{"id":3447,"date":"2014-01-01T10:55:43","date_gmt":"2014-01-01T15:55:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=3447"},"modified":"2014-01-01T10:55:43","modified_gmt":"2014-01-01T15:55:43","slug":"how-i-teach-yoga-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/how-i-teach-yoga-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"How I Teach Yoga Philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well first of all, as with Ayurveda<\/a>, I don\u2019t really teach<\/i>. How could I? What \u2013 do I know something? Not really. Even less as I get older. But I have gathered a ragged bouquet of question techniques that range from musings to proddings to provocation. Gentleness is key, because the discussion has to explore and penetrate belief, which is sometimes all a person thinks they have in defense against despair. Musings are good icebreakers for where we are frozen; provocations require familiarity and trust.<\/p>\n

The most repeated question for me, which I try to apply to every yoga-claim about the origin of the world or consciousness or the nature of the internal self-sense, is \u201cHow is this idea useful?\u201d Further: “How will it promote justice and resist the destructive impulses of the heart and civilization?” The demand for psychic and social utility exposes the word \u201cphilosophy\u201d as insufficient to the project of yoga, which doesn\u2019t \u201clove wisdom\u201d from an ivory tower so much as it wants to know: \u201cWho will I\/we become if I\/we see\/feel things (dar\u015bana) this way?\u201d<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve cooked my questions and shared them at the buffet of the seminar, here are some flavours that have emerged through the conversation that makes it all worthwhile.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It used to be that the unexamined life was not worth living. Now, the unexamined life is killing the planet. Staying mindful of our collective condition will keep things on point and our heads out of the stars. We are cooking ourselves toward a 3.5C temperature rise by 2035<\/a> in a world of gross injustice and inequality, masked by neo-liberal marketing and drowning in smarm. Maybe there\u2019s something to that old idea of Kaliyuga after all. Except it probably doesn\u2019t help to feel all orientalist-romantic-mythic-pious-resigned about it. One thing is for sure: if we\u2019re going to indulge in yoga philosophy, it ought to do<\/i> something for the salmon, the redwoods, our children, other people\u2019s children, people who are recovering from or still oppressed by colonization, and people who don\u2019t have enough to eat.<\/li>\n
  2. Beliefs conceal and suffocate unsolved problems. Describing the problem really well brings it back to life, generating a heat that can dissolve the belief, so that something new can form.<\/li>\n
  3. Allowing one\u2019s beliefs to stand unquestioned can be an act of passive violence against others.<\/li>\n
  4. Do we even care about philosophy? Didn\u2019t we get into yoga for the postures, the endorphin rush, to feel the flesh again? Well that\u2019s how many of us arrive, but at some point, barring a premature demise, our asanas will be limited to a few pelvic tilts in a hospital gurney, and this will be much enhanced if you can have meaningful and mentorly conversations with the younger people who come to visit you. According to Sv\u0101tm\u0101r\u0101ma\u00a0and other Ha\u1e6dha\u00a0yogis, philosophy and ethics flow naturally from the physical practices that dominate modern postural yoga. They suggest that if you reason and debate and try to improve your ethics before<\/i> sitting in gomukhasana to barf up your excess phlegm on a cotton rag or holding your breath until you\u2019re purple you\u2019ll just aggravate your internal psychic splitting. This may be true for some, but I imagine it\u2019s too rare to be significant. There are way too many posturing cotton-rag-barfing-purple-faced savants who are \u2013 surprise! \u2013 still<\/i> assholes for Sv\u0101tm\u0101r\u0101ma\u00a0to be simply taken as gospel on the point.<\/li>\n
  5. Let\u2019s seriously absorb the fact that all yoga philosophy arises prior to humanism, democracy, scientific method, and feminism. This means we really have to dig for the problems it can still dialogue with effectively. We\u2019ll have to peer into the ancient, internal, always-unnamed spaces of flesh and thought, untouched (if this is possible) by the last two centuries of technological change and industrial expansion, the last fifty years of post-modern ironic self-reference, and the last thirty years of identity politics. Is there something underneath our cultural constructions and oppressions that an Iron Age practitioner like Pata\u00f1jali\u00a0can address? Maybe \u2013 if we try to look past his<\/em> own constructions (if this is possible) to questions like \u201cWhat does my breath mean?\u201d or \u201cWhat can my attention do?\u201d or \u201cHow many layers of wordless silence can I experience if I get really still?\u201d or \u201cHow can I act with integrity, faith, and dispassion?\u201d Because he sure can\u2019t tell us anything about the ethics of climate or genetic engineering. If yoga philosophy has something to offer, it\u2019s probably the general encouragement to pay rapt attention to everything<\/i>. (Not half-assed internet attention.)<\/li>\n
