This is the first in a series of personal reflections on yoga and its place in our lives. Sally Hess, a lifelong professional dancer and a professor in the Department of Music and Dance at Swarthmore College, holds Introductory Certification and lives in New York City. Here she writes about yoga, art, dance and the spiritual links between them. Send your View From the Mat ideas to Richard Jonas, Communications chair (rrjny@rcn.com)
My feet spread and anchor as they sense the floor. My head moves gently up from the base of my skull. As I raise my arms slowly, my body, the one and the many of it, lengthens, widens, awakens. The eyes soften. The breath deepens. Nerves sing clearly. First pose of the day, Urdhva Hastasana.[1] To intensify the lengthening of the spine I grab my elbows and press my forearms upward, which also allows the ribcage to increase in volume, front and back, as I inhale, and the pelvis to hang more freely beneath it as I exhale. So many ways to apprehend this pose; the most immediate, the most necessary component, perhaps, is attention. An attentive attitude opens the door to concentration, which I am thinking of here as a form of contemplation, and then another, if only it will come ajar, to mystery and to reverence.
I have found myself from childhood on drawn to the East, through dance, music, and because I had the good fortune to live near the glorious Metropolitan Museum of Art. Especially too with my discoveries of the asanas (yoga poses), when sitting on my bedroom floor, age 8, I twined hand and foot, reached toes to nose. I continue to experience how closely the arts of the West, secular as well as religious, prompt an awareness of mystery and guide me inward. Living somewhat contentiously in a youth culture, watching, feeling this body evolve with age, I have become newly interested in dance and yoga as instruments for exploring the arts, given the form I now have with which to experience and present them. This means examining divisions and boundaries. When I inquire, what comes to the fore today are lines not only of correspondences across time, cultures and religious structures, but of cooperation. They are both lovely and mysterious. My attempt here is to re-member and re-cognize in body-mind-heart, with repeated trips to museums and to theaters, that "we live our lives forward into mystery ... We must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand…." [2]
Recently, I made a number of visits to the Met's exhibit of works by Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), the first "comprehensive survey of his career" [3] in the US. Each time, I came away with a sense of calm, washed free of the accretions of sound and pattern, the various busy-nesses of my life. I felt able to see freshly. What was it in the paintings that made this possible? Eventually, I concluded that I had been subtly engaged by what I perceived to be the artist's search, undertaken anew each day (a regularity echoed in my asana practice), for alignment and a distilled, shimmering, precision.
While the exhibit starts out with landscape paintings, by the 1950s, Morandi is focusing on the everyday objects that we keep inside our houses: jars, bottles, pitchers, small boxes on tables and shelves. They're in his studio, he is using them not because of what they might hold (spice, vinegar, letters), their function, and not because they are in any way exceptional (costly material, unusual design, sentimental associations). It's their surface association, I imagine, that fascinates him, their horizontal alignment.
What happens when this long-necked vase is partially hidden by that yellow matchbox? Do I sense more acutely curve and gap? Does my eye correct for a right angle at the end of the line, or readjust for the table edge? Morandi's beige signature on beige background, slightly cramped against the right edge, floats in mid-canvas, tugging the gaze away from the presence of these shapes and into the ever-moving finish itself. The palpable brushstrokes recall us to texture, to journey, the painting's spatial future, and its own opposite, a sort of trailing goodbye.
Everything here looks as though it's minutely trembling. In this canvas and the ones next to it, objects seem both to gather and spread. (Not unlike my own body in performance, vibrating with the collective breath of the audience, or in practice alone, rolling with the swell of asana traveling throughout my system — as though attending to sensation turned me inside out).
When they gather — jar with bowl next to vase -- they stack, but horizontally, and they do not look settled or sure: though on the flat, balance remains an issue. The containers have depressions and irregularities, but it's not about rough or smooth. Things here rub and sidle, their contact is light yet appreciable in their adjusting for position. I see the outside, the horizontal and superficial pulling my attention wide with brown, cream, orange shapes, but I intuit an emptiness inside that lends fragility to this flattening movement. The muted palette leads the observer to inspect surfaces as though they were themselves interiors, accomplishing thus an act of introspection, the adequate tool (medium?), I think, for an introverted artist whose curiosity required the prolonged steadiness of patience.
