Donna Farhi Quotes

Shaucha, or living purely, involves maintaining a cleanliness in body, mind, and environment so that we can experience ourselves at a higher resolution.

What distinguishes an asana from a stretch or calisthenic exercise is that in asana practice we focus our mind’s attention completely in the body so that we can move as a unified whole and so we can perceive what the body has to tell us. We don’t do something to the body, we become the body. In the West we rarely do this. We watch TV while we stretch; we read a book while we climb the StairMaster; we think about our problems while we take a walk, all the time living a short distance from the body. So asana practice is a reunion between the usually separated body-mind.

The word asana is usually translated as “pose” or “posture,” but its more literal meaning is “comfortable seat.” Through their observations of nature, the yogis discovered a vast repertoire of energetic expressions, each of which had not only a strong physical effect on the body but also a concomitant psychological effect. Each movement demands that we hone some aspect of our consciousness and use ourselves in a new way. The vast diversity of asanas is no accident, for through exploring both familiar and unfamiliar postures we are also expanding our consciousness, so that regardless of the situation or form we find ourselves in, we can remain “comfortably seated” in our center.

When we practice asanas from an interior perspective, we bring our minds back into the body. Instead of directing the body as a separate entity, we relocate our minds within our body and begin to listen to the nonverbal, nonmental information contained within the soma. As we give our full attention to every breath, movement, and the subtlest of sensations, the body becomes mindful, and the mind becomes embodied.

The same force that moves the tides, opens a flower, or creates lightning in a storm animates our bodies. This life force moves the breath, the fluids, and the current flowing through our nerves as well as the inner workings of each and every cell. This animating principle is the force behind all the organs of perception: hearing, touch, taste, smell, and sight. Although not itself a solid substance, this life force infuses the body and manifests as the light shining from our eyes, the glow of the skin, and the timbre of the voice. As this force moves through the body, it influences the shape and form of our structure, creating our posture, the rhythm of our walk, and the character of our faces. Everything that has ever happened to us—our birth, the fall from a tree at the age of six, our thoughts and feelings, what we eat, the climate in which we live—is inscribed upon our body, creating a living archaeological record. When we develop an awareness of the interior movement that permeates the body, we gain access to the movement of our minds. Yoga is a means of reviving our connection to this natural wisdom.

Interesting things happen when we give up struggling with a situation or problem outside of our control.

effulgent

we are practicing to live, not living to practice,

Without a larger purpose, we are just stretching our hamstrings. But in the context of the eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga, this simple action can serve the purpose of steadying the mind (dharana, the seventh limb) and developing acceptance for where we are (santosha, one of the ethical precepts, the first two limbs of the yamas and niyamas). We can be testing our honesty (satya): Are we willing to work with clear alignment and integrity even if it takes a little longer, or do we just want to get our head down on our leg so we can look good? We can be noticing all the thoughts and distractions that percolate up as we’re holding the posture and patiently bring the mind back to our breath and the immediate content of the moment (pratyahara, the fifth limb). Or we can just stretch our hamstrings. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with just stretching our hamstrings, but if we are really interested in practicing Yoga, we can give our actions an umbrella of intention and achieve so much more with the same basic materials.

we” are not only breathing this life, “it” is also breathing us.

Patanjali tells us that the failure to recognize our intrinsic goodness is caused by a momentary inability to perceive the silent and omnipresent life living itself through us. And why do we not perceive this silent and fundamentally benign backdrop? For the most part our primary modus operandi consists of identifying with and participating in the transitory movement of thoughts, feelings, memories, fantasies, and sensations and our ideas and judgments about ourselves and others. This veritable extravaganza of sensations is so compelling and so interesting, and so seemingly real, that we start to believe that this is who we really are. The dramatic enactment of these passing phenomena eclipses our view into our core self. We may believe that we are our anger, our pain, or our disappointment. We may be convinced that we are only our body, our wrinkles, or our successes or failures. When we get beneath all these exterior embellishments, we discover, as my elderly friend Denis tells me, looking down at his weathered hands, that we are “just the same person” in a different body. Through practice we emphatically prove that the parading sensations and identities that we may have found so convincing are actually temporary visitors, and when we become quiet and focused enough we understand that in hosting these visitors, our house, the Self, remains unchanged. Or as Patanjali describes in the very first sutras that define Yoga: Yoga is the settling of the mind into silence. When the mind has settled, we are established in our essential nature, which is unbounded Consciousness.

