Five Elements Series Part 4: The Ether Element and Curiosity
Ether has no form. Its essence is emptiness. It is the space the other four elements arise in and pass away in.
That makes it hard to write about, and it also makes it the element most of us are avoiding. Ether represents the void, the emptiness we all run into at moments. And we mostly have one strategy for the void: fill it. More activity, more plans, more work. Some of us meet it right after a big push, when the thing we were chasing is done and the quiet underneath it is still there. The void doesn't fill through more activity. It fills through quiet and retreat. For many of us, practice is the place we go to empty out instead.
Ether is also the element of the mind. Thoughts and emotions ride on it. In the Yoga Sutras this shows up as chit: noticing what is. Looking, listening, feeling, without stories, dramas, or interpretation. Just noticing. When we can know something without immediately deciding what it means, we come to know it as it is.
Which is why the ether element runs on curiosity. Curiosity is open, available, full of wonder. It doesn't assume, and it doesn't need to make anything happen. Watch a three-year-old. They walk around amazed at what's in front of them. They never stop and decide they've got it all figured out.
Most of us start practice that way. Then we begin to think we know it. We have the posture pegged, labeled, understood, and we start interacting with the practice from history instead of from what's here. Then we're bored. Nothing happened to the practice. We stopped being curious. When was the last time something you've done a thousand times tore you open a little? That's where curiosity lives, and assuming we know is how we lose it.
Two ways to get acquainted with ether.
Next time you're in a crowded space, spend a few minutes moving through it while trying to avoid everyone. Notice what that's like. Then spend a few minutes stepping into the empty spaces instead. Most of us spend our lives defensively managing whatever comes at us. Stepping into the space is a different life, in miniature.
And in practice, put your attention on the spaces: between the inhale and the exhale, in the body after you come out of a posture, between your hands and the floor, behind you and in front of you. Notice what placing attention on space does to the practice. Notice what opens.
I wrote a book about that. The first chapter is twenty-eight minutes, read in my own voice. Enter your name and email and I'll send it to you.
Sat: The Sanskrit Term for "The Real Deal"
In the last two blogs I've written, I have been discussing Sat-Chit-Ananda, an ancient yogic compound that describes the experience of yoga. Each of the three Sanskrit words, sat, chit, and ananda, all speak of different aspects of the one, unitive experience called yoga. It's almost like a description of the Holy Trinity, which connotes the three various qualities and aspects of the one God. The same is true of Sat-Chit-Ananda. While each word is a world unto itself, the experience of yoga occurs when all three of these worlds take form at the very same moment.
Non-Doing
In this blog, I intend to write about the Sanskrit root, sat. Sat is really the part of the compound of Sat-Chit-Ananda that has less doing or action than chit. Chit is the active part that we play with our minds. It's how we direct it. And, specifically, we direct the mind on 'what is,' as opposed to the way we think it is; the way it might be; or the way think it ought to be. Chit is a direct form of seeing without interpretation. Sat, on the other hand is not active. It's just who we are, essentially, when we’re not trying.
It is an interesting word because it can mean two different things when we translate it from Sanskrit to English. On one end of the spectrum, it can be used to describe something that is either true, right, and/or good. On the other end of the spectrum, it can mean being, existing, or abiding in. So we have these two very different usages of the word, and yet when we join both together, we have something along the lines of "true being" or "abiding in the truth." So the term, sat, is pointing to a sort of presence or quality of being that is right good, and true.
Authentic Self
So when we put it together sat is really who we are at the very core of ourselves, namely the authentic self. Given the intensity of change and the fast-paced times we're in, it isn't always easy to connect to or even know who we truly are. We're so hyper-stimulated that to look for and discover what this is seems only for the elite, for those few monks and yogis who live in monasteries and caves somewhere in the Himalayas. The problem is that if we don’t start to look to see who we authentically are, we run the risk of flitting about life, never feeling truly anchored to a sense of the sacredness of who we truly are.
Initiation
So where do we start? How do we uncover our authentic selves? In yoga we start from where we are. It doesn’t matter whether we’re coming from a bright place or a dark one. I personally started practicing Ashtanga from a place of tragedy. My journey began more than 20 years ago when my brother committed suicide. Why is suffering such a powerful initiator? Because the experience of suffering wakes us up to our vulnerability. It’s often from this place that we go looking for answers. Some of us, like my wife, was initiated into her journey into Ashtanga Yoga in order to “ get a six-pack abs.” It doesn’t matter where we start. The journey toward the heart of who we are on the level of being, our authentic self, starts where we start.