In another group of paintings, the same, or similar (cup, bowl, bottle) objects are brought to converge on each other, pressing from back to front, and now, through depth, they convey an impression of witness, looking back at me. The pitchers are taller than the canisters, but the short ones hide much of the bigger ones anyway. They do so without volume, their matte browns cause forms to blend or recede. When they recede, they seem to cohere vertically, without touching. They hang, again, in a kind of flatness. As I sense the artist looking more precisely in painting after painting and from year to year, assembling a repertoire of similar things (cartons, bottles, tins), I feel invited to refine my own sight, I feel indeed, guided to insight.
There are not many other visitors here. I can stand square in front of each painting, then gradually step right, from one canvas to the next, aware of a slight twist to the torso as I move. I mimic the boxes' sideways arrangements, while at the same time I experience my height, the lift of my spine. Immediately, I'm aware of my own strenuous, or is it tenuous? verticality. Like the vase and the matchbox I've endowed with sensation, I too seem at the moment insecure in the stacking of my vertebrae, which, curving jointedly against each other as the bones cluster, both affirm and attempt to disperse their gravitational relationships.
I've come to the Museum with a 93-year-old friend. Nina is an artist. She's been familiar with Morandi's work for three generations, and time has given her a perspective on it that I cannot have. But so has space: she is sitting in a wheel chair looking diagonally up, while I look at the canvas, spot-on. She struggles not to sink and spread in the leather seat — her effort is to gather herself up to create internal space (for breath, for height), while mine includes a need to release and expand.
The more I look, the more I sense Morandi's concern with expansion and extension, tiered horizons attracting the upright. I realize the same principles apply to my asana practice. In fact, over the hours spent in the Museum, standing, shuffling, shifting my weight from foot to foot and my bag from shoulder to shoulder, I repeatedly, spontaneously, come into Urdhva Hastasana to counter the natural forces that slump me forward and down. I breathe more widely and my attention sharpens.
Nina too, wants to change position. She stands up. Now approaching the paintings at her full 4'11", she is still looking diagonally up but her spine is longer and she has more lung space.
Two viewers reaching up and stretching out, comprehending — these are also aspects of the yogi's attempt. Now I find more parallels between Morandi's work and my asana practice: the exhibit shows that as he grew older, he continued to rearrange the various ordinary but favored objects in his studio, painting within the trusted fluidity of meditation. Under my gaze, some boxes seem to float alone and others to organize vertically. Glasses blend or separate, two ewers share one handle. By the 1960s, Morandi was using watercolors, allowing outlines to blur and tiny canals of paint to run nerve-like into a white background. As the edges of painted things soften, their alignment is less rigorous, it feels to me as though they are paying less careful attention to each other, yet without losing neighborly awareness.
Cups, vials, table, become increasingly something, a particular thing, yet each thing is disappearing. Bottles dissolve in their own watery color, celadon bowls efface themselves in favor of their own shadows, a shape is known by where it is. Or by where it was… I am getting lost…
I am forgetting that the eye is first Morandi's, not mine, the objects are two-dimensional creations framed over there on a wall; of course I can't pick them up (surely, they'd be paper-light. I imagine placing them on my kitchen shelf), but as they have no heft, they have no story. Or if they do, or did, it was his story, and he has let it go. By 1964, he has removed his personal presence, his ego-drive, from the paintings. The objects float and jostle in their painted space, the canvas hangs on the wall, and confirm meaning and matter I think, the way an "abstract" Balanchine ballet does. Morandi has said, "Nothing can be more abstract, more unreal than what we actually see. Matter exists of course, but it has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meaning that we attach to it."[4] I guess at meaning, want it, invent it, forget it. In looking and looking more, not tired but refreshed by the looking, I understand that the painter has given up the need to inform the objects with significance, instead he has let the shapes themselves pull his consciousness into a meditative state. Adjectives like objects: attentive, accepting, fitted.