  6. Other essential questions include: How should we live? (cf. Gita<\/i>) What is this sense of witnessing, and what does it mean? (cf. S\u016btras<\/em>) What is this flesh capable of? (cf. Ha\u1e6dha\u00a0Yoga\u00a0Prad\u012bpik\u0101<\/em>)<\/li>\n
  7. In years of conversation with fellow students, I\u2019ve noted six general fields over which these questions unfold. Existential honesty. The problem of the body. Feeling versus thinking. How we form, discover, manage, and change our patterning. Our capacity to witness. And: what’s the best balance between enjoyment and discipline?<\/li>\n
  8. But wait a minute. Even if we think we\u2019re finding \u201cessential\u201d questions beneath the cultural constructions that an archaic text cannot speak to, we have to ask: If there are people in the world who literally don\u2019t have the time or resources to consider them, are they really that essential?<\/i> In other words: let\u2019s not let doing yoga philosophy amplify privilege or distract us from the business of justice. You\u2019ll know this might be happening if you go for more than a day or so in your practice of memorizing the s\u016btras\u00a0without thinking about the state of polar ice, or what the lives of people who sew yoga clothes are like.<\/li>\n
  9. We have to be careful about the psychological hazing that can proceed from moral relativism. “Would you rather be right, or happy?” is supposed to back a person into the ecstasy of surrender. But in some areas we must never surrender, if we love the world and animals and other people. It may take longer to make us happy, or it may not make us happy at all, and we might need to take holidays from it for our personal health, but it is always good to campaign for what is right.<\/li>\n
  10. The books we use in yoga are old and aphoristic and deep and hard to read. It\u2019s good to accumulate many translations. If you can find an oral commentator to sit with that can be useful, but remember that they will hold their point of view as strongly as they hold the text.\u00a0It\u2019s good to slowly cozy up to Sanskrit, as much as you\u2019re able. The roots and etymologies are especially amazing. Above all, it\u2019s very good to realize that the commentarial tradition for each root text exposes so much variation in interpretation that it becomes obvious that each successive reading is a political act. The question of \u201cWhat did Pata\u00f1jali\u00a0mean exactly?\u201d is not only unsolvable by even the most elite Sanskritists and oral tradition-keepers (who themselves are separated from \u201coriginal meaning\u201d by millennia and incomprehensible cultural change), but also much less important than \u201cWhat should a collection of s\u016btras\u00a0say to us now?\u201d Doing yoga philosophy today means making active, creative choices about what kind of person you want to be, and what kind of world you want to live in. The old books provide limited, but sometimes crucial guidance. Their authority is often overblown: the inverse projection of self-doubt.<\/li>\n
  11. Many 19th\u00a0century ha\u1e6dha\u00a0and tantra yogis were guerrilla warriors. Their ethics demanded armed resistance to colonial occupation. There are reports of gangs of yogis hijacking stagecoaches filled with English, killing them, and roasting and eating their flesh. With the India Arms Act of 1878, the British Raj specifically forbade \u201cyogis\u201d from bearing firearms. They displayed a material pragmatism and political ferocity virtually absent in today\u2019s yoga culture. They would be interesting philosophy teachers to have. They would perhaps advocate that yogis engage in material sabotage of the industrial infrastructure that is killing the planet. They would have very convincing arguments, and they might be very confused by the idea of protesters meditating for peace beside the bitumen pipelines upon which their economy depends.<\/li>\n
  12. The subthemes of various Yoga philosophies have been relativized or displaced by later developments: each specialized, compartmentalized. Cosmology now belongs to physics. Ontology belongs to phenomenology. Psychology belongs to clinicians and psychodynamic psychotherapy practice. Neither\u00a0the Laws of Manu<\/i>\u00a0nor the Gita<\/i>\u00a0can give appropriate\u00a0policy advice. So it is really the scope<\/i> of yoga philosophy that matters now: its impulse as a grand project. It\u2019s an attitude that encourages the interdisciplinary heart with the whisper: make connections, make connections<\/i>. Yoga intuits that there are no hard lines between physics, biomedicine, and psychology. Yoga says: think as generalists as well as specialists. E.M. Forster\u2019s epigram to Howard\u2019s End<\/em> says it well: Only connect the poetry and prose of life\u2026<\/i><\/li>\n
