Yoga Practice Buddhist Practice

Photo by Susan Crowder

Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the ancient, foundational yoga practice manual, defines yoga as “the stilling of the changing states of the mind.”* Patanjali’s teachings are primarily focused on meditation, not the physical postures, which are largely a 20th-century innovation. Yet for me the movement – linked in the Ashtanga system to focused breathing and steady gaze (drishti) – has been an essential doorway into mental stillness, which I can achieve much more reliably on my yoga mat than on my meditation cushion. Yoga drew me into spirituality. Now that I am looking to go further in my spiritual life, however, I have found Buddhism more compelling than the Hinduism that underlies Patanjali’s writing.

Recently it hit me that, in my Buddhist practice, I am about where I was with yoga ten years ago. I have had some teaching and read some books. I have been meditating daily for a couple of years yet remain a novice in relation to those states of absorption that are the goal of meditation. In recent months I have been attending weekly meetings and done one weekend retreat with the local branch of the Triratna Buddhist Community. So, I am encountering people who are practicing Buddhists, but I have barely started on the work of understanding the teachings, much less made the commitment to try to live them. I’m in the water up to my knees but have yet to dive in, and it seems I am caught up in wondering where this stream might take me.

In the midst of this wondering, my thoughts often run to my experience with yoga practice. These are comforting thoughts, I think because of the incremental nature of practice. I know that on any one day the gains are likely to be small but so are the risks. No great declaration of faith is required, just a commitment to inquiry renewed on a regular basis. I know there will be challenges for me when I am ready for them, and on the days when the most I can do is show up there will be psychic rewards in that. Looking at it this way both draws me forward and gives me the courage to proceed.

* Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (2009), p. 10.  My comment on 20th-century contributions to the physical practice of yoga is based on Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (2010).

My Journey with Yoga

I have practiced yoga for the past fifteen years, the last nine at Yoga East in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.  This period, from my late 40s to my mid-60s, has been eventful: the end of one career and journey into another; a house move and the beginning of the empty-nest phase of parenting; the death of both my and my husband’s remaining parents and a six-month separation that seemed a near-death of our marriage; his retirement; and another career change for me.  These events along with many others have created the context for my journey with yoga, which I think of as a kind of pilgrim’s progress to adulthood.

The journey has not been about yoga but about facing and moving beyond the baggage of childhood and youth and learning how to deal with the present on its own terms.  Yoga has not been the only source of support by any means.  Study of Buddhism has been an essential accompaniment.  Other spiritual reading and self-help books, readings and teaching from my professional fields of organizational learning and dialogue and a couple of rounds of therapy, as well as conversations with family members and friends who have, at different times, been my teachers, have all been important.  I would like to work through how these different sources have interacted and how (if at all) they have become integrated in a consistent perspective.

At the same time, yoga has been central in a couple of ways I would like to explore.  One of these is the tangible fact of regular practice.  My first yoga teacher conveyed to me the aspiration of daily practice. I have held that as the standard even through times when it was far from the reality, and it is stronger than ever now that my definition of “practice” has expanded beyond the physical postures.  The other is also tangible but subtler.  It is the body-mind connection, specifically the way in which the subconscious is embodied and accessible through the body.  The combination of physical movement with aware breathing in yoga practice has made it, for me, a powerful tool for working through the physical to the psychological and vice versa. In this blog-journal I would like to reflect on the experience that led me to this realization and the benefit I have gained from it along the way.