Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

INTRODUCTION

Awakening Insight—Ganga White’s Approach to Yoga

by Mark Schlenz, PhD

Ganga White has led the evolution of yoga in America for nearly four decades. He helped host yoga’s arrival in this country during the sixties and seventies. He nurtured its development through the remainder of the twentieth century. Today, he remains at the forefront of yoga’s ongoing transformation into the twenty-first century.

Once an officer in the Sivananda organization, Ganga established the first yoga centers in Los Angeles and several other major American cities. In 1968, his newly created White Lotus Foundation offered one of the first in-depth yoga teacher training programs in this country and established the working model for numerous programs that have since proliferated. Ganga’s departure from Sivananda stimulated a major transformation in yoga’s growth. Disillusioned by financial and ethical scandals involving the swamis, Ganga broke ties with traditional hierarchies of India, led the White Lotus to independence, and rededicated the foundation to the development of the total human being and to elucidating a free, open, and contemporary approach to yoga. Since then, thousands of yogis now teaching in the United States and around the world have trained with Ganga at White Lotus and share his liberating perspectives with thousands more of their students.

As a leader of yoga’s modern development, Ganga has always been nourished, rather than bound, by the past. Today, yoga’s current popularity has given rise to a myriad of new market-driven forms and newly minted yogis. Much of what is currently marketed seems completely cut off from the vast richness of yoga’s deep history. Yoga’s age-old potential for fundamental transformation of the whole person is too often diluted to appeal to fashionable desires for physical attainments. Ganga’s scholarly study and thorough immersion in the literature, philosophy, and techniques of ancient yoga traditions inform and inspire the evolution of his own dedicated practice and teaching. With this deep grounding, Ganga’s innovative contributions build upon the vital essences of yoga’s timeless gifts without subservience to archaic institutions or doctrines.

While many current yoga trends seem to disregard historical contexts, others tend to romanticize the past, fetishizing certain practices and depriving them of relevance to our current situations. Ganga’s deeper understanding of yoga’s many traditions recognizes how various practices emerged from specific historical, cultural, and social conditions and, even more important, how they have been consistently adapted as these conditions have inevitably changed through time. This dynamic sense of history nourishes Ganga’s efforts to make yoga more relevant to our present and to our future. Through all its manifestations, yoga has always offered liberatory alternatives to rigid hierarchies that threaten the survival of the human spirit. At this moment, that spirit, and in fact all life on the planet, is more threatened than ever before. Our present potential for global annihilation, whether by our explosive weapons of mass destruction or by our escalating devastation of our own ecosystem, requires new orientations to preserve the human spirit’s potential for creativity, healing, and love.

Incorporating essential wisdom from yoga’s heritage with progressive insights of science and modernity, Ganga’s evolutionary approach makes yoga more applicable than ever to addressing the overwhelming problems that currently confront every person. The crux of his insight is that we can certainly change the future of our species by constantly developing the ways we perceive and value our individual selves. Through constant self-examination and ongoing reflection, one’s personal yoga practice becomes an invaluable tool for continual self-discovery and transformation.

Ganga’s insights into dynamic principles animating the asanas enable his students to approach the poses as unfolding paths to personal evolution rather than as cul-de-sacs of arrested perfection. His teachings empower his students and allow them to let their own experiences guide them into deeper possibilities of personal growth and freedom. That is why this book, in contrast to so many yoga books written to formulas and dictates of the publishing market, offers principles rather than prescriptions.

Most yoga books currently published exploit niche market appeal by prescribing specific practices that promise certain benefits to particular audiences. Many claim the ancient authenticity of a particular tradition or lineage of teacher for their authority. Others rely on charismatic teachers or celebrities to underwrite their inflated promises. A growing number of hybrid approaches claim benefits only possible through newly created combinations of yoga with something—almost anything, it seems—else. Yoga Beyond Belief presents a unique, non-dogmatic, integrative vision of contemporary yoga. It is an inspiring manual for beginners and experienced students alike.

What most available books share in common is the premise that they can give you something special by telling you how to do yoga their way. In this book, by contrast, Ganga shows you how you can learn to do yoga your way. What Ganga shares in the following chapters is not based on passed-down authority, fashionable popularity, or eclectic gimmickry. It is based on working principles of careful inquiry, experimentation, and observation.

