surgical in its precision. We use this laser-like focus to move our breath and awareness into the very heart of the challenge. Then, in that tiny bindu, or singularity, of focus, breath by breath we can begin to widen the point in small increments, until our field of awareness is once again open and verdant. This takes tremendous practice, and it is important that we also honor the contractive emotional state itself. This is necessary to the healing process, and why it can take some time for our view to fully expand again. It takes patience, because the contractive state will reassert itself repeatedly as we heal the emotional wound.

This expansion and contraction is an example of spanda, or pulsation. Everything is made up of pulsation. Our breath and emotions mirror the larger pulsations of the cycles of the seasons, the phases of the moon, even the daily trajectory of the sun, from the first rays of dawn, to the last fingers of light as darkness enfolds us once again. The refinement of our awareness to laser beam focus, in tandem with opening to the Big Picture, is a way to attune to this spanda principle. Once we begin to notice the rhythms of the natural world more and more, we become more sensitive to this vital energetic force that is the very fabric from which all life is woven. Nature is the most perfect manifestation of this raw creative vitality. This is why many of us seek refuge in the natural world, whether it is the seclusion of a forested retreat, the wind-swept precipice of a mountain hideaway, or sun-drenched beaches where wave upon wave rolls forth from the ocean in a soothing rhythm that coaxes the body, mind, and heart into easeful release. We are nurtured by nature, even healed by its sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touch.

Practice 4: Meditation

Meditation is the most powerful way to connect to the pulsation of the natural world. It is the penultimate step in attuning to the grand universal pulsation of the Great Heart. Daily meditation takes whatever level of awareness has been cultivated thus far, and magnifies it. It is in that place of not trying to do, but allowing to be, where awareness can blossom like the universe itself, infinite and full of wondrous gifts.

Once again, it begins with the relative world of the body. Asana prepares our body to sit for a period of time, but the seat taken has to be comfortable. It is never about how much pain we can sit through. Unnecessary pain only distracts us from submerging our consciousness into the depths of our awareness. There are many, many ways to meditate using breath, drshti (gazing points, with both open and closed eyes), mantra (sanskrit syllables chanted together to open up individual consciousness to the Universal heart), as well as other techniques. Each tradition has their own sequence that is designed to lead the practitioner into a greater and greater depth of awareness. A daily meditation practice increases the steadiness of our awareness. With the proper techniques, meditation becomes the fertile ground from which the seeds of our most noble intentions grow into magnificent gardens of service. It becomes a place where we can access guidance from our own intrinsic heart wisdom, and use this more refined understanding of ourself to live from a place of abundance.

I have been blessed to receive initiation into a tantric lineage of meditation by Paul Muller-Ortega, a renowned scholar of both meditation and profound wisdom teachings. This Nilakantha method, as he calls it, has further refined my sensitivity to the subtlest energetic pulsations of life. It has awakened in me an even greater capacity to serve every being who seeks my assistance in the fullest, clearest, and most skillful way.

Entering the Emotional Forest

When I reflect on how I used to cope with challenges in my life before I came to the yoga practice, I realize my responses were usually reactions, and not responses at all. I was working with a limited understanding of myself and the world, lashing out in frustration with both my physical body and words. During that time, the only outlet that helped refine my point of view was the writing of poetry and performance of music. It was through observing what I wrote that I gradually started to see how much dark energy I was submerged in. The yoga practice then became a place to explore that darkness and, little by little, begin to bring light to those places of shadow. It was not instantaneous. There was, and still is, a lot of work involved in picking through the pieces of my own emotional wreckage. This is where the practice of the Big Picture comes in very handy. I began to realize that even though there are patches of shadow, there are also corresponding patches of light as well.

When a harmful emotional state takes hold of me, I allow my awareness to open as if stepping away from the emotion, like stepping away from a tree to see the surrounding forest. I then acknowledge that the current emotional state holding my attention is only one of many trees. We are never only one emotion, nor are we that one emotion forever. Even the strongest storm ends at some point. However, we have to stand firm in the buffeting winds and lashing rains, and rise every time we get knocked down. This takes perseverance and patience. It takes courage. It takes equanimity. All of these things, and more, are cultivated through the practice of yoga.

The practice itself will ask us to face the things that make us feel afraid, or unworthy, or uncertain. In asana it could be a handstand, or a backbend, or a balancing pose. Even corpse pose can bring up anxiety, because it symbolizes the death of all that has come before. It is usually done last specifically for this reason. The practice has ended, the creative process is finished, and now we let go of all of our doing to sink into the sweet release of being; being with our breath as it grows quiet, and allowing our awareness to open and attune to the imprint that has been left behind by the life of the practice. From beginning to end. From birth to death. This is the essence of every relationship or task we engage in. When we engage with our life in a moment to moment practice of awareness, our life becomes a place of deep contentment and joy. It is not that life no longer challenges us. It is that we are able to accept the challenges, no matter how much fear, anxiety, anger, or grief enfolds us, and seek to respond in the most life-affirming way.

It is a blessing to be alive and be an embodied being. This is a gift that is so precious, yet is often taken for granted. Practicing awareness allows us to see this gift for what it truly is. Then, we live with a joy and passion that is fiery and contagious. We move our bodies for the sheer delight of it, we gather within our communities to share our gifts and inspire one another. We seek to know who we are so we can better live this precious life, and better serve all beings we meet upon our path.

Embracing the Journey

Every person we meet is a messenger. As our awareness becomes more and more refined, the messages that are being offered become clearer, and we become better at determining what they mean in relation to our life at that moment.

My own steady practice and study has brought me gifts beyond compare from the most surprising of places. I have been supported in the way I needed, when I needed it, sometimes by people I barely knew. I have been offered incredible lessons from many different beings; from my most intimate partner to strangers I have met only once in this lifetime for the briefest of moments. Each time I was able to open my awareness to receive what was being transmitted, my veil of ignorance was pulled aside to show me the things I needed to change about myself to better serve all beings.

We all have the potential within us for greatness. We all have the ability to touch the surface of the divine heart and penetrate its depths. We all have the courage within to plunge into the unexplored wilderness of our emotions, and return with newfound insight and revelations that catapult us into the next level of our incarnation. We all are divine, and, with what my teacher Paul calls “a patient working with one`s self,” can dive deep into the ocean of the Great Heart of Consciousness, and emerge with a perspective that is as wide as the universe, a mind that is steeped in peaceful contentment, a heart that is bursting with joy, and a body in which we feel fantastic to be alive!

The practice of awareness is one that never ends. Like examining a jewel of infinite facets, there is always another perspective to see ourselves from, whether it is attuning to body and breath, seeing the Big Picture, feeling the pulsation of the natural world, or steeping our consciousness in the depths of meditation. Every time we consciously open our individual awareness to explore our relationship to ourselves and the world, we take another tiny step towards universal awareness. This is that experience where we feel we are not just a thread in the tapestry of life, but the entire tapestry itself.

The experience I had in Tucson was a brief taste of this union. It is accessible to every one of us, with patient and dedicated practice. It takes time, but every step of the journey itself is rewarding. I am still seeking the establishment of a permanent connection to that One Great Heart. Will it be established in this lifetime? I don`t know. What I do know is that my life has transformed from a place of shadow to a place of light. Challenges still arise, almost daily, but I approach them with my heart and awareness open wide. In that space of receptivity, I can see the next step that needs to happen, and how best to accomplish it. I remain receptive to each moment, feel my breath, open my awareness, and wait patiently for the next glimpse of the extraordinary to startle me into the arms of the divine.

© 2009 Mark Shveima