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Obstacles (Antaraya)
Three hundred years ago the anonymous author of the Shiva-Samhita cautioned his students that “there are many hard and almost insurmountable obstacles in Yoga, yet the Yogi should go on with his practice at all hazards; even were his life to come to the throat.”1 He was telling them that a trip into the country of the Self isn’t always easy. Some days, just as on any other trip, there are obstacles to overcome: either it’s raining outside, the locals aren’t very friendly, or you take a wrong turn and get lost.
But while I agree with the author that you should always press on with your practice no matter what obstacle arises, I’m not sure that struggling until your life comes to your throat is wise. At the very least, you’d have a really hard time breathing. There’s no denying that yoga practice can be frustrating or maddening at times, but a life-and-death struggle with obstacles usually just makes things worse.
In a sense, obstacles are defense mechanisms. They’re a part of ourselves protecting us from ourselves and preventing us from pushing our practice along too quickly. These defense mechanisms becomes obstacles only when:
- We quit and walk away from yoga entirely.
- We ignore the obstacle, either consciously or unconsciously, and banish from our practice the cause (or causes) that seems to precipitate it.
- We confront the obstacle head-on, like a battering ram, with face and eyes and teeth set in a determined grimace, and struggle to get around or over or through it as quickly as possible.
Most of us are accustomed to doing something when we feel thwarted, to fix the problem or at least tinker with it to make it better. While it’s appropriate at times to push against an obstruction, more often than not, this strategy leads to frustration or, worse, to injury.
The Sanskrit word for obstacle is antaraya, which means “to come between.” Obstacles come in many shapes and sizes, both physical and mental. In classical yoga antarayas are vritti-factories that continually churn out impediments to practice. Fortunately for us, the yogis catalogued dozens of obstacles in their guides, mostly of the mental kind, that come between us and our destination. They’ve done this to alert us to possible detours and stumbling blocks on the road ahead, reassure us that obstacles are natural features of the practice landscape, and encourage us to press on and not get dispirited.
Probably the best-known traditional obstacles are the nine listed in the first chapter of the Yoga-Sutra (1.30). The first, sickness (vyadhi), is a physical obstacle, but the other eight can be considered mental. These include languor (styana), doubt (samshaya), heedlessness (pramada), sloth (alasya), dissipation (avirati), false vision (bhranti-darshana), nonattainment of yogic stages (alabdha-bhumikatva), and instability in these stages (anavasthitatva).
Patanjali adds that his obstacles are attended by four distractions (vikshepa): suffering or pain (duhkha), depression or melancholy (daurmanasya), physical restlessness (angam-ejatva), and disturbed breathing. These distractions are surefire signs that something is wrong with our practice, whether it’s pranayama or posture, or almost anything else.
I don’t believe that Patanjali had to contend with all nine obstacles in his own practice. At least I hope not. It seems more likely he collected them in conversations with colleagues and students, and from his school’s tradition, both written and oral. Over the years I’ve collected accounts of dozens of obstacles, both physical and mental, from my students’ journals.
Physical Obstacles
There are three general categories of physical obstacles: (1) ignorance about the topography of the body and the qualities of the breath; (2) imbalance and its related tension, found just about anywhere in the body; and (3) sickness, usually a cold or the flu and accompanying symptoms of misery and despair. Depending on the severity of this sickness, your pranayama practice should be modified to a simple reclining breathing awareness or put on hold altogether until you feel better.
Mental Obstacles
There are also eight mental obstacles that seem to surface again and again:
Dismay. Many beginning breathers feel dismayed by the prospect of mastering an entirely new practice from scratch. One student told me, after sitting in on a few classes and thumbing through Light on Pranayama, “There’s just so much to learn.” At the time I thought he was excited by the prospect of adding to his store of yoga knowledge. It turned out that he was simply put off by the wealth or welter of information and practices.
Indolence. Sometimes called sloth, inertia, or laziness, indolence is probably the most common obstacle. Almost all of us, however many years we’ve been trudging along in our practice, struggle occasionally (or more than occasionally) with indolence, our built-in resistance (tamas) to doing our daily work.