This is why working with our most deeply held resentments and grudges can bring about the greatest change, because it is here that we start to deconstruct the scaffolding upon which all our other points of view are based.

Yoga is an ongoing participatory experiment in which the world and every part of our life becomes our laboratory. It is a hands-on practice that can work only with our fullest and most complete participation at all times, every minute of the day, every day of the year, from our first breath to our last. It is this active inquiry that will gradually change our point of view. We will undoubtedly discover that what we take to be our “normal” state of being, and what we defend and tenaciously cling to, is the very source of our misery. This suffering is self-generated, and by the same logic, we are the only ones who can generate our own inner freedom.

Yoga postures, were traditionally practiced very slowly, with each movement synchronized to the breath, in order to balance the nervous system and open a perceptual gateway to the parasympathetic nervous system. This makes us available to our feeling function.

You are this vastness. This vista you see, this grandeur, this enduring strength—if you go deeply enough inside yourself, you will find not something small but something immensely spacious. This is the essence of the human spirit.

What these first central precepts the yamas and niyamas ask us to remember is that the techniques and forms are not goals in themselves but vehicles for getting to the essence of who we are.

The yamas and niyamas are emphatic descriptions of what we are when we are connected to our source. Rather than a list of dos and don’ts, they tell us that our fundamental nature is compassionate, generous, honest, and peaceful.2

Yoga is a technology for arriving in this present moment. It is a means of waking up from our spiritual amnesia, so that we can remember all that we already know. It is a way of remembering our true nature, which is essentially joyful and peaceful.

yoga is not about self-improvement or making ourselves better. It is a process of deconstructing all the barriers we may have erected that prevent us from having an authentic connection with ourselves and with the world. This tenet is an extremely important one because the effort to change and improve ourselves is fraught with the risk of subtle self-aggression that only produces more unhappiness. We cannot strive toward something that we already are.

The great paradox of this “work” is that there is no reward to strive toward, because the practice is the reward. In the very moment you focus your attention by coming back into your body, your breath, and your immediate sensate reality, you will experience a deep sense of vibrant stillness. This feeling is so pleasurable, so joyful and revitalizing that you will be drawn to practice, and, more important, you will begin to be naturally drawn toward lifestyle choices that nourish your well-being. This

not to make the mistake of thinking that the perfection of the yoga asanas is the goal, or that you’ll be good at yoga only once you’ve mastered the more difficult postures. The asanas are useful maps to explore yourself, but they are not the territory. The goal of asana practice is to live in your body and to learn to perceive clearly through it. If you can master the Four Noble Acts, as I like to call them, of sitting, standing, walking, and lying down with ease, you will have mastered the basics of living an embodied spiritual life.

If we profess to be teaching Yoga, which is a science and art of living, we must practice that way of living ourselves. If we wish only to teach poses or postures, it would be better to call what we do by a name other than Yoga.

the yamas and niyamas are actually emphatic declarations of what we are when we are connected to our true nature.4 The yamas, or “outer observances,” and the niyamas, or “inner observances,” are often referred to as the inner and outer “restraints.

time acts as an invisible mortar for our experience; it is what stands between potentially discordant elements and, through finding their correct relationship, brings all into a unified whole.

We may assume a false sense of liberty and feel an initial resistance to putting reins on a life that we believe to be free. Yet this false sense of freedom almost always moves us further away from our true self and from real happiness.

When the body is viewed as an apparatus for carrying the head around, we leave ourselves prone to the tyranny of our intellect and the justification and defense of the rational mind.

