There’s a story of Chuang Tsu’s which also looks at strengths and weaknesses, but unlike Martin Seligman’s point of using your strengths, Chuang Tsu recommends working on your weaknesses. Here is the story which I called The Lagging Sheep in my book, The Spiritual Teachings of The Tao:

Tien Kai Chih was talking with Duke Wei of Chou, who asked him, “I understand your Master Chu Hsien has studied life. What has he taught you about it?”

Tien Kai Chih replied, “While I am busy sweeping his courtyard, how can I hear my master’s teaching?”

Duke Wei said, ”Don’t evade the question, Mr. Tien. I’m very interested in what you’ve learned.”

Kai Chih said, ”I’ve heard my master say ‘One who skilfully nourishes life is like a shepherd, who rounds up the sheep that lag behind.’”

“What did he mean?”, asked the Duke.

Kai Chih replied, “In Lu there was a man named Shan Pao, who lived in the wilderness, and drank only water. He didn’t share anyone’s work or the benefits from it. Though he was seventy years old, he still had the complexion of a child. Unfortunately he encountered a fierce tiger, who killed him.

There was another man called Chang Yi, who spent all his time consorting with the wealthy and powerful, paying his respects. When he was only forty, he came down with a fever and died.

Of these two men, Shan Pao nourished his inner self, and a tiger attacked his outer, while Chang Yi nourished his outer self, and disease attacked his inner. According to my master both of them neglected to round up their lagging sheep.”

Maybe Chuang Tsu would say that your strengths will look after themselves, whereas your weaknesses need some attention. Keeping them in balance may be the way to have a centred approach to life.

Towards the end of August, I noticed that I was being affected by the combination of too much work and too much stress. I woke up some mornings with a pain in my solar plexus; I found myself making multiple trips to the toilet, and I was starting to feel my nerves getting strained. I was especially concerned about a feeling of ‘butterflies’ or sore tenderness in my kidneys. I had never before had a response like this to a bout of hard work, and I wondered if it was my age that was the cause of this. After all, 67 is not the ideal age to be undertaking the effort of making a low budget film, with all the responsibilty that that entails.

I got back home from Norwich (where we were shooting the film) on a Tuesday night in early September, having closed the production down. Now it is 7 days later, and I am starting to feel better, more like my normal state. However, I have found it almost impossible to do any sustained work during this week, and have found the idea of going online and answering emails almost repellent. It was clear that I needed a lot of rest, but besides trying to get a lot of sleep (and wake up later than 6:00 am), I needed to do a lot of breathing meditation to calm my system and get some kind of balance back to my body/mind.  I also needed to get my eating both more regular and consume more fruit and veg. I also needed to start exercising again, something I have not been able to do while the film took over my life.

The first couple of days had me feeling very tired and lazy, and the nights were full of dreams about the film – anxiety dreams associated with the film showing that it was still dominating my mind. I often woke early – at 3:00 or 4:00 am – and on waking could feel that constriction in the solar plexus, although it was not as strong as it was during the nights of the production. I managed to breathe into this constriction and to calm it down ( or in some way open it up). Later I realised that this contriction, which I feared was a possible heart pain, was in fact emanating from the gall bladder. The area of the solar plexus has so many organs of the body operating there that it is diffficult to work out which parts of the body are causing the problem there. And it may be that the problem is that all the organs are not working well, so that it is a symphony of dysfunction that is really happening. For example, you have the diaphragm there, which in many people is not moving freely, thereby causing either pain or poor functioning at that spot (either in the front or back of the body). There are also vertebrae there which can be a problem for many people – sciatica can be caused by nerves being trapped by these vertebrae. Then there is the large intenstine, which traverses the abdomen at this point, and of course the top of the stomach is also running through here, and the spleen and liver are also there. It is like the spaghetti junction of the body. All these organs packed into a small space, and all trying to function. But which ones are not working properly, and why?