Asmita
We all start the journey with an identity that you and I call, “me.” Patanjali’s Sutras call an excessive sense of me, asmita. Asmita is often translated as “ego” but is, in fact, more like that part of us that overly identifies with our opinions, our beliefs, our moods, and, in general, the way we think things are. When we’re locked in our fixed ideas, we may feel superficially safe, but if given even half-a-scare, a loss, or physical pain, we immediately come face-to-face with our fragility, our aloneness in the world, and sometimes, even, the meaninglessness of life. And it’s worse when what we thought we knew or understood is, all of a sudden, pulled away from us.
When I lost my brother, everything I thought I knew about life, got mangled. In one moment, nothing made sense anymore. I’m not just speaking about the horrible grief of losing a brother, which is heartbreaking in and of itself. I’m also noting the sense of having the rug pulled out from the identity of who I thought I was. My asmita wasn’t able to cope with the stark reality that my brother could end his life so tragically.
When the asmita is particularly strong in us, we feel a sense of separateness from our world. We feel a sort of disconnect. That can show up as malaise, frustration, low-grade anxiety, bouts of rage, and the sense that something just doesn’t feel right. We often regard these feelings, as “bad news,” but, in yoga, we regard them as, in fact, “good news.” The reason why is that if we apply consciousness or chit to them for any sustained amount of time, we begin to develop deeper insight into who we are.
If we do not face what’s right in front of us, these feelings can give us the sense that the world has no luster. This is what in Hindu philosophy is called maya, the illusion of our separateness. But illusion and insight are two sides of the same coin. Through the application of chit, the veil of illusion opens up to a sense of greater unity or harmony with the world we live in and the relationships we have, both to ourselves and others.
A coaching client has been struggling with low-grade anxiety for the last three days. His wife and he are in a disagreement. His employee just can’t seem to get things done the way he’s requested. His boss is acting like a ‘bull in a china shop.’ He’s been trying to get a product ready for market by traveling back and forth from San Francisco to Southern California every week for the last six months. He feels anchorless and reports feeling like “a ship out to sea.” As we sat in conversation, I asked him, “What are you feeling?”
“Anxiety.”
“Where?”
“In my chest and belly.”
“What does it feel like in there?”
“It feels hollow in my belly, and at the base is this heavy stone.”
“How heavy?”
“Like one big brick.”
“Great. Just notice that.”
After a few minutes… “What are you noticing, now?”
“The heaviness is gone.”
“What’s here, now?”
“Sadness and fear.”
“What does that feel like in the body?”
And so the conversation went on like this for about 20 minutes. We just kept applying chit to the body, checking in every once in awhile to report on what he was experiencing. After a period of time, the intensity of feeling shifted from anxiety, fear, and sadness to clarity, insight, and wisdom. At that point, he realized that he needed to reestablish trust with the people around him, that he’d been so unmoored by trying to get the product to market, that he hadn’t really given his relationships the time and energy they deserved. “I’ve always prided myself as a ‘relationship guy,’ and I’ve been stuck on just getting it done. Boy have I been missing the boat.”
In the case of my client, anxiety, which is normally regarded as something that needs to be overcome, was, in fact, a great teacher. Because he had the courage to apply chit to the discomfort in his body, he was able to wake up to see how his overemphasis on accomplishment rather than relationship was affecting not just others but mainly himself because he wasn’t being congruent with his essential self. That’s sat. It’s often through pain and discomfort that we wake up or our reminded of who we fundamentally are and what’s truly important to us.
Gratitude, Chutzpah and The Long Slog
But it’s not just suffering that puts us in touch with sat. It also shows up when we’re connected to the practice of gratitude. I feel a deep sense of gratitude that I have the space and time to write about topics that mean a lot to me. Writing is my gratitude practice. I feel more truly who I am when I can slow down enough to distill my thoughts and feelings into something that can be read by others.
For many of us, passion is a doorway into Sat. It takes incredible passion to be willing to face ourselves on the mat the way we do. Even though Guruji used to say that Ashtanga is universal, that it’s for everyone, I’ve always been clear that it isn’t for the faint of heart. You need the fire of passion burning in you to face the things we face on the mat. Sometimes we show up and feel a llittle broken, sometimes we face limitlessness, but we’re always face-to-face with ourselves. The practice becomes the mirror expression of how we are each day. And it takes incredible chutzpah to look each day. It’s this passion for practice that uncovers an aspect of our sat.
One of our relatively new yoga students is in the stage of her practice that I call “The Long Slog.” It’s the point where she’s experienced the initial thrill of learning a portion of the primary series, but now she needs to practice what she’s learned in a continuous manner to both develop some mastery and, more importantly, to really extract the deeper learning that the sequence has to offer her. This is the point in the practice where we unpeel the layers of holding, old injury, childhood wounding, and boredom, lots of boredom. During “The Long Slog” many new students give up because they see the work that’s in front of them, and it appears daunting. Others recognize it and see the value.