Those of us who have had the fortune to learn from Ganga have learned much from watching his characteristic responses to questions from students. Perhaps an alignment he suggests contradicts an instruction a student has been taught by another teacher or has read some where, and so the student asks which is the right way. Older students who may have heard this question posed and answered more than once before know not to expect a definitive, or even the same, answer from Ganga.

What we know to expect instead is a demonstration of sincere inquiry, often enlivened with his spontaneous wit and infectious laughter. Almost invariably Ganga will experiment in the pose with the juxtaposed alignments before commenting on their relative merits and limitations as they might apply to different bodies, physical conditions, or stages of learning. Despite the newly discovered insights he might share in any instance, the consistency of his response is that it is definitely based in his immediate investigation as it builds upon his lifelong experience. Attentive students learn that this process, not the particular answer to any particular question, is the lesson.

That lesson is generously and repeatedly shared, along with splashes of Ganga’s wit and stories, throughout this synthesis of his life’s work. After providing a holistic overview of yoga traditions, Yoga Beyond Belief shares a wide range of functional principles, practical skills, and realistic attitudes that will empower you to evolve your own yoga practice. It encourages processes of self-discovery that will truly free and deepen your practice and your life and, so, enrich our world.

The introductory chapter, Standing On the Shoulders of the Past, inspires an evolutionary perspective for contemporary yoga practitioners. This perspective is strengthened in the next chapters of the book through a comprehensive survey of various yoga forms in The Many Yogas and through a detailed analysis of the origins, history, and psycho-physical-spiritual principles in Hatha—The Yoga of Sun and Moon.

In the book’s central chapters, the practical insights of an evolutionary perspective are applied to specific aspects of Hatha yoga practice. Finding the Ah Ha! in Hatha—Principles, Hints, and Insights into Yoga Practice deals directly with many of the overarching questions, internal techniques, and attitudes yogis grapple with in developing a sustaining and dynamic personal practice. A practical context for pursuing a lifetime yoga practice is strengthened with more applications of concrete insights and experiential observations in The Internal Alchemy of Hatha Yoga and in Useful Styles and Modes of Practice. Together, the contents, experiments, instructions, recommendations, and insights offered in these central chapters can liberate yoga students to learn from their own yoga practice and become their own yoga teachers. Practical considerations become particularly focused in Injury, Pain, and Healing, where insights for healing and for learning from injury are offered from the author’s experience.

The last group of chapters returns to a deeper exploration of philosophical contexts of yoga traditions in relation to contemporary practice. Yogic mappings of the subtle body are considered from an evolutionary perspective in The Chakras—The Play of Matter and Energy. Then the nature of daily life itself is explored as a personal path of unfolding enlightenment in Meditation Is Your Life; in this chapter he shows that the real essence of meditation is free from obligatory, routine practices and techniques. Finally, Spirituality, Enlightenment, and the Miraculous reconnects the practical with the philosophical and rejoins the personal with the planetary as the evolutionary potential of the human spirit is reoriented to a liberating navigation of inquiry and insight. This final chapter challenges established definitions of enlightenment and presents a new, accessible vision of spirituality for modern times.

Attentive readers will learn how to apply insights offered here to their own experiences. Yoga students of all levels, from beginner to teacher, will learn to form and answer questions about their own practice through their own inquiry. As a result, this book offers yogis the most important benefits of yoga. Yoga Beyond Belief offers approaches to yoga that open possibilities for deep and liberating transformations of the self. It can certainly help guide all readers to an awakening of insight, free of archaic dependencies and romantic beliefs, and ready to meet the accelerating challenges of the twenty-first century.

Dr. Mark Schlenz is a professor of creative writing and environmental studies at UC-Santa Barbara and a certified yoga teacher.

Yoga’s growing popularity in the West raises many questions. For example, is yoga becoming Americanized and does that Americanization degenerate the purity or authenticity of the teachings? If yoga is being changed in the West, what right do we have to make these modifications? These concerns also raise deeper questions: What is the nature of tradition and authority? Can we truly know exactly what was taught and practiced in the past? Is there any actuality to the concept of pure teachings from the past?

