Tami Simon: You’re listening to “Insights at the Edge.” Today my guest is Richard Freeman. Richard is an author, teacher, and founder of The Yoga Workshop here in Boulder, Colorado, which is where Sounds True’s studios are. His background includes Sufism, Zen, and vipassana Buddhist practices. He’s also a practitioner of bhakti, hatha, and Iyengar yoga, and is also an internationally respected instructor of ashtanga yoga.
Richard is the author of a new book, The Mirror of Yoga, and has created many audio learning programs with Sounds True, including The Yoga Matrix, Yoga Breathing, Yoga Chants, and an instructional DVD series called The Ashtanga Yoga Collection.
In this episode of “Insights at the Edge,” Richard and I spoke about the paradox of self-reference and how it relates to the true goals of yoga practice, the discovery and breaking down of samskaras, and how yoga unites the opposing patterns in the body. Here’s my conversation with Richard Freeman.
I wonder, Richard, if we could start by you offering a chant, if you’d be willing. Maybe a chant that is appropriate at the beginning of some kind of teaching session.
Richard Freeman: OK. This is a Shanti Pata from the Yadur Veda that’s used at the beginning of teaching, at the end of teaching. And it’s a nonsectarian one; it’s not theistic nor atheistic, because it’s just talking about “May we together be protected, may we together have great enthusiasm in our study, may we enjoy together, may our study be brilliant together, and may we not hate each other”—
TS: I’m very interested in that!
RF: —as a result of what we’re going to be doing, which is just communicating. And so it’s just emphasis on the idea of being together.
TS: Sounds perfect.
RF: It’s a nice chant. So I’ll chant it. [Chants in Sanskrit]
TS: Beautiful. Thank you.
You start your new book, The Mirror of Yoga, by actually talking about listening, and how listening is a central key in yoga. And I don’t think most people would think listening has anything to do with yoga. Can you explain that?
RF: Yes. This is actually a traditional point of view, that yoga begins with sravanam, or hearing, or esoteric yoga begins with listening to nada. So listening is the ability to let things be, because you’re just kind of letting them metaphorically float in space, allowing them to unfold and manifest in whatever way they are. And that’s what you do when you listen to something. So you temporarily suspend your presuppositions, you give them space. In the yoga tradition, they’d say you’re giving them akash, or nonobstructive, radiant space, in which things can just unfold themselves, reveal themselves for what they actually are.
Anyone can do this, at least for a few moments. And then it’s the same thing you would do in mature or advanced yoga practice, except you can sustain it a little bit longer. It’s just listening.
TS: And how might that apply to what most people think of as yoga, which is, you know, twisting their body into some kind of shape? Where is the listening there?
RF: So that would apply to getting people to slow down. And then in the process of twisting their body or doing whatever they’re going to do, to observe it more carefully, so that all the things that come up, that you squeeze out of the body in twisting it, you’re able to feel them very deeply. So it would be sensations, emotions, feelings, and then all the different thoughts, stories, and opinions that come up as you do that to your body. And if you’re grounded in listening, then you can observe them mindfully as they come up.
And that way, even though you’re engaged in a process of trying to make your body do something, you see the presuppositions of that. In other words, you see that you’re playing a kind of a game, though perhaps a sincere game, which is practicing. So say I’m going to stand on my head, or I’m going to do a sun salutation, then seeing that is part of the practice, meaning, “Why am I doing this? Why am I practicing?” And then you can also see the various layers of your motives: “Well, I’m practicing to feel good. I’m practicing to become stronger, or to become more beautiful,” or “I’m practicing to understand who I am or what the world is.” And then you’re able to see your mind working, and giving space just to those thoughts.
So listening is always there in the background. Or giving space: listening is a metaphor for space, or mind, which is a metaphor for mindfulness, or just intelligent awareness of whatever is.
TS: Now, you called your new book The Mirror of Yoga. In what way is yoga a mirror?
RF: Well, a clear mirror is a metaphor, it’s something that’s going to allow you to see yourself—indeed, if there is such a thing—and all the things we believe ourselves to be, like our different mental processes, our emotions, different parts of our body we think are us. And so yoga gives you a clear vision of them, as if reflected in a mirror.
