Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

reintegration. Death teaches us about the inevitability of separation, ending, and that all things must pass.
    On my first trip to India, a yogi took me to the funeral pyres near a river. Cremation is very common in India and some yogis even make a meditation practice of watching the fires and burning bodies. My yogi friend suggested we try to watch a burning body, crackling and charring as it disappears into its essence of dust and light. To our Western mindset and conditioning, this practice may seem macabre, even diabolical. But in the East, the death meditation is often seen as a way of awakening us to our ephemeral nature and opening our hearts to care and love. We do not emphasize this aspect of death, nor talk about it much in our culture, but we have similar experiences. When we attend a funeral of a loved one, we usually leave with a full heart, more sensitive to others and more caring. I remember making a call to my aging father, who was normally a bit stiff and self-absorbed, and finding him unusually open and caring. He asked a lot of questions abouthow I was doing and how my life was going. Sensing how differently he was behaving, I asked him if anything unusual or important had happened. He said no. I asked what he did that day and he said he visited my mother’s grave at the cemetery and had been looking over arrangements he had made for his own burial plot next to her. I realized that my father was doing the death meditation and that it had opened his heart.
    As I watched that body burn on a pile of logs by the River Ganga, my horror and revulsion slowly began to subside. My heart began to soften and open and I saw deeper into life and death through the doorway of flames. We sat by the sacred river and watched the body melt away into a film of ash floating downstream. In the evening light, long clouds lined the sky. There was sadness and joy, ending and beginning. An extraordinary stillness and beauty filled the night with the pink glow against the blue sky reflecting and enhancing the delicate, green spring grasses lining the hills. Slowly the light, and with it the beauty, faded and I almost began to mourn its brevity and departure, as we do the inevitable loss of things dear. But the moonlight arrived and began to light the skies, trees, and clouds. Beauty began revealing itself, reborn again in new ways. We can mourn the loss of the past or keep our eyes on the ever-present, constantly changing dance of dissolution and creation.
Looking Forward, Looking Backward
    Another form of meditation or contemplation involves one or several sittings, during which we try to project and experience self in old age, near the end of life. The meditator visualizes him-or herself with diminished capacities and abilities, such as much less energy, mobility, and eyesight, and imagines the other unpleasant qualities of old age. Why do such a seemingly depressing exercise? Because it is a common folly of youth to feel “these things will never happen to me.” In the naiveté of youth, we feel we will overcome the problems of sickness and old age.We will practice yoga, we will eat properly, and learn to heal ourselves. Fortunately, we can preserve our vitality to a great extent, but bodies do wear out and age. The body is not a perpetual motion machine. Other than the universe and life itself, perpetual, eternal machines do not exist. The realization that these things could happen to us offers a source of wisdom, and like the death meditation, this awareness can inform life, infusing it with appreciation, care and attention, and awareness of life’s preciousness.
    This contemplation is not a negative approach, but actually the seed of something positive and illuminating. When the Buddha was born into a royal family, an astrologer advised his father that this new son would either become a great king or a great monk. Fearing that his son might leave the kingdom, the father brought him up isolated from exposure to sickness, old age, and death. When he got older, the Buddha toured his kingdom, and saw the sick, aged, and dying for the first time. He was powerfully thrown into this meditation and it eventually led him to his own awakening and the discoveries he went on to share and teach.

How Much to Practice
    All of these forms of meditation practice can be beneficial and enjoyable, and can be used in any combination. Opportunities for them abound. There are no formulas on how much or how often to use them. They offer