If I wake early like this, and realise that I am not going back to sleep, I try to breathe/meditate in bed. I might do this for 2-3 hours, or until I feel sleepy and turn over and go back to sleep. So how do I do this, and what is the process?  Firstly I take a ‘sleeping’ meditation posture. I lay on my back, arms and legs held out from the body at an angle of 30 degrees or so, and I place my thumb inside a ‘soft fist’. I start by laying my head on the two pillows that I sleep with, but as the meditation continues I usually take one pillow away (leaving a slightly raised platform for my head) , and sometimes I also take away the second, laying my head directly on the mattress. Having taken this position, I start to breath in and out. I breath in through the nose and breath out either through the nose or through the mouth. My eyes are closed.

After a couple of minutes I realise that I am not relaxed enough, especially regarding thoughts that arise, so I deliberately focus on my eyes, and try to relax them by ‘turning them inwards’ – that is, allowing my eyes to relax in their sockets, and to stop focussing out, but instead allowing them to focus in, and to follow the breath as it enters my body and travels down to the ‘dan tien’, the area a couple of inches below the navel. Once I feel the breath flowing through my eyes and down into the dan tien with some regularity, then I know my body is starting to relax. Soon I become aware that my arms are feeling heavier on the bed and there is the feeling that the breath is able to travel through the eyes and into the arms, descending down to the softly clenched fists. At this point this is not really breath, but is in fact chi, the energy that powers the body. It is chi that I feel going down to the dan tien, and chi that I feel descending through the arms.

To Be continued

To me there is a relationship between attaining oneness with Tao and letting go. Both involve a setting aside of reliance on ego and an acceptance that life, the universe, and everything is greater than our own small self. To really let go, to allow things to happen as they will, means to accept that our own plans, our own attempts to stay in control of events, is doomed to fail, and will in the end prove an unhealthy way of living. Instead of trying so hard to make things work out as we would like them to, we are better off -  healthier and happier – to just rely on things turning out as they will. This requires trust, something which is in short supply in our day. To trust is to assume that ‘all will be well’ that there is an existing pattern in the universe that sorts things, events, and people in a way that is not inevitable or determined, but that will be somehow OK. To try to work against this flow of events puts us in opposition to this pattern, and since this pattern is also in us, it means that we are acting in opposition to ourself.

This can’t be good. Acting against ourselves is how we create imbalances in the flow of energy, of chi, and how blockages and stagnation occur in the body, leading to illness. If we want to stay healthy, then we need to make sure that our individual pattern is aligned with the universal pattern. The energy that flows in and through us should  not be blocked, but should just continue the flow that is in the universe at large. This is, in its own way, attaining the Tao. Our individual pattern, our energy flow, is the power or essence of who we are. It is our signature. And this derives from the Tao, the universal pattern or energy flow.

The Tao te Ching (Chapter 16) says,

Attain complete emptiness

Hold fast to stillness.

The ten thousand things stir about;

I only watch for their going back.

One way of looking at this chapter is to see that it is about meditation. In deep meditation it is possible to attain emptiness and stillness. But this is only relative emptiness and relative stillness. Our heart is still beating, our digestive system still moving, our lungs still  expanding; we still have awareness. Our body as an object in space is still, but our body as an energy system continues to function. However it is functioning at a slower and deeper level than when we are active. This means that our systems are able to slow down – our breathing, heart beat and digestion all slows – and this has a corresponding effect on our muscles, nerves and brain. No physical action is required, our involuntary systems provide all we need to stay alive, and so our nervous system (and mind) are able to take a well-needed rest.

One of ‘the ten thousand things’ in the world is our body, and in meditation it is very easy to view it ‘stirring about’. This stirring is not extreme, it is rather gentle and subdued, and so it is easy (in our relative state of emptiness, when so little outward activity is happening) , to watch for the body’s ‘going back’. Everything rises and falls, our chi rises and falls, our breath rises and falls. As we watch internally (the words used to describe this is something like ‘to turn your gaze around’) and become aware of how our energy circulates, rises and falls, then the places where we have obstuctions or blockages start to ‘light up’, show us where we have a problem.

It is this self-discovery in meditation of our subtle and not-so-subtle blockages, obstructions and pains that gives us the chance to self-heal, to start the journey to health that can break up these blockages, eliminate this pain, and increase the free flowing of our energy. I believe that this road or path to health is one of the ‘ways’ to the Tao.