But again, the metaphor of a mirror is then, perhaps you’re not the image in the mirror. And so again, it’s a way of allowing observation.
TS: Now, you know Richard, I’ve known you a long time here in Boulder, Colorado, where we both live. And I’ve always thought of you as sort of a local god, and what I mean by that is just a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful yoga teacher, really in a class all your own. And I think you have a way of articulating the true purpose and process of yoga that is very unique, and really gets to the depth of what yoga is. And so that’s some of what I’d love for you to share with our listeners, what you think the true goal of yoga is. And the process, how does it work? How does it enable us to reach that goal? That’s a big question, it’s a tall order, but I think you can do it, man!
RF: [Laughs]Let me take a breath for a second here.
TS: Yes, please.
RF: I don’t know if I can articulate the process or the goal very well. And I don’t know if it’s a blessing or a curse, but I’m very much aware of the kind of slippery and paradoxical nature of what I’m trying to work with here, which is “me,” or “my body,” or “my mind,” or “your mind,” “your body,” or this whole whatever this is that we’re experiencing. I’m aware that it’s very wonderful and slippery, like a wet bar of soap. I think Gary Snyder had the metaphor of the avocado pit: you can hold it in your hand, but as soon as you squeeze it, it just pops right out because it’s slippery.
And so I see that kind of fundamental self-reference paradox in almost all the different aspects of yoga, as the goal of yoga being this experience that actually we’re already having. And again, paradoxically, though we’re having this experience, we’re not really experiencing what we’re experiencing, because our mind is always making a representation, a thought or an image, even about what we’re experiencing, and it cannot stay on subject. It just moves on or spins on, and so it’s very difficult to have an experience of what is right in front of you.
Now, there’s a saying that the truth, which in the Vedantic tradition or the Veda is called raman, that the truth is pratyaksha, right in front of your eyes, and it’s hidden right there. So one of the old stories is that the gods, not wanting human beings to be enlightened—because the gods are entertained by human beings. It’s just like when we watch a series on television, we find it engrossing, entertaining, sometimes maddening. And if all of the characters were to become enlightened, it would become a very boring show. I can’t imagine a more boring show!
And so the story is that the human beings are the playthings or the cattle of the gods. And so the gods decided a long time ago that they have to hide the truth from human beings. And where can you hide it, because human beings are so clever; they’re these brilliant talking monkeys, and they have these brilliant minds, particularly if they do meditation practice and yoga practice, they become more and more brilliant and insightful. So where are they going to hide it? And so the only place that they could find that human beings would never look is pratyaksha, or in front of the eye, as what is actually rising in the present moment, [this] is the raman.
And so this is the challenge of practice. Because then immediately we think, “Well, what is rising?” And our mind goes, “Well, let me look around and let me see what is arising in the present moment.” And then we think, “Oh, it’s hot, it’s cold, it’s thick, it’s thin, it buzzes, it doesn’t buzz, it’s changing.” And we’re again just trying to overlay a theory on the immediate experience.
And so a lot of yoga begins when you start to see your mind doing that on itself, like the hand that tries to reach around and grab itself, or the eye that tries to turn itself inside out to see itself, which is of course impossible. And it really begins when you get a sense of that kind of serious self-reference paradox lying at the very heart of the big questions in life, like “Who am I? What happens when I die? What is the universe? Why is the universe?” All of those great questions are built in self-reference paradox.
TS: So you’re saying because of this self-reference paradox, it’s going to be difficult for you to answer this question, because how could you as the person—
RF: It’s absolutely impossible to answer the question.
TS: Thank you, Richard!
RF: However, we can really use words, use language, to kind of metaphorically circle around this. And the words can actually work. There’s no guarantee that they’ll work, but you can get remarkably close.
TS: Let’s go for it.
RF: OK. It’s just like if I wanted to describe something in nature that’s beautiful. Say I were a combination of a biologist and a poet, and so I started describing the beauty of some insect’s wing and the fine hairs, going into all the different processes I’ve discovered through my microscope, and then through my biochemisty, and describing and describing and describing the wing of a fly or something. And none of those descriptions are the wing of a fly. And you can fill encyclopedias with those descriptions, but the fact that there’s a wing on a fly is just mindboggling; it’s stunning, and it’s stunningly beautiful if you were actually to get a good look at it.