I have watched these objects exchange place, destabilize, realign, and in the end, almost vanish. They separate and glow, now mixed, now fading. The artist has allowed them to lead his hand, they've become simply forms in light, made of dark and light. Because his imagination has comprehended them fully and with sustained concentration, I too can see them more precisely, more intensely (pitcher, vase, glass, tin), in the Museum and at home. Or such is my impression, the illusion of it, the art of it, and the memory.
In the last works, the individual containers have been used as vehicles for their own disappearance, they've become still (life), though still here and now. It seems to me that in the process of looking and making over a lifetime, the artist has not distilled the shapes he paints, he has distilled himself. (My practice too: to clarify the self). Over the years, the paintings line up, glass-bottle-bowl-box: each a metaphor to carry us inward, where there is emptiness, absence too. Call it silence. But glowing. And waiting.
Nina and I have circled the exhibit. In front of the last paintings, I wonder, can absence be radiant?
Walking back into the street, I feel cleansed by what I've just seen, and I recognize the feeling — I receive the same inside/out wash from doing two hours of yoga poses. Familiar obstacles, physical and mental, go away. I am proprioceptively clear. If in the early years of practice, the poses require muscle action, and later on, attention to the weight and balance of bones, now, as practice lengthens and endures, they're also about nerves: I'm able sometimes at least, to become aware of a delicate coursing back and forth throughout the body/mind as the pose adjusts, indeed "re-poses" itself from moment to moment. The entire physical system is being stimulated by a latticework conversation, calling forth layers of exchange in a wordless query and response. As with the poses, so with these paintings: towards the end of his life, and certainly towards the end of this exhibit, the objects Morandi paints have become calligraphic expressions of space and relationship, even more closely, expressions of his perception of their presence and relationship. The objects glisten, and signify beyond what their shapes attest. Morandi's work lends itself to contemplation -- I see sight becoming vision, I can see sight meditating.[5]
As I leave the Museum, I'm returning from Bologna to New York City and into English. On the corner of 84th and Fifth, I remember that mysterion means mystery, and that the Latin translation for the Greek word is sacramentum. I feel indeed, that I've passed through a sacramental process. Extending the thought: sometimes (lovely moments), though "I" do the asanas, they manifest effortlessly and perform themselves, ex opere operato. The expression, "from the work performed," is 13th century Church Latin referring to the fact that a sacrament is efficacious on its own[6], and is not dependent "on the personal holiness of the minister."[7] Another definition adds, "The sacraments produce grace of themselves."[8] Crossing streets, cultures and religions, I'm inquiring into the irruptions of grace…. I think of these several approaches to mystery as paths I follow in my wanderings, while year after year, my yoga-body tells me that "from the work performed" is not an ink-on-paper metaphor.
In our yoga practice, the effort is to align self with Self, and for our teacher, Mr. B. K. S. Iyengar, "Alignment creates an intercommunicating structure that (…) is an offering to God."[9] Thus the activity is to entrust self to Self in a process through which the more I become who I am (who?), the less I need to be me. The more I practice, the less it is Sally doing yoga," and the more it is Urdhva Hastasana (or Ustrasana or Vrksasana[10]) appearing always the same, yet only or especially, this present shape, now solid, there trembling, because human, and unique. The daily routine of "pose and re-pose" (Mr. Iyengar's expression), deeply soothing to the nerves, is to my understanding, a contemplative practice. Morandi's painting was also a contemplative practice, internally focused, constant, repeated, but also spontaneous. Ultimately, the fruits of the painter's practice, his work, now hanging in museum collections all over the world, are shared. Might it not be the same for the yogini and her asanas when she takes her poses from the privacy of her home or even the space of a classroom where the efforts of many are nonetheless focused individually, onto a proscenium stage?