During ‘The Long Slog” we’re doing the same thing over and over and over again, but each day it’s different than yesterday’s practice, last weeks practice, or the practice we had a year ago. We start to see what it is that is constantly changing. Behind all the change, we cannot help but notice a part of ourselves that always remains the same. That’s sat, the one self, the eternal part of us, the one that never changes.
Sat and Chit, Being and Doing
Recently, I’ve been watching old Ashtanga video footage on Youtube. One of the videos that I recently became reacquainted with and that has always particularly moved me is the 1993 Yoga Works footage of Guruji leading a class with Tim Miller, Chuck Miller, Maty Ezraty, Richard Freeman, Eddie Stern, and Karen Haberman. I saw this video a few years after I started practicing Ashtanga. This was a time when all-things-Ashtanga absolutely thrilled me, and I remember being totally enthralled by those ‘masters’ on the screen. It must’ve been a bit like what it was to see the Beatles on Ed Sullivan or Led Zeppelin at the Greek Theater. What I most loved--and still love--about that video was that even though they were practicing the same sequence, each was approaching the practice from a very different place. To me, Tim was all heart. Chuck was depth. Eddie was laser intensity. Richard was pure grace. Maty was fiery passion. Karen was herculean strength. I could not help but see a portion of their authentic selves shine through in the footage. What I saw and still see in those yogis and yoginis was the merging of doing and being. This is the same thing as sat and chit being one.
It isn’t yoga to me when I see yogis practicing the way pianists practice scales, without connection to their essence. It’s a lot like those people who go to the gym, turn the Stair Master on high, and look up at the Today’s Show to see what Ann Curry is wearing today. It’s vapid. It’s like saying, “I have a body somewhere below me that needs to be exercise, but I am somewhere else. And, hey, at least it’s yoga.” When I see this 1993 footage, I am reminded that when sat and chit are one, something beautiful and graceful emerges that is both pleasing to the eye and puts us in touch with our sense of aliveness, ananda, and our essence, sat.
When the Walls Come Tumblin’ Down
Ashtanga is physically very hard. There’s a ton to do and remember. From the moment we arrive on the mat until the moment we leave, we are in an incredibly detailed choreographed set of movements, breath cycles, internal contractions, and endorphins, lots of endorphins. By the time we complete the practice, a defensive part of the psyche is sometimes so pooped out that our authentic selves just magically appear. In other words, the practice exhausts us in such a way that a lot of walls we put up that keep us away from ourselves and the world around us fall down. Many of us experience this in savasana. Sometimes we experience it for 30 minutes after practice. Sometimes it lasts for a whole day.
One of our new students clearly had it for seconds last Monday. As I was leaving the studio, I noticed him looking at the sky in a meditative way for about 5 seconds. Most of us just glance up to notice whether it’s sunny, cloudy, or rainy. We don’t often really look. Something about this students practice allowed a part of his automatic responses to not take root in that moment. It was actually breathtaking for me to watch him appreciate the simple beauty of the blue sky.
Remember...Forget...Remember...Forget...Remember...Forget
In those rare moments when sat, chit, and ananda appear simultaneously together, the moment is sublime. Once we’ve experienced this union, we can’t help but keep looking for it. Why? Because it feels both expanded and natural, transcendental and normal, and deeply and profoundly true, good, and right. We often label ourselves by what we do, and we describe ourselves by the lives we’ve previously lived. When sat coexists with chit and ananda, we know who we truly are.
And the game of sat is really a game of remembering and forgetting. Remembering who we essentially are and forgetting who we are, remembering and forgetting. Once we think we’ve understood it, we haven’t. In order to continue to remember, it can help a lot to make choices from this place, to follow the thread of resonance that sat presents. When we do, we cannot help but create lives for ourselves that are true, good, and authentic. In the next blog, I will speak more about how to choose sat as a way to remember more than we forget.
Sat-Chit-Ananda Series
This is the third part of a four-part series that explores the experience of yoga. Be sure to check out the other posts
- Part 1—Choosing the Yum: Sat-Chit-Ananda
- Part 2—Chit: Noticing What is
- Part 3 Sat: The Sankrit Term for "The Real Deal"
- Part 4: Isvara Pranidhana: Sticking With What We Truly Know
Chit: Noticing What Is
In my previous entry, I discussed Sat-Chit-Ananda, an ancient yogic compound of three Sanskrit roots: sat, chit, and ananda, that describes the qualities of the experience of yoga. I spent most of that blog entry discussing ananda, which I translated in our everyday language, as "the yum." By "the yum," I mean that profound experience that something deep inside is fed and, thus, resonates profoundly. We all have an experience of this from time to time. It shows up in those moments when life is especially rich, rewarding and poignant. "The yum" is our truth; it's our essence; it's our raison d'être. And essentially, I made the case for the idea that "the yum" is what we're after in the practice of yoga.