And because we as humans are grounded simultaneously in the mind, but then the mind is grounded in what in yoga we would say is prana, or mediate experience. We’re grounded in the body, we’re grounded in this larger shared experience. We kind of already know that, and a lot of the communication is getting people to feel what they already are feeling, kind of understanding what they already understand, to just see the miracle of, say, a fly’s wing.
TS: So we could say then that the goal of yoga is something that can’t be said definitively, but we can circle around it. And the process of yoga, how it works, the actual process, we can also circle around.
RF: We can certainly circle around. And this is again one of the paradoxes: you can’t talk about it, it’s too stunning. You can’t grasp it with the mind. However, there’s nothing else worth talking about.
However, we do have to talk about practical things. And if we talk about practical things, or what we would say are ordinary things, really intelligently, that thing that we can’t talk about kind of shines through. It becomes a communal experience for everybody.
But unfortunately—or fortunately, I think fortunately—you can’t tie it down. You can’t nail it with the term “God” or the term “Brahma” or any concept. They can get close, but then it kind of slips out; it spills out over the edges of whatever.
TS: I’m going to take a different approach here for a moment. In a yoga class, I once heard you say that the true yoga teacher, the true guru, is the shushumna nadi, the central channel of the body, the central axis in the body. And I’d be curious first of all if you could say something about that, how is that the true yoga teacher. And then also help give people a feeling, a sense, of what the central channel in the body feels like through your description.
RF: As I recall, what I said in class is that because we start with an invocation to the guru of gurus, it’s a chant that’s implying that there’s one teacher with an endless number of forms, and that we have direct access to that teacher at the core of our heart. And of course the core of the heart is imagined to be part of a long central tube that goes through the rest of the core of the body, starting with the middle of the pelvic floor, the perineum, and going up through the roots of the navel, through the core of the heart, through the throat, behind the root of the palette, up out of the top of the head. And the central channel is imagined to be empty, hollow like a reed.
And that in the central channel is where the true guru is, or where you live, or if you’re a theist that’s where God lives, or the Buddha nature is, in this central channel. And that way people don’t have to project that archetype so strongly out onto their instructor or their teacher. And that will actually allow them to love their teacher more, because their teacher is a human. Everyone is going to have human teachers at some point, and if you can appreciate them as human, you can actually love them more. But if you have to put them on the pedestal of the ideal—you know, this person is perfect and they’re omniscient and they’re omnipotent—then you don’t really have a relationship with them anymore. It’s more like an economic function: I need something from them.
And then a good teacher, even if they’ve been placed on a pedestal, is always pointing out the real teacher. Just like a parent would with a child; at some point, the child has to make their own decisions, and hopefully the parent has instilled some decent values in the child.
So the way that traditionally one can access the feeling of the central channel, even if you’re not a seasoned practitioner, is through the back of the palette, or what’s called the talu muda, or the root of the palette. And something that automatically opens this root of the palette is whenever you feel extremely satisfied, as in having an aesthetic experience, an experience of very fine beauty, you release, you go, “Ahhh!” And that tends to release the palette.
Another thing that’s done in mantra practice is just the syllable “Ah,” which is kind of the foundational sound in language systems, because it’s kind of an unarticulated sound: “Ahhh.” The tongue becomes quiet, the soft palette where the uvula is becomes quiet, and it’s almost as if your ears open. So if you really wanted to listen, you could just say, “Ahhh!” And if you were listening and understanding things, you might say, “Ahhh!” Or perhaps it could become a little bit more embellished with “Ah ha!”
And so the sense of aesthetic pleasure, the experience of beauty, whether it’s poetic beauty, or visual beauty, musical beauty, or just seeing the beauty in mathematics, or the beauty in your friends, all of these different things will open up, and you’ll have this feeling of aesthetic satisfaction. And if you can stay with it long enough, you’ll see that it’s organized, that your body is responding and you’re feeling it, not only intellectually or sensually, but you’re feeling it through all the different layers of your body, as if they’re all connected by a tube.