I’ve been reading The Potent Self by Moshe Feldenkrais. Feldenkrais was interested in the relationship between how people used their bodies (how they functioned) and the way that their experiences had formed their bodies- the individual complex of nerves, muscles and bones that was the vehicle for bodily expression. That is, we all create a body for ourselves out of personal experience – life’s events – and we then we have to use that specific body in our daily activities.

Feldenkrais, like the Tao Te Ching, would say that when we are infants (before too much experience has altered us) we are a perfect mix of form and function. Our bodies are adapted well to what we need to do with them: feed, digest, get rid of waste, move to explore and so on. But as we grow up, and our parents and society warp us with rules and conventions, our form gets altered so that function can often become dysfunction. This is the area he explored, looking at how we as adults move in a semi-dysfunctional way and originated movement therapies to try to correct these imbalances.

Looking back (and looking even now as well) at my own body, I can see so many parts of my body (and so many body systems) that diverged from that perfection of infancy. In fact, I have spent the last 20 odd years discovering these dysfunctions and trying to correct them, through yoga, tai chi, meditation, self-massage, breathing, and so on. I’m pleased that at 67 I suffer no obvious ailments, take no medication, have no pains, and that my body functions pretty well for someone of my age. This must be due to the practices that I have taken on during these past 20 years. Still, I inherited a strong body from my parents, so genes must also have a role to play in the well-being of an aging body.

Recently, I have been trying to get rid of cramps that I have been able to induce in my upper calves. Years ago these cramps would erupt spontaneously, when I would bend my legs at a certain angle while lying in bed. The pain, which is intense, would force me to straighten my legs to get rid of the spasm.  However I decided at a certain point to try to live through the spasms, and to try not to straighten my leg. This was not often possible, because the pain was too intense and I would have to go for relief. But sometimes I could tough it out and remain breathing into the pain.

Why did I do this? What did I think I would achieve?  The theory (maybe this is my theory) is that the cramp is caused by muscles which are in a state of tension, so that they can easily go into spasm. However the question that precedes this assumption is, why are the muscles in tension in the first place? The cause of this muscle tension, I think, is trapped chi, chi that has stopped flowing, and that has stagnated at a particular point in the body, in this case the upper calves, where several layers of muscle slide over each other. Of course the question can then be asked, why has the chi hardened or obstructed here? The answer for me is that it has an emotional origin. Tensions elsewhere in the body, probably originating due to stress from the belly or solar plexus have a kind of ripple effect down the body, so that the chi which should be flowing from these middle areas have become stuck, and caused a corresponding blockage down in the legs.

So you can see that to deal with cramps in the leg, I am really also dealing with some kind of blockage or stagnation in the solar plexus/belly, caused by tension which originates from an emotional response. This emotional response is very hard to characterise, since it can be seen as nervousness, fear, anxiety, and all of these can have many reasons for existence, depending on when these experiences happened and how I dealt with them at the time. When you have lived for 60 odd years, your body is a vast repository of emotional experiences from all your previous ages, so its not easy to pick apart what action or feeling caused which blockage. However, if you do a certain amount of self-therapy along with this kind of bodywork, you often get insights into what has caused what. At times the release of a particular tension gives rise to an image or a memory that gives clues as to why that particular tension was formed.

So the practise of bodywork: self-massage, yoga, tai chi, allied to meditation and self analysis can often give us insights that are valuable in curing both body and mind.

Mu Soeng, Trust in Mind

One of the questions implied by Mu Soeng in his book Trust in Mind is “Why do you want to live longer?” This is in one sense an obvious question, but it is one that we never ask ourselves. Why is it that we take it as a given that more life is better.

There are people who believe the opposite, that less life would be better. These are people who are suffering terribly from a terminal or incapacitating illness, which has so drastically reduced their pleasure of life that death is seen as the only release. This is the basis of the euthanasia movement, to allow those for whom life is no longer good to voluntarily end their life.

There is an opposite movement to Euthanasia, and this is the trans-humanists who believe that life can be extended indefinitely through science and technology. This means using medical interventions like human growth hormone injections, or waiting for the advent of nanotechnology to provide miniature machines to swim inside our blood stream sweeping up toxins and malevolent viruses. They also believe that stem cell research and genetic manipulation will enable us to cure aging and enable us all to live infinite lives.

