It is an axiom of yoga that we should live more at our own center, or as yoga teachers will sometimes say, “live more in the spine.” But in fact a little introspection reveals that no matter how often we leave our “home” in the spine we always return to it. For this is how we are made.
Think of it this way: you have a falling out with a friend. It may take a while but in time, you become friendly again. Say you lose your job, wreck your car, or lose money in the stock market. Or maybe you “fall” head-over-heels in love or win the lottery. Perhaps you are stricken with grief over the loss of loved one. No matter what the outward source of your emotion, and no matter whether it is a high or a low, sooner or later it dissipates and you are “yourself” again.
Think of it another way: we leave behind our joys and our woes every night when we sleep! Indeed, we could not live for more a day or two without some rest from the ceaseless play of outward actions, thoughts and emotions. We must, by our very nature, return to within the body temple. Paramhansa Yogananda (author of the famous classic, Autobiography of a Yogi, and whose teachings we follow) taught that at night, in sleep, our consciousness and life-force rests in the lower subtle (astral) centers, or chakras, located along the astral spine. By contrast, meditation, in its more advanced forms, involves the withdrawal of energy and consciousness back into the higher centers (chakras) in the brain!
The difference between the nature-imposed experience of returning to our home in the spine during sleep, and the conscious return born of meditation is that the former brings us only temporary relief while the latter can significantly enhance our well-being and life experience.
There are differences, too, in the how the body’s life-cycles influence us. A younger “body” is more likely to want constant excitement. The older one is either wiser or simply worn out. It’s like hot sauce: the younger you are, the more you use. Sadly, however, the desire-driven mind can still hanker after sense stimulation long after the senses have lost their capacity to deliver.
Must we sit in lotus posture the rest of our lives to get off this ever-turning wheel of life? Or, does it all at least end six feet under, in the grave? Are the wholesome pleasures of life and the satisfactions of selfless service, creativity, learning, and exploring somehow wrong? Is there any way to reconcile our longing for changelessness with our wonderment and interest in the world around us?
Swami Shankacharya, founder of the monastic orders of swamis centuries ago, described God and the goal of creation and human striving in the word Satchidanandam. Yogananda loosely translates this as “ever-existing, ever-conscious, ever-new Bliss.” While this succinct description of the state of cosmic consciousness might elude our daily life’s experience, it is both the source and the solution to reconciling our desire for stimulation with our need for constancy. The secret lies in using these impulses to gradually refine our understanding and our experience until at last our soul arrives home —to the transcendent and permanent state of Bliss.
The impulse to seek ever-new stimulation is an attempt to regain the higher-than-conscious memory of “ever-new, ever-thrilling, ever-changing bliss.” The impulse for constancy derives from our memory of unbroken consciousness. The existence of both have their foundation in the reality of our immortality — our permanent unceasing existence. The trick is to gradually see the one in the experience of the other.
Golly, sounds good but HOW? Try this: when we enjoy the things of this world enjoy them with mindfulness: that Presence of Mind which remains uninterruptedly conscious throughout our activities. And how do we do that? First by contacting it in daily meditation!
Mindfulness both IN meditation AND in activity is not easy to achieve. It takes patient daily practice, an effective technique and a qualified teacher. It takes more than that though, too. It’s rather too easy to slip from mindfulness into self-talk and from there to slip beneath the waters of a stream of sub-conscious habits and reactions. Hence the need to convert the relatively static and difficult to maintain state of mindfulness into a dynamic relationship: the I-Thou relationship. Relating to our watchful, soul state as the living and loving presence of God or guru is more satisfying, more helpful, and infinitely more heartfelt. Thus the inevitable self-talk gets converted into a dialogue with the Divine Self whose voice is silence and whose gift is intuitive guidance.
As we begin to act in harmony with this guidance we forsake the need to rely upon (or rebel against) moral precepts seemingly imposed from outside ourselves. We become a cause for our life’s transformation, rather than an effect of other influences.
The technique of meditation taught at Ananda uses the mantra Hong Sau and consists in watching the breath while silently chanting the mantra. Watching the breath develops in us the capacity to be watchful (self-aware) during daily activity. Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita famously describes advanced meditation techniques such as Kriya Yoga as pouring the inhaling breath into the exhaling breath (and vice versa). But it could also be seen, and more accessible to most of us, as describing how watching the breath in meditation helps us to be more mindful during activity, and how being more mindful in activity helps us to concentrate during meditation!
This then is a step we can take towards resolving our existential paradox: living in the constancy of mindfulness amidst the ever-changing flux of outward conditions and right actions. Yogananda gave a simple way for anyone to start when he counseled: “be actively calm, and calmly active.” So, try it for yourself and “see.”