Another way to feel that is kindness or compassion. Those rare moments when you actually appreciate another being without any strings attached, in which you’re not thinking about yourself: “Oh, here I am, being compassionate!” or “Here I am, being kind!” But you actually really, they kind of catch you off guard, and non-self-consciously, you feel kind of an identity with another being, whether it’s a human being, or a bug, or a whale, or a dog. And that’s compassion, and that opens the central channel. And again, you start to feel from the central channel through all of the different layers of the body; eventually through all of the different ways that the mind is habituated, you start to feel this kind of joy.
TS: So what’s happening, Richard, whether it’s a moment of tremendous beauty or a moment of spontaneous compassion, that the subtle body would actually respond in that way? What’s the mechanism? What’s going on?
RF: Different schools of yoga seem to agree that the mind, which is called the chitta, and prana, which is the way that sensation is organized through the body and mind, are two ends of the same stick. So there’s a physiology, or a pranic pattern to an ecstatic state of mind. So there is a body-mind connection that way, and yoga just exploits that connection. And so we start to experience one of these finer states of mind. And there’s endless varieties of fine states of mind, because you can never repeat one with exactly the same content. But you start to notice its physiological qualities.
And so hatha yoga, which is the yoga that deals with primarily pranayama and posture and mudra and kundalini awakening, tries to create the physiology of an insightful state of mind. That way the body and the prana help support your focus or your concentration on whatever that indescribable, fine thing is that you’re discovering. So you need to really listen.
Say you’re listening to Mozart, and there’s one phrase that is just beautiful and you have to concentrate, so your body gets ready: “Let me concentrate.” And so a musician will do all kinds of things to concentrate. And so the yoga practitioner does the same thing. And so in yoga practice, we’re learning, we’re cultivating this sensitivity in the body so that the whole body can participate in our mental focus.
So the releasing of the root of the palette in traditional yoga is extremely relaxing, initially through the whole body. And in that relaxation, the metaphor is of the falling down of prana—or some schools would say shakti—from the back of the palette, the root of the palette, through the whole body. And so it’s almost like a fine comb going through your sense fields as you relax, and this prana falls down, or it’s the release of apana, and it eventually ends up on the earth. And earth in the yoga body is the pelvic floor, and this is kind of where the water goes down and you’re “Ah!” And then you can relax once you’re truly seated on the earth. And then the earth responds, and it’s almost like a seed grows from the center of the earth, and it returns back up the central path where it came from.
TS: There’s a quote that I wrote down from The Mirror of Yoga that says, “Yoga unites opposite patterns in the nervous system in order to open up the core of the body for our observation.” It sounds like that’s what you’re getting at here in terms of introducing this idea of apana falling down and prana rising up. Could you say more about this, this idea of the opposite patterns and their uniting?
RF: So we have top-to-bottom opposite patterns, prana and apana. Apana behaves like water: it goes down and it contracts, and it’s said to govern exhaling and squeezing things out of the body. And so we try to release the apana, which is our held tensions when we first start practicing. We hold our thoughts in our body, particularly in our head if we’re—or if you work at a computer, you’re holding it in your neck and your face and your eyes. Just again to say, “Ah,” or some way have some kind of way to begin the practice, which drops the apana. And you initially become quite composed and relaxed. And eventually it will drop all the way through the whole system. We’ll take any kind of dropping to begin with.
It’s complementary opposite is the same energy. It’s all made of the same stuff, but there’s a pattern that rises up and spreads out, and this is the stimulation of the sense fields, and this is the pattern that is called prana. And it governs inhaling, and it tends to go from this sense of relaxed natural unity out into the many, so it’ll sprout ideas, stories, fantasies. And if the mind isn’t trained well, as you stimulate your sense fields, you start to see sense objects in the sense field, just like we ordinarily do. We see things in the world around us, and normally we see them as somewhat separate from their backgrounds. And so prana is this rising up and going out.
But stimulating that, we tend to get lost in the individual branches, the stories of the mind. And so again, you have to drop the apana in order to kind of let go of all that sense of grasping of form, and return to just being here, nowhere to go. No one needs to go anywhere because there’s no one to go anywhere, and there’s nowhere to go. That’s the realization that might occur with prana, or with the apana.
