The Essence of Classical Yoga - Practice and Nonattachment

Postscript; in view of the various yoga students and teachers who have asked permission to print and distribute this and future yoga/therapy posts, please do so if you think this material will be of use to you and yours. I intend to copyright nothing unless explicitly stated. Blessings, Jon.



Classical yoga is commonly defined as that school of yoga whose primary teaching source lies in the 195 interconnected aphorisms known as the Yoga Sutras, whose authorship is ascribed to Patanjali, who may have been one, or a number of, yoga adepts. These aphorisms, or sutras are extremely terse statements concerning the nature of the yoga path which were designed to be memorised by one generation of students or chelas and passed to the next. At some point, variously defined within a timeframe of 200 B.C.E. to 200 C.E., they were embossed in writing, and the exact date of origin remains unknown, although some authorities have placed their age as being over 5,000 years.

There are dozens of translatons of these sutras into English and they carry interpretations with them. Some of these are wonderfully revelatory, although many are laden with premodern values which have little relevance for the 21st century. As part of an AQAL Yoga project I am working on, I thought i would place an intrgrally-informed commentary upon one of these sutras here in this blog. More will be forthcoming. Last November I declared an intent to write a book on AQAL yoga in segmented form...given the demands on my time at present in other areas, I will restrict myself to a somewhat haphazard sequence of commentaries of which this is one.

This blog's topic is a commentary on the twelfth sutra of the first of four books of which the Yoga Sutras is structured (written I;12). In my opinion, it delivers the essence of yoga practice.

It runs, in Sanskrit; abhyasa vairagyabhyam tannirodhah

Abhyasa means "practice"....vairagya means "restraint" or "nonattachment" ...tannirodhah means "restraint"

The aphorism therefore translates as "Through practice and nonattachment, restraint is possible"

In order to understand what is being restrained here, one has to look at the previous eleven sutras.

Briefly; the mind can be compared to a lake to which the winds of your outer and inner environment cause surface ripples (chitta-vrittis or "mental fluctuations") which distort an  accurate view of the lake bed, which, here,  we could, think fuzzily as being your deeper or higher self (I will not go into which level of awareness that lake bed is here, whether it is subtle or causal, just think of it as the place you may be able to rest within in in states of deepest tranquil meditation). By restraining the fluctuations of your surface, everyday mind, it is possible to attenuate the ripples so that you can see  to the river bed without distortion and experience residing in an  abiding tranquility in which your deeper essence can be experienced.

(Ken Wilber affectionados please note; this essence is both pre- and trans-personal in that both unconscious drives and transcendent witnessing both disclose in the absence of the surface wanderings of the mind.)

The aspiring yogi therefore is instructed to restrain her/his chitta-vrittis through practice and nonattachment.

I would argue here that practice and nonattachment are different perspectives on the same process. Orthodox interpretations of this sutra treat them as separate components of the process.

Practice is what you do whether you move into a posture or asana or sit and restrain biophysical energy through breath retention (pranayama) or sit to inwardly focus in meditation (pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, samadhi...different degrees of essentially the same process).

Nonattachment is the awareness with which you practice. Which is to say that in order to maximise the results of your practice, you must remain nonattached.

What nonattachment has always meant to me personally is that one needs to observe what is going on in the practice without identifying yourself with the practice.

For example, let's say you are sitting and performing a forward bend, commonly Sanskritised as paschimottanasana. Over you go, forehead towards shins, hands holding thighs, knees, shins, feet or toes depending upon how flexible you are. Now at some point you will experience discomfort in some part of your back which is stiff. If you try to move too far beyond your comfort zone, you will be in a lot of pain and will mentally dialogue all sorts of stuff like "O god lemme outa this pain...nunno its good for me...more pain more gain o god..." etc. At this point you are identifying with your physical body and therefore are attached to it. Therefore you are not practising nonattachment because you are not capable of observing what is going on. Your awareness is shrink-wrapped around the sensations of pain and therefore you are not practising yoga.

You could go the other way. Let's say you bend slightly but experience no discomfort whatsoever.  Now most likely your mind will start to wander into fantasyland...what wonderful things you are going to do after the yoga session. Now your awareness is shrink-wrapped around your fantasy and you are identifying with your mental body, the chitta-vrittis. Again, you are not practising yoga.

Let's try a middle way. You begin to bend and reach a zone of mild discomfort. In this place, it may well be possible for you to witness what is going on physically and witness what is going on mentally. As the experience of mild discomfort/intensity exerts a gravitational effect on your awareness, no shrink-wrapping, or contraction of consciousness should occur and this experience opens out spontaneously into a clear open ground of awareness into which the various physical and mental sensations occur. By choosing a middle path of optimum intensity, energy (prana, chitta) is released which enables you to expand your awareness so as to transcend-and-include your physical, vital and mental functionnings. The result is that you attain a Witness state of nonattachment in which the practice - physical, energistic, mental and emotional - is happening. And what you are able to do now is to calibrate your practice in accordance with your will rather than be driven by the more animalistic urges to get out of what you are doing or daydream.

This calibration; you may choose to intensify the stretch in this forward bend by either making a splint of your back and pulling yourself forwards which will intensify the sensations in your hamstrings. Alternatively, you may wish to pull yourself forwards so that the sensations in your rounded back are more intense. Either way is yogic provided that you retain your powers of witnessing and do not contract into being the dude-in-pain. The former is doing paschimottanasana the yang way, the latter is doing it the yin way. Both release energy necessary to fuel Witness Awareness. Learning how to practice yoga involves deciding what is best for the organism you Are at any one time. And these decisions  can only truely be carried out with integrity once you have learned how to calibrate in the climate of nonattachment. A suitably qualified yoga teacher can show you how to practise from an external point of view and you need to be appraised of all personal adjustments,  precautions and prohibitions regarding each posture for yourself personally so best not to practice from a book  but how you choose to calibrate is up to you.

And that is how you can optimise your proficiency in hatha yoga, as in all forms of yoga.

When you are in a state of yoga, practice and nonattachment are the same performance viewed from different perspectives. Practice is  the Zone-#2 perspective side of the equation, an outside perspective on an interior endeavour. Nonattachment is the Zone-#1 perspective, the 1-p x 1-p x 1p  phenomenological experience of the practice. For more on these Zones, read here.

As a last word; if you wish to practice any physical movement and make it yogic according tothis sutra as I have interpreted it -try the following exercise and let it be nothing more than doing a standing forward bend. But don't do this if you have back problems; consult a suitably qualified yoga teacher if you want to work on your back. Do something else like fraise your arms above your head.

1. Stand with feet parallel and together, back straight.
2. Align yourself with your deepest self...witness your physical, energistic and thinking self.
3. Be okay with yourself if you have no idea what I am writing about if I go on about an energistic self. If you practice according to all the above, it woill be disclosed to you in time.
4. Let yourself drop forward and witness everything -physical, emotional, mental - that is going on.
5. Note where you are feeling things most intensely. It may well be the hamstrings. Note the quality of the discomfort. If you shrink-wrap yourself into your body, bend your knees slightly until the disconfort is enough for you to remain in Witness.
6. Stay as long as is comfortably possible and grok.
7. Bend knees, straighten up and remain in Witness throughout. Notice the intensity fading and what happens then. (The physical sensations fade out into a disclosure of the pranic energies if you remain attentive for long enough.)

Anyway, I hope this proves of use.

Om Nama Shivaya.

Jon xx