Moving in and letting go

Jim Tarran

It is still winter, but at this time of year, one cannot help but start thinking of the spring. Hope, or faith then, is essentially a positive emotion and one that makes the yogic life not just better but actually possible. It is because of faith or trust that we can surrender, joyfully. When in meditation or asana, we experience thoughts, feelings or physical sensation: it is our attitude towards them that is so important.

We talk or hear talk about release being our natural state and clarity being our ‘real’ identity but it is often more than apparent that this is not always our everyday experience of our life and our relationship to it. We are all trained to be on the look out – the criteria is relatively narrow and definitely subjective – for certain thoughts, feelings, sensations and to classify them as good, bad or neutral. Once identified through grasping, the next stage comes in, keeping or rejecting; in other words, craving and aversion.

Because our own conditioning is personal, subjective and relatively narrow, it is inevitable that a whole load of stuff just slips through the net and passes away and therefore follows the natural order of arising, passing, cessation. But many other things do not slip through and so a sort of congestion begins to arise so that our contact with the life right in front of us becomes increasingly removed as a layer of stuff. A wall builds up and we may become at best ‘comfortably numb’ as if we where looking at life through someone else’s glasses or as if life where just a program on in the corner of a waiting room with the volume down – just incidental.

The yogi’s perspective is different when the yogi feels or thinks s/he is aware that s/he thinks or when s/he feels again s/he is aware. But to make ‘pure’ awareness possible, there has to be something else; a deep-seated awareness that the object of awareness only arises in awareness as it passes through. If it where not passing through on its way to settle, it would not be felt at all. It is almost as if we were sat in front of a giant snow shaker looking straight ahead – the pieces of glitter or ‘snow’ that we see are those that pass through our line of vision on their way to settle.

When the yogi adds this reflection to awareness, pure awareness becomes possible and the appropriate response to that settling aspect is adopted that is emotionally positive surrender – Ishvara Pranidhana (surrender to god or to universal/higher law).

Surrender, then, has two meanings: one is a giving up based on defeat, a sort of hopelessness; the other is a joyful surrender, knowing that the passing of all things is inevitable but it is also wonderful, for everything becomes fresh and new and the foundation of identity ceases to be the ever-changing, conditioned-based experiences of the body/mind (the glitter as it falls). This is the path to clarity, freshness and creative open-mindedness that lies behind.

Just as the wine bottle clears when left to settle, the proactive yogi does not only surrender to but is tuned in on the ‘settling aspects’ and moves deeper into the clarity behind in sync with them. In the same way that a surfer feels and is totally sensitive to the swell rising and moving beneath him/her and rides it. There is a sense of control from surrender. A sense of freedom from acceptance is gained as the yogi learns to move in rhythm with letting go.

Quotes

There is something formless yet complete
That existed before Heaven and Earth.
How still how empty!
Dependent on nothing unchanging,
All pervading, unfailing.
One may think of it as the Mother of all things under heaven.
I do not know it’s name but I call it “meaning.”
If I had to give it a name I should call it “The Great.”

— La-tzu