Yoga to Ease Anxiety

Yoga Book Collection for Sale

1/26/2019

Dear friends in Yoga,
In the spirit of keeping only what I need, I am selling my collection of Yoga books. Some of these are old stand-bys and some are very rare because they were imported from India or Europe, or they're just old. I'm asking $100 for the lot. The only catch is you must take them all. There are 55 books in the collection, and they cover topics ranging from the practical side of asana to the philosophical, historical, and mythological side of yoga. Plus there's a little Zen.

American Yoga, Carrie Schneider
Anatomy of Movement, Blandine Calais-Germain
Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda
Awakening the Spine, Vanda Scaravelli
Bhagavad Gita, Eknath Easwaran
Celestial Key to the Vedas, B.G. Sidharth
Chair Yoga for You, Clarissa C. Adkins, Olivette Baugh Robinson, & Barbara Leaf Stewart
Chair Yoga: Seated Exercise for Health and Wellbeing, Edeltraud Rohnfeld
Complete Kama Sutra, Alain Danielou
Complete Yoga Book, James Hewitt
Downward Dogs and Warriors: Wisdom Tales for Modern Yoga, Zo Newell
Eighty-four Asana in Yoga: A Survey of Traditions (with Illustrations), Gudrun Buhnemann
Essential Zen, Kazuaki Tanahashi & Tensho David Schneider
Extension, Sam Dworkis
Grist for the Mill, Ram Dass
Hatha Yoga: the Hidden Language, Sivananda Radha
Hatharatnavali, Srinivasayogi
Heart of Yoga, T. K. V. Desikachar
History of Modern Yoga, Elizabeth de Michelis
Insight Yoga, Sarah Powers
Kripalu Yoga: Meditation in Motion, Amrit Desai
Light on Yoga, B. K. S. Iyengar
Living Yoga, Georg Feuerstein & Stephan Bodian (Eds.)
Living Your Yoga, Judith Lasater
Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy & Sister Nivedita
Openness Mind, Tarthang Tulku
Oracle of Rama, David Frawley
Plus-Sized Yoga, Donald Keith Stanley
Psycho-Yoga, B. Edwin
Ramayana, Aubrey Menen
Relax and Renew, Judith Hanson Lasater
Sivananda Companion to Yoga, Sivananda Yoga Center
Speaking of Siva, A. K. Ramanujan
Spirit of Yoga, Kathy Philips
Spiritual Science of Kriya Yoga, Goswami Kriyananda
Spiritual Stories, Ramana Maharshi
Teaching Yoga, Mark Stephens
Teachings of the Hindu Mystics, Andrew Harvey (Ed.)
Therapeutic Answers to Common Yoga Pose Questions, Jaimie Perkunas
Upanisads, Patrick Olivelle
Upanishads, Eknath Easwaran
Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker’s Guide to Extraordinary Living, Stephen Cope
Yoga and Parapsychology, K. Ramakrishna Rao (Ed.)
Yoga for Depression, Amy Weintraub
Yoga for Stress Relief, Shivapremananda
Yoga Gems: A Treasury of Practical and Spiritual Wisdom from Ancient and Modern Masters, Georg Geuerstein
Yoga in Modern India: the Body between Science and Philosophy, Joseph S. Alter
Yoga Mind, Body & Spirit, Donna Farhi
Yoga Morality, Georg Feuerstein
Yoga Nidra, Richard Miller
Yoga Rx, Larry Payne & Richard Usatine
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Chip Hartranft
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Satchidananda
Yoga: the Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness, Erich Schiffmann
Yoga: the Ultimate Spiritual Path, Swami Rajarshi Muni

Another Curve Ball

8/8/2017

Spent a good amount of time in the ER Sunday night with severe chest pain and difficulty breathing. Good news: it's not my heart or my lungs. Bad news: it's either esophagitis or an esophageal ulcer. Not life-threatening, but it can take a while to heal.

In the meantime, I'm not supposed to lay flat, fold forward, do extensive core work, or have my head below my heart. And while that doesn't negate every yoga pose, it takes enough of them out of the picture that I can't effectively teach. So, I'm letting go of my last two classes.

It will be good. I can focus more on being a parent to my teenager who just started in a really tough school. I can focus on feeding myself and my family beautiful, fresh food. I can take the time to take care of myself, mind and body, including the kind of yoga I need for me. And I can focus more on writing, which is where my heart really is right now.

