The definition of Integral Yoga shapeshifts, just as I myself shapeshift.
I study Integral Yoga ad infinitum, as I will study my changing selves. The principles I have learned so far have guided me toward meeting myself as I am now: a changeling, a therapist-in-training (whom I admire), who will evolve, who can give space so others can transform into a self they admire with the new cells they acquire, to see ourselves as imperfect beings with no need to aspire. We walk in between worlds and jump around in times. The sutras and fight or flight prepare us for collisions with distinct definitions and other points in time-and-space and then their opposite or distinct value sends us whirling a shade to the right, a shade to left and also in-between.
I am a white, newly (and ever so slightly) middle-aged cis-heterosexual (probably not all hetero, and quite often don’t feel like any gender or anything at all, but raw energy or sludge). I was raised in a middle-class household with two mothers. I am educated (with the gaps that come with terrible distraction, age, substance abuse and the American Public School System) and have a degree in English and Scottish Literature, an MFA in Creative Writing, and am once again a graduate student ,and once again living with my mothers, as if I returned to the time of my adolescence. Slammed back down into my room from the future to the past. “The Divine Mother and the Mother Country”
THERE IS NO ORDER. Sutra, airplanes, blackouts, sutra, breath, eyes open:
When I was twenty, I developed anorexia and meanwhile a practice and devotion to embodied Ashtanga Yoga. Stretching and starving myself, feeling welcomed to the Yogic tradition and holding it with love and curiosity, and at times–desperation. I studied the sutras and the asanas. I imagined Yoga meaning union, connection and being one with another. I have heard anorexia associated with privilege and yet I don’t, off hand, associate privilege and dying, and still the shame made me feel I deserved to be smothered in mud and I choked, at refusing a cheesy slice of deep-dish pizza, an ice cream in summer, or a slice of birthday cake. I could feel the food, this precious food that gives life and signifies something to the baker or the birthday boy, already transforming itself into rolls of white, curdled fat under my skin. It felt like a madness with no end and no beginning. I wondered where it led. Nowhere and still, I went ahead.
How can we heal from our mind, if our mind wants us dead? Sutra.
“Sunyata
The spiritual conquerors have proclaimed sunyata to be the exhaustion of all theories and views; those for whom sunyata is itself a theory they declared uncurable.
We interpret pratiya-samutpada as sunyata. Sunyata is guilding, not a cognitive, notion, presupposing the everyday. (MMK, XII;8, XXIV: II, I8)55. P 88
‘Are these really contradictory, or does the exhaustion of perspectives liberate us for the polyvalence of many perspectives?
‘Ultimate serenity is the coming to rest of all ways of taking things, the repose of named things; no Truth has been taught by a Buddha for anyone, anywhere.’ (MMK XXV:24)” (Lack and Transcendence, 1996, p. 88)
And in this sanctity, me. Skipping back to a state of existing!
My year abroad in Edinburgh University, once again positioned me to learn, I would run around the green meadows no matter how cold it got, with hunger gnawing at me like another absence; a world of microbiome crying for carrots and cashews. When I practiced yoga, I felt in touch with my body at last. What body? Meanwhile, in California, my mother was drinking herself to what we thought would be her death, (and thank the fathomless universe she stopped and now lives a sober life in the here-and-now, where I am am) and I ran from the pain. Sutra, a stick in time. “The mind looks down at the body, realizes what flesh implies, and panics. As a consequence, ‘everything that the man does in his symbolic world is attempt to deny and overcome his grotesque fate. He literally drives himself into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of his situation the they are forms of madness’ ” (Lack and Transcendence, 1996, p. 8)
In Edinburgh I went to sessions of life drawing where I could look at other people’s remarkable bodies, the magic body and felt my own body withering. I felt inverted from the fear of losing the ones I loved. Something solid but capable of disappearing. When I got very thin, and hadn’t had my period for a year, I remember noticing my missing libido and its lack protecting me from closeness with other people. My breasts almost blended into my bony chest. Sutra: “In contrast, Sri Aurobindo’s ‘integral yoga’ is the seeking for consciousness that is integral, an ontology of wholeness which overcomes the alienated discontinuity of human existence…A transcontinental discourse of resistance to the objectification, fragmentation. And functional exploitation of consciousness under the oncoming rush…(Banerji, D Introduction. Seven Quartets of Becoming.) (This yoga from another world is happening always. Saving me my own transcontinental fragmentation. Sutra…)
JUMP FORWARD. New me. New definitions. Miraculously surviving like a cat with nine lives. Questing onward in search to “rid the mind of thoughts” (Banerji: Traditional Roots of Sri. Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga. (2016). p. 99)
I lived abroad for about twelve years in Spain where I taught English and consumed the sun of Spain, and the wine of Spain, and the men of Spain and the days of Spain– felt my past vanquished at last. Sutra:
I lived a new kind of life as an immigrant/expat. Participating daily in ruinous adventure. Parties, parties, parties. I tried to balance my new reality: teaching, tutoring, transport around Madrid and parties, new people. Endless streams of beautiful faces and parties with no end. Endless nights.
