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Working with Obstacles
What’s the best way to deal with obstacles, then? Even before you begin your journey and start meeting obstacles, do three things. First, inquire honestly of yourself, Am I truly ready for pranayama? Think about what’s involved in the practice before you commit to it. Recognize that pranayama is an everyday practice that demands time and effort and may not return any rewards for weeks or months to come. Many students realize that, after a few weeks of halfhearted practice, they don’t really feel fit for (adhikara) the work. They may not be interested in breathing, they may not have the time for—or be willing to spend the time on—another responsibility in their lives, or they may not see the point of the practice. Whatever. The real obstacle to these students’ practice is that they don’t want to practice in the first place.
What do you do if you discover that you’re not ready? Don’t worry. The best policy is simply to let the practice go for the time being. Be patient. If you’re sincere about yoga, someday you’ll no doubt feel ripe to begin pranayama again.
But if you are ready to start, then the next step is to gracefully accept your ignorance. Allow that you don’t know everything there is to know about yourself or that things you think you know about yourself may be mistaken. I have a mantra I repeat to myself now and again, just as a reminder of this: “I don’t know who I am.” By admitting ignorance immediately and willingly, you weaken its grip on your consciousness and are more accepting of whatever obstacles come along.
Some students resent being asked to concede they’re ignorant. Don’t forget, this ignorance has nothing to do with your IQ and doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person. Even smart people and people who do good deeds are bound by avidya. Think of it as a kind of metaphysical blind spot intrinsic to everyone’s everyday consciousness.
Finally, when you’re ready to commit to practice and you’ve accepted your ignorance, ask yourself the most important question of all: Do I truly want to know who I am? This question logically follows from our ignorance, but it also issues from an intense desire that all of us have to know the truth about ourselves and what the yogis call a longing for liberation (mumukshutva). This is, as the sage Shankara wrote eleven hundred years ago, the “will to be free from the fetters forged by ignorance . . . through the realization of one’s true nature.”2
We don’t always recognize how essential this desire is to our practice. It’s common for beginning students to think that yoga is something they do, that it’s apart from who they are. Their practice, then, is not integral to their being and is often haphazard and mechanical. More experienced students, though, usually recognize that their practice expresses who they are, that it flows out from their being to sustain and replenish their lives.
Just as prana is the hub of the wheel of life, the mantra “Who am I?” is truly the hub of all spiritual practice. As the great sage Ramana Maharshi said, “Every living being longs always to be happy, untainted by sorrow; and everyone has the greatest love for himself, which is solely due to the fact that happiness is his real nature. Hence, in order to realize that inherent and untainted happiness . . . it is essential that he should know himself. For obtaining such knowledge, the enquiry Who am I? in quest of the Self is the best means.”3
Some students discover that they don’t really want to know. There’s also a part of everyone’s nature that’s comfortable with the status quo and that doesn’t like change. It might be useful to jot down a few impressions about your response to the big question, Who am I? Don’t worry about being right or wrong; give yourself permission to speculate and have fun. Hold on to your jottings for later. It will remind you of where you started from and, as you wend your way over hill and dale, how far you’ve traveled.
But even students who are well prepared for the journey run into obstacles. After all, they’re ignorant, too. And while well-prepared students do struggle occasionally and even quit their practice, I’ve noticed that they tend to treat their obstacles not as foes to yoga, as Vyasa says, but as opportunities to further their practice.
With the help of their Witness and the four projections (bhavanata) listed by Patanjali—friendliness (maitri), compassion (karuna), gladness (mudita), and equanimity (upeksha or samatva)—they first carefully look at the obstacle from every angle over a period of days, weeks, or months, depending on the obstacle. They don’t do anything but simply observe and gather as much information as they can about the obstacle and their reaction to it. Frequently, when this choiceless awareness (a phrase coined by J. Krishnamurti) is applied to the problem, the obstacle itself seems to suggest an opportune solution.
Helpers (Pari-karman)
You might expect that the yogis wouldn’t leave us hanging out there on the obstacle limb without any help, and you would be right. Patanjali, for one, comes to our rescue with a number of different helpers to whom we can turn for succor whenever the obstacles seem to be piling up to Himalayan heights. In addition to the four projections mentioned above, he mentions several other helping hands, such as:
- Faith in the rightness of what you’re doing and in the certainty of your own success. Faith is bolstered by energy (virya) and enthusiasm in the original sense of the word, which is to be inspired or possessed (entheos) by a god. “The person who has control over himself attains verily success through faith; none other can succeed. Therefore, with faith, the Yoga should be practiced with care and perseverance.”4
- Clear intention and constant mindfulness (smirti) of what you’re doing and why, in regard to both short-term and long-term goals and in the subtle adjustments of everyday practice.
- Contentment (samtosha), which accommodates both success and failure with good humor and grace, and self-acceptance; at the same time, the willingness to take risks and embrace uncertainty. “As long as one is not satisfied in the self, he will be subjected to sorrow. With the rise of contentment the purity of one’s heart blooms. The contented man who possesses nothing owns the world.”5
- Careful discrimination (viveka) between what’s important to your practice and what’s not, and the willingness to surrender the latter.
- Open-minded study (svadhyaya) of traditional and contemporary guides to breathing and yoga, and associating with and contemplating on what Patanjali calls the vita-ragas, the beings who have conquered attachment. “By listening to instructions, by contemplation and by being in the company of a calm and sure-minded preceptor, doubts can be removed.”6
Not only Patanjali but virtually every authority on pranayama emphasizes the need for regular, sustained, patient practice. “Perfect consciousness is gained through practice. Yoga is attained through practice; . . . through practice is gained success in pranayama.”7
Last Word
Don’t be surprised—or discouraged or doubtful—if you discover some antaraya that I haven’t mentioned in this chapter. The ones I’ve listed here are just among the most common and surely don’t exhaust all the possibilities—the flat tires, delayed flights, missed connections, and whatever else the universe and your karma cook up to make the journey interesting and exciting. Be assured that whatever obstacles you unearth, in the thousands of years that yoga has been practiced, other aspirants have bumped into them, too, and lived to tell the tale.
By the same token, I haven’t listed all the pari-karman either. While the universe often seems as if it’s out to get you, the yogis have an abiding faith in its goodness and grace as well as an abiding faith that its fondest wish is for you to be happy and know yourself. Keep your eyes and ears and heart vigilant for helpers. Just as the obstacles lead to the four distractions (vikshepa), the helpers take us to their opposites: the discharge of sorrow and pain, contentment, steadiness of the body-mind, and—best of all—easy breathing.
Notes
2 Shankara, Crest-Jewel of Discrimination, trans. with an introduction by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood (New York: New American Library, 1947), p. 38.
3 The Collected Works of Ramana Maharshi, ed. Arthur Osborne (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1970), p. 39.
4 Shiva-Samhita, trans. Rai Bahadur Srisa Chandra Vasu (New Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1990), p. 26.
5 The Concise Yoga Vasishtha, trans. Swami Venkatesananda (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), p. 35.
6 The Yoga Philosophy of Patanjali, trans. with a commentary by Swami Hariharananda Aranaya (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), p. 71.
7 Shiva-Samhita, trans. Rai Bahadur Srisa Chandra Vasu (New Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1990), p. 43. |