If you want to follow me on my new adventures, I'll be blogging mostly at my new site: amymvaughn.com. Hope to see you there!

I Do Not Have, nor Have I Ever Had, My Shit Together

7/9/2017

By Booyabazooka Wikimedia CC BY-SA 3.0

In March, I wrote another book. By May, I was in the throes of one of the worst depressions of my life. I walked away from my teaching jobs, cancelled lectures, and completely withdrew from anything social. I quit doing my home practice and binge watched Survivor, all 34 seasons.

My therapist, who I’ve been seeing for anxiety, panic, OCD, and just generally being a spaz, was caught off guard. My normal eager to please, bring-it-on-I-can-do-it attitude was gone. I was a lump. She would make a suggestion and I would swat it away as if it were completely unreasonable. See a friend? I’m sleeping fifteen hours a day and not doing laundry. As if I’m going to “see a friend.”

Soon after this shift she said, “I think you might have bipolar.” I took the inventories, talked to my family, consulted my psychiatrist. They all agreed with her.

Denial, anger, bargaining, grief, acceptance. Damn it. I have bipolar disorder, characterized by looooong bouts of high functioning hypomania and sudden deep depressions.

Kick ass.

I’ve learned the hard way that mental illness is not something you fuck around with. So I got to work. For the last few months I’ve been trying different medications, dealing with side effects, and redefining my emotional baseline. I’m now finally balancing out on a low dose anti-seizure medication that for some reason works as a mood stabilizer. No one knows why.

Tomorrow I am going back to work, back to teaching super slow yoga at a drug and alcohol rehab, and I’m nervous. Really nervous. Yoga is different for me now. For the last six years I’ve gained a lot of my identity from yoga. The irony is not lost on me. The whole point of yoga is to strip away the outward identity, our enculturated masks.

But I thought in order to be faithful to the tradition I had to be it. I mean, it’s a lifestyle, right? I lived and breathed yoga. I judged my every thought and action in its framework. I judged other people by it too. I wasn’t practicing yoga, I was enmeshed in it. Lost in it.

Part of my current depressive cycle has been a rebellion against yoga, and it’s been interesting to watch. Yoga is not my life. No one thing is or ever could be. I’m a mom, a wife, a vegan, a writer, and a hundred other things as well as someone who does and teaches yoga. This was a hard lesson to learn. But my “devotion” to yoga falls into a pattern I’ve maintained for decades, a samskara if you like, of throwing myself into things headlong, whole heartedly, in order to hide within them.

A lot of good has come, and will continue to come, from my time obsessed with yoga. I have helped people feel better and learn coping skills. I wrote a book that I hope makes the story of yoga accessible to the average Jane and Joe. And I kept myself physically healthy and emotionally grounded during what could have been some serious manic benders and suicidal depressions.

None of that is erased. The only difference is that I no longer feel defined or confined by yoga, which is its goal!

But now I'm worried that when I get on the mat tomorrow, in front of needful souls in their various stages of crisis, that it will be different, that I may not be able to guide them as well without my manic obsession backing me up.

Even without it though, I do still believe in the practice. No matter how this weirdness that is modern postural yoga came into being and into my life, it works. It changes our brains for the better. I have to continue to trust that when the time comes all my inner drama--all the definitions and ideas I have about yoga and what it is and who I am in relation to it—all of that will fade away, along with everything else, and be replaced with the magic that comes from moving beyond conceptualization and into that quiet attention to body and breath. Into the act of yoga.

Personal Update, May 24 2017

5/24/2017

Tomorrow my son will be done with middle school, and I will become the parent of a high schooler. He worked his ass off to maintain his grades in a self-contained gifted / accelerated program and got into the highest ranked public school in Arizona. Not only is he smart and determined, but he’s funny and empathic. I am proud beyond words.

But that is not the only transition my family and I are going through.

Our sweet old dog, Jane, passed away. A large, cancerous tumor, of which we were unaware, ruptured. She went quickly. The house is quieter, emptier without her. She and I spent most of every day together. Jane was 14 and had a good life. Still, it takes adjusting.

Another transition: I am reinventing myself yet again. It seems that I do this every five or so years. First I was an adjunct professor for five years, and a technical editor. Then an at-home mom for five years. Most recently I was a yoga instructor and educator for the last five-plus years. And now, I think I’ll be a writer.

The more I pull away from the public yoga-sphere the more comfortable I am in my skin. I love yoga and know the good it can do. The industry that has grown up around it, however, is toxic to me. So, I am not teaching for the time being. I am open to returning but only if I truly feel called.