Eyes Unclouded By Longing
In this entry, I intend to speak about chit, which is really "the doing" of Sat-Chit-Ananda. It's the action we must take to uncover, and meet "the yum." Chit is often translated as understanding, comprehending, or the fixing of the mind. The action that leads to such an outcome is, essentially, observation, the simple act of noticing.
And it's not just any old noticing, it's the kind of noticing that occurs when the "eyes are unclouded by longing." (Tao Te Ching). It's a kind of looking, listening, feeling, tasting, touching, and intuiting that allows us to see into things but is not obstructed by stories, dramas, or any interpretation whatsoever. It's really just noticing what is. The action of chit, as described in The Yoga Sutras is an active form of observation without interpretation. When we really get to know things without immediately jumping to conclusions, when we can just notice with curiosity, openness, and a quality of freshness, we come to know them as they are.
The Habits of Seeking Relief
We rarely see this sort of observation applied on the geopolitical stage. Instead of curiosity, what tends to show up amongst enemy nations is distrust, accusation, manipulation, coercion, and combativeness. At the heart of this form of noticing are human emotions that are difficult to be with discomfort, distrust, and, more often than not, fear. This doesn't just happen among nations. It also occurs in our everyday relationships.
A few years ago I was coaching a married couple, who claimed to have "the perfect sex life," but they just couldn't get along. Both had plenty of justifications as to why the other wasn't being a good husband or wife. He complained that she was "passive aggressive" and always found ways of deflecting responsibility for their arguments. She would argue that he was domineering and even, at times, dictatorial. When we first met, the two of them tried to get me to see their respective interpretations of what was wrong with their partner.
She'd say, "I don't want to argue. I just want to feel the way we felt when we first got together." He'd rebut with, "I am not trying to start a fight. Come on, Chad, can't you see how manipulative she is?" At the point in our conversations when both had uncovered and identified the manipulative games they played with each other, I asked them, "Well, what's here if you're not playing out this psychodrama with each other?" Immediately, the masks came off, and what revealed itself in the space was raw, passion, and it was so palpable in the room, but neither of them could just be with it without reacting to it.
Being With What Is
Part of chit is really the capacity of being with things as they are, without interpretation, reaction, or labeling. And there's so much we have great difficulty being with. Like the couple above, a lot of us have a hard time being with our passion. Instead of just experiencing it, we tend to jump to the conclusion that it means something like, "What does he want from me?" or like, "I don't deserve her." We also have difficulty being with certain feelings in our bodies, like anxiety, sadness, anger, and even joy. Before we will ever really let ourselves just feel what's coming up emotionally, we are often already seeking a solution that will get rid of the discomfort.
That's what "following the yuck in order to get to the yum" is all about. Something occurs, like somebody says something to us that makes us uncomfortable, and then, before we actually give ourselves the space to just experience the pain, we go looking for a way to get rid of it. We might seek revenge. We might go and hide. We might go straight for the pint of Haagen Dazs. This is just habit. It's the habit of reacting so as not to be with the experience, as it is.
The Body as the Field of Experience
We know the world through our bodies. All we need to do is slow down enough just to notice what's coming up, what it's feeling, and meet the feelings with curiosity and openness. But being able to slow down and notice isn't necessarily easy. That's why we practice daily and why the Yoga Sutras state that when practice is done steadily and for an extended period of time, we develop a solid foundation (1.14). It takes continuous practice to get the hang of choosing the direct experience through the body over the reactive, interpretive reality that our discursive minds create. In other words, it takes a lot of clarity and years of practice to be with both the pleasure and discomfort that shows up in our body without seeking gratification. One of the benefits of daily practice is that we get the hang of being with the initial discomfort when we have to choose something that in the short-run doesn't feel so good but is ultimately for our highest good.
A student came to class today with some tears. She was sad but proud of herself. Yesterday, she broke off a relationship with someone who she cared about but didn't see a future with. As she put it, "the relationship wasn't heading in the direction I wanted it to go. Breaking it off is really painful, but I know that, in the long run, it's the right thing for me." Instead of holding on to the relationship for another year or two, she knows that deep down inside, she has to let it go in order to meet someone who really does meet her. Sometimes being with 'what is' doesn't feel so good. In the case of our student, it's painful, but, simultaneously, there is a feeling, deeper down that something is "right," that it’s perfectly fine to just be with the discomfort, without having to fix it or resolve it.
