Yoga Articles by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad
The 3rd Perspective & Yoga - Bringing the East & West Together (Page 4)
Joel Kramer Yoga Journal, November/December 1981
Tightness in the muscles affects glands, circulation, nerves - our energy - thus accelerating the body's breakdown. When the body becomes less flexible and open, it has a direct effect on the mind and personality. There is no way to stay the same. Life is change, and change in a person can take only two directions. You either specific habits become more rigid and crystallized, more set in your ways, or you continue to grow, transform, and open up to yourself and the world you live in. Yoga brings the energy, stamina and flexibility to move out and meet life totally.
The deeper you get into the body, the deeper you must get into the nature of the mind that is doing yoga. There comes a time when you realize that the major limits you face in yoga do not live in the body, but in the mind's resistance's. We all, at least intellectually, value growth, often without realizing that growth involves change, which means dying to old ways of being. Our attachment to the pleasures and comforts we have secured creates unconscious resistance to change, a resistance that must be made conscious and worked with. Not to do this greatly limits your yoga. In fact, most breakthroughs in yoga are mental. For example, yoga moves to a new dimension when you usually prefer to do yoga alone rather than in a class or group. This is a sign that you are generating energy from an internal place and are in touch with your own inner processes. Another more advanced breakthrough, which is also mental, is when you fundamentally do not fear hurting yourself. This means that you are sufficiently in touch with the feedbacks of the body and with how to do yoga that you can fix your own problems.
These are examples of mental changes that have a more far-reaching effect on your yoga than how flexible you are or what postures you are doing. In fact, one of the greatest changes that occurs is when you see that yoga is a process to be lived rather than a goal to be achieved. This is true for every posture. Getting the final pose is not the important thing. Technical aspects such as proper use of breath, concern with alignment, creating more energy to strengthen nerve flow, and so forth, are important only as tools of self-exploration. The yogic process is both simple and profound. It involves confronting yourself and your limits, learning to read physical and mental feedback, knowing how to get into blocked areas, and knowing when to push and when to relax in the posture.
The essence of creativity is an aware balance between control and surrender. This involves the capacity to take your life in your own hands and direct it. It also involves letting go so that life can lead you. Yoga is a miniature universe in that it encapsulates the basic polarities of existence. Each posture is a play between push and release, focus and attention, direction and letting go. The more yoga teaches you this balance, the more it carries over into other areas. Balance cannot be achieved mechanically by formulas or by copying others who may have greater understanding. There is a creative, personal aspect to it that can only be “known” in yourself. Specifically, the answer to the question, "Should I push for further depth, hold the posture, or back off and relax?" is fundamentally knowable only in the moment. Whether you move appropriately depends on how sensitive and in tune you are. So yoga is - as is life - ultimately an art, which means that there is always a uniquely individual expression of universal principles. Everybody is both the same and different. A given posture gets at similar areas in everyone. Yet each posture can be approached in endless ways. The more rigid your approach to yoga is, the more mechanical your sessions become. When yoga becomes a chore, it is a sign that the creative aspect is missing and you are “on automatic.” You have to pay attention not only to what your body is saying, but also to what happens in your mind.
Feedback is one part of a system telling another part how it is being affected. It is a key to integrating the internal and the external, for it is both looking within and looking without. Examples of physical feedback are pain, dullness, different levels of intensity, energy flow, trembling, fatigue and so forth. Mental feedback comes in various forms such as boredom, ambition, fear, inattention, hurry, a sense of struggle or effort, being easily distracted, or being concerned with time, with comparisons, inadequacy, and so on. There is also feedback that involves responses to externals such as diet, environment and relationships. I can learn from others, but it is only by being in touch with what's going on inside of me that I can see if the other's point of view makes sense for my life.
Integration of mind and body, without negating either one, is a challenge all of us face. We are both two things and one thing at the same time - a mind and a body, and a total organism or unity. The "third perspective" sees that the seeming polarities and paradoxes of life, such as the mind/body split and individuation versus merging, are actually not opposed at all, except in the way we think about them.
We can look at the different problems that both Eastern and Western cultures are facing as results of the imbalance that both the "perspective of the one" and the "perspective of the many" create. The West, as exemplified by science, values progress (“becoming”). This has given us great technical mastery and many material advantages, including a longer life, but has created a spiritual vacuum and brought alienation and isolation. The East's yearning for the eternal (“being”) has developed inner perspectives that help people break out of personal isolation and connect with a power larger than themselves; but this has been coupled with holding life cheaply and has brought great poverty, suffering and human degradation.
Yoga means “union.” It offers the potential of bringing together these polarities in our personal lives, and is a force that can help forge a needed synthesis between East and West. The flame of yoga is moving West. We have a unique opportunity to infuse Eastern mysticism with Western practicality and create a more viable context to meet the challenges of these times.
© 2000 by Joel Kramer.