Issue Three: Practice
In the last note, we explored the unsuspecting things that are already overhauling our attention. We explored how our expectations influence us at a level that precedes, and in many cases limits our consciousness. Most importantly, we detailed how some of the seemingly insignificant aspects of our practice hold real potency and can radically expand what we are capable of attending to in the first place.
In this note we are going to answer the question - If our attention has been shaped by everything we've repeatedly done before, can we deliberately shape what it becomes capable of noticing next?
Would you rather listen to this note?
The Sanskrit word sādhana is often used to mean simply the contents of your practice. Translated more specifically it means a methodical discipline undertaken towards a goal.
My favourite definition though came from a teacher of Vajrayana Buddhism who defined it beautifully as ‘liberating discipline’. For me it captures the essence of what we want from a practice perfectly. It’s a structure we commit to in order that we can become more free in how we move, feel and respond. A structure that helps us to get outside of the box. Another teacher said that ‘Sādhana is what happens when practice stops being random and starts becoming a path.’
One of the reasons sādhana is so powerful is that it harnesses something very ordinary about how human beings actually work. We are creatures of repetition.
Much more of our lives is habitual than we probably like to imagine.
We wake in familiar ways. We move in familiar ways. We think familiar thoughts. We take familiar routes through conversations, relationships and decisions.
Our brains and nervous systems become increasingly efficient at doing what they have repeatedly been asked to do.
When we become dissatisfied with our situation though and want something to change often we go looking for novelty.
A new technique;
A new teacher;
Perhaps a new piece of information that is finally interesting, inspiring or powerful enough to dislodge something.
Whilst it’s true that those lightbulb moments are plentiful, rarely do they carry enough weight to break the momentum of what is quite literally often lifetimes worth of practice. I know you can think of many times you had a realisation that you pledged would change the fabric of your life that didn’t.
Because noticing a new possibility, and bringing it into reality are not at all the same thing.
Change - ironically perhaps - occurs through repetition.
What we repeatedly attend to, practise and respond to becomes increasingly available to us. Simple enough?
Rather than deny we are creatures of habit, the routine of a regular practice, builds from it. We return over and again to the breath, and the posture, and the quiet space for meditation, and in doing so something starts to shift in the background - and it’s far more than just becoming more accomplished at the thing we are practising.
Liberating Discipline (Yoga loves an oxymoron!)
At a first glance, it would seem that liberation and discipline are the opposite - especially when the words routine and discipline are so closely tied, and for many of us what we long to feel free from is a pre-determined routine - but it doesn’t take long to realise the two only occur effectively in relationship.
Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge and learning, speech, music and the creative arts. She is often depicted carrying a stringed instrument which is perhaps the perfect example of this.
No matter how intrinsically talented, or deeply interested in music someone is they don’t become proficient as a musician through their creativity alone. The first step is learning the scales. Movements that condition the hands, and fold the progression of the sounds into implicit knowing. An avid musician will likely run through thousands and thousands of them in a lifetime.
At first it takes a great deal of attention simply to have the fingers in the right place, to apply the correct pressure, and move at the correct speed. But eventually, the familiarity of the scale demands less and less attention, and all that resource is freed up instead for spontaneity. To improvise, to interpret. To play!
And, much like the foundational practices of yoga, the scales are not something that are ticked off as complete and then never revisited. Rather, they remain an active part of the practice and preparation to ensure that their availability remains ready at the surface.
Sādhana works in much the same way. When the foundational patterns becomes familiar enough that we no longer have to devote all of our attention to simply performing it, attention becomes available for something else.
At first, the structure consumes us.
Eventually, the structure holds us.
And from that stable base expression, creativity and freedom flourish.
We discover the subtleties that simply weren't available when all of our attention was occupied with remembering what came next. And importantly that weren’t available until we’d stretched out our attention span, and dropped our assumptions about what was coming next anyway.
The patterns that repeat themselves
Of course, repetition doesn't only create patterns we have deliberately chosen.
There is another Sanskrit word worth introducing here: saṃsāra. Traditionally, saṃsāra describes the cycle of conditioned existence - most famously the cycle of birth, death and rebirth. But we don't have to believe in multiple lifetimes to recognise something of the mechanism it describes. We recycle patterns.
Something happens and leaves an impression. Yoga gives us the word saṃskāra for these impressions: the traces of previous experience that become part of the way we meet whatever happens next.
We encounter something similar again and that previous impression is already there, guiding us into a groove of prior experience.
Every repetition makes that particular route a little more familiar, and little more inevitable. Eventually, the pattern begins to acquire what we might even call karmic momentum.
