High / Low.
Up / Down.
Twists / Turns.
….The Polarity – Good / Bad
Black / White
If you ride on a rollercoaster long enough, you’ll get sick.
The nature of the ride is to thrill us, to entertain us, to excite us.
Such is the nature of Life.
But when you line up at your favourite amusement park, never do you think that the ride is going to actually going to kill you.
Though on a good ride, you certainly feel that way.
As you wait in line, you will no doubt reflect on the fact that the ride is overengineered by a significant factor.
Redundancy upon redundancy.
Intellectually, you know it to be safe.
But this knowledge is of little use the moment the ascent mechanism disengages and you feel the first drop.
“I guess it’s too late to get off” most sane people will think.
And then that moment you fall.
“Why have I done this to myself!”
Terror.
Gut wrenching fear.
Perhaps, a scream.
Death never felt so close.
But then… the first turn.
The out-of-control descent is broken. You are swept up, by a structure unseen.
The fear turns to exhilaration.
The adrenaline dumps.
You begin to enjoy the ride, knowing in an intuitive way, that at the next turn or loop, that even if it feels like you are free falling, you are held by something robust.
Something other.
A support beyond your movement.
And then, before you know it, you come back around to the start.
Changed.
Moved.
Different.
Slightly nauseous.
Welcome to the rollercoaster of life.
No doubt we will experience horrific moments of free-falling; change, break ups, trauma, new beginnings, opportunities.
But what is the steel rail that guides you safely from beyond?
Do you spend time acknowledging it?
How much do you trust the engineering?
Through the practice of Himalayan Meditation, I’ve learned to trust my Soul.
‘He’ is the over-engineered track.
The hefty rail that is my constant.
But who built this ride? And how can I know that I’m safe?
Meditation has taught me to make space for the architect of my life.
I like to call this Grand Overall Designer – God.
In part, because I used to have no faith, and it humbles me to now love God.
But the God I believe in isn’t the same as the God that I didn’t.
The God I didn’t believe in was a separate heavenly dude who had his hands on the levers and seemed to make more people suffer than I though fair.
The God I believe in now, this different God, isn’t a dude. He is one and the same as the consciousness that pervades all of our experience.
As a Yogin, I like to call him Shiva.
You can approach this God by contemplating that niggling feeling in the back of your mind ‘that you know that you know that you are.’ A feeling of being here (wherever that is – try zooming out until you can’t zoom no more.)
This awareness of your Self is a gateway to the immensity.
It is a way to approach God.
Often it is the extreme lows of life that make us reach out to this higher power.
But who gets off the rollercoaster, alive, excited, amped up… and then thanks God for the thrill?
Who in life, attains success and then acknowledges the divine collective that enabled it?
The ego likes to hog the limelight.
Many reach out to the spirit in moments of despair.
Less in moments of triumph.
Yoga has answers to this problem, and is concerned with divinising all aspects of your life.
Instead of locating yourself in space, time and causation, through Yoga, one slowly begins to orient around a much, much bigger force; consciousness itself.
Whether we acknowledge it (or not,) all of our experience occurs inside of awareness. So, if we are looking for a rational, worthy candidate for the divine, my money is on awareness itself.
Pondering the mysterious experience of what it is to know that you know that you know, requires a plasticity of mind. We have to let go of what we know and begin to see that we know that we know.
For the mind itself loves to contain, to cut out, to divide and hold. But it cannot grasp something larger than itself.
Try it!
See if you can hold the infinite!
I can’t, so I choose to surrender to it.
An example: Melbourne is a part of Australia, but it will never know what it is to be ‘all of Australia,’ even though Melbourne is only Australia.
The nature of a gold necklace is the same as a broach or a ring. The fundamental constituent is one, though the forms differ.
So too the mind, and all of our experience, is a part of consciousness / awareness.
Yogic practice is used to help us to still the mind. Raja Yoga (or broadly speaking, meditation) helps us go beyond the mind by pacifying it.
And much like a still pond will allow the sediment to settle, revealing with clarity what lays at the bottom, so too when the mind is stilled, we are given a glimpse into the divine reality before our eyes.
This is the enlightened view.
But if we are caught by identifying with the moving instead of the fixed, the pond will always be clouded and the divine out of sight.
Remember the rollercoaster?
It was only the cart that moved and shook your reality up.
The nature of the rail, however, is that it was fixed all along.
Present.
Stable.
So too consciousness.
Through the ups and downs of life, one can find stability not in the shoulder strap, nor in the friend freaking out next to you, but only in the track.
Asking movement to stabilise you is really quite obviously irrational.
Yet as a default setting, we can cling to our experience of life, seeking permanence from the impermanent.
Look at the rise of the youth obsessed beauty industry if you need global proof of this view!
Upon the path of Yoga, faith in one’s undertaking comes not from the say so of the engineering boffins, nor the fact that other people have survived the rollercoaster, but as a feeling that arises when we see that we were held throughout the turns and loops and twists.
The absence of the ride is the absence of life.
To be alive and at peace requires both track, rider and cart.
Through yoga, we can find deeper enjoyment in life, by not clinging to it.
This is why we direct you to meditate, but then to watch your life, closely.
If you like who you become with a simple 30-minute daily practice, keep at it.
If you don’t, ditch it and find something you can lean on. You’ll find something that works if you really want it!
The true beauty of traditional yoga is that there is a plethora of practices available for every temperament; from the soft and gooey practices of devotional Bhakti Yoga, to the righteous service of others in Karma Yoga, to the intellectually nourishing practical philosophy of Jnana Yoga and back to the mind pacifying Raja Yoga.
Which path to follow?
As the great Saint Swami Vivekananda strikingly put it;
“Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy – by one, or more, or all of these – and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details.”
“All of these” is what I have done.
The traditional 4 Yogas – Bhakti, Karma, Jnana and Raja (Hatha) Yoga have been our approach, and is the philosophy that underpins what we teach at Kailash Ashram.
Most ‘Yoga’ studios focus on one aspect of Hatha Yoga – physical poses.
This is like limiting the vastness of Australia to one postcode. Yes, technically a suburb is Australia, but is not really representative of the diversity of the continent.
Why limit yourself?
If you are seeking to capture the essence of a more traditional approach to Yoga, so that you can ‘trust the roller-coaster track’ called your Soul, I’d love for you to join me on our iconic Soul Retreat.
During the retreat you’ll be able to learn a variety of practices to suit your temperament, and physical and mental capabilities, no matter your experience level.