Clearly the trans-humanists and other life-extenders must believe that life is good, otherwise why would they want to see it continue indefinitely. As Mu Soeng puts it, they must believe that life is a carnival and should become endless. If we ask them the question, “Why do you want more life?” what will we get as an answer?

In the quote above, Mu mentioned “how one meets the challenges of living, aging, becoming sick, and dying. We all have to age, become sick and die.” The trans-humanists do not believe that we have to age, get sick and die. They think that science and technology will come to our rescue and enable us to stay in one mode only- that of living well. Ray Kurzweil, the computer-based inventor, is one of the leading lights of this movement. I understand he takes 182 dietary supplements a day and expects that in 20 years technology will enable him to escape death. Unfortunately I am sceptical about this possibility, and I think Mr. Kurzweil’s epitaph will read “I didn’t expect to be here.”

Anyone who wants to stay living, and to avoid aging, must be either very selfish: “I want more life because I don’t want to die” or they have a deep-seated fear of death and this clinging to life represents a denial of the reality of aging and dying. We know that our unconscious does not believe in the reality of death; it is purely life-centred and believes we will live forever. But our consciousness knows what the reality truly is, that our body and mind ages, stops working and succumbs eventually.

My idea of life extension is different from this. I accept that living also means dying, and we can’t avoid life coming to an end. In fact, accepting death is the way to make life richer and more valuable. But I believe we have in our own hands a way to delay aging and the illnesses associated with it. My plan is to some day publish a ‘longevity kit’ which would comprise a book, a Cdd and a DVD which would give people the tools to push aging back into a short span at the end of life, The aim of this is to extend middle age – when most people are still hrealthy and active- into a much longer period of time. At 50 and 60, most people are still in good heath and in a reasonable state of fitness, but in their 70s there is a sharp decline and by the end of the 70s many people have lost their spark of life and they begin that long slide into illness leading to suffering and death. I think there is a better way to live, a way that would enable us to die like this:

The Zen master Hoshin told his disciples this story. One year, on the 25^th of December, the monk Tokufu, who was very old, said to his disciples, “I am not going to be alive next year so you should treat me well this year.”

The pupils thought he was joking, but since he was a great-hearted teacher each of them in turn treated him to a feast on succeeding days of the departing year.

On the eve of the new year, Tokufu said,

“You have been good to me. I shall leave you tomorrow afternoon when the snow has stopped.”

The disciples laughed, thinking he was just getting old and talking nonsense since the night was clear and without snow. But at midnight snow began to fall, and the next day they did not find their teacher about. They went to the meditation hall to look for him. There he had passed on.

How does someone come to have such a full awareness of life and death that they are able not just to say when they will be letting go of life as a conscious choice, but also make certain that they have the time to settle all their emotional accounts, say proper farewells to everyone they love, and leave in a dignified and simple way. This is certainly the way that I would like to go.

The state of non-attachment is a difficult one, because to be in that state means that when you look at people you look at their Buddha nature, their true self, their divinity, if you can see that. If you are a man you don’t look at beautiful women in exclusion to ugly ones, or instead of men etc. Lovely bodies are not there to be lusted after. All bodies are seen as the same- impermanent, void. You can’t look at cars, clothes, houses, anything, with a view to desiring and possessing them. In non-attachment you have an eye of equality since everything (in a scientific sense) is ultimately made of atoms and are all similar. To view the world dispassionately, like the stoics, is to gain freedom of mind, once you are able to look at things as they are, without the bias of personal desires. But how many people can do this? How many young people can live like this?

There are still personal needs, such as food, drink, shelter, clothes, but these ideally should be found in simplicity. The Chinese, and more especially the Japanese, took this simplicity of satisfaction of need and turned it into beauty through making simple but elegant objects to eat and drink from, to wear and to sit on. They transformed the basic and essential into the beautiful.

Learn to see properly. To have a clear blue sky mind is to be free of illusions. No, it is to be free of delusions and thus to understand that our ordinary sight is illusionary. Not that our ordinary world is a phantasm or an illusion spun by some god or other, but that our sight itself is illusionary, in that we do not see what is real. The real cannot be seen. It is only when we close our eyes and turn the light around and look inside that we are able to ‘see’ the real. We still can’t ‘see’ anything, but we have the feeling that we are getting into the right neighborhood, are getting closer to it.