But then the prana loves to create stories, becoming: “I am so-and-so and I need to attain enlightenment” or “I need to go out and save the world or save other beings.” And these are beautiful ideas, and they’re associated with at least the creation of a theoretical self or subject, and then all these objects, time and space. And it really isn’t our personal mind that’s doing this; it’s just the way that the world is.
So you have those two opposites. The prana needs to drop so you can have a direct experience of the dissolution of the forms and patterns, categories, ideas, that thrive and unfold on the tree of the prana. So you need both.
And then the idea of opposites are whenever you have an attitude or a theory about the world, your intelligence or your prana in the background creates a kind of opposite to it. And so say in my ego structure, I create the idea, “Well, I’m a good guy.” And then my mind or the unconscious mind, the unconscious intelligence, projects, “Bad guy out!” And I don’t realize that “good guy” and “bad guy” are interdependent concepts.
And so in my body, to do yoga, I have to find the complementary opposite for each idealized pattern that the mind has made and grasped onto. I find it’s complementary opposite pranically, and it’s embedded in the sensation of the body, and I have to discover their interdependence. And then when I do that, I can let them go.
And so this is the idea of the chakras. You have to balance the front sections of your pelvic floor with the back sections of the pelvic floor, but you’ll find that they’re conditioned, just from your life experience. So you have ways of being in the world where you believe yourself to be certain things, and you are scared to death of other things. And your experiences, particularly through childhood, have reinforced these samskaras, or these patterns. And so the processes of yoga are a way of discovering my biases, and then balancing them, or discovering their opposites, and then letting it go.
And in letting go, I can return to what’s really important. And what was important was earlier on held in a container, and then what happens is that what is important always spills out over the borders of whatever container I make. And my container might be an image of God, or it might be a political doctrine, which when it initially arose was appropriate and useful, but then was insufficient to really contain the whole complex reality. And so I have to let go of it. And so the process of yoga is a way of seeing through something in order to let go of it.
TS: OK, I want to unpack a couple of the things you said. You mentioned this term “samskaras,” and I’d like you to say a little bit more about that, what they are, how they form, and then how hatha yoga helps them de-form, if that’s the right word.
RS: So the word “samskara” just means “to put together. So it’s things that have been put together that don’t necessarily belong together. So for example, say as a child I fall down and hurt my knee on the playground, and everybody laughs at me. It’s a common experience. And so from then on, there’s a particular pattern associated with my knee that I scraped, and those pattern lines go through the body that I associate with being laughed at. So that is part of my memory system, that samskara.
And samskaras— There’s good samskaras, because there are a lot that come built-in with the human body that are necessary for survival, like the way we smell certain things, how certain odors are repulsive because they’re associated with poisonous things. But then there are a lot of our more personal samskaras, which have been survival mechanisms, but then they have prevented us from feeling certain realms of the full spectrum of sensation and feeling through the body. And then intellectually we cannot go to certain areas and imagine certain things because of samskaras. And so our imaginations are stunted by this sticking together of sensation, feeling, and experience. And our physical bodies are stunted by these samskaras.
And so much of the work of yoga is discovering samskaras, and then holding them, or holding the sensation patterns or the thought patterns, as if they were objects of meditation, or holding them as if they were—not reacting to them in the normal way. And in this way, we can experience the sensations and feelings or the prana pattern as being not necessarily associated with the thought patterns that we’d always believed in.
TS: So we’re experiencing the energy, but we’re disconnecting it—
RF: We’re experiencing the sensations without the mind running off with the memories and thoughts. And so this gradually deconditions the prana body, so you’re able to experience all kinds of levels of sensations in the body, and through the five senses, and through combinations of the five senses. And then in your mind, you become more flexible in your intelligence, and you’re able to imagine all kinds of things without seeing your ego invested in them. And so it’s highly stimulating and freeing.
And so the whole principle of samskara is again the basic principle of getting the map confused with the territory, which is the basic ignorance that yoga hopes to see through, in which my mind makes a symbol for things, and that way I can think more quickly. But the symbol is never the thing that it symbolizes.