In the meantime I wrote a novella, Thigh Gap. It’s a dark comedy about a woman who escapes a wildly over-controlling husband and becomes the world’s most famous stripper. It’ll be available in a few weeks.

I am also adjusting to medication for bipolar disorder, a.k.a. manic depression. The way bipolar manifests in me is through very long stretches, several months in a row, where I’m hypomanic; and then severe crashes into depression, which last a few weeks. Being hypomanic means being really up -- baselessly confident, euphoric, crazy productive -- but without the psychosis and compulsions of mania. (The latter are probably prevented by the medication I’m already on for OCD.)

You might be thinking hypomania doesn’t sound so bad, and honestly I am sad to let it go. But the tradeoff for riding that high and getting three times as much done as anyone rightfully should is that it is hell on relationships and hard on my health.

The first few weeks of any medication takes patience. There will be side effects to muddle through. Insomnia, headache, lack of coordination, and lack of short term memory are the most pronounced of those that I’m dealing with. Hopefully they will resolve soon.

To end this little update, I just want to give a great big "Thank You!" to all of my family, friends, and well-wishers for your patience and support as I make my way through all of these transitions. It means the world to know that, while I may be sequestered away, you guys have my back.

Why I Do Yoga or Hey Everybody, I Have Bipolar Disorder

4/26/2017

I’m supposed to be making a flier to convince people to take my yoga classes at Shall We Dance. I tried putting all the usual things on the screen: Do something great for your body and mind! Build inner and outer flexibility, strength, and balance! Check out my awesome credentials!

But my heart just wasn’t in it.

You want to know why I do the physical practice of yoga? It may not be for the reasons you think.

I do yoga to help me get through the week. It’s no secret that I have multiple anxiety disorders (OCD, panic disorder, generalized anxiety). But recently I’ve been diagnosed with Bipolar 1, which makes a lot of sense given my hugely productive upswings and staggeringly apathetic lows.

But no matter what mood I’m in when I get to the mat, by the time class is over I’ve moved back toward the baseline, back toward feeling like everything is going to be OK.

It isn’t magic. I looked it up, because I fear being duped and appreciate scientific evidence. Yoga really does change your brain chemistry, if you’re paying attention. It’s the conscious act of placing your attention on the experience of moving and being still that

initiates the process of flushing out stress chemicals,
provokes the release of serotonin and GABA and a bunch of other feel-good neurotransmitters, and
activates those parts of the brain responsible for feelings of peaceful equilibrium as well as patience, empathy, compassion, creativity, and the ability to concentrate.

Caveat: it works best if you move . . . very . . . slowly.

I say some weird stuff in class because of this connection between feeling the physical sensations of the present moment and the mental effects of practicing yoga. This is why I say:

Stay in your body.
Feel your whole body: front, back, left, and right.
Be aware of the stretch, and on another level be aware of your entire body.

I say all this craziness and other stuff to remind us (myself as much as everybody else in the room) to “stay embodied,” which is another odd thing I say. Because staying aware of being embodied is the trick to why yoga feels like magic.

So that’s why I do yoga. The rest is bonus. Sure, it makes it so my body hurts less when I wake up in the morning. Sure, I’m more flexible than a whole lot of other women in their mid-40s. Sure, my lung capacity is huge, I can open my own pickle jars, and I feel secure standing on my tiptoes reaching for stuff on the top shelf. There’s no doubt that a physical yoga practice helps maintain us physically. So would a lot of other types of exercise.

But what matters to me is being kind and present with my family and friends. And without yoga, my brain gets tangled in knots. Yoga smooths it out. That’s why I teach what might be the slowest (non-yin or restorative) class in town. That’s why I say strange things like “Feel your skin.”

There are other classes, other teachers, other styles, that serve other purposes. And I would absolutely recommend them if you want to sweep through the beautiful flows of sun salutes or gain mastery of the more challenging acrobatic poses.

But if you want to practice slowing down, being present, and changing your outlook, at first temporarily and then maybe even lastingly, you should check out my classes at Shall We Dance.

Now, how do I fit that onto a flier?

Yoga and Cultural Appropriation (Part 1)

2/15/2017

Discontinued Lululemon branded mala, which sold for $108.

An author named Rachel Carter recently asked for my thoughts on yoga and cultural appropriation. Here's how I responded. I'm hoping she has return questions, where I'll delve into this further. There's a lot more to say than what's covered here.