But first, let's clarify: what is contemplation? In contemporary Christian understanding of the term, it is "a form of non-discursive prayer" which is due less to "human effort and more (to) the result of direct divine grace."[11] In the Indian tradition, the Yoga Sutras speak of Samadhi, "in which the mind is ‘composed,' in the sense that it rests without fluctuation, either upon an external object, a mental object, or within its own nature."[12] Instead of the more usual "concentration," David Carpenter, whose interpretation I follow, prefers to translate Samadhi "as contemplative calm, a concentrated form of attention that does not waver from a single object …. [It is] a state … in which the yogi's sense of separateness from the object of attention finally disappears along with all mental movement," and he points out that Samadhi cannot simply be "willed into existence."[13] While it is the result of cultivation, or practice, it cannot be expected, summoned or controlled.
Contemplative practice as I understand it, is the conscious effort, day after day, across the span of years, to establish the practitioner in that state of open calm where there is no separation from the object of attention. Doing one's asanas, sitting for meditation, lending attention to the breath inside and around oneself: these are all contemplative practices. Generally, long and intense training in asana is required before it becomes a contemplative practice and leads, whether such a state is sought or not, to "contemplative calm." In the Indian tradition embodied and taught by Mr. Iyengar, the training is set in a specifically religious context: practitioners study and endeavor to live by Patanjali's Eight Limbs of Yoga (Ashtanga Yoga), in which asana, the third branch in a climb culminating in Samadhi (the eighth limb), follows Yama and Niyama, the rules establishing personal and communal ethical behavior. However, Mr. Iyengar has both written and demonstrated that each asana in and of itself can be a direct opening into Samadhi: "When there is oneness from the cell to the self, from the physical body to the core of the being — then the pose is a contemplative pose and we have reached the highest state of contemplation in the asana."[14]
In the (Western) past, one of the images that came to mind when monks or yogis were mentioned, was of a solitary figure meditating in his hermitage (a Carthusian, for example, in his cell) or a solitary figure sitting in lotus pose in his cave. Yet that image of the yogi, exotic, esoteric, has now quite faded. On TV, men in business suits advertise computers in Vrksasana, women perch on car roofs in Padmasana for SUV ads, and the ladies in Sex and The City seduce their instructors during yoga class. Yogis are performing more frequently on the concert stage (so too, in fact, are monks, as the Tibetan diaspora has brought many of the secret monastic practices into the public arena, a matter of political and cultural survival).
What happens then, when a contemplative practice becomes a public event? The question is put with immediacy on my part, since my life as a professional dancer has for a long time included a search for some measure of recollection on stage and off. I have begun composing and presenting various yoga sequences (on stages, in studios and living rooms). It's one way to enter the dilemmas of distress and distraction, to investigate what is meant by the famous definition of yoga as "the cessation of the turnings of thought."[15] I've wondered whether one can "do one's yoga" — where the stage is the practice space and the audience is the world, and still remain profoundly attentive to the inner realm. Doesn't being viewed (more than being seen, since this is an unequal relationship — the audience sits comfortably in the dark, watching a space filled with light, perhaps with music) make it impossible to execute a sequence of asanas and remain in a contemplative state? One can ask additionally whether asana practice loses its integrity as a result of being put on view, cheapened because, precisely, it's staged? I would propose to the contrary, that the performer's state of contemplative calm can indeed be maintained in performance and shared by the audience members: it may be experienced as an intimacy with the performer, which envelops and even enraptures the viewer.
The difficulty, it seems to me, is for the performer — can she enter a state of contemplation? It's not a technique or a possession. One cannot summon it at will for a given occasion. Let's look at an example of asana in performance where the yogini was by her own admission in just such a state of contemplative awareness. Since I was in the audience, I will describe what I saw, and then what she told me she experienced.
