Yogic Awareness

Jim Tarran

Letting ourselves be happy is at once the simplest thing in the world but it can also be a challenge. At this time of year, the season itself calls us to be joyful and so we may meet this juncture within ourselves.

There are two doors before us: one is surrender and one resistance, one is a saying yes to the calling to live, to engage, to communicate; and the other calling us to protect ourselves by keeping our selves removed.

One is motivated by acceptance and non violence and the other by fear. BKS Iyengar says that violence arises out of fear and to curb it, what is needed is a change of outlook on life, a change in orientation. Iyengar goes on to say that, ‘Violence is bound to decline when men base their faith upon reality and investigation rather than on ignorance and supposition.’

How else are we to investigate reality than with faith with some degree of confidence or trust?

It is not that we expect life to behave in this or that way, but that we recognise, that which occurs is transitory. Even if to our human perception and expectations, this may be moving slower than we consider ‘real’. It is faith in this movement, understanding of the inherent transience of conditioned things (sampajanna) that allows our awareness to be fully engaged. Without the faith or surrender that is born from this recollection, we cannot be said to being aware in the ‘yogic’ sense.

Yogic awareness then is light, relaxed, spacious, non violent and joyful. There is no fear of engagement because we do not take ourselves or the conditioned world that we are part of too seriously. It is this that allows us to have humility and joyful resignation to touch ourselves and our lives more sensitively, in the mundane relative sense and also in the absolute sense. Absolute sense is the ultimate connection with all things that can be experienced through our disentanglement from the mundane through seeing within it this transient quality.

This principle of awareness is practised both in the microcosm of your yoga mat and the macrocosm of the wider world.

Quotes

If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.

— Dalai Lama