I’m happy to talk about yoga and cultural appropriation. I have only my own experience to offer, which I've written briefly here. If you have further questions, please feel free to send them.

I would recommend contacting Carol Horton and Matthew Remski, who would both be far more erudite than me on this topic.

(Here's my story.)
For my undergraduate degree, I dual majored in Religious Studies and Psychology. The Religious Studies department at the school I went to, Northern Arizona University, took a history of religions approach. That means I studied the development of religions: how they started and grew. Each religion, each culture, was considered with the utmost respect.

That’s how it came to pass that, when I first studied the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali under Bruce Sullivan (a student of Mircea Eliade and the author of the Historical Dictionary of Hinduism, Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces, and others), I was fully convinced that yoga in the U.S. was a thoughtless appropriation, a weak caricature of one of Patanjali’s eight limbs. For the next ten years, I would have nothing to do with it.

Then I developed a massive combination of anxiety disorders: generalized anxiety grew into panic disorder, social phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and finally agoraphobia. I tried everything to get better, especially for my son who was fast becoming a toddler and needed a functioning mother.

Everything I read about anxiety, which was a substantial amount due to my academic bent, said do yoga. After years of suffering and suicidal ideation, I finally gave up my perhaps self-righteous animosity toward American yoga and tried it. And yoga made all the difference. Because of yoga I was able to get into treatment. That whole story is in Yoga to Ease Anxiety.

But I was still wary of cultural appropriation. So I determined to learn everything I could about how yoga started and grew, and how it came to be what it is now in the U.S. It took five years for me to feel like I had a decent grasp on the subject, and From the Vedas to Vinyasa is the result.

Now I am conflicted. I love yoga. I love the history, the philosophy, the depth of yoga. And I love the practice of yoga, even knowing that modern postural yoga is a far cry from what the ancient or even medieval yogis practiced. It gave me my life back and provides me stability every day.

But at this point in time, right now today, I can’t stand and do not want to be associated with the business of yoga. The commodification and exploitation of the practice makes me angry and anxious if I spend too much time thinking about it.

I absolutely believe that the practice and study of yoga can benefit those who are called to it in this crazy, stressed-out age. There are great teachers out there, who can help people develop a worthwhile practice that will in turn help them mature emotionally and spiritually and find equanimity.

However, it’s a buyer-beware situation. In stripping yoga down in order to commercialize it and make it appealing to the masses, the yoga industry is peddling a form of yoga that can end up being sped up, competitive, body shaming, and devoid of substance, as well as ego-aggrandizing rather than ego-taming. What passes as yoga in many gyms and studios can do as much harm as good, physically and mentally. (The Science of Yoga by Wm. J. Broad and Hell-Bent by Benjamin Lorr provide two very different perspectives on this.)

I continue to practice and teach in a style that used to be the norm in the U.S., when yoga was counter-cultural, but is now far slower and less acrobatic than the types of yoga that are currently most popular. Other than that, I am growing more reserved about my interactions with modern yoga culture and focusing instead on turning the effects of my yoga practice toward building a quiet, peaceful life of love, joy, and creativity.

Stages of Mysticism: a synopsis of Evelyn Underhill's Practical Mysticism (Part Two)

1/21/2017

This post continues the discussion from Part One.

Chapter Four: Meditation and Recollection

Continuing along the mystical path laid out my Underhill, this chapter dives deeply into the practice of training our attention, or Recollection.

Underhill defines Recollection as “the subjection of the attention to the control of the will.” It begins with the “deliberate and regular practice of meditation.” There is nothing special, according to her, about disciplining our consciousness: “The real mystical life,” she says, “which is the truly practical life, begins at the beginning; not with supernatural acts and ecstatic apprehensions, but with the normal faculties of the normal man.” It is something that everyone must do if they “would get control of their own mental processes.” She then lays out the process of training our attention.

In describing meditation she says, “Take, then, an idea, an object, from amongst the common stock, and hold it before your mind.” And as with all guidance to beginning meditators, she warns that this is not nearly as easy as it sounds: “But, the choice made, it must be held and defended during the time of meditation against all invasions from without, however insidious their encroachments, however ‘spiritual’ their disguise. It must be brooded upon, gazed at, seized again and again, as distractions seem to snatch it from your grasp.”

Eventually, through this act of focusing, we begin to merge with our object of meditation, to “sink as it were into the deeps of it, rest in it, ‘unite’ with it.”

