Waking Up The World Is Hard. Make It Simple.

“Consciousness means our capacity to be aware, both externally as well as internally, which we call self-awareness.” B.K.S. Iyengar explains in Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom (p. 109).

Mr Iyengar differentiates consciousness from the mind. Mind is citta in Sanskrit. Iyengar likens it to an outer sheath of consciousness like our bones and muscles are to our vital organs. It flits and flutters. It isn’t capable of productive evolution. It’s fickle, desirous, and whim oriented. He learned that from his teacher and his own experiences.

We wouldn’t know we had organs without teachers. Herophilus considered the Father of Anatomy from 275 BCE taught us about our organs and is among what I’ll call, “physical explorers.” I consider BKS Iyengar one too. However, he didn’t slice things open to look at them. He used the art, science and philosophy of yoga. His son Prashant might prefer more precision in my language, so I will honor him here and call it Yog.

Mr. Iyengar delved into Patañjali Yoga Sutras as his guide and made his own mind, body, and spirit his laboratory. He was able to share the transformative discoveries promised by Patanaji by creating an accessible method of teaching them. It’s called Iyengar Yoga.

Explorers are always discoverying more. In 2018, scientists discovered a “new organ” known as the interstitium, which like the skin wraps around every organ. This goes to show, what we think we know is never the whole truth. Which is why, gaining clarity through practices such as Yog not only bring a clearer understanding of our mind, body, and spirit, it also purifies our ability to be open to learn and discover more.

This way, we don’t get stuck in the grooves of habitual thinking. Those old enough may remember playing a record (you know that round vinyl thing that enable us to listen to our favorite music whenever we wanted to), you might also remember when it got stuck and replayed and replayed the same sound ad nauseum. That’s what getting stuck in habitual thinking patterns is like. It’s why we can be in the year 2020 and still think like we are in the mid-1800s.

We are complex beings and capable of great metamorphosis and transformation, but we can also get stuck for eons. Man’s inhumanity to man throughout history has been a study of our destructive capabilities, and how habitual thinking patterns can delude us from the truth of our interdependence and interconnectedness.

Truth has escaped us since the beginning of time because the story is always retold from our perspective. It is a re-fabrication of an interpretation shaped by our outer sheath desires and shaded by our lack of consciousness. Waking up is hard to do on our own. Thanks to great teachers like BKS Iyengar, we can learn to wake up with a simple commitment to practice.

“Yoga points out how we generally react to the outside world by forming entrenched patterns of behavior that doom us to relive the same events endlessly, though in a superficial variety of forms and combinations. Anyone who looks at history or listens to the litany of woe and war on the daily news will bear this out. Does mankind never learn anything, we ask in exasperation.” B.K.S. in Light on Life (p. 111).

BKS explains that in order to get to this evolution we say we want, we have to cultivate the fire or tapas to break free from the old patterns. I feel it’s important to consider Newton’s First Law, “a body at rest stays at rest.” You may be familiar with it. When you commit to a practice, you can also rely on the second part of that law, “a body in motion stays in motion,” to keep your momentum going.

Let the revelations of greed, inequity, and barbarism that is happening right now in 2020 and has been for centuries, create a fire for change. Yes, we want to do all we can to shift things within the existing paradigm. However, if we want a new paradigm, it’s important to consider creating personal transformation, because when each of us transform personally, we help to shift the whole of us towards real evolutionary change.

~ Rhonda