Love and Yoga

Jim Tarran

Having recently had Valentines Day and it being the season when nature’s critters are thinking about making young, one’ attention turns to love. There are many kinds of the stuff: romantic love, sexual love, motherly love and brotherly love, love of one’s country or one’s lifestyle. There is infatuation and there is spiritual love, there are soul mates and playmates and of course all the variants of mixing up theses different aspects of love together.

In the West we might associate love with the colour red, but in the East it is more closely connected with green. The chakra system clarifies this by telling us that the resting pace of the mind is in the heart chakra ‘anahata’ (pronounced anarhata) and that this chakra is connected with green light. Powerful energy is associated with the base chakra ‘muladhara’ (pronounced mooladhara) which is said to be the release point of the transformative ‘kundalini’ energy, this is connected with red light and with the earthy rooted aspect of our energy and so sexual activity focused on this kind of psychological release is associated with red.

In yoga practice, awareness is often emphasised but what is meant by this? Are we not already aware when we feel upset or angry and speak harshly or inappropriately to someone from these feelings? When one feels happy, sad, angry, tense, one is often all too aware of these feelings, so what use is awareness and why is it emphasised in yoga? Perhaps then, this is where the word love can come in to play.

Awareness is a start, it is a stepping stone. But stepping on to the first stepping stone across a stream is of no significance or use unless followed by the second and the third until you are across. Taking the step into awareness then can leave you, at best, no further than taking no step at all; at worst, with a strong feeling or thought with which you have no tools to handle.

Love then is a word that can be understood in yoga to equal accommodation or containing. It can be further understood through such expressions as experience lit up, or full acceptance. In Buddhism, there are the terms wakefulness and mindfulness which we can roughly equate with awareness and love, since as we have already observed, the heart chakra is the seat of one’s mind (chitta-heart/mind), so mindfulness is best understood as awareness in the heart chakra or open-hearted awareness..

In our ordinary experience of awareness, for instance, the scenario normally follows that we become aware of something at the same time as becoming caught up in something. This is where perception meets conditioning and causes reaction. Put more simply, it is where we become aware of something and which then sets up a reaction in our character; this could be judgement (approval /disapproval), which can lead to an attitude that some things should be there and some should not. In turn, these may lead to rejecting (hatred/ignorance-dvesa/avidya) or to grasping (attatchment-raga).

When it is not understood that character or personality is conditioned (samaskaras) and is being formed and reformed arbitrarily, under the influence of the changing conditions of life, then the mistaken view that personality is self (asmita) arises and one believes in reactions and perceptions and their subsequent desires and aversions and is caught, choice is lost and one feels oneself to be at the mercy of life’s whims and fancies, or in other words insecure and defensive.

On the other hand, recognising this ongoing process as a subjective and arbitrary gives one a sense of lightness and humour about what one feels, thinks and senses. This expresses itself as the ability to light up one’s experience. One migrates from having all one’s intelligence stuck up in the head where it puts energy into the secondary function of mental proliferation. If there is an imbalance between experience and conceptualisation, one becomes unplugged from reality and is left creating the universe based on the limited and biased experiences of the past.

To cut a long story short, Love is an attitude of openness, a willingness to accept, to perceive, to take in life, as it is whether that be an aching back or an aching heart. This sense of openness is not passive in the usual sense but is inherently intelligent as it accommodates experience out of a drive to want to know it, a drive that when taken to its fullest, takes one beyond one’s likes and dislikes to a place where acceptance and knowledge are synonymous.

Using the word love is evocative of this kind of strength; the strength to keep an open space around what is perceived, to have the intention sufficiently powerful to really want to dispel the darkness. It is interesting to notice that words like love and hate have long been associated with light and dark, suggesting that hatred has a closing down a shutting out effect and love the opposite.

One more question may still hang on one’s lips at this point: ‘Well, if love accepts, then surely evil, unhelpful states of mind are left unchecked and free to grow and infect our actions?’ The opposite, in fact, is true: containing, accepting and opening to an experience, contains a natural intelligence, because one is not tied into the sensations, be they pleasant or unpleasant, one is free to see their qualities – useful, appropriate, truthful, untruthful and the most appropriate response does not need any pre-planning or preparation. It‘s like a ‘nightlight’ candle burning in an upturned pint glass, it is contained, there is no aggression, there is a space around the flame, it is seen clearly but it does not burn anyone, and eventually it extinguishes itself.

When the pull is felt, one is not pulled; thoughts, sensations, feelings are still the wild horses they have always been but one does not get one’s foot snared up in their reins and so is not pulled with them as they run. Without fuel, a fire dies out on it’s own and without our energy being invested in a thought or feeling or a sensation, then it will disperse itself as the conditions that caused it inevitably change.

Applied to asana practice, this means that when one’s knee produces a painful feeling not felt before, one is not caught in trying to get rid of it (hatred/ignorance - fighting it or pretending it’s not there) and one’s nervous system, one’s own inner guidance will be awakened to guide. Because of the unconditioned non-personal aspect of this kind of guidance, yoga calls it ‘Ishvara Pranidhana’ or surrender to God. Here, there are none of the down sides that we see so much of in the world from surrendering to an external God because here, God is unaffected by social, political pressures. It is not open to manipulation from the outside or from bias from the subjective personal point of view, because it is a local experience, felt deep in one’s core and has nothing to do with external pre-determined authority. It is an ability to listen deeply to intelligence that is imminent and open, sensitive and not compulsive.

In Buddhism, self is negated through insight and a new intuitive intelligence is awakened within that is ‘Buddha’-or awakened, illumined. This dropping of the word God diminishes the dangers: a love that sees and a sense of trust and spiritual commitment that enables one to give to this unprepared flow of knowing and living creativity.

Quotes

In this life, in this life, in this life,
In this, oh sweet life:
We’re (we’re coming in from the cold);
We’re coming in (coming in), coming in (coming in),
Coming in (coming in), coming in (coming in),
Coming in from the cold.

It’s you - it’s you - it’s you I’m talkin’ to -
Well, you (it’s you) - you (it’s you) - you I’m talking to now.
Why do you look so sad and forsaken?
When one door is closed, don’t you know other is open?

— Bob Marley