“Moreover,” she goes on, “as your meditation becomes deeper it will defend you from the perpetual assaults of the outer world. . . . And gradually, you will come to be aware of an entity, a You, who can thus hold at arm’s length, be aware of, look at, an idea—a universe—other than itself.” And finally, in Recollection, you “turn this purified and universalised gaze back upon yourself.”

So here’s the process:

Step one: First we are to devote our attention to, meditate on, an object to such an extent that we are no longer aware of where our consciousness ends and the object begins.

Step two: We abide, protected from the world, in this meditative state.

Step three: Eventually, we discover an awareness outside of our ordinary consciousness, a witness that stands outside of our personal whims.

Step four: We turn this new found awareness back upon the personality and are able to witness our self.

For Underhill, this is just the beginning, the initial training of consciousness at the outset of the mystical path:

“So doing patiently, day after day, constantly recapturing the vagrant attention, ever renewing the struggle for simplicity of sight, you will at last discover that there is something within you—something behind the fractious, conflicting life of desire—which you can recollect, gather up, make effective for new life. You will, in fact, know your own soul for the first time: and learn that there is a sense in which this real You is distinct from, an alien within, the world in which you find yourself, as an actor has another life when he is not on the stage. When you do not merely believe this but know it; when you have achieved this power of withdrawing yourself, of making this first crude distinction between appearance and reality, the initial stage of the contemplative life has been won.”

However, this trick of consciousness is nothing in itself. It takes the addition of Purgation and a loving disposition to continue down the path.

Chapter 5: Self-Adjustment

Just training our attention is not enough because the act of seeing ourselves through this disinterested or detached awareness reveals an inevitable conflict between our new understanding and our “old habits, old notions, old prejudices.”

Once we get our first glimpse of Reality, “Never again,” Underhill tells us, “need those moralists point out to you the inherent silliness of your earnest pursuit of impermanent things: your solemn concentration upon the game of getting on.”

But just seeing this truth is not enough. She assures us that we will backslide without self-discipline. Having recognized the fallacy of our old perceptions of what is real and important, we have to make systemic changes. This “drastic remodeling of character” is called Purgation, and it is “the second stage in the training of the human consciousness for participation in Reality.”

Purgation itself has two components: detachment and mortification. According to Underhill, detachment means stepping away from three very ingrained behaviors. It is “the refusal to anchor yourself in material things, to regard existence from the personal standpoint, or confuse custom with necessity.” And mortification is “the resolving of the turbulent whirlpools and currents of your own conflicting passions, interests, desire; the killing out of all those tendencies which the peaceful vision of Recollection would condemn, and which create the fundamental opposition between your interior and exterior life.”

As we see here, for Underhill, morality is more than just choosing to follow a set of rules. It is a question of our fundamental disposition. She points to one character trait as the most in need of adjustment: “You are enslaved by the verb ‘to have.’”

“The very mainspring of your activity is a demand, either for a continued possession of that which you have, or for something which as yet you have not: wealth, honour, success, social position, love, friendship, comfort, amusement. You feel that you have a right to some of these things: to a certain recognition of your powers, a certain immunity from failure or humiliation.”

But holding these beliefs keeps us from experiencing Reality: “So long as these dispositions govern character we can never see or feel things as they are.”

The answer, the path forward, is one of expanding our capacity for detachment, which Underhill does not see as cold or hard hearted, but as characterized by a compassionate recognition of the intrinsic value of all things.

“So it is disinterestedness, the saint’s and poet’s love of things for their own sakes, the vision of the charitable heart, which is the secret of union with Reality and the condition of all real knowledge. This brings with it the precious quality of suppleness, the power of responding with ease and simplicity to the great rhythms of life; and this will only come when . . . the verb ‘to have’ . . . is ejected from the centre of your consciousness.”

The effort continues, as we see in the title of the next chapter, through love and will.

Chapter 6: Love and Will

The next effort that must be made, after working to train our attention and remodel our interior landscape, is “to push with all your power: not to absorb ideas, but to pour forth will and love.”

It is “by an eager outstretching toward Reality” that we “move towards Reality” and “enter into its rhythm.” Underhill says we must “look with the eyes of love,” which she admits sounds a little corny, but it couldn’t be more important.

