Balance this, balance that, everyone is trying to achieve balance in life. The harder we try, the more out of balance we get. “Balance is the ability to obsess equally in every area of Life”. The very thought of struggling to achieve balance is comical; imagine a tightrope walker furiously waving his arms and flinching in order to maintain his perfect balance. Tightrope walkers do frantically wave their arms from time to time, generally right before they fall. Balance is effortless, trying to balance is a continuous struggle.
Great Yoga masters have described the state of Yoga as being a condition of mind free of imbalance, free of mental oscillations and fluctuations, the conscious still-point at the center of all polarities. The practice of Yoga will lead to the state of Yoga; this is what Yoga will do for you, without fail, if the practitioner maintains their “tapas”, or sustained, determined practice over a long period of time.
So how is it that Yoga will bring about this ideally balanced state of consciousness, this “oscillation and fluctuation free” condition of Being? Will the practice of Yoga impose stillness, quiet, and mental equilibrium upon the student from the outside, in? Will Yoga bestow peace and emotional balance to the harried and agitated heart of the sincere student who labors strenuously to find the hallowed ground of stillness? Well, yes, Yoga will do this for any sincere seeker, but not in the way that most yoga students believe that it will. In my own experience, and in the experience of most every long-term Yoga practitioner I have every known, Yoga works in the most paradoxical way to establish balance, i.e., mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being. The practice of Yoga brings about the state of Yoga not by imposing balance upon the student, but by exposing imbalance within the student. And here lies the rub as well as the understanding why so many students of Yoga only dabble with a sincere, committed practice, or give up on their practice when progress seems slow, or missing altogether.
The practice of Yoga, which is the sincere seeking of union with Infinite ground of Being that stills the torment of the mind, will expose with uncanny efficiency every imbalance that lies hidden within or appears obvious on the surface of the life of every single student who is courageous enough to unroll their mat and face their own imbalances. The infinite wisdom of Yoga will custom design a perfectly orchestrated curriculum of healing for each individual student by exposing the layers of imbalance that have accumulated in their physical, emotional, and mental bodies over time. As each layer of imbalance is exposed, generally beginning with the physical body and moving inward through the emotional and mental bodies, the student is allowed the “opportunity” to bring awareness, the fire of their own presence to bear upon their imbalance, which inevitably presents itself as discomfort, discomfort ranging from “mild inconvenience” to excruciating, nearly intolerable suffering.
Who among us wants to have their imbalances exposed? Beginning students are generally faced with their physical imbalances first. The overly muscular student facing the tension and blockage of their tissue which is far too dense. The willowy, over-flexible student realizing their extraordinary range of motion will not compensate for their lack of strength and stability. As these initial superficial imbalances are overcome, deeper and often more subtle imbalances now can make their way to the surface. The hyperactive, fidgety student, who thought their energetic countenance an asset, will find it difficult or impossible to hold still when necessary. The slow moving, “take everything easy” student will find it unpleasant to be required to hold to a pattern and establish a rhythm in their practice and they will miss their frequent “serenity breaks”.
As these inevitable imbalances within the student are exposed with surgical precision by the practice of Yoga, the diligence and presence of mind to continue and strive through difficulty will burn away the disparity, the differential that exists between the optimal center and the extreme to which the student has strayed through their habit of living. It is at this level of attainment the maturing student may well enjoy months, or years, of seemingly stable, balanced living, both in practice and all their affairs.
However, in the search for perfect balance and true freedom of the spirit, which so many yogis have established as their purpose for living, deeper and far more insidious demons and dragons of mental and emotional imbalance will necessarily wind their way to the surface of consciousness, in much the same way that shrapnel long lodged in the deep tissue of a war veteran will find its way to the surface of the skin to allow a much deeper healing to commence. In Yogic terminology, we have made contact with the far deeper “koshas”, or layers of our emotional and mental bodies, which have stored, buried, and repressed patterns of feeling and perception that have, in many cases, seriously affected and discolored our lives from our inception. Making these “painful patterns of perception and feeling” all the more insidious is that they have been doing their damage unbeknownst to us as their operation is silent, lurking below the surface level of consciousness in the vast tracts of the sub-consciousness. Although their operation may be silent and automatic, these hidden patterns can and do create terrible pain and suffering in the experience of the spiritual seeker, which is made all the worse because the cause of the difficulty is hidden from conscious view.
How hopeless we would all be if there was no access to exposing and altering these “viruses of perception” that bring such discomfort and imbalance to so many sincere and hard-working spiritual aspirants. Carl Jung commented “that which remains in the subconscious comes to us as fate”. Because we are not aware of these deeper levels of disturbed, or imbalanced perceptions, the mayhem and chaos they cause most often seems to come out of the blue and we are cast down by circumstances, people, or situations that catch us unaware, off-guard, and often without any defense. We can find ourselves powerless, overwhelmed, swamped with emotional turmoil or mental disturbance which can be so powerful, it acts as a near perfect firewall between our individual soul and our infinite connection to Spirit.
The great gift of Yoga is that a sustained, committed practice will find these unresolved and hidden emotional and mental imbalances within us. This is both good and bad news, depending at which moment of the process we happen to be experiencing. The infinite and compassionate wisdom of Yoga, with perfect precision, will orchestrate the curriculum of events, circumstances, and people to expose our mental and emotional imbalances that they may be brought into harmony and alignment with the perfect balance that is our eternal state of Being. To our limited and mortal minds, this can seem to be a terribly unfair and excruciatingly painful process, so much so, that we would never, in a million years, consciously initiate such a process upon our own selves. And because we could never initiate such “healing seasons” upon our selves, we could never heal the deepest and most harmful imbalances of our nature on our own volition or will-power. The “long, dark seasons of the Soul” are arrangements of Spirit that our individual egos would never agree to; they are far too painful.
So, take heart, Yoga friends. Your committed practice of Yoga is searching, scouring, and locating all the “land-mines” of repressed emotional residue, as well as the painful and limiting patterns of perception that were laid down in the subterranean caverns of your psyche over the many years passed. When these deepest inner energetic coils of thought and feeling were originally imprinted into our minds, we did not have the emotional maturity nor the intellectual or spiritual wisdom to prevent such accumulations of disturbance from taking hold of us. We swallowed the pain at the time of original imbalance because to digest before we were ready would have killed many of us. The infinite wisdom and love of Yoga knows we harbor such painful and debilitating patterns of energetic holding within us and we will be given every opportunity to bring our current presence, faith, and persistence to these emotional and mental barriers as a higher intelligence brings them out of energetic escrow for us to survey - exactly as we are willing to do so.
Ease up on trying to achieve balance. Let your loving practice of Yoga bring you to balance as every imbalance is exposed to the light. We may be strengthened and encouraged by the knowledge that there is but one energy in the Universe and that energy is in eternal and perfect balance, which we may call Love. In our forgetfulness, our experiential disconnection from Spirit, our separateness, we unwittingly, or perhaps deliberately, warped and shaped this one eternal energy into imbalance, turning it into anger, fear, grief, sorrow, impatience, regret and all the rest of the unholy lot. As our practice finds, and unwinds, these mortal coils of energetic disturbance, these great organic and primal energies of our Being will be transmuted, alchemicalized into the far finer, more subtle, more creative, and more cooperative expressions of the energy of Love. We will be brought into ultimate balance and once there, we need never stray again.
blessings to all, welcome to this new website
Greg