The body is made of ‘matter waves’ (Dancing Wu Li Masters) and the chi is energy waves and may be the source of the matter waves.

A few months before I had painful sciatica down my left leg. It coincided with a rare astrological event (November 2003) that all the astrologers were excited about. I tried many treatments to get rid of it, but in the end Osteopathy (by Robert Zagar cracking my back) got rid 0f the pain. I continue to work on my spleen and stomach meridians, am trying to lose the tension in my belt meridian and in the neck and shoulders.  I have definitely freed up these energy waves so that my body feels lighter, more energetic and vital than it has for a very long time.

To have a free and supple body with no tension is the ultimate and such a body should have a mind that is also without stress, tension and worries- a blue sky kind of mind, one in which the spirit naturally and spontaneously arises. This is the ultimate quest, attaining a Blue Sky mind.

Early Growth

Hexagram 4:  MENG (Childhood)

Mountain
Over
Water (stream)

I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.
H.D. Thoreau

All beginnings hide their magnificence. Life is unfolding, but it is not yet fully manifest: in the beginning of things, in early growth, we see only the tips, the first growths that hide enormous potential.

The image: A spring flows out of a mountain.

Water emerging from a deep source under the dark cover of the mountain collects naturally into a spring, pure and transparent, like the clarity of a child’s innocent mind. As it travels down the mountain and enters the valley the murmuring streams converge into a great river, grow broader and deeper and eventually merge into the sea. When the spring gushes forth, it doesn’t know where it will end, it just flows on and on, trusting its own nature. Everything begins in this small way and has the potential to become naturally great.

But at the foot of the mountain lies difficulty. After the spring emerges, sediment builds up and the initial pure clarity of the fresh spring is obscured and lost. Our own minds also start out pure and clear, showing the mind of Tao, but as we grow up we acquire conditioning – kleshas, ignorance, attachments, false illusions – which all obscure our inner clarity, and we are left with the conditioned human mind, losing the real and gaining the false. We fail to see the world clearly, and our ego gets in the way.

The way to combat ignorance, to reverse the human mind back to the mind of Tao is through self-cultivation, through nourishing our correct nature, but it is difficult to do this without losing childlike innocence.

Lao Tzu was asked,

“Can you explain the Tao of keeping good health?”

He replied,
Can you embrace the One?
Can you keep from losing it?
Can you know good and bad fortune without consulting the oracle?
Can you rest where you ought to rest?
Can you stop when you have enough?
Can you leave others alone and seek it in yourself alone?
Can you flee from desire?
Can you be sincere?

Can you become like a little child? A child can cry all day without becoming hoarse — so perfect is its harmony. It can clench its fists all day without relaxing its grip – such is the concentration of its power. It can stare all day without moving its eyes — so unconcerned is it by the outside world. It walks but doesn’t know where. It rests where it’s placed, but it doesn’t know why. It unconsciously mingles with things, and just follows their flow. This is how to guard life.

Rabbi Jesus said,

Truly I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

All beginnings, whenever we start something new, whether it is a yoga teacher training course, a business, a relationship, a creative work, a new political or social movement or the birth of a child, all follow this pattern. We start everything with the expectation that it will grow, develop and prosper, and it can if we have the flexibility of yin to act in accordance with the time and follow the right principles.

The danger at the beginning of things can only be overcome by cultivating our virtues, our highest human values. These are the principles that can sustain our growth, help us to fulfill our potential, and avoid and correct any obstacles that arise. What are these virtues? Swami Satchidananda said that his teacher Swami Sivananda used to say that yoga was so simple. It was “just being good, doing good.”  All new beginnings need to be sustained by the most positive values that we can bring to bear: love, compassion and honesty. The ethical teachings of the yamas and niyamas in Patanjali’s yoga sutras say the same thing – by living correctly, ethically, we can live well.

At our beginning we are innocence itself, pure love, and for most of us we are as close to our essence as we will ever be in this body and in this life.  As we grow and develop we cross a bridge from love to fear and our task is to return to that beginning and go back over the bridge from fear to love.

