Back pain and soul suffering. Why do I need yoga? An answer from Richard Freeman.
When I started my yoga practice, back pain and a fat roll on my belly seemed to be my main problems. They were the result of a sedentary lifestyle. I began to read about and practice various meditation techniques because of so called ‘everyday frustration’, which is known to everyone, I guess. It was caused mainly by irritation which source laid down in a tear between intense professional life and personal life; and moreover, everything was seasoned with never-ending rush, chaos and the noise of a big city I used to live in. Ordinary problems of a modern human being. Have yoga helped me? Mostly yes. But my yoga story is more complex.
I start from the end, with a book that fascinated me some time ago: The Mirror of Yoga. Awakening the Intelligence of Body and Mind by Richard Freeman. The author verbalised, in a beautiful and clear way, many ideas and sensations that had been swirling around in my head when I tried to label my yoga experience. What attracts us to yoga is, at the beginning, mainly trivial. Like a belly fat roll. When the roll disappears and the back doesn’t hurt anymore, our mind is ready to find new goals, like bending forward as much as possible, getting great physical strength or amazing flexibility… So again, we desire something. I used to set those new goals for myself until someone directly asked me about the purpose of my practice. And when I heard my own answers about staying relaxed, healthy and fit, about destructive sedentary lifestyle or professional burnout, I felt that all those answers did not satisfy me at all. Then I started thinking: why do I practice yoga? And I thought about it for half a year. And I ceased my practice at that time.
This lack of practice was quite productive. The physical side of yoga was no longer as important as it used to be. Obviously, I fell out of shape, physically and mentally. Yoga, as a direct, honest and profound mindfulness practice, conditioned me in a very new way, indirectly, slowly and imperceptibly. This process of conditioning has been described perfectly by Richard Freeman and I discovered his words at the end of my half-year yoga abstinence.
When we are on the mat, here and now, we squeeze (literally) out of our bodies the essence of yoga: the direct experience of our human nature and the nature of the world. When our inner expectations cease, when we stop thinking what yoga should be, it can become finally a path to undo the root of all types of misery through the direct experience of deep, clear, open awareness. Ultimately we find that this is an attraction to the joy of this liberating experience that underlies all our other desires and that attracts us into the realm of practice in the first place
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At some point I found my own answer to the question what yoga gives me: happiness, in a form of a deep and conscious presence. After all, isn’t it the purpose of all mindfulness practices? When I am standing in an asana, in the spacetime, in my mortal body which allows my cells to receive all possible stimuli, I can experience the reality in the most honest way possible. Freeman points out that the experience itself is independent from us. We cannot do it, it is just happening. The only thing we can do is to get up from the couch, take our yoga mat and start practicing. And our starting point is always here and now, the present moment. When we observe our body and breath, all the processes and patterns, we enter a state of meditation and we change our perspective from an individual experience to a universal one. We can go deeper, we can look deeper, with no fear, no prejudice, no judgement. We are able to see that all things we experience as individuals are connected to everything around us. In an honest practice I see my body as a manifestation of life itself. I do no create new stories about it or about the practice. When I see myself as a part of the universe, I feel safe and free: Dissolving in this way into the heart of yoga is an act of honesty. It is the art of humility and of genuine awe and appreciation for the life process as it is. Yoga reveals itself when we allow our senses, our intelligence, and our bodies to unfold free of a self-image or any sort of goal and motivation. Through this process of openness and expansion, we find ourselves engulfed in a rare form of freedom (…)
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If you want to change your point of view and re-evaluate what you are doing, you need some personal courage and honesty. Our ego wants to be sure that we know something, we possess some kind of knowledge. It is trying to reduce the practice to one definition, formula or truth. It wants to be omniscient, fearless and stable in a completely unstable world. The voice of ego can be heard, because we are disconnected from the whole context. Yoga gives it back and makes it less frightening. We can stop labelling or categorising. We only experience and observe. In this state, our mind and ego are resting. Of course, there are moments in our lives when we shall categorise, but sometimes we should stop doing this to see more and go forward. Freeman says that in every practice we should first create the path and the frame. This is healthy and appropriate, because the path takes us to the point where we can (and shall) go beyond the frame and think outside the box. In this way we can see the bigger picture. The frame becomes a paradox at some point, because every idea and technique have blind spots. Only the capacity of evolution and adaptation to new conditions and circumstances guarantees that something or someone can survive. Like in nature.
When we observe carefully, we gain new points of view. Yoga teaches us to see the inner patterns during the practice and then, at some point, in our life — we can say that this is its inevitable side effect. We learn to observe inner patterns of our actions, without judging or rejecting them. Maybe with time we can learn how to catch bad, unhealthy habits and patterns on mental and physical level (for example, on muscular level). This kind of awareness gives us space for acceptance rather than rejection. It does not limit us, put labels, compare with someone or something. Even if it is difficult, and surely it can (and will) be, it should be followed, because it shows us one of the big truths: that everything is a continuous transformation. In this state we can appreciate the esscence of the change itself. It no longer brings sadness or fear. When we observe something closely, we are able to give up our expectations of how it should be. Isn’t it amazing? This relief when we accept the change and we do not expect something that probably won’t happen at all, because our minds are controlled mostly by harmful illusions. When you leave illusions behind you, you can experience a sort of freedom you could not even imagine. Richard Freeman summarises it in a very beautiful way: Yoga begins with listening. When we listen, we are giving space to what is. We are allowing other people to be what they are, and we are sanctioning our own bodies and minds to fully manifest. Yoga also begins in the present moment. Many classic texts, such as the ‘Yoga Sūtra’ by Patañjali, start with the word ‘atha’, meaning ‘now’, which refers to this very notion. In the context of the ‘Yoga Sūtra’, the use of the word ‘atha’ means that we have come to a point in our lives where we are ready to wake up from our conditioned existence and our habitual ways of behaving, thinking, and interacting with the world. It insinuates that we are finally ready to get real and to discover the essence of all existence that lies deep down in the core of our own heart and at the center of our being. (…) Yoga is freedom. It is freedom from the fear of not knowing who we are, from presenting a face to the world that is not truly representative of who we feel ourselves to be, and from pretending to believe in things that we do not really know to be true. This is the liberation we find in yoga as we return to the present moment: to our natural mind and to a state of complete happiness
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*Freeman Richard, The Mirror of Yoga. Awakening the Intelligence of Body and Mind, Shambala Boulder 2012, p. 21.
**Freeman Richard, The Mirror of Yoga. Awakening the Intelligence of Body and Mind, Shambala Boulder 2012, p. 18.
***Freeman Richard, The Mirror of Yoga. Awakening the Intelligence of Body and Mind, Shambala Boulder 2012, Introduction.