“To ‘look with the eyes of love’ seems a vague and sentimental recommendation: yet the whole art of spiritual communion is summed in it, and exact and important results flow from this exercise. The attitude which it involves is an attitude of complete humility and of receptiveness; without criticism, without clever analysis of the thing seen. When you look thus, you surrender your I-hood; see things . . . for their sake, not for your own. The fundamental unity that is in you reaches out to the unity that is in them.”

It is this effort of love and will that allows us to progress into what Underhill calls the Forms of Contemplation.

“Therefore this transitional stage in the development of the contemplative powers . . . is concerned with the toughening and further training of that will which self-simplification has detached from its old concentration upon the unreal wants and interests of the self. Merged with your intuitive love, this is to become the true agent of your encounter with Reality . . . .”

At this point we have seen that we begin by training our attention to see things as they are rather than filtering them through our enculturated language and self-serving categories. Next we find that the new knowledge brought from this awareness gives the lie to our old way of being in the world and, if we are to progress, we must stem this cognitive dissonance by adjusting our thoughts and actions to meet up with the wisdom we’ve gained. And finally, here we’ve seen that the path is still not passive. We must press on, through love and will, reaching out toward Reality.

In the next post, we will explore the results of all of this effort, which is the journey through what Underhill calls the Three Forms of Contemplation. They amount to ever-expanding circles of loving union with the World of Becoming or Nature, the World of Being or Spirit, and finally with the Absolute, whatever insufficient label we choose to give It!

Stages of Mysticism: a Synopsis of Evelyn Underhill’s Practical Mysticism (Part One)

1/18/2017

Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941) Photo credit: William Edward Downey. Public Domain

Evelyn Underhill was born a mystic. She experienced spontaneous unitive states of consciousness from an early age. As an adult, she studied and wrote about mysticism both to deepen her own understanding and to advocate the practices that nurture what she saw as one of the most important experiences a person can have.

She wrote the short, dense book, Practical Mysticism: a Little Book for Normal People, in 1915 as a guide for the “everyman” of her era. (As she used the masculine normative throughout, I’ve decided not to mark each instance with a [sic] for ease of reading. Please forgive me this lenience.) Underhill firmly believed that mystical experiences are available to all who truly pursue them.

She admits that the topic is usually reserved for those cloistered away, and then goes on to say: “Yet it is to you, practical man, reading these pages as you rush through the tube to the practical work of rearranging unimportant fragments of your universe, that this message so needed by your time—or rather, by your want of time—is addressed. To you, unconscious analyst, so busy reading the advertisements upon the carriage wall, that you hardly observe the stages of your unceasing flight: so anxiously acquisitive of the crumbs that you never lift your eyes to the loaf.”

In other words, it was written for people going about their workaday lives with little or no comprehension of what she calls Reality, with a capital "R," which different people call the Ultimate, the Absolute, God, Allah, Brahman, the Sacred, and so on.

I believe that her message is just as important to us today, if not more so as the stakes are raised in our time concerning the future of humankind. But her writing style is challenging, to say the least. What I propose to write here is a series of posts that will provide a synopsis, chapter by chapter, of that already little book. I am doing this mostly, if I’m candid, to help myself and maybe others parse its compressed and nearly antiquated early 20th century prose into something more manageable for the early 21st century mind. That said, I find many of her florid turns of phrase to be both spot on and delightful, and at times, like in the above quotation, to show important consistencies between our times. Therefore, I will use her words liberally throughout.

Let’s get started.

Chapter One: What is Mysticism?

“Mysticism,” as Underhill defines it, “is the act of union with Reality.”

Setting aside, until chapter two, the question of what exactly Reality is, we are asked instead to consider the word “union.” Union, she says, is happening all the time. It is not some “rare and unimaginable operation” but instead something we are always doing. We are uniting with something, “in a vague, imperfect fashion, at every moment,” and “with intensity and thoroughness in all the more valid moments” of our lives.

So, the question isn’t whether we will experience union, but “what, out of the mass of material offered to it, shall consciousness seize upon—with what aspects of the universe shall it ‘unite’?”

The problem is that most of us spend our time uniting with things that are superficial and impermanent, less than Reality. At the root of this problem, according to Underhill, is the question of labels.

“Because mystery is horrible to us,” she says, “we have agreed . . . to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent.”

To put this another way, we are separated from Reality because we automatically categorize sensations and perceptions. We spontaneously label everything. But labels misrepresent reality because words and the mental categories they create are necessarily less than the experiences they represent. It is this veil of words, of superimposed mental categories, that prevents us from experiencing, “uniting,” with Reality directly.