Since our Western cultural inheritance precludes a whole relationship to the body, it is not at all surprising that hatha yoga here has often been reinvented as a sophisticated form of calisthenics whose sole purpose is to make the body beautiful and to increase longevity. These things hatha yoga does well, but such goals are not the primary goal of yoga practice, and when we practice in a way that causes this unhealthy identification with the body, we are merely doing exercises with Sanskrit names. The practice becomes bent to accommodate the perception of the body as an “it” rather than requiring us to bend our minds and stretch beyond our objectified perceptual leanings. When our primary imperative shifts from attaining a form to developing an intimate connection with the life force moving through that form, we are reclaiming the only part of the practice that ultimately can have any relevance for us—finding out who we really are.

To become a welcome vessel for the breath is to live life without trying to control, grasp, or push away. And how easy is this? The process of breathing is the most accurate metaphor we have for the way that we personally approach life, how we live our lives, and how we react to the inevitable changes that life brings us.

We do this by focusing the mind on the unchanging and eternal part of ourselves, which is always present. At the same time, we learn to observe the constant parade of visitors on this backdrop without getting too friendly or hostile toward any of these temporary guests. We don’t invite and we don’t refuse, we don’t suppress and we don’t indulge, we just let these guests come and go. Through practice, we find that there is a neutral “witness” that perceives these passing phenomena but does not falsely take these manifestations to be an accurate representation of itself.

Positioning ourselves to see and experience this more encompassing view does two things: it opens us to new possibilities and freedoms, and it also makes us more vulnerable and exposed. If you have ever stood in the best vantage point for seeing a panoramic, 360-degree view, you know that such a place is necessarily completely exposed to the elements. From here you will see everything, but also from here you will feel everything in the most vivid way: the wind, the sun, and the rain.

fitness of the gross, or annamaya kosha, layer of the body is inferred from the inner health of the subtle body. Health, a light body, freedom from craving, A glowing skin, sonorous voice, fragrance Of body: these signs indicate progress In the practice of meditation. Shvetashvatara Upanishad 2.123

When we cease to identify ourselves with things outside our control and when we cease to wrongly attribute our success or failure to these things, we are well on the way to finding a place of inner ease that no one and no thing can take away from us.

For many years I actively imagined that each practice session was a meeting with someone special. When we know we are meeting a loved one, we take extra care dressing and grooming ourselves and we want to bring the very best of ourselves forward. We make the room fresh and sparkling and take special care that it is beautiful and inspiring. Eventually that special someone we invite to our practice becomes us: we start to value ourselves so much that we want to treat ourselves in the best possible way.

When we offer ourselves unqualified compassion, we start to make positive associations with our practice time. We become the kind of person we’d like to hang out with.

Tibetans have a saying: “Engaging in virtuous practice is as hard as pulling a tired donkey up a hill, but engaging in negative, destructive activities is as easy as rolling a boulder down a steep slope.”6

I well remember a teacher giving a talk about the yama of nonviolence (ahimsa) and saying that each time we kick someone out of our heart we develop a hole in our self and that hole cannot be repaired until we invite this person back in. My first response was: “What a lovely thought!” But almost instantaneously I rallied: “There has to be a footnote to this law! There must be some fine print at the bottom that says except your mother-in-law or that horrible colleague who gossips or the estranged friend who betrayed me.” And then it became clear—the degree to which there are exceptions is the degree to which the mind still holds to its old point of view. This is why Yoga practice involves such a methodical and painstaking examination of where we have created convenient loopholes for ourselves.

Rather, we can regularly ask ourselves these questions: Who am I becoming through this practice? Am I becoming the world in which I wish to live?

The sixteenth-century treatise Yoga-Sara-Samgraha (“Compendium on the Essence of Yoga”) makes a distinction between aspirants who “think” about and would like a spiritual life (arurukshu) and those who are actually practicing (yunjana). This succinct categorization tells us that not much has changed in human nature since time immemorial.

