Advaita - Non-duality

 I am teaching a weekly yoga class this month. The problem with this is that I have ZERO spacial awareness and am full of an impending sense of doom. In addition to the millions of hours I spend on lesson plans, I am now also spending evening hours writing sequences and studying yoga manuals. 

Jade thinks this is a wonderful opportunity during which I will grow as a human being.

That is why I am doing it. I want to grow as a human being.

I've never been comfortable being bad at things. 

Therapy Elsa insists I stop saying "bad" and instead say "imperfect." More than any other thing she has repeated over the last 4 years is the sentence, "I don't think it's as black and white as all that." She (and Jade) says that I am a perfectionist and that my idea of "bad" is anything at which I do not excel. The black-and-whiteness in me says that if I am not excellent at it, I am bad at it.

No one likes to be imperfect at things, but I feel like I'm actually allergic to it. I mean, there must be a reason I break out in hives so often, despite the dermatologist, allergist, and rheumatologist saying there is nothing fundamentally wrong with me.

When I completed yoga teacher training (YTT) over the summer, I was kind of bummed that we didn't spend more time on the asana or physical practice, so I could become perfect. I wanted to know how to sequence and be comfortable teaching, if that’s something I decided I wanted to do. (It's very normal the first time teaching any new program for some trial-and-error figuring out the pacing of all the different parts-- God knows I've called my 1st hour class "my guinea pigs" for the last 16 years of teaching English.) 

So…we did of course sequence, but we also spent a lot of time on the spiritual aspects of yoga, which I was initially uncertain about. For the Christians out there, I should clarify what I mean by spiritual: I don't mean that we invoked Patanjali before every practice, although in some lineages I think they do. I mean that we spent a lot of time exploring the ethical, emotional, philosophical, and internal aspects of yoga. This at first felt counter-productive to me because how would I get a job teaching yoga? I felt I could not walk into a studio and say, "Allow me to teach you about non-violence." Even though it was beautiful, how could I actually use it?

Now that we're 5 months post-production, though, I realize that my biggest takeaways weren't the things I learned physically. They were the spiritual aspects. And not because we spent so much time on them, either (although maybe it’s that, too). It's because I am -- and you are -- at the core, a spiritual being. Therefore, it is the spiritual aspect for me that tracks most and has the greatest staying power.

I've thought a lot about spirituality in this practice in the last 5 months. Is spirituality intrinsic to Sanskrit and yoga really all that different from Christianity?

When we say namaste, "The light in me sees, honors, and values the light in you," is that not essentially the same thing as saying, "The Imago Dei imprinted in me bears witness to the Imago Dei also present in you"? 

I can't help but think that it is. I know it's the Christian way to discount similarities to other spiritual ways of being, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to deny this.

Another example, actually, is the Christian unease with calling itself a religion at all -- despite most of the world referring to it like that.

"It's a Relationship, not a religion!" Christians say (or maybe just the Christians I know).

But yoga is actually the same way. Yoga truly isn't a religion. Yogis and yoginis around the world practice many different religions. But at its core, yoga is a spiritual state of being in the world. Or being "In the world but not of it" (John 15:19), if you will ;-)

Or what is a mandala but a different iteration of the Chartres Labyrinth of the Christian mystics? And probably both are manifestations of something else entirely.

It used to be perhaps uncomfortable to chant AUM/OM, said to be the primordial sound vibration of the universe.

But the reader in me, the woman surrounded by books to remind myself of all I have not yet learned, read The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkein. 

(I hated it, btw. Tolkein is not for me.)

But I loved that Eru Illúvatar (God) sings the world into existence. Perhaps that is what God did. Perhaps instead of speaking the world into existence, He sang it. And perhaps that Word that he sang or spoke is the primordial sound of the universe. 

Somewhere during the last 12 months of YTT and after, the preeminent definition of yoga shifted. It no longer means a physical practice with poses to master -- although it certainly can be that, also. First and foremost, it has come to mean the practice of getting comfortable with wondering; getting comfortable with not knowing. Getting comfortable with the non-duality of things.

Christianity, as I've understood it, is a religion of dualities (except for the mystics). There's a heaven and hell. You go to one or the other. There is righteousness and sin. If you are not righteous (God), you are a slave to your passions (sinner)... that is, until you accept Jesus (righteous) as your Savior. And then you (sinner) become holy (righteous). And you are now in a position to tell everyone around you (sinners) that they need Jesus (righteous), too. So they are not consigned to hell (for sinners).

In yogic philosophy, which has continued to percolate in my mind in the months since YTT ended, there is a concept called advaita, or non-duality. The literal translation is "non- secondness." The first time I heard the word, I loved it. I loved it because it was Therapy Elsa's favorite sentence -- "I don't know if it's as black and white as all that" -- wrapped into a single word.

I have always seen being comfortable, knowledgeable, intelligent, poised, and experienced as deeply good. I have always seen being uncomfortable, anxious, scared, flustered, and unsure as deeply bad. The biggest thing yoga has taught me is that it's a spiritual practice to become comfortable with discomfort. 

How can I be imperfect at something and still breathe through it, allowing myself to be messy and panicked and inexperienced? How can I become comfortable with discomfort, with not knowing?

* not knowing how the world was created

* not knowing what God is

* not knowing what's in the hereafter

* not knowing if there's a hell I'm now destined for 

* not knowing what steps come next in my sequence because I left it at the front of my mat and now I'm at the back of my mat

* not knowing what to say for the next cue because my head is so full of cues that my tongue has frozen up

* not knowing if I will crash and burn at teaching 

It's what the early Christian mystics did. It's what the earliest practitioners of yoga did. It's what you do every time you breathe into indudalasana at the 28-second mark.

As I said, I am going to teach. It will be imperfect, and I will be flustered. There may even be more panic attacks. But I'm doing it because far more important to me than being comfortable is growing as a human being. Yoga as I have come to know and experience it through teacher training means embracing the practice of life itself. And life is not always comfortable.

So I step forward in uncertainty. And, as Yoga Elsa is fond of saying, that's not nothing.