But we can overcome this separation by learning to experience our sensations directly, through “contemplative consciousness,” which is a faculty we all have. That will be the focus of chapter three. But before we get there, we need to talk about Reality.

Chapter 2: The World of Reality

In her second chapter, Underhill takes on the question she set aside at the beginning of chapter one: how to describe the experience of Reality.

When we “reach out and unite with the fact, instead of our notion of it,” she says, we experience “direct communion.” When we achieve “an ideal state of receptivity, of perfect correspondence with the essence of things,” then there is an experience of “absolute sensation.”

“It is,” she goes on, “a pure feeling-state, in which the fragmentary contacts with Reality achieved through the senses are merged in a wholeness of communion which feels and knows all at once, yet in a way which the reason can never understand, that Totality of which fragments are known by the lover, the musician, the artist.”

OK, let’s back up a bit and recap. To begin with, we are always uniting with some aspect of Reality, however shallow that encounter might be. And sometimes the encounter takes on greater depth—in love and in creative acts. (And I wonder if we should consider adding here reverie and all of those events which these days we might call “peak experiences” à la Maslow and “flow experiences” à la Csíkszentmihályi.) Then, in the mystical experience, the encounter is no longer with only a piece of Reality: it is complete immersion.

Moving forward again, Underhill begins to explain how to cultivate this experience when she says, “Eternity is with us, inviting our contemplation perpetually, but we are too frightened, lazy, and suspicious to respond: too arrogant to still our thoughts, and let divine sensation have its way.”

She tells us, “It needs industry and goodwill if we would make that transition: for the process involves a veritable spring cleaning of the soul, a turning-out and rearrangement of our mental furniture, a wide opening of closed windows, that the notes of the wild birds beyond our garden may come to us fully charged with wonder and freshness, and drown with their music the noise of the gramophone within.”

This spring cleaning of our inner lives is a necessary step in learning how to refrain from subjecting our immediate experience of sensations “to the cooking, filtering process of the brain.” Continuing on this theme, in chapter three we will learn “to put the emphasis upon the message from without, rather than on (our) own reaction to and rearrangement of it.”

Chapter 3: The Preparation of the Mystic

According to Underhill, there are “two great phases in the education of every contemplative . . . the purification of the senses and the purification of the will,” also known as Recollection and Purgation." And both are achieved through "self-simplification.”

“What is it that smears the windows of the senses?” Underhills asks. And she answers, “thought, convention, self-interest.” Later she adds, “Religion, priggishness, or discontent may drape the panes.”

To make this clearer, she says, “To ‘purify’ the senses is to release them . . . from the tyranny of egocentric judgments . . . to make of them the organs of direct perception. This means that we must crush our deep-seated passion for classification and correspondence; ignore the instinctive, selfish question, ‘What does it mean to me?’”

Ok, you may be saying, I get it. I’m supposed to stop filtering sensations through my preconceived, enculturated categories. But how do I do that? I believe that Underhill would have us find inner stillness.

“At this very moment your thoughts are buzzing like a swarm of bees. The reduction of this fevered complex to a unity appears to be a task beyond all human power. Yet the situation is not as hopeless for you as it seems. All this is only happening upon the periphery of the mind, where it touches and reacts to the world of appearance. At the centre there is a stillness which even you are not able to break. There, the rhythm of your duration is one with the rhythm of the Universal Life. There, your essential self exists: the permanent being which persist through and behind the flow and change of your conscious states.”

Finding this stillness, she says, is comparable to the “Eastern visionary” beckoning us to “Take your seat within the heart of the thousand-petaled lotus,” or the Christian mystic urging us to “Hold thou to thy Centre.”

“This is a practical recipe,” she says, “not a pious exhortation. The thing may sound absurd to you, but you can do it if you will: stand back, as it were, from the vague and purposeless reactions in which most men fritter their vital energies. Then you can survey with a certain calm, a certain detachment, your universe and the possibilities of life within it.”

Through this “deliberate withdrawal of attention from the bewildering multiplicity of things” we begin to simplify and purify the will until it can “retreat to the unity of its spirit.” And there we unite not just with our own eternal spirit but successively with the “three levels of existence: which we may call the Natural, the Spiritual, and the Divine.” She also calls these levels the World of Becoming, the World of Being, and the Absolute or God.