When you watch a baby, she is completely at one with her body; her body moves where it needs to go, and her beauty is in her perfection. She is totally present; there is no future, there is no past.

The goal of yoga is to find our true essence, to be totally connected to the spirit or soul within, our inner God, and to be present in each and every moment, just as a baby is.

As we practise our yoga asanas, we are looking to release the habitual patterns of deep tension and bad posture that many of us have developed so that we can allow our bodies to move freely and without tension.  It is our attention on the body as we practise and the conscious use of the breath that will help us to get in touch with the body’s inherent wisdom to keep us healthy and happy.  As we allow the gravity and our breath to work for us and touch the ground with trust and love, we can learn to trust and love ourselves and the universe around us. This is how we can make the return journey to that bridge so that we can cross back from fear to love.

Pranayama practise and kriyas will help us to clear the impurities from the body, clear our energetic pathways and give us a deep inner strength.  The purpose of meditation is to still the mind, learn to understand its wily ways and gain some control over it so that we can go beyond the conscious mind to something much deeper that puts us in touch with the God within us and the immense universal power within us and outside of us. This is true love and with this love we have nothing to fear.

“To be or not to be?”, that must have been the question that this producer asked himself, and his answer was “No, I’ve had enough.” To those of us who have never contemplated suicide, it seems such a radical thing to do, to stop life just like that. I don’t blame him, it was his life to keep or lose, but he left a 15 year old son, and who knows the psychic repercussions that this will have on him. 

In meditation, it’s relatively easy to come to this stage, the point where you are only ‘being’ and so can contemplate ‘non-being’ . When in meditation you have come to a highly relaxed state, with a quiet mind and a body that has almost disappeared from sensation, you have left behind ‘doing’, ‘making’ and ‘having’, and most of what remains is the breath – inhale and exhale, with the pauses in between.  At this stage the breath is so clearly life, your life, that you are filled only with ‘being’, and the body and mind become the possession of your involuntary systems- the circulation and movements of blood, lymph, spinal fluid, water, food and so on, all controlled automatically by your brain.  

When you become aware of the breath being your life, of only ’being’ , life becomes very simple, a matter of one inbreath and one outbreath. It is so simple that you can understand how easy it would be to stop breathing and to cease to be. Every once in a while, especially when times are painful, I have found myself being forced to ask myself , in meditation, why I go on, what purpose my life is serving, and whether it would make sense to stop. When this question arises, I take a review of my life, the present as well as the future. Am I happy? Are there things I still want to do?  What do I hope to achieve in the future? What responsibilities do I have, that I would be ducking out of? Do I have the potential of greater happiness in the future? So far I have always answered in the positive, that to be means more to me than not to be, but I suppose a time might come when the balance might swing the other way.

Today in meditation I realised that the past only exists in our body, where memories are stored, and that these are delusions, not accurate remembrances of what we experienced. The future too is a complete illusion, since we don’t know if we will be around to experience it. All we are left with is now, the present instant, the inbreath and outbreath that express our life’s feelings, thoughts and emotions.  And this is more than enough if we can find a way to be really present to that breath, to the moment in which we live. To be is really to breathe.

Cloud (water)

Over

Thunder

After stillness, action; after rest, movement; after completion: beginning. One yin and one yang make up the entire universe.

In February seeds lie in the ground, but they are not dormant. Within they are beginning to stir, slowly uncurling, starting the long journey to fulfil their mysterious inner potential. But we cannot see their progress; the ground hides them, just as our deepest motives and impulses, the mysterious unseen movers that cause us to move, lie hidden in our psyche.

The Decision of the I Ching Hexagram 3, Beginning says,

The beginning of a tiny sprout.

Sublimely prosperous and smooth.

Favourable to be steadfast and upright.

Do not act lightly.

From the slowly rousing seed, there emerges first a root, which buries itself deep into the soil, and then a tiny seedling appears, a tender shoot which rises up. This first tendril represents new life, and life grows out of two movements – the rise of yang and the descent of yin. The seed surrenders itself to the earth and in turn receives nourishment from it.