By the way, our student is creating the yum in her life simply by being willing to face the pain of breaking off the relationship. Why? Because she is creating a sort of congruency between whom she knows she is deep inside and whom she is out in the world. Creating that harmony sometimes requires being with what we fear the most. In fact, more often than not, it takes incredible courage to make that leap.
Asana: Directing Our Awareness Toward Ananda
The practice of asana (posture) teaches us both how to be with the discomfort when and how to kinesthetically distinguish when the experience of "the yum" is authentic. In Patanjali's Sutras, "the yum" in asana is described as: sthira sukham asana (2.47), the place in the posture that has the simultaneous qualities of sthira, steadiness, and sukha, comfort. So when we practice asana, we're developing a feel for ananda. That's why Pattabhi Jois used to say that Ashtanga Yoga is 99% practice and 1% theory. It's not a passive, intellectual pursuit. It's active, and it requires the direct experience.
For those of us who practice, we all know it. Every once in a while we're in a posture, working with the breath a little, refining the alignment, noticing the bandhas, and then all of a sudden there's this deep, resonant feeling of, "Yes," or "Mmm," or "Ahhh," or just emptiness, vast emptiness. That's the experience of sthira sukham asana. And it's the experience of ananda. It's not that superficial pleasure we get when we eat a cookie or drink wine. It's deeper than that. There's a sort of profundity, a rightness, a fundamental goodness about that experience.
And it's why Mysore teachers give adjustments in class. They do it, not because they simply want to force students into a deeper posture, but because they want the student to connect to the deeper resonance that the posture can evoke in the body. When we get the hang of finding those dual qualities in our physical practice, when we find that sweet spot, we begin to develop the skill for discovering it in our relationships, in our work, and in our lives.
Being at Choice
The funny thing is that the moment we've found that sweet spot, it's gone. It only occurs in a moment. So what brought us sthira, steadiness, and sukha, ease, in our asana or in our lives yesterday won't hold up today. The nature of things is change. Nothing is constant, so we have to remain flexible, not just in body but in mind, as well.
Part of chit is being aware and open enough to see that we are constantly at choice in how we interpret things. Usually, we just assume that the way we've interpreted reality is just the way it is and probably the way it will always be. Consider that your interpretation of this blog would change dramatically if you read it ten years from today or even if you read it one more time. Yet we have the tendency to think that our interpretation of 'what is' is the way it is, that it's fixed.
But if we will apply chit to an experience and the interpretation of it, we will find two very different domains of reality. The first is based in the direct experience, which is always here and in the present moment. The second is rooted in ideas, beliefs, opinions, and judgments, all of which are past oriented. So, for example, as I was practicing this morning, I noticed a lot of heavy and crampy sensations in my back and legs. That was my direct experience. I could have interpreted that experience to mean that I was stiff today, certainly quite a lot stiffer than I was yesterday. Once I made that interpretation, I could have followed that logic and made my stiffness mean something like, "I hate practicing when I am stiff. I think I'll just skip the rest of the poses I planned to do and go straight to savasana (corpse pose)."
I am at choice only when my awareness is here and now, in the present moment. When I am stuck in my interpretation of what the sensations means, I'm caught in a cascade of decisions, which are all informed by past stories and experiences that have nothing to do with what I am experiencing in the moment. More often than not, the choices are not appropriate to the situation at hand. But when I just experience the sensation directly, I am more apt to make choices that are appropriate for that particular situation, choices that bring me back to ananda, to both my truth and to what's needed in the present moment.
Chit-Ananda
It takes incredible patience not to jump straight to conclusions but simply to observe what's here. Patience is not about waiting without any discomfort. True patience is really the capacity to wait both with comfort as well as discomfort. If we will slow down enough and direct our attention to what is here in the present moment without judgment, without labeling, with curiosity, by allowing things to be as they are, we will discover what the well-known and widely respected Ashtanga Yoga teacher, Richard Freeman, calls "the yoga matrix," which he describes as "the background of unconditional love and absolute support that is the true nature of an open mind" (Freeman, Richard. The Mirror of Yoga: Awakening the Intelligence of Body and Mind. Boston: Tambala Publications. 2010. Print). This is nothing other than ananda, our truth, our happiness, our wisdom, and the deep, profound sense of the perfection of things.
Sat-Chit-Ananda Series
This is the second part of a four-part series that explores the experience of yoga. Be sure to check out the other posts!