Finally, Underhill sets out the path in toto:

“We begin, therefore, to see that the task of union with Reality will involve certain stages of preparation as well as stages of attainment; and these stages of preparation . . . may be grouped under two heads. First, the disciplining and simplifying of the attention. . . . Next the disciplining and simplifying of the affections and will, the orientation of the heart. . . . So the practical mysticism of the plain man will best be grasped by him as a five-fold scheme of training and growth: in which the first two stages prepare the self for union with Reality, and the last three unite it successively with the World of Becoming, the World of Being, and finally with that Ultimate Fact which the philosopher calls the Absolute and the religious mystic calls God.”

The next couple chapters go further into the practices of Recollection and Purgation, which we might also call meditation and detachment.

To be continued . . .

New Classes!

1/6/2017

Dear friends in Yoga,

I’ve found a great new space for our classes! It’s the Shall We Dance studio at 4101 E. Grant Road, which is on the north side of the street just west of Columbus. Starting 23 January, I’ll hold gentle hatha classes there Monday and Thursday mornings from 10:15-11:30.

The building is not much from the outside, but it has beautiful floating wood floors and it’s big enough for classes to expand without becoming crowded. There’s a front desk with friendly staff, and it has dressing rooms and fans that turn off. (If you remember Ms. Fit, you’ll understand why this is important!) Outside, you can park on the street side or behind the building.

The cost will be $10 per session, which is on par with places like Yoga Oasis, Yoga Connection, and Mindful Yoga. But, unlike at those places, I get a 50% split of whatever comes in. So every time you pay, $5 goes to overhead and $5 goes to me. They do take credit cards and offer punch cards, though not at a discount.

Besides all of the great physical attributes and conveniences of this location, I am hoping it will offer our classes stability. In just over a year three places I’ve taught have closed: the owners of Ms. Fit retired; Bookmans Sports is becoming a Bookmans Entertainment Exchange; and most recently the landlord at Modern Mystic chose to repurpose the space. Hopefully, by striking out on my own like this, I can avoid that kind of turbulence for many years to come.

On a more personal note, I am nearly healed and have started to rebuild both physically and mentally. Physically, my abs are shot and my balance is terrible! Mentally, I am reassembling my life in a way that is peaceful and sustainable. Part of this includes not offering night or weekend classes right now so I can focus on my first priority, my family.

Thank you all so much for your patience and encouragement during my recent chapter break. I’m so looking forward to getting our classes going again!

Peace and joy,
Amy

December 28th, 2016

12/28/2016

Dear friends,

Modern Mystic Yoga Academy is closing its current location at the end of this year. And, since Bookmans Sports also recently closed, that means I will not have any ongoing public classes for the time being.

I do have two upcoming engagements with Bookmans.

Saturday January 7th, I will have a couple of mats for brief individual instruction and a table for my books at the Ina Bookmans Wellness Fair from 1:00 – 3:00 pm.
And Sunday January 15th, I will be teaching a class at the Grant Road Bookmans beginning at 9:30 a.m. The class is FREE! Please bring your own mat.

Other than that, I’m going to give myself a few more weeks to heal before figuring out where to hold classes. I sincerely apologize for my extended absence and look forward to being able to offer my students (and my family and myself) a more stable teaching schedule and environment!

With gratitude,

Amy

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Yoga Book Collection for Sale

Another Curve Ball

I Do Not Have, nor Have I Ever Had, My Shit Together

Personal Update, May 24 2017

Why I Do Yoga or Hey Everybody, I Have Bipolar Disorder

Yoga and Cultural Appropriation (Part 1)

Stages of Mysticism: a synopsis of Evelyn Underhill's Practical Mysticism (Part Two)

Chapter Four: Meditation and Recollection

Chapter 5: Self-Adjustment

Chapter 6: Love and Will

Stages of Mysticism: a Synopsis of Evelyn Underhill’s Practical Mysticism (Part One)

Chapter One: What is Mysticism?

Chapter 2: The World of Reality

Chapter 3: The Preparation of the Mystic

New Classes!

December 28th, 2016

Yoga Talk

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Chapter Four: Meditation and Recollection

​Chapter 5: Self-Adjustment

​Chapter 6: Love and Will

​Chapter One: What is Mysticism?

​Chapter 2: The World of Reality

​Chapter 3: The Preparation of the Mystic

Yoga Talk

Archives

Categories

Chapter 5: Self-Adjustment

Chapter 6: Love and Will

Chapter One: What is Mysticism?

Chapter 2: The World of Reality

Chapter 3: The Preparation of the Mystic