  13. <\/i>Foucault points out in The Order of Things <\/i>that\u00a0our narrowness of imagination is exposed when we encounter the outrageous mixing of disciplines and categories flaunted by ancient systems. He writes of \u201cthe laughter that shatter[s]\u2026 all the familiar landmarks of my thought\u2026 breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.\u201d In this vein: we may no longer (must no longer) believe in the power of the moon to enhance or shrivel the amniotic fluid of pregnant women depending on whether it is new or full, as did the old practitioners of Vedic astrology. But we can feel in the thrill of such a metaphor what it means to exist in a world in which every piece of knowledge is coherent with every other piece. It is this feeling of interdisciplinary exuberance <\/i>that yoga philosophy (mythology, early natural philosophy — whatever we should call it) being as old as it is, as scattered amongst metaphysics and naturalism as it is, can contribute to the lab of modern human sciences.<\/li>\n
  14. Neither \u201cdualistic\u201d nor \u201cnon-dualistic\u201d are adequate descriptions of anything, because: intersubjectivity! Various forms of Tantric philosophy seem to say this as far as I can tell, but I don\u2019t know enough about it yet. I hope to learn more about this this year.<\/li>\n
  15. The reason that \u201cyoga philosophy\u201d has been excluded from the philosophy departments of Eurocentric academia is because it has been accused of being indistinguishable from religious practice. (Bina Gupta details how this works.<\/a>) This is true, but that same argument might also eliminate Platonic, Aristotelian, medieval, Renaissance, continental and analytic philosophy as well, governed as they are by varying degrees of metaphysical abstraction, priestly elites, protected by initiation rituals, and worshipped through sacramental books. At least with yoga philosophy, religion is never actively excluded (except in whatever the C\u0101rv\u0101kas\u00a0practiced, who we think were hunted into extinction by the brahminical hegemony sometime around the era of the Buddha). This is an honest presentation, given that the unconscious life that religion massages and molds with its poetry and archetypes will never leave us. Rationality believes it is always uncovering the unconscious. The fact that its effort is endless merely describes the endlessness of the unconscious. The unconscious is an infinitely receding horizon, and no language will capture it. Religious language is one among many languages of the infinite: an evocative one, a chaotic one, a language through which delicate subjective agreements can be shared, a language that can sometimes balance other languages that get too up themselves. Of course if it\u2019s authoritarian it\u2019s worse than useless.<\/li>\n
  16. Deconstruction, disenchantment, disillusionment are all means, not ends. The end is a renewal of curiosity and dignity.<\/li>\n
  17. So yoga is not comfortable with the category of “philosophy”. It has religious origins and elements and contemporary devotees, but many deny it is a religion. Then we come across the Isha Upanishad<\/i>: \u201cWholeness taken from wholeness; wholeness yet remains.\u201d (Easwaren) Or the Ha\u1e6dha\u00a0Yoga\u00a0Prad\u012bpik\u0101<\/em>\u00a04:56 \u2013 \u201cEmpy within, empty without, empty like a pot in space. Full within, full without, full like a pot in the ocean.\u201d (Akers) And we realize it\u2019s also poetry. Written with bones, breath, on banana leaves, vellum, paper, and now screens of light. What is poetry? The active re-enchantment of the inner voice. (This is a passing definition of meditation.) Poetry is the active enrichment of how we confess to each other. Poetry is anything that feeds us for the difficult journeys ahead.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The most repeated question for me, applied to every yoga-claim about the origin of the world or consciousness or the nature of the internal self-sense, is \u201cHow is this idea useful?\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3452,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,112,1,19,28],"tags":[282,283,141,50,207,193],"class_list":["post-3447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-poetry","category-uncategorized","category-yoga","category-yoga-philosophy","tag-bhagavad-gita","tag-hatha-yoga-pradipika","tag-patanjali","tag-yoga","tag-yoga-philosophy","tag-yoga-sutras"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3447\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}