Paying the Boatman

Why would you choose to measure your life by endings when all the experience, the felt sense of being alive, is in the journey?

By Phillip Moffitt

Like many people who study hatha yoga in the United States, I practice a Buddhist form of meditation called vipassana, or insight meditation. In this particular practice you first learn to stabilize the mind by focusing on a single object such as the breath. Once concentration is strong, the mind is allowed to move as it chooses while you stay mindful of what it is doing, not getting lost in thought. Of course, you do get lost in thoughts as well as feelings and body sensations, over and over again, but each time you return to awareness. Gradually the mind becomes much more steady. You begin to develop the capacity for choiceless awareness in which all thoughts and feelings can be experienced without the mind contracting, and you get a taste of the inner freedom that is available to you. When you keep your mind awake and stable in this manner, you are also able to see yourself more clearly, and various insights about yourself arise. There is a sense of "seeing things as they are," as one of my teachers, Ajahn Sumedho, likes to say.

Vipassana meditation and hatha yoga work well together because hatha yoga helps you ground yourself in the current moment through increased body awareness, which greatly enhances the meditation experience, while mindfulness practice brings new insights and meaning to your hatha practice.

One of the benefits that can accrue to you if your hatha yoga practice includes the element of mindfulness is the ability to start making wise distinctions in both thinking and behavior. This ability to make distinctions is sometimes referred to in vipassana meditation as "clear seeing" or "clear comprehension." Achieving this access to clarity is most important in making those hard decisions in life which muddle the mind so much that you no longer know what you really care about. However, it can be hard to grasp these distinctions when they involve the emotions, so it is helpful to start to see how they work in terms of the body and your hatha yoga practice. For instance, when you have a recurring injury or one which happens without a clear origin, it is important that you make the distinction between the symptom and the underlying condition.

It is very tempting when dealing with a recurring back injury or a mysteriously injured shoulder or hip to approach your yoga teacher wanting to just be fixed, to be relieved of the discomfort and the limitation it imposes. It's easy to focus your attention on the symptom and contract your identity into the discomfort. So often in these situations yogis succeed in getting the pain to go away in the short term only to end up with a chronic pain or a much more serious injury. By bringing mindfulness to bear on the injury, it becomes clear that your body's natural balance has been disturbed due to certain conditions coming together. The discomfort is just a message warning of this imbalance. There is no reason to contract or organize around the discomfort; rather, you can use it like a navigational tool whose diminishment will indicate that you are on the path of healing. Once this distinction is made, the wise course—with the help of your yoga teacher and maybe a doctor and a well-trained bodyworker—is to start investigating the underlying conditions, including how you hold and move the body, your emotional life, and your beliefs concerning your body. You can change the underlying conditions so that the whole chain of cause-and-effect is altered.

Page 1 2 3 4

See All Philosophy Articles »