In our yoga practise as in life we need to follow both of these dimensions: using gravity to find our own root, and using our prana, our life energy, to rise up. We need to understand how we relate to the ground, how we use the ground. To find our own root is to learn to trust the earth, and to let it really support us, with no holding on to muscle tension. The ground represents elemental power and energy, the power that nurtures and grows.  Can we trust it enough to just let go and rest into it?

The seed is the essence of the plant, just as our seeds – our cells and eggs – contain our essence, our inner self.  So in this season our being starts to emerge from its hibernation, the life force unfolding towards the light. Seeds are powerhouses of energy, sharply concentrated and attentive foci of action. The smallest plant, soft and pliable, carries tremendous power in its root, the serenely unfolding yang power of the life force. We too have this power within us, but our fears, doubts and anxiety create obstacles that inhibit the release of the intense force of our life energy. Hexagram 3 is an emblem of this situation: the crashing power of the thunder is damped down by the clouds above. Our tremendous latent power is covered over and inhibited. Before we are able to emerge into our own light we must make a journey back, a reversal into our root so that we can again emerge from it. Paradoxically, we make progress by moving backward, crablike, as the Tao Te Ching tells us,

The Tao moves the other way

The Tao works through weakness

To go back the other way means to return to the root, to the source and origin of our being, where our power lies hidden and sleeping, coiled like the serpent power – Kundalini. Yoga is a means of discovering and releasing this latent energy so that we can use it in daily life. Many of us live too much in our heads so we need to practice bringing our energy down to our base, our fundament.  Vanda Scaravelli taught a yoga influenced strongly by using gravity, allowing the natural pull of weight to draw us down to earth, to ground our self in ourself. When we work on the base – the essential, the fundamental – then we are working with the base chakra, the first power centre of the body.  As we allow ourselves to be supported by life, solidly grounded on the earth, comfortable in our own skin, then we are balanced in the root chakra. And the root chakra is the support of all the other chakras.

Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa says:

We connect to the planet through our first chakra, and it’s where we return ourselves back to the earth beneath us.  It is at our first chakra that we accept we are even here on earth.  It is where we first say ‘yes’ to life.

Once we can unconditionally say ‘yes’ to life we can discover our true self, our true nature, and in doing so we liberate our energy and become free of fear, as the Katha Upanishad tells us,

When the wise understand that it is only through the Eternal Self that we see, taste, smell, feel, hear, and enjoy, they meditate on this Self and go beyond all suffering.  When we are present with our Self, we are beyond fear.  And this is our true nature.  The Eternal Self lives not only in our hearts but also among the physical elements. It is a boundless power manifesting as life itself, entering every heart, living there among the elements – that is the Eternal Self.

When we lose fear we automatically gain courage, which is why courage is one of Socrates’ cardinal virtues. He did not mean only the bravery of a soldier, but our everyday courage when we strive to overcome our deepest fears. Yoga can be a powerful tool to help us gather our courage, and learn to live in greater freedom. When we are free, we begin to see reality clearly, without the delusion of the past. In such a state, we can see the obstacles that stop us, can grow past our old conditioning, can learn to grow  ‘prosperous and smooth’, just like the tiny plants.

As the Zen monk Tiantong Hongshi says,

Everywhere life is sufficient, in its way.

In us life is also sufficient, and we have everything we need within to fulfil our enormous potential. All we have to do is wake up and realise it.

He touches on meditation as one of the Body Technologies of Mood. He considers meditation as a safe and effective ‘body technology’ to regulate emotions. Its calming effects work through feedback. In a meditative state, ‘the rythmic breathing and relaxed state of the muscles are interpreted by the brain as conducive to a calm state of mind.’

We usually think that the onset of a strong emotion causes body changes, but in meditation the reverse happens: the body changes come first and they induce the emotions. Since a feedback loop can be amplified, it stands to reason that improving meditative skills through practice can lead to more voluntary control over the body and the emotions. This has been demonstrated in advanced yogis,  who can control their hearbeat and breathing to a great degree.

Jones makes an interesting comparison about breathing and the basic emotions, in that he considers them to be similar, ie, that they are biological -’hard-wired,etched into our neural circuitry, by our genes rather than by our culture.’

An interesting and well written book.