I first realized the importance of these questions at a lecture series in the early seventies on one of the foundation texts of yoga, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. The lecturer was my great friend and mentor, Swami Venkates (1921–1982), a much-loved and respected yogi and Sanskrit scholar from India.¹ He explained that very little is actually known with much certainty about Patanjali, whom many consider one of the early codifiers, if not the father, of yoga. I use Patanjali as an example because his yoga sutras are used by many teachers as the touchstone of yoga, yet the text can be interpreted in widely differing manners. My swami friend emphasized that any translation or commentary on any text always involves someone’s point of view. In fact, the translation process itself is interpretation. Even if we read or listen to a text in its original language, we must acknowledge that a large amount of personal interpretation still goes on in the way we receive it.

Language usage, meaning, and circumstance change over time. We have heard the story in Psychology 101 of the man who runs menacingly into and out of a classroom with a banana and the students are asked to write a report. Nearly everyone describes having witnessed the man doing different things; some saw the banana as a gun, a flashlight, or a telephone. What does this case of multiple interpretations of a single event imply about the possible purity of subtle teachings handed down over thousands of years? What should we learn about the limits of tradition and authority from our observation of the phenomenon of every major religion and tradition breaking down into dozens of sects and subgroups with conflicting opinions, often with each one asserting that only its members have the actual truth? Even secular laws written in contemporary times with clear intent are prone to conflicting interpretations. Carefully written laws can be stretched, interpreted, and argued in different directions. Spiritual concepts and teachings, especially from the ancient past, are far more vulnerable. Spirituality is not an exact science to be laid out in narrowly defined paths.

Tradition and Interpretation

An adept scholar can find many different, often contradictory, meanings in the ancient texts. There are many examples in every tradition where, in order to support various philosophical positions, the same texts are translated in different ways. For example, some teachers believe Patanjali was an advocate, if not one of the originators, of Hatha yoga, while others assert that Patanjali’s sutras do not support the practice of physical yoga at all. When I first started teaching, I mentioned in a class that I was taught that the sutras were the foundation of Hatha yoga. A few days later a well-known elder swami from another organization called me and angrily chastised me, asserting that Patanjali was not at all an advocate of physical yoga. He stated that Patanjali’s mention of asana and pranayama, posture and breathing, only referred to sitting quietly and stilling the breath for meditation. The swami said spending time and energy to cultivate the body would lead to attachment, body consciousness, and would detract one from the true spiritual path. This opinion is the antithesis of what most modern, Western yoga students believe.

Another example of differing opinions in the yoga sutras is the word brahmacharya. Usually translated as celibacy and abstinence, brahmacharya has also been reinterpreted by some teachers in modern times to mean responsible sexuality or spiritual sexuality aimed toward God. This shows how the same text can be assumed to have opposite meanings. There are texts that prescribe renunciation in order to attain god-hood and those that say indulgence is the path. Some ancient scriptures say the doors of heaven are only open to vegetarians and others that say the opposite. I remember Swami Venkates pointing out that yogic texts and teachings are so vast and so complex that we can find traditional support and authority for almost anything we want to do. In spite of these limitations, students and teachers often spend great energy in debate to try to bolster an edict or find an exact meaning of a Sanskrit sutra in English. This quest may ever elude them. How can truth or the immensity of life and spirit be confined and captured in explanation? How can wisdom and spiritual realization be attained by mechanical processes or the practice of specific techniques? In this book you will see how these questions or problems should not cause us despair but, rather, strengthen us in following our hearts and minds.

