Yathabhimata-dhyanada va PYS I.39
– Or (steadiness of mind is attained) from meditation upon anything of one’s inclination.
This sutra appears at the end of a listing of various objects a yogi is suggested to use for meditation practice. In the yoga system, meditation is almost exclusively encouraged through methods of concentrating the mind in one place, creating a groove in the mind in one direction that replaces and stills all the multiple grooves and dances the mind is usually following. Once this one pattern is established, it too, eventually, is let go and:
Tada drastuh svarupe vastanama PYS I.3
-Then the seer abides in her/his own true nature
In Edwin Bryant’s commentary on this sutra, he mentions BKS Iyengar’s book Tree of Yoga. In this book Mr. Iyengar offers what Edwin Bryant sees as an innovation to sutra I.39 – to take asana as the object of meditation. This is an innovation because while asana is mentioned several times in the yoga sutras, it is never mentioned in this context. However, if a yogi were to practice asana with it being the single point of concentration, Edwin Bryant says, it would absolutely be in line with these teachings. It might, he says, even be a more advisable practice than ever before, due to the way that most yoga is approached today – through asana.
How then can we put this in to practice? How do we make asana, which is constantly changing throughout a practice, something steady enough to meditate on, as an object of concentration? The breath seems like a good lead, but that has its own sutra. A specific body part could work, and I believe does in the Iyengar tradition, but it doesn’t really suit the vinyasa style class, in my mind.
This reminds me of what Davidji spoke about during the Master Classes at the beginning of the year. While sitting in virasana (hero’s pose), he asked us to consider what the “energy signature” of the pose is. He said that all poses have their own energy signature – much like an energetic graffiti tag. He encouraged us to see it. Then to have a sense of each energy signature like a sound vibration, or like a letter, and that when we practice a vinyasa (especially a strict one-breath-count vinyasa like Suryanamaskars) to feel that we are stringing them together into a sentence, a chant, a prayer. And it’s not cool to mispronounce prayers… So make sure that each pose is as fully “pronounced” an energy signature as your body is capable of, then let go and move onto the next.
I believe if we were to set this as our intention for our vinyasa practice – to really enact asana as chants or prayers, with that much concentration on fully enunciating the energy signature, we could approach this idea of using asana as a point of concentration.
To fully enunciate the signature requires a great deal of concentration – and a dialogue between the external structure of the body, and the internal energy. Without the external structure and alignment being maintained, the energy signature gets static-y or completely fuzzed out. Without the energy signature, we may as well be doing any other form of workout. To fully enunciate a pose, to create a resonant vibration of a chant with our asana, it is necessary to have this back and forth between the external and internal – in every pose, every time, all class long.
From there we could begin to imagine how carrying over a practice like this to our day would make us more aware of the moment to moment of our lives. We might be encouraged to savor the moments more, and be less likely to arrive at the end of the day and feel like it was all a blur. We might even start to be aware of the “sentences” that we create with the physical and mental asanas we perform throughout the day, and decide if we could make them more true to the story we want to be creating on our path.
Jennifer Whitney 