At twenty-eight I fell in love with an impure man. I attached my soul to him, worshipped him, only saw him, who in turn erased me of myself and god knows where I went. “Sutra 5. Ignorance is regarding the impermanent as permanent, the impure as pure, the painful as pleasant, and the non-Self and the Self” (Patanjali, 2005, p. 86 ) He lured me into Romeo and Juliet passion in the streets of Madrid. Black and blue marks arose on my body, someone’s body. They would hurt if touched. In the moments of stillness, I fit in the time to practice yoga in the top room of our flat; music in my headphones and a landing from having been lost. Breath into my heart center and I could reach for myself and try to soothe myself. A white girl doing downward dogs and men giggling, eyes on her ass.
“Without looking up from his device he said, ‘I need some data’
He is often like this: so, intent on what he is doing that he forgets to say Hello or Goodbye or to ask me how I am. I do not mind. I admire his dedication to his scientific work.
‘What data?’ I asked ‘Can I assist you?’
‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘In fact. I won’t get far if you don’t.
Today the subject of my research is’ – at this point he looked up from what he was doing and smiled at me—‘you.’ He has a most charming smile when he remembers to use it (Piranesi p. 21) But he spoke to me in Spanish and always asked, “Estás contenta?” I never was but as least he fed me and I ate. Love changes shape too. In the beginning love is kind, and sweet, and later it’s something you need and something you’ll die without.
I miss that world and that version of me. Singing as I walked toward my apartment and had no idea of how God would present himself or if he’d have gotten wasted and left me alone to wonder. As I approached our apartment, I would sing, “Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be, as you were, as you were, as an old memoryyyy yeah, memoryyyyyy yeah.” Nirvana. I can feel it happening without me. I can feel many worlds happening and many absences. Sutra 12: “Then again, when the subsiding past and rising images are identical, there is ekagrata parinama (one-pointedness).” (Patanjali, 2005, p. 181)
“We feel that our minds and knowledge are limited and finite. So, there must be a source of infinite knowledge. “ (Patanjali p.40) Using the knowledge for good. Liberating language instead of limiting language. Yoga saved her. Yoga makes him humble. She inhaled yoga and her lungs healing. I am going to yoga because I can’t take it anymore. Decolonized Yoga. Bathing in the multiplicity as a pause from the man who colonized me. And suddenly I am freed by a stranger (a woman in a bar).
Sitting in my childhood home having survived my past, I am learning to honor and learn from it—this is ad infinitum. I limit time-jumps if I can (although I dream often about wanting the love of that violent God). I flash back to how desperately I wanted to be bonier and bonier—thinking the less space I took up, the more value I would have as a woman. Now, as then, I went to yoga or I practiced in my room. I am reflecting again on the 12th stich and the words from the Yoga Sutras, “Vairagya” Detachment and “Abhyasa” Practice. I try to keep my mind from getting stuck in the love story that broke my heart and instead come back to the practice and dedication in my heart that seems to persist in all the realities, transcend what is Eliza here, to the Eliza there and there, to the Eliza everywhere. Encountering you, my fellow .
Referencies:
- Loy, D. (2000). Lack and Transcendence : The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism. Humanity Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books.
- Banjeri, D. (2022). Introduction. Seven Quartets of Becoming.
- Clarke, Susanna. (2020). Piranesi. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.
- Sri Swami Satchidananda. (2005) The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Trans ; 11th ed.