Yoga is a cherished and valuable tradition. We can learn from and use the tradition in an approach tempered by the realization that what we call tradition is truly our own, or another’s, interpretation of what something may have been in the distant past. My swami friend Venkates suggested that we use ancient writings to stimulate our inquiry and to catalyze our direct perception and understanding of our own lives without becoming overly dependent on tradition. Relying too much on doctrines and texts for guidance in living cuts one off from direct perception and from the living awareness of insight. Yoga should be viewed as an art as well as a science. Structured, more scientific, aspects of yoga and techniques also involve unstructured, indefinable dynamics that require artistry and awareness to apply. Living in wholeness and creativity has structural components, but life is more an art than a science. Even in asana practice there is structure as well as the artistry of application to the individuality of the person and the moment. Yoga is practiced within the tradition but must be applied according to the uniqueness of each person’s life and situation. We should not simply idealize the past and assume that teachings, purportedly unchanged from the ancient past, are perfect, superior, or appropriate for the present. It is impossible truly to know the ancient past. Giving teachers, and even teachings, the status of perfection is the beginning of authoritarianism and a recipe for abuse. When teachers say they are presenting a perfected teaching, there is the veiled implication of unquestionable authority. The teacher is elevated as the pure vessel of this perfected path. It is important to be aware of what power, stature, and position a particular viewpoint gives to the teacher expounding it. There is no single interpretation of yoga. We cannot learn to fly by following the tracks left by birds in the sand. We must find our own wings and soar.

Another great teacher, J. Krishnamurti, said, The observer is the observed, meaning, among other implications, that when we study something it is affected and colored by our own interpretations and projections. This influence is also a problem in setting up scientific experiments. The way the experiment is set up affects the outcome. Is light matter or energy? It turns out that it depends on how we look at it. The method of observation has a direct relationship to the way the observed object is perceived. Krishnamurti also said, Truth has no path, and that is the beauty of truth, it is living. A dead thing has a path to it because it is static.² He pointed out that because we have exactness and authority in the technological world, we unconsciously carry the ideas of authority and structure over to the spiritual arena where they have no place. We are living, changing beings. We can learn from and honor tradition and we can also grow beyond it to develop the ability to listen to our own uniqueness by incorporating contemporary insights and discoveries. If we are too busy trying to relive the past, we may miss birthing the new. We do not have to limit ourselves to searching backwards through the musty corridors of the ancient past for answers to the mutating and constantly changing questions of the living present. Tradition can be valuable and useful, but we should not forego the much more relevant insights that can be found right here and now on our own yoga mats, and in the laboratory of our own lives.

Freedom from the Known

An insatiable appetite and energy for learning and a fresh inquiring mind are among life’s greatest assets. This is why the concept of beginner’s mind has been emphasized in the East. When we come to learning as a beginner, we are open, questioning, looking. When we approach a subject as an expert, we are more closed and fixed in the accumulated information we have gathered, in the past experiences we have had. When we’re an expert, or experienced, when we know something, even a yoga posture, we tend to approach it mechanically, from the past. We lose the freedom of discovery, the freedom of being fresh and new.

As our journey in the unending process of learning and growing in wisdom progresses, we must endeavor to keep a fresh context, a fresh attitude, a beginner’s mind. We must keep the content we acquire from hardening and clouding the context in which we hold information and experience. Our context, the ground of being with which we hold the information, should be kept open, flexible, and free.

There is an ancient saying: He who knows, knows not. And he who knows not, knows. Or: He who knows doesn’t say. And he who says, doesn’t know. One of the messages of this saying is that there is much more to wisdom and understanding than mere knowledge and information. Knowledge and information are limited, as there is always room for growth and change. One who thinks he knows doesn’t understand this limitation and has therefore a restricted perception. One who sees his or her own limitations, and the limits of knowledge, may actually see more clearly. The word intelligence, from inter legere, means to see between the lines. Intelligence is seeing between the hard lines of fixed information and knowledge, having the subtle, flexible perception that can see beyond the norm, beyond limited definition and formula. I once heard a very wise man discussing this concept and also what brings about a state of clear intelligence and penetrating perception. His inquiry revealed that the necessary ground for awakening intelligence is an open state of consciousness that begins with not knowing. Saying I don’t know is the beginning of the awakening intelligence. As this wise man was explaining this, he looked up at his questioner and said, And you don’t know either! pointing out that this type of seeing does not happen by looking to others to fill our void. The vulnerable state of humility, of saying I really don’t know opens one to discovery—but we must also be vigilant not to allow ourselves to become susceptible to those who would like to fill us with their dogmas and doctrines.

A Fresh Point of View

A famous Zen story is