A spontaneous insight
Whilst practising last week, I experienced something that felt like a small insight into the nature of yoga practice and why it works. This small insight arrived into my consciousness without any precursor. I had just realised something that I actually already knew on an intellectual level but hadn't fully appreciated on an instinctual level.
Bearing in mind that it is probably impossible to fully describe a thought, feeling, or emotion so that the listener will experience the same thing as the teller, I'll try to describe what it is that I came to realise.
This is it: Yoga practice works by slowly removing anything that masks our experience of our true nature.
That is, yoga practice is not a process of adding things (knowledge, clarity, physical abilities, or mental sharpness for example) but, rather, it's a process of removing things. Yoga practice creates space (and space is made, of course, by the absence of things) for us to make fundamental and profound realisations about the true nature of our own consciousness and, by extension, about the true nature of reality.
To put it in a simpler way, we are already equipped with all of the psychological, mental, and instinctual faculties to experience bliss, peace, oneness, samadhi, self-realisation, whatever-you-want-to-call-it, without having to add anything. But the background noise of our own minds causes us to struggle profoundly to avail of this experience.
That was my insight.
On reflection, it turns out that this is so far from an original thought that it maybe doesn't even deserve the title of 'insight'. I've heard countless times that yoga practice is just a process of 'polishing the mirror of awareness' or that it's like 'peeling back the layers of an onion'.
In fact, we just need to hear the first four of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras to know that this is how yoga works.
Here's a very rough translation:
1.1 Now begins the instruction on yoga
1.2 Yoga is the stopping of thoughts
1.3 Once all thoughts have stopped the individual experiences his/her true nature
1.4 At all other times the individual identifies with the thoughts
So Patanjali says we need to remove something (thinking) in order to experience the state that he calls yoga and experience our true nature.
I've read, chanted, reflected on, and discussed those four sutras hundreds, if not thousands, of times. They are telling us the same thing as I 'realised' during my practice. And yet, despite knowing those sutras so well that I was able to write them out without looking them up, it felt, last week, like I had discovered this for myself.
The experience of this small realisation I had was just that; an experience. Although I already 'knew' that this was the case, I had never before spontaneously realised it to be the case. And so it did really feel, to me, like a rare and precious insight into the nature of yoga practice.
We can read and study and chant and memorise all sorts of things but the problem is that our daily lives usually don't allow us the empty mental space that's required to allow us to experience true clarity.
That's why we need a practice that allows us to cultivate the conditions for spontaneous realisation to occur. Through regular yoga practice, we're preparing the ground of our consciousness to accept the seeds of insight and along the way, once in a blue moon, we might experience a glimpse into our own true nature.
Long after our bodies age and become unable to perform impressive feats of flexibility and strength, the potential of yoga practice to bring about blissful awareness of our own selves will keep us coming back for more.Yoga Sutra 1.14
Success in yoga is achieved through practice and non-attachment