Current Letter | John's Letter Archives
Winter 2002
NAMASTE,
Death was seen peering in the windows even before the planes struck on September 11.
Last June, all of us at Unity Woods were shocked when Tina Ibarra, a long-time student who worked in the boutique and was a friend to many of us, was killed in a car crash near the Naval Observatory. Then, over the course of the summer, two of our teachers lost their mothers: one after a prolonged illness; the other, suddenly and unexpectedly. It was a summer of memorial services.
Now, of course, tragedy and loss have taken on monstrous dimensions. And because the Pentagon was one of the targets struck, many in our community have been directly affected in one way or another. In the first week of class after the attacks (Unity Woods was closed between sessions the week of Sept. 11), one of my students recounted being less than a hundred yards from where the plane struck the Pentagon as it smashed into the building in a roar of fire and thunder. No doubt, there are many stories of horror and grief yet to be told in our community and just as many stories of sacrifice and courage. As I write less than two weeks after the conflagration, we are only beginning to learn of and come to grips with the magnitude of events and the tumult of feelings that roil around them.
What is there to say?
For me, it is too soon to wrap my heart and mind around the events that engulf us at the moment. I have gone from stunned disbelief and amazement as I sat those first few days after the crashes, transfixed before the television set like so much of America and the world, staring at the relentless replays of what looked like scenes from a Bruce Willis movie but were only too real; to tears at the sight of a man, clothes ripped and covered with blood and dust, kneeling on the sidewalk, his face buried in his hands in abject sorrow and despair, or the sound of weeping survivors as with breaking voices, they described the last words spoken between them and dear ones in those final moments of terror and love; to a distant feelinglessness, an empty place deep inside that scares me more than any of the rest of it. Anger is strangely absent.
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Even before the events of September 11, death was going to be the subject of this newsletter. The earlier losses of the summer had already announced his presence. The catastrophes in September ushered him in the door.
Of course, death is always present. Even if he isn't knocking at the door of our particular house or the house of our neighbor or of one of the members our family, still one need only read the paper or watch the evening news to see his shadow.
For the practicing yogi, though, at some point death is an everyday guest. His visage is glimpsed in myriad ways.
Each time we practice asanas, birth and death are there. Our practice is like a tiny lifetime. It is born in the first breath, the first movement. It goes through different stages - of growth, of instability and stability, of decline. There are successes and failures, excitement, disappointment, frustration and calm. And it ends in Shavasana. There is a reason Shavasana (Corpse Pose) comes at the end of each practice. For the beginner, Shavasana is just a time to rest and relax after the exertions of practice. But it is really much more than that. Mr. Iyengar says that, "In this asana the object is to imitate a corpse. Once life has departed, the body remains still and no movements are possible... But it is much harder to keep the mind than the body still. Therefore this apparently easy posture is one of the most difficult to master." Death is surrender; in fact, it is the surrender of a lifetime, of ourselves. In Shavasana, if we truly practice as deeply as possible, we surrender every part of our body, letting go everywhere. When we do, our breath becomes very soft, very slow, almost imperceptible. It is then that the mind becomes more nearly quiet, more nearly still. We approach a corpse-like state. I have had students who have become quite unsettled after a deep Shavasana. They felt that they were floating or that they couldn't feel their limbs or their body or that they had stopped breathing. They were frightened by their experience. Death tends to be scary for most of us.
Each time we practice pranayama, (the awareness of the movement of energy through the movement of breath), birth and death are there. One breath - an inhalation and an exhalation - is called a cycle, and each cycle is like a tiny lifetime. Every breath is born the same way our life begins: in the first moment of inhalation as we fill our lungs with air. And every breath dies in the same way our life will end: in the last moment of exhalation as we surrender the breath and with it, everything.
Each time we practice meditation, birth and death are there. As we sit, attending to our bodies, our breath, our minds, most of the time we experience innumerable comings and goings. Sensations in our bodies arise and dissipate. We breathe in; we breathe out. And like physical sensations, like our breath, thoughts appear and disappear. In fact, who we think we are dies as we touch who we really are - only to be reborn again and again. Our life, yoga practice, breathing, and thinking - all have beginnings and endings, all are born and all die.
These experiences are not metaphoric. Everything is, in fact, changing, shifting, being born, dying, being reborn, dying again, the wheel ever turning.
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In some Tantric and Buddhist traditions, practitioners meditate at charnel grounds in the presence of corpses in various states of decay. This is not done as some gruesome, morbid ritual, but rather as a graphic reminder of the impermanence of everything, including us.
In a way, yoga practice is a preparation for death. We learn to be present through fear; we learn that whatever we are experiencing will change; we learn to let go when the time comes to let go.
All this death stuff may seem kind of grim. But in fact, to truly experience the reality of impermanence, of which death is such an inescapable example, is deeply liberating. Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutra, says that one of the fundamental causes of suffering is abhinivesha, the clinging to life, whose counterpart is the fear of death. When we realize fully that everything changes and dies, it is as if a weight were lifted from us.
In Carlos Castenada's book, A Separate Reality, Don Juan, the Yaqui Indian sorcerer with whom he studies, tells him, "Only the idea of death makes a man sufficiently detached so he can't deny himself anything. A man of that sort, however, does not crave, for he has acquired a silent lust for life and for all things of life. He knows his death is stalking him and won't give him time to cling to anything, so he tries, without craving, all of everything."
To understand the imminence of death, then, does not make us distant or unfeeling. Rather it allows us the freedom to feel the pain and grief of life and, along with it, the delight and richness of life, more deeply than ever. The renowned Indian saint, Sri Anandamayi Ma, was said to have been in ecstatic communion with the Divine in a most profound way. People traveled from far and wide to be in her radiant presence because of the power and joy and clarity with which she expressed her experience of that Divinity. She spoke to them of the unimportance of transitory pleasure and pain and the beauty and bliss of living in the Light. Even so, when her husband, who had, upon realizing the nature of the woman he had married, become her most devoted disciple and tended to her needs for many years, died, she wept inconsolably for days.
To be free of the fear of death is to be free to feel the fullness of life in all its joy and sorrow. We can learn much about this by being aware of all the tiny births and deaths that take place in our practice and in our lives.
Weeks go by between the time I write this newsletter and the time you read it. Months will have passed since all the deaths of the people I have spoken about here - the one at a time deaths and the thousands at a time. Who knows what will have transpired in our lives as our government seeks retribution for the attacks on our cities and our people, and those who would be our enemies strive further to instill fear and despair in our hearts? Surely, irrespective of their actions or ours, many will have been born and many will have died, perhaps even you or I. Maybe Mr. Iyengar's words are as wise and valuable here as anyone's.
"Live for the present and know yourself well. The fear of death cannot be overcome by ordinary people, but only by yogis - and not by ordinary yogis like you and me! We still have far to go in our practice. You and I are still scratching the surface of the subject."
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