Humbling

So far, the overpowering feeling in my warm-up yoga workshop for India is one of being humbled. It’s more than slightly mortifying to have one’s bad habits and laziness held up to your face so clearly; when I practice in a studio with a teacher, I see all too clearly what a slacker I am most of the time on my own.

But this is good.

The whole point of the exercise is to wake myself up a bit, to get out of what I think Krishnamurti (who we’re reading for the workshop) means when he talks about the brain falling into a groove (but not the groovy kind) where habit takes over experience and “the mind becomes mechanical, repetitive, and so loses its depth, its beauty.” (Krishnamurti, Meeting Life, p.198).

I know for certain I’m all about that most of the time; I have my “ways” and I like them. Here, I guess, is my opportunity to get out of them, at least a little bit, and see what happens.

One of those ways is definitely my skepticism about the mystical “woo-woo” side of all this. We talked at some length this afternoon about how yoga practice is about liberation; but, I wonder, liberation from what? If I don’t believe in the Hindu metaphysics underlying the practice, am I doomed forever for it just to be a different form of physical exercise? And if so, is that so bad?

When I read, for instance, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and try to make sense of concepts like Universal Soul or Cosmic Substance, or try to wrap my mind around an utterance like, “After receiving revelation of the distinction between sattva and Purusa, the adept gets an omniscience and an ability to control all states,” I can’t help thinking about a text like Plato’s Timaeus, which is similarly opaque, but which nobody these days takes seriously as actually describing the way things are.

So, I remain confused. And humbled.

But again, that seems to be the point.