In the afternoon of our Yoga Symposium, Carrie Owerko, Lara Brunn and Michelle LaRue presented An Offering of Anusthana (Devoted Practice)[16]. The first movement, entitled Invocation, began with Carrie performing a string of Hanumanasanas. These are full splits, one leg in front, one behind — the torso is held upright and the arms are raised overhead. The upper back arches, as the gaze turns upwards to the hands joined in prayer. We watched Carrie extend her entire body smoothly and inform the extension of her limbs with a streaming energy. At the same time, we could see her drawing up and in to her center, from hip sockets to navel to spine. While the story of the pose recalls Hanuman's great leap across the ocean to Lanka, its physical execution and sustaining rely on active compactness of the legs in the hip joints and the integrity of the pelvis in relation to the spine and head. The asana is at once spread and contained, not a tearing but a folding open of the heart: Hanuman, the monkey chief who dedicates his faithful service to the Lord (Rama), is the traditional example of bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion to God. In the course of the nine-minute segment, Carrie performed 12 iterations of the pose, approaching the height of her extension each time somewhat differently until at last she was rolling on her back in a full forward bend while keeping her legs in the open position, to reorient herself upright each time in a new direction. It was a virtuosic demonstration of control -- rhythmic, smoothly exact, beautiful.
Now I speak in accord with several friends who shared my response: what we had just witnessed took us beyond rhythm, rigor and the pleasures received from watching excellent technique in a lovely form. The seamless intensity of execution initiated with Hanumanasana continued into the next sequences: Carrie's face grew luminous as though she had a candle glowing in her heart, which sent its warmth out over all the skin of her body. She grew radiant through the poses, or more exactly they grew radiantly inside her — we felt in our own limbs the elastic fullness of completion as one asana flowed into the next, each shape becoming a radiance that we experienced with her. We found ourselves weeping with joy — watching and being, both outside and inside, together in these forms. The poses indeed evolved organically, and though they were beyond us for the most part (Hanumanasana to Urdhva Mukha Svanasana to Adho Mukha Svanasana to Uttanasana and Tadasana to a suite of Viparita Chakrasana)[17], they nonetheless involved us: they drew us sympathetically to the performer (we liked her!), and inward to our own core — we shared in the involutionary process of spiraling into a calm center. From this source sprang the tears of joy, unbidden, uncontrollable.
Assembling asanas in a sequence for performance was in no way demeaning, not a cheapening of a sacred practice meant for the eyes of initiates only. The asanas were not being brought down to a lower level ("idle entertainment"), rather, they ennobled us. But then, the intention had never been to present them purely for display and general consumption. As the title, Anusthana, indicates, the foremost motivation was to compose an offering of the fruits of practice, an act of devotion directed to the teacher (Mr. Iyengar), and by extension, to the best in each one of us. Carrie told me that the first section (Invocation), starting with Hanumanasana, had been choreographed as a celebration for Patricia Walden, a beloved American teacher. She said that what we saw, months later in Pennsylvania, was an "honest" and immediate expression of that ongoing celebration, for Patricia was internally present to her as she performed for us. Carrie likened her participation in the event we witnessed to "sharing a painting that you make with love and joy." Indeed, the long study and refinement which these poses had undergone in Carrie's body, reminded me of the process of concentration, that is, gradual distillation, to which Morandi's painterly gaze submitted the objects in his studio.
Carrie said what we had observed: the performance of the asanas was "not about the outer but about the inner movement." This conversation took place as we were standing in a rush-hour subway car after class, and as we hurtled along underground, she recalled with a big smile that she had felt as though she were "somersaulting into the clouds, to be one with the sky." So this was about flying! The shapes are the length and breadth of a body, the body contains the shapes, and yet, she was saying, as we saw, that the shapes arise from deep inside to radiate beyond the body. They allow the inner being to burst out "over the clouds and fly." In this state, she went on, "anything is possible. When your heart is full, [there is also] the intention of sharing, of communicating that feeling."