TS: Now, you said something interesting, that some samskaras are necessary, like the sense of smell, and I don’t want to smell something terrible and ingest it. Now, I was always under the impression that samskaras were conditioning and something that I wanted to unbind or—
RF: Or something you want to see through. Because you do want to have memory and associations. Like when you’re driving down the street, the fact that I know that in this country I should drive on the right side of the road, you want to keep those. But you also have to see that they’re contingent, that they’re merely conditional, and depending on context, circumstance.
TS: OK, that makes sense. So now to link this back to the way people think of hatha yoga and doing these, as we said, twists and turns and contortions, etc., how in that process am I seeing through samskaras, potentially?
RF: Potentially, yes. If you’re doing the yoga practices in the context of mindfulness practice— So traditionally I would say, if you’re doing hatha yoga within the context of raja yoga, meaning you’re doing it in order to really see, then the practices are used to kind of uncover the nature of your mind. So the practices help to expose your mind. And they have a lot of other benefits to them, but those are not the main point or the main benefit. Like you become healthier by balancing the body and improving the circulation, all of these things they do, but ultimately the body is going to die anyway, so it’s not the main point.
However, the practices can all be perverted, and the ego function of the mind can co-opt all of the yoga, and one can start practicing in order to become a more solid entity. Which is completely understandable: the ego function is likely to co-opt any kind of spiritual or meditative or religious discipline. And then what’s common is that one day, maybe through getting feedback from others, they discover, “Oh, I’ve been doing that!” And the idea is then to just see that, to see that this is the way that the mind works, that it naturally tries to reduce it to a kind of materialism. And this is the normal way the mind works.
And so given the right context, given a proper lineage or a proper teacher, one is going to experience their own mind doing the most ridiculous things with the yoga. And this is an essential part of the practice, to be able to witness the worst things in your own mind, and then to see them change.
TS: One of the programs that you’ve created with Sounds True is Yoga Breathing: 2 Guided CDs on the Art of Pranayama. And we’ve been talking a little bit about this union of opposite forces. Previously in our discussion, you were talking about apana and prana, and how we can work with both as rising and falling energy. And I’m curious if you can connect that more to the breath and the practice of pranayama, and this union of opposites that can be experienced.
RF: Within the schools of yoga that I’ve studied, pranayama is really the central practice, even though asana is initially emphasized. Asana becomes the gateway into a really fine pranayama practice. And so we try to practice pranayama as we’re doing asana, and then also have a separate practice of pranayama.
And so this is because all of sensations and thoughts are mediated through prana. So as you think, every thought you think, there’s a response in the sensation patterning in the body. And through practice, you become very sensitive to that. So practically every proposition my mind makes rebounds off the pelvic floor, and rebounds to the different layers along the central axis. And so you’re kind of getting feedback from your deeper or subtle body all the time about your thinking.
And the way to access those feelings is very easily done through the breathing, because prana is much more than breathing. But prana and apana have direct control over breathing, inhaling and exhaling. And through it, you can start to access how you’re thinking and how you’re feeling. And though advanced pranayama practices, where you’re deliberately stretching your breath out to see what’s there, and then holding the breath to get particular responses, is something you have to be prepared to do, and you have to be trained to do, so that you don’t go crazy or blow a gasket.
Just simple pranayama practices or beginning pranayama practices everyone can do, because everyone is already breathing. And so just beginning with mindfulness of the breath to very simple ujjayi breathing, where you create a whispering sound with your breath so that you can easily extend it, so you’re in a very pleasant way breathing more deeply. These are accessible to everyone.
And in doing that, you start to uncover feelings and thought patterns that normally you’re not dealing with in your everyday, distracted, discursive mind. You’re not really dealing with how you’re really feeling things, because you’re playing a role in your normal conscious day, and you’ve got to do this and you’ve got to do that. And perhaps your intelligence way in the background has doubts, or has more enthusiasm. And so just the practice of pranayama really brings feelings and inspiration or doubt right up to to the surface, so that you can observe it and feel it and process it.
TS: I’m wondering as a gift to our listeners if you’d be able to take us through a brief introductory component of pranayama, just a brief example to give people a sense of connecting with their breath in the way that you’re describing.
