Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

spirit be confined and captured in explanation? How can wisdom and spiritual realization be attained by mechanical processes or the practice of specific techniques? In this book you will see how these questions or problems should not cause us despair but, rather, strengthen us in following our hearts and minds.
    Yoga is a cherished and valuable tradition. We can learn from and use the tradition in an approach tempered by the realization that what we call tradition is truly our own, or another’s, interpretation of what something
may have been
in the distant past. My swami friend Venkates suggested that we use ancient writings to stimulate our inquiry and to catalyze our direct perception and understanding of our own lives without becoming overly dependent on tradition. Relying too much ondoctrines and texts for guidance in living cuts one off from direct perception and from the living awareness of insight. Yoga should be viewed as an art as well as a science. Structured, more scientific, aspects of yoga and techniques also involve unstructured, indefinable dynamics that require artistry and awareness to apply. Living in wholeness and creativity has structural components, but life is more an art than a science. Even in asana practice there is structure as well as the artistry of application to the individuality of the person and the moment. Yoga is practiced within the tradition but must be applied according to the uniqueness of each person’s life and situation. We should not simply idealize the past and assume that teachings, purportedly unchanged from the ancient past, are perfect, superior, or appropriate for the present. It is impossible truly to know the ancient past. Giving teachers, and even teachings, the status of perfection is the beginning of authoritarianism and a recipe for abuse. When teachers say they are presenting a perfected teaching, there is the veiled implication of unquestionable authority. The teacher is elevated as the pure vessel of this perfected path. It is important to be aware of what power, stature, and position a particular viewpoint gives to the teacher expounding it. There is no single interpretation of yoga. We cannot learn to fly by following the tracks left by birds in the sand. We must find our own wings and soar.
    Another great teacher, J. Krishnamurti, said, “The observer is the observed,” meaning, among other implications, that when we study something it is affected and colored by our own interpretations and projections. This influence is also a problem in setting up scientific experiments. The way the experiment is set up affects the outcome. Is light matter or energy? It turns out that it depends on how we look at it. The method of observation has a direct relationship to the way the observed object is perceived. Krishnamurti also said, “Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static.” 2 He pointed out that because we have exactness and authority in the technological world, we unconsciouslycarry the ideas of authority and structure over to the spiritual arena where they have no place. We are living, changing beings. We can learn from and honor tradition and we can also grow beyond it to develop the ability to listen to our own uniqueness by incorporating contemporary insights and discoveries. If we are too busy trying to relive the past, we may miss birthing the new. We do not have to limit ourselves to searching backwards through the musty corridors of the ancient past for answers to the mutating and constantly changing questions of the living present. Tradition can be valuable and useful, but we should not forego the much more relevant insights that can be found right here and now on our own yoga mats, and in the laboratory of our own lives.

Freedom from the Known
    An insatiable appetite and energy for learning and a fresh inquiring mind are among life’s greatest assets. This is why the concept of
beginner’s mind
has been emphasized in the East. When we come to learning as a beginner, we are open, questioning, looking. When we approach a subject as an expert, we are more closed and fixed in the accumulated information we have gathered, in the past experiences we have had. When we’re an expert, or experienced, when we
know
something, even a yoga posture, we tend to approach it mechanically, from the past. We lose the freedom of discovery, the freedom of being fresh and new.
    As our journey