Why are you afraid?
People continue to come to me or write to me with concerns and questions about COVID19. It also seems to be affecting the attendance of classes quite seriously. More than anything, I feel myself sitting back and watching this unfold with curiosity and some anxious thoughts are there too. Ive been asking myself what is the yogic perspective on disease, immunity, etc?
Unsure of whether I should address our practice community, I reached out to my teacher, Sri B.N.S. Iyengar of Mysore, India, who was an original student of Sri. T. Krichnamacharya and is one of the most honored and respected practicing yogis and teachers, he is in his late 90’s and still teaches daily asana, pranayama and philosophy. His english is not as strong as some other Indian teachers, but his teaching somehow seeps through, with stories and concise statements, alike.
I asked a friend who is with him in Mysore now to ask him what he would say to those who are becoming part of the wave of fear surrounding COVID 19. His Response:
“Why are you afraid of a virus? Go to the metaphysical state. Convert gross body into subtle body. You have already understood this. In this metaphysical state, you can hold the atom bomb in your hand. Only yoga culture [philosophy] can establish this order. Only yogis. No novelist, philosopher, or politician can do anything about it. Only Yogic practices, get higher metaphysical stages. Then you can hold the atom bomb in your hands. Only Yogis will survive this case.”
I’ll take a shot at interpreting this for our western minds. The yoga philosophy is simple, two types of things are here and are defined in this way:
1) Stuff: Always changing.
More specifically, all this stuff is swinging back and forth, seeking a balancing point— just as a marble that is dropped into a funnel will swing back and forth until it finds the chute at the bottom. We have given names to the upward (rajas) and downward (tamas) swing, and that point between them (Sattva.) These are the three Gunas that rule our material world. Not just our cells and atoms (what Guruji calls gross body), but also the subtle fields this philosophy postulates is below them— like the shape of the sea floor affecting the surf.
Change is the law. The shape of the sandy, rocky bottom is also always changing, and even the harder materials below that become eroded and sculpted. The movements of our thoughts and our reactions to them, like the sea floor, affect the gross materials of our bodies, and in turn are also affected.
2) Awareness: Never changing.
Awareness itself is the second piece of our world. Awareness is that thing which is defined as that which witnesses: it can not change anything, nor be changed by anything. It is constant, eternal, and radiant. It is the ray of light which travels straight and true, illuminating.
The yogi seeks to stop this pain-inducing cycle of identifying themselves with the stuff that is changing, and believing the stuff won’t change, and then despairing when it does. This philosophy encourages us to instead step deeper back into the subtle body, to begin identifying ourselves with what is only witnessing, what is illuminating, what is eternal. Guruji says wisdom is “emitting rays,” the realization that you, every single one of you, are emitting the rays of light which illuminate this world. We use tools involving body, breath, and mind to practice this refinement of who we are.
This should not bring us to disassociation with the world, but instead to a deep delight in it, a playful creative spirit where we realize we are the authors of this story. As my teacher Andrew, a student of Guruji’s for over 25 years, put it in his statement on the virus, “The world is not dirty. And we are not so clean.” We are deeply connected, the swinging of the three Gunas are happening at every scale and level, from the most enormous cosmic energies, to the heartbeat of a nation, of a community, of one person to the smallest atomic levels and beyond. Whether it is called the three Gunas, or the harmonic oscillator, we exist here in these huge forces.
When we identify as the witnesses of this world, we can look on the most frightening of things without fearing obliteration. We can watch the aging of our hands without distress, we can look each other openly in the face with love and understanding; and stand through death and disease and natural disaster together, knowing that none of us, and yet also all of us, are exempt here.
I do not wish any more human suffering than there already is— yet I am, in a way, grateful for the opportunity to see what this situation is revealing to us about the way we care for one another; about the way we view our place in this world; and how we are so deeply a part of the fabric of things.
If the larger system that we are apart of us out of balance, inevitably all manner of things will arrive as the opposing force. This virus is here, but we gave it a name, we illuminate it now and it will also pass away….and then the next fearful thing will come and so on. Alchemize fear into your actions, into your work toward a more balanced way of relating, of consuming, living and creating. Do things that make you and others feel wonderful, and let your radiant awareness rest on the things you want to see grow in this world.