RF: I can try. So this can be done seated. I would recommend someone sit straight in a comfortable way. So if padmasana (full lotus) is comfortable, you can do that, or just a cross-legged form, or sitting in a chair with feet on the floor, whatever is not going to create pain in the joints of the body. And that’s basically the first requirement for pranayama, is that you have a proper asana, or a proper seat for practicing.
And then we can start. And the way to start is really to soften your eyes, because the eyes are really intimately a part of the brain. And as we think about things and as we worry about things or strive for things, the eyes are always flickering about, and there’s often a kind of tension in the eyes. So we can begin by letting the eyes be steady. And for some people, if the eyes are open, and they just find something kind of neutral, a kind of non-object object, out in front of them, just a visual pattern, the eyes can rest there. Other people find it easier to close the eyes.
And then as the eyes are steady and soft, the mind starts to focus. And as you focus the mind, a kind of tension arises in the body that you immediately let go of through the palette. And so this releases tension in the mouth, activity in the tongue. And then as if you’re smiling, as if you were compassionate, the upper back of the palette, the soft palette, releases. And this is a way of kind of suspending the language function, or dropping the apana, as we said earlier.
And then the technique that’s used in ujjayi pranayama is very helpful. And that is, you make a very soft aspirant sound with the breath, as you do in whispering. And so actually it’s the vocal cords that close a tiny bit, so you get a very smooth aspirant sound with both the inhale and exhale. And it’ll sound to some people like the wind in the trees; other people think it sounds like water flowing through pipes. And if you concentrate on the sound, automatically you’ll start to deepen the breath, you’ll start to smooth it out.
And the first stage is to find a kind of pleasure or delight just in the breath itself. And so there’s no need to stretch it a lot, although stretching will automatically occur when you listen to it, but there’s a kind of delight just in the sensations themselves that are associated with breathing.
And then after a few minutes of I would say pleasurable breathing, we can start to notice the ends of the breaths. And so the crest of the inhale, when the inhale comes to its fullest point, the muscles in the throat move a tiny bit. And if you release your palette as the throat moves, as if you were saying “Ah,” then the awareness drops from over the head back down through the palette into the heart as you exhale. And so exhaling becomes a way of meditating on or relishing the residual sensations from the inhale.
And so this way, keeping the heart or the central line of the body open as you exhale, then the end of the exhale—even if it’s not a complete exhale, though occasionally you do make it all the way down—the end of the exhale will create a kind of closing pattern in the abdominal wall and the pelvic floor. And so when we inhale, we try to draw our attention down under the belly so that we can stay in touch with the residual grounding pattern of the exhale, as we fill back up inhaling. And so in this way, the inhaling pattern is drawn through as you would pull a thread through the eye of a needle, the inhaling pattern is drawn through the seed point of the exhaling pattern. And then by keeping the back of your palette released, the exhale pattern is a way of allowing the seed point of the inhale in the heart to radiate out throughout the whole exhale.
And so this is the basic pattern of pranayama, where during the movement of the inhale, you’re really concentrating on the residue of the exhale, and during the movement of the exhale, you’re concentrating on the residue of the inhale. And since they’re two ends of the same stick, they’re naturally linked together. And this has a very fine effect on the mind in all of its stages. It’s just a matter of practicing, and then it naturally becomes finer and smoother and more precise.
TS: Thank you, Richard.
RF: You’re welcome.
TS: You said it’s just a matter of practicing, which brings me to a question. You’ve been now practicing yoga for four decades?
RF: Over four decades. Though I wonder, maybe— I’m kind of practicing practicing, but soon I hope to actually take up the discipline.
TS: What do you mean by that?
RF: Well, it’s almost like always returning to the beginning, because the mind likes to create it as “Oh, you’re going somewhere,” up to heaven, or some exalted place, when in fact just getting back to the kind of zero point of the present moment is the most profound and satisfying feeling, in which you’re not really there, it’s just like everything else is there, but you’re not there. It’s such a relief. And so I hope to get back any day now!
And that’s the beginning of the practice, right in the present moment. Then you start over again. Because any kind of edifice you build from practicing, [like] “Oh, I’m so accomplished” or “I am so this, I am so that,” that’s just a house of cards that’s going to get knocked over. And so I hope to start any moment now!