I find that thinking about karma as momentum is the most useful way to start thinking about karma rather than how it is often presented as a harbinger of cosmic accountability, the universal punishment for our misdeeds, or rewards for our good actions. Non-dual practices come in many different forms but at the core of them is the statement that underneath everything, there is ultimately only one thing. No fundamental good. No fundamental bad. Karma then is not some external judge, rather, it is either gaining or losing mass in response to our additions. It’s entirely impartial in the process, but it is responding to everything that occurs.
Whatever language we use for it, the important part for our purposes is that momentum reduces possibility. The more established a pattern becomes, the less space there appears to be between something happening and our response to it. Eventually the response can feel so inevitable that we stop experiencing it as a response at all. It is simply what happens, what we do, or perhaps even who we are.
This is where sādhana becomes much more than simply having a healthy routine.
Practice gives us somewhere to interrupt that momentum. Not necessarily so that we can replace one fixed response with another supposedly better one, but so that we can create enough space within the pattern for choice to become available again.
Perhaps that is one useful way of thinking about liberation in practice. Not the extraordinary ability to somehow exist without conditioning, but an increasing capacity to recognise our conditioning before it decides for us.
There is another useful word in the Yoga Sūtras for this: viveka, usually translated as discernment or discrimination.
In Yoga Sūtra 2.26 Patañjali introduces viveka-khyāti, sustained discriminative knowledge, as the means through which our fundamental misidentification can be overcome. Then in 2.28 he connects this directly to practice: as the obscurations are diminished through yoga, the light of knowledge develops towards discernment.
In much simpler terms, we practise in order to see more clearly.
That sounds almost too obvious to warrant saying, but it changes the emphasis of practice quite considerably. We're not simply practising to become calmer, stronger or more flexible. We're creating the conditions in which we might become progressively less confused about what we're actually experiencing.
Because paying attention, as we explored in the last Note, isn't automatically the same thing as seeing clearly. We can pay extremely close attention and still be wrong. We can notice someone's behaviour and completely misunderstand their intention. We can feel something intensely and misunderstand what that feeling means. We can even become incredibly observant whilst mostly gathering evidence for something we already believe.
This is perhaps where the distinction between judgement and discernment becomes more important.
Judgement tends to be fast. Something happens and almost immediately our previous experience rushes forward to complete the picture. We know what it means, whether we like it, whose fault it is and what normally happens next.
Discernment doesn't require us to throw any of that experience away. Quite the opposite: experience is enormously useful. It allows us to recognise patterns, avoid mistakes, develop confidence and acquire skill. Discernment simply asks whether we can remain aware that what we know is part of what we're bringing to the experience, rather than necessarily being the totality of what is there.
Can I see what is actually in front of me before everything I already know rushes in to tell me what it means?
Perhaps this is one of the real skills we are trying to develop through practice: to become more capable without becoming more certain. To know more without assuming that we therefore know everything. To develop discernment without mistaking our discernment for an infallible view of reality.
And if that all sounds rather abstract, fortunately yoga gives us an exceptionally convenient place to practise it.
Our own body.
Why the body?
If the purpose of all this is to work with attention, conditioning and discernment, it is reasonable to ask why yoga spends so much time involving the body at all. Why not simply sit down and think really carefully about ourselves? Indeed arguably for a long time that was exactly what yoga did consist of!
One answer is that the body gives us an extraordinarily immediate place to observe the difference between what is happening and what we think is happening.
Come into a familiar posture and notice how quickly you already know what you're going to find. My hamstrings are tight. I'm bad at balancing. This is my good side. My back doesn't bend that way. I should be able to go further than this. Some of those statements might be completely accurate, but something interesting has already happened before we've had the opportunity to find out.
Sensation has become story.
And story becomes identity.
We haven't simply noticed a particular sensation in our hamstrings today; we've become someone with tight hamstrings. We haven't simply wobbled; we're bad at balancing. A temporary sensory experience has been compared against everything that came before it and folded into an existing idea of who we are.
This is one of the reasons the body is such a potent vehicle for practice. We are very strongly identified with it, and it produces an almost constant stream of sensory information with which we can practise.
Rather than immediately asking what a sensation means, we can get curious about what is actually there. Pressure, temperature, stretch, effort, trembling, breath, an impulse to stop, an impulse to push harder. Then we can notice the almost instantaneous arrival of the interpretation that follows.
The aim isn't to get rid of interpretation. Nor should we start distrusting every signal our body gives us. The practice is simply to become increasingly interested in where sensation ends and interpretation begins.
Once we do that, even the most familiar āsana becomes rather more interesting than arranging our body into a particular shape. It becomes a controlled environment in which we can watch perception, conditioning and response happening in real time.
The body is where we learn discernment.
Tarka
There is another concept from the Tantrik traditions that adds something useful here. Many of us who have spent time around yoga will be familiar with Patañjali's eight-limbed system. Less commonly discussed are the varyingly limbed systems that appear in throughout the broader Yoga traditions. One that makes a regular appearance is tarka. The word can be translated in a number of ways, including reasoning, inquiry or reflection, but in this context I'm particularly interested in its role as a kind of contemplative investigation.