Yoga is thus not something we can make happen but something that happens to us. But it does not happen by accident.

By anchoring our spiritual practice always within everyday life, we remove the arbitrary barriers between what is considered spiritual and extraordinary and what is material and ordinary.

We establish a calm abiding center, not to fortify ourselves against the chaos of life, but to help us become resilient, tolerant, and accepting of the inevitable, perplexing, and often agonizing losses we all go through. A calm abiding center and a fully engaged life, therefore, go hand in hand. This inner tempering through the fire of practice allows us to live at higher and higher levels of charge: to feel intensely, love intensely, and work intensely without fracturing in the process. We make firm this abiding center of equanimity, but not to sequester ourselves from life or to make life less “lively.” Rather, as the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said about capturing life through the lens of his camera, we “discipline reality.” Cartier-Bresson did not lessen the poignancy of his subject matter through being attentive to it. In the same way, when we practice Yoga we do not dampen the fiery nature of life: if anything, we place ourselves right in the fierce heat of the center.

the purpose of Yoga, which is to realize a unitive state, concentrated asana practice, the third limb of Ashtanga Yoga, will naturally involve each of the other seven limbs of practice, especially the ten ethical precepts of the yamas and niyamas (the first two limbs).

When we’re not busy being somewhere else, more often than not what we participate with is our past or future version of ourselves and our life. Instead of seeing how things actually are, we continue to see them as they once were or as we imagine they will be.

This is a potent moment that many of us experience daily, if not hourly—the moment of feeling a longing for happiness. If we can get comfortable in being in that pause, however it manifests for us physically, psychologically, and emotionally, we have a better chance of responding to our longing in a way that is not simply a stopgap measure.

When we contain rather than constantly discharge our feeling state, we allow ourselves to feel completely. In feeling completely, we reexperience our aliveness and the source of that aliveness. When we cultivate the discipline to pause, it becomes possible for us to make a choice that is outside our normal habit pattern. And it is in breaking through these entrained patterns that we can begin to experience a more liberated state of being.

What we discipline, then, is this movement of awareness, training ourselves to stay with rather than run from all that we experience. When we choose to stay with our practice despite the inevitable highs and lows in our lives, we are actively choosing to focus our awareness on that part of us that is unchanging. With each practice session, we start to identify with this steady part of ourselves. When we’re feeling sad, we practice anyway. When we’re happy and excited, we practice anyway. When we’re in the depths of grief, we practice anyway. When we have a thousand things to do, we practice anyway. We do not practice to rid ourselves of these feelings or to suppress them. Neither do we practice out of stoic denial. When we practice through thick and thin, happy and unhappy times, we are saying, “Sadness is moving through me, but sadness is not who I am; excitement is moving through me, but excitement is not who I am; grief is moving through me, but grief is not only who I am.” When we practice anyway, we make room to fully experience all our feelings while at the same time not allowing those feelings to paralyze or solidify into our identity.

Yoga tells us that our biggest obstacle in perceiving reality as it is is our habit of identifying with and participating in the stuff that fills our mind. And what is this mind-stuff? Latent impressions are left in our minds from past experiences in the form of memories, which tend to dictate our way of seeing things in the present and thus further determine the shape of our future. As if our minds are not already filled to the brim with these past impressions, we further complicate our mind state by making things up, filling the mind with fantasies and fears about things that haven’t yet happened. The habit of participating in all of this tomfoolery itself forms more latent impressions, which strengthens our conviction that this is who we are. It is as if we have become so used to dressing in masquerade that we start to see ourselves as our fantasy character.

Very simply, we set aside time and a quiet place to engage in inquiries that will remind us of who we really are. We do this practice as often as necessary for this understanding to become an implicit part of our being. For most of us this means practicing from the first breath to the last.

We can assess our practice by asking only whether Yoga practice is building our integrity as a human being and helping us live as an expression of our most noble virtues. Whether our practice strengthens our ability to be present with all that we experience is the only criteria we need for what we do or don’t do on the mat.