The urgent need to justify indolence, by the way, to ourselves and others, occasions some of the most creative journal entries I get. Exotic vacations, visits from long-lost relatives, protracted bouts with strange diseases, child-rearing responsibilities, life-shattering career or residence changes, alien abductions—all seem to increase dramatically during the usual eight-week run of my pranayama course.
Distraction. Many students find they can’t relax and focus on the breath because they’re too distracted by the fluctuations of their consciousness.
Discouragement, impatience, doubt. Students often report that, even after they practice diligently for several months, absolutely nothing happens or that, at least in their opinion, things happen too slowly. This experience usually leads to one of three different obstacles:
The student gets discouraged. Compared to posture, pranayama seems to require an effort out of all proportion to the results.
The student gets impatient. Even Mr. Iyengar describes pranayama as tedious and repetitive. As one student complained, “All this lying around on blankets is a big waste of time.” Someone like this will frequently skip over the foundation practices and plunge headfirst into “real” pranayama. In his haste he may well trip over an obstacle I call “incapacity,” which is trying to do something you’re not really prepared to do.
But most commonly the student starts to doubt. There are two kinds of doubt. In the first kind the student may doubt the practice of yoga itself, either because he has the wrong teacher or the wrong approach for his needs or temperament or because the practice seems ineffective in the face of a seemingly insurmountable obstacle, to borrow a phrase from the Shiva-Samhita.
The second kind of doubt is self-doubt. Here, when faced with that insurmountable obstacle, the student doubts not the efficacy of the practice but his own capacities. Faith in the practice can be restored, in the first instance, by finding a more simpatico teacher or practice environment, or maybe a different book. The other two varieties of doubt are more difficult to overcome. They seem to dampen the student’s interest in the practice and his willingness to continue the journey.
The cautious lions, elephants, and tigers approach to pranayama is especially susceptible to these three obstacles. It’s never easy to make an effort without having something to show for that effort. But the fact is that pranayama, for most students, develops much more slowly than posture. It’s important to understand this at the outset of your journey and lower your expectations accordingly.
Instability. Not all beginners report difficulties early in their practice. “I’ve never done anything as incredible as this before,” exclaimed one student. “It’s changing my whole life.” But it sometimes happens that after this promising start, the student slips back to what he considers to be a lower level of practice. Patanjali calls this instability or unsteadiness (anavasthitatva).
Instability isn’t an obstacle if the student accepts the backward step as simply a phase in the natural ebb and flow of all spiritual adventure. But after tasting nothing but the sweetness of the practice at the outset, it’s difficult to lose that flavor or have it turn bitter. She’s then prone to quit the practice in frustration.
Fear. The last obstacle is, I think, the most formidable of all and so the most threatening to the continuation of our breathing practice. It can appear anytime, early on or later down the road, and usually with no warning. For convenience I call it fear, but in fact, students’ reactions vary, and as a descriptive word, fear may be too strong for some or too weak for others.
We often forget that pranayama isn’t merely deep breathing. Instead, it’s a powerful means of penetrating ignorance or confusion (avidya). Remember, Patanjali tells us that, through pranayama, the veil that covers the light of our higher awareness (buddhi) is lifted.
Sometimes the light illuminates things that are truly awesome and wondrous. Other times, though, the light is far too bright, and it shines into the darker corners of our consciousness, where we discover things about ourselves we’d rather not know. It’s important to remember that inefficient breathing often reinforces the bridling of unpleasant or dangerous thoughts or emotions. When we change the way we breathe and make it more efficient, these thoughts or emotions frequently rise to the surface of our awareness.
Truthfully, while the fear seems threatening, it’s really a signal that our practice is on track and working as advertised. It tells us that we’re cutting through the coverings of avidya, the innate and acquired structures and agents of our consciousness, especially our surface self, that obscure our authentic self.
Sometimes, depending on the nature of the insight, the student can face the fear. If she’s willing to accept that self-knowledge isn’t always comfortable and keep going, her practice usually becomes stronger and more self-assured.
Notes
1 Shiva-Samhita, trans. Rai Bahadur Srisa Chandra Vasu (New Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1990), p. 31. |