It is important because tarka reminds us that noticing our experience isn't the end of the process. We can interrogate what we notice.
Is that actually what is happening? What part of this is sensation and what part is memory? What am I expecting? What am I assuming? Is the conclusion I've reached the only one available to me?
And, of course,
What happens if I look again?
I love that this process of inquiry finds a place within yoga itself, because it makes clear that practice doesn't require us to become passive recipients of our experience, nor to unquestioningly believe everything that arises within us. We pay attention and then we get curious about what our attention reveals.
This is also why discernment is different from simply having better judgement. We're not trying to become faster or more sophisticated at reaching conclusions. We're trying to become increasingly capable of recognising the material from which those conclusions are being constructed.
Each time we do that, we loosen a little of the inevitability of the pattern.
Beginning again
There is, however, a quality required for all of this that is much harder to teach.
We have to be genuinely willing to discover something we weren't expecting. We have to be genuinely willing to have been wrong, or at the least, only partially informed.
Zen gives us a particularly lovely language for this in shoshin, usually translated as beginner's mind. At first glance it's a beautifully uncomplicated instruction: remain curious, stay open-minded, try to see something without immediately burdening it with everything you already know - or think you know - about it. But beginner's mind becomes considerably more challenging once we have some experience. It's relatively easy to be a beginner when we know we don't know. It is much harder to approach something openly when we're fairly convinced we already understand it.
Beginner's mind isn't asking us to pretend our experience doesn't exist. That would make very little sense given everything we've just explored about practice and repetition. Rather, it asks us not to let experience have the final word. We can know the sequence and still pay attention to what happens today. We can know someone incredibly well and still allow them to surprise us. We can have a great deal of experience in our work and still entertain the possibility that something has changed. We can know ourselves intimately without assuming that everything we've previously believed about ourselves has to remain true.
Tantra uses a slightly different word with a slightly different flavour; sukumāra. It carries connotations of softness, delicacy, tenderness and receptivity. For me, it describes a willingness to remain sufficiently soft so that experience can actually reach us.
Beginner's mind is about becoming willing to begin again inside something familiar.
Which, of course, takes us straight back to the topic of this note sādhana. Although by this point you could be forgiven for thinking the purpose of this note was to define every Sanskrit word beginning with ’s’ I could think of!
We have covered quite a lot of terminology here, but underneath it the process is surprisingly straightforward.
The practice is to return to something often enough that it becomes familiar, but to resist allowing that familiarity to determine what we find.
We return, we pay attention, we question what we notice, and then - hopefully, gradually - we become a little more free in how we respond.
We are using repetition deliberately to work with patterns that were themselves created through repetition.
We are not trying to eliminate our conditioning, or reach some imagined state in which nothing that has happened to us previously has any bearing on what happens next. We are simply trying to become familiar enough with the process that we can occasionally catch it in the act.
Karma does not make what happens next absolutely inevitable. It makes some things increasingly likely. The groove gets deeper, the familiar response becomes easier, and eventually we can travel a very long way along it before we even notice we've started moving.
Practice gives us somewhere to notice sooner.
Ultimately, practice gives us the opportunity to choose.
In the body, this might be the moment I feel a sensation and catch myself declaring what it means. In meditation, it might be noticing the familiar thought before disappearing into it. Outside the practice room, it might be recognising the beginnings of a reaction before I have already said the thing I know I'm going to regret.
None of this is particularly dramatic… which is why we can so easily underestimate it.
We tend to imagine transformation as the moment something changes, when more often the important work is everything that makes a different response increasingly available when that moment arrives.
The musician practises the scales so that when the music asks for something spontaneous, their hands have somewhere to go, and we practise on the mat for much the same reason. So that when life presents us with something we didn't rehearse, we have more than one response available to us.
A Small Practice
If you've been following these Notes from the beginning then you’ve already got two practices, and we are using this reflection to revisit with fresh eyes rather than add another. Keep the space you made in Issue One, and the attention we began playing with in Issue Two. Choose something very simple to put inside it: a few breaths, a familiar posture, five minutes of sitting, or a short sequence you already know.
Then, for the next week, deliberately keep it the same. Resist the temptation to make it more interesting, more ‘advanced’ or complex.
Each time you return, see if you can notice the process we've been exploring throughout this Note.
What can I actually feel?
What did I expect to feel?
At what point did sensation become interpretation?
What do I already think I know about this?
You don't need to answer every question every time, and you certainly don't need to arrive at some profound realisation. The point is simply to give yourself enough repetition that the structure starts to become less interesting than what is happening within it.
Next time, we'll explore what it means to yield to the process…
Until then,
Chris & Debbie