TS: On the one hand, of course I know what you’re saying. But on the other hand, there’s some sense—and this is what I’m curious about—that over these four decades, there’s been some flowering or unfolding or greater depth of realization, something like that. And I’m curious what you might say about that, how you might map it, if you would, if you had to, since I’m asking you to!
RF: I notice a gradual easing in myself of suffering. It’s easier for me to recognize patterns that my own mind makes, and then on occasion to let go of those patterns. But traditionally, the path is mapped out as going over the course of endless numbers of lifetimes in order to keep the mind practicing. We’re trained always to look at ourselves as beginners. It’s very dangerous to achieve some exalted state, and then to give up paying attention. So I like to keep practicing, see.
And so traditionally, if one were to think, “Oh, I’ve been practicing for 42 years now,” that’s nice, but at the rate I’m going, maybe 42,000 more lifetimes I’ll start to understand this. And that’s a way of showing an appreciation for the profundity of the depth of what this actually is. And then perhaps if you had a deeper taste of what actually is, you might expand that to “Well, 42,000! That’s nothing. Maybe 42,000,000 more years of practice.” And then through practicing, you start to say, “Wow! This is just absolutely astonishing! Maybe 42,000,000,000 more lifetimes and I’ll get it.” And even that proposition is exciting.
And so the sense of being a beginner is no longer something that the ego tries to squirm out of. But I’m willing to spend however long it takes doing it. Because the process itself is exciting. Just doing a little bit of pranayama and a little bit of mindfulness practice is thrilling. And who knows where it all leads to?
TS: Well, Richard, I want to talk to you again at “Insights at the Edge.” I hope I have the opportunity to do so, there’s many more things I’d like to talk to you about. But I just want to end with this one question, which is that our program is called “Insights at the Edge,” and I’m curious for you—here you’ve talked about beginning, beginning, beginning, but what would you say is your “edge”? An edge of discovery, understanding, confusion perhaps? Anything.
RF: My edge is something that my mind keeps returning to, almost like a puzzle. And it’s in the contemporary yoga world, it’s this puzzle of there being so many schools and attitudes that seem to be competing with each other, and how I can teach people the kind of basic absurdity of how we divide ourselves, or how we create our school of thought or our own personal religion. Even though it’s inevitable that we do that, how we can better understand that process in ourselves and our neighbors so we can reconnect, or let go of it?
I see this kind of stupidity arising in myself, but when you read the newspaper and you read about political things, it’s the same stupidity going on. And then you start to see what’s going on in the contemporary yoga world, which is simultaneously a brilliant synthesis, because there’s so much available to us now, so many different traditions that are fine traditions, and yet our human tendency to be stupid about it, and to try to create our own true way. It’s just our natural ego-function working. And it’s embarrassing; I see it in myself. It’s still there.
TS: You’re going to have the best method of breaking down all dogmas and fundamentalism and division! You’ll be the number-one best method! Just a joke there, Richard.
RF: I’ll have the best method, then I can sell it and take over the world with it.
TS: Exactly!
RF: And the mind is, it’s a jujitsu artist: it’ll just take everything from behind and flip it over. It’s kind of thrilling, a predicament like this. But I think we get by with communicating with others, seeing that everybody else is in the same predicament.
TS: Now, we started with a chant, and you said that it was traditionally a chant that could be done at the beginning and at the end, so I wonder, would you be willing?
RF: Yes.
TS: Thank you.
RF: [Chants in Sanskrit]
TS: Thank you, Richard.
RF: Thank you very much, Tami.
TS: Today I’ve been speaking with Richard Freeman. He’s the author of a new book called The Mirror of Yoga, from Shambhala Publications. And he’s also created four different programs with Sounds True: The Yoga Matrix, which is a six-CD series on the body as a gateway to freedom, and The Yoga Matrix audio program became the seed of the book The Mirror of Yoga. Also a two-CD program Yoga Breathing: 2 Guided CDs on the Art of Pranayama, and an instructional two-CD program called Yoga Chants, which are chants that allow you to deepen your yoga practice. And additionally we have a collection of three DVDs of yoga instruction with Richard called The Ashtanga Yoga Collection.
SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks everyone for listening.
