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Fall 1994

NAMASTE,

I’ve been flying a lot lately. It’s getting so I can almost recite the pre-take off safety instructions by heart, from how to fasten my seatbelt to “should we experience a loss of cabin pressure…secure your (oxygen) mask before helping others.”

As I listen to these last instructions, I am struck by the relevance this has to yoga practitioners. We are all working with varying degrees of intensity, to understand ourselves better, to improve the quality of life around us. After all, what good are we going to be to the person next to us if we are gasping for breath and barely conscious ourselves?

In some circles, however, those of us who practice yoga, or for that matter, any discipline directed toward personal growth and development, are regarded as being of marginal use at best in our demanding, fast-paced society. Whether we be practitioners of an Eastern discipline such as yoga or a Western form such as psychotherapy, we are often characterized as selfish and unconcerned with our neighbors, society or the environment. Media created generalizations lump meditators together with leveraged buyout artists as prime examples of the “Me Generation”, concerned only with Numero Uno.

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Even people who should know better, like noted psychologist James Hillman, put down meditation and psychotherapy as an abdication of one’s responsibility to the world at large. In an interview in the April 1991 issue of The Sun magazine, Hillman expresses this idea by saying, “First get inside yourself, find out who you are, get yourself straightened out, then go out into the world, then you can be useful…We’ve held to that view but I don’t think that’s it, I don’t think it works.” In other words don’t just sit there blabbing about your mother to your shrink or gazing at your navel at some meditation retreat. Get out there and do something! Later he says, “The world is in a terrible sad state, but all we’re concerned with is trying to get ourselves in order…It’s better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all.”

It’s not that critics of the various “personal growth” disciplines (for want of a better term) don’t have a point. One can engage in any of these self-help programs as a means of escaping from difficult or unpleasant circumstances, or ducking responsibilities, or avoiding relating to others. Such avoidance does indeed deprive society of potentially productive members and contributes little if anything to the development of the individual. It may, in fact, foster a deeper sense of victimization, alienation, or an exaggerated sense of self-importance. And you only have to look through some of the ads in the Yoga Journal to see that there are more than a few folks out there floating around in the woo woo, looking for a quick and easy (but not necessarily cheap) way to eternal bliss. The advertisers seem to think so, anyway.

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To follow up on Hillman’s point, certainly we don’t have to be enlightened masters, completely free of confusion, doubt, and neurotic nuttiness before we can or should try to do something about the “terrible, sad state” of the world. Hillman is right in saying that we need to do something and that we can’t wait until we feel good to get started.

On the other hand, we’ve got a world full of people running around half-cocked, trying to do something to make it better. We’ve been at it for awhile, and the results are, not surprisingly, half-cocked. We don’t see ourselves clearly, so we don’t see anything else clearly. It all turns into a muddy jumble. To paraphrase computer jargon: confusion in, confusion out. The terrible, sad state of the world is a reflection of our own terrible, sad state within, of our own pain, alienation, and suffering.

The point is that through our deep observation of ourselves, whether through yoga or therapy or a walk in the forest, we see that we exist only in connection with the world. Everything we do affects the world and everything that happens affects us. This is what the law of Karma really means. Existence is an interactive process. We see it within the world of our bodies when we do yoga postures with devoted attention. The workings of the microcosm of our bodies can reveal to us the workings of the macrocosm. The laws of cause and effect, the fact of interdependence and connectedness are true on every level. The goal of our yoga practice is, ultimately, to uncover the immediacy of that experience of connectedness. And as with every sphere of our lives, balance is the key to that understanding. We will act; we must act. But we can act only with as much clarity as we have.

Ideally we’re not doing yoga or undergoing therapy to feel good or be free from problems. We’re doing it so that we can see more clearly, function more effectively, so that we don’t further muddy the waters of our lives and the lives of those around us. We’re not doing it to get away from it all. Indeed the very doing puts us more in touch with the world. We’re doing it so that when the cabin pressure falls we’ll be able to breathe and we’ll be able to help the person next to us breathe, too.

A peaceful autumn to you all.

       

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