As we talked, the words kept coming back, "sharing" and "communicating." This may indeed be a contemplative practice, but it is not an exclusively private one. In an article reviewing some of the latest work in brain research, Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff explain how the recently discovered "mirror neurons" operate in humans and primates. I applied this newfound information to our experience watching Carrie in our Symposium gathering last March. Scientists (Giacomo Rizzolatti, Corrado Sinigaglia and colleagues) observed that neurons which "fired when a monkey grasped an object also fired when the monkey watched a scientist grasp the same object." The monkey apparently understood the experimenter's actions (similar brain activity watching and doing) to be like his own. "What was surprising was that the same neurons that produced ‘motor actions,' i.e. actions involving muscular movement, were active when the monkey was perceiving those actions performed by others."[18] Part of me wants to say, "but we know this, we dancers, we yogis! It's called the kinesthetic response!," it's what makes us bounce up and down to the beat as we (try to) sit in our seats at a dance concert (think for example, of Alvin Ailey's Revelations).
Rizzolatti and Sinigaglia however, are describing the behavior of brain cells, and their conclusions go far beyond my experience of not being able to sit still in my red velvet seat. In this excerpt from Mirrors in the Brain, we learn that "the rigid divide between perceptive, motor and cognitive processes is to a great extent artificial; not only does perception appear to be embedded in the dynamics of action, becoming much more composite than used to be thought in the past, but the acting brain is also and above all a brain that understands."[19] So when Carrie was performing Hanumanasana, we who were seeing the action on stage (and some of us have also done the pose many times) were understanding it through reliance on our motor neurons. "We can recognize and understand the actions of others because of the mirror neurons."[20] The next step: "Our abilities to understand and react to the emotions of others may depend on the brain's ability to imitate the neuronal activity of the individual being observed."[21] So whether or not we were able to perform Hanumanasana like Carrie, we responded neuronally (with our emotional mirror neurons) to her radiance as she was doing the poses. She wanted, indeed intended to communicate to us her joyous heart. We received her joy with our tears because we share the same neural construction.
This sounds rather cold. And yet, the excitement at the discovery shines through the writing and points perhaps towards an eventual recognition of the sense of intimacy which we felt while watching Carrie: "When we see a friend crying, we may feel sympathy because the activity in our brain is similar to that in the brain of the person crying," summarize the authors, who conclude, "Mirror neurons show how strong and deeply rooted is the bond that ties us to others, or in other words, how bizarre it would be to conceive of an I without an us."[22]
And yet … there is a history for these discoveries, albeit on a different register. For me, this past holds up an ancient Indian mirror (darpana) in which "I" and "us" reflect one another and travel further together. It is set forth with precision as a theory of aesthetics in Bharata's treatise, Natya Shastra (ca. 1000 BC). Kapila Vatsyayan, one of the foremost scholars of classical Indian dance, art and architecture, explains that the purpose of rasa (religious or artistic essence) was to "lay down the rules for the kind of total artistic performance through which the audience might achieve a state of supreme joy or release from the world of illusion … in a three-part process: first, the vision of the artist; second, the content, form and technique of the artistic expression; and third, the evocation of a similar aesthetic experience in the audience."[23]
Here there is a triangle: an I, the artist, an Us, the audience, and between them, the asana — the bridging, radiant shape. The artist is in a state of concentration (or "mystical bliss") "which can be described by the word yoga … The artist's problem … is to convey this experience."[24] While I assume that Carrie did not consider this a problem, she did wish to communicate her state of inner harmony to those watching, and to share it with us. Vatsyayan continues, "The work of art," in our case, the asana, serves as the "bridge from the formless, through the many forms, to that which is beyond form."[25] Mr. Iyengar puts it plainly when he writes, "The asana has to enshrine the entire being of the doer with splendour and beauty. This is spiritual practice."[26] The asana in the rasa triad, is the shrine in which the yogi practices. It is established as the home inside which a state of contemplative calm can arise. For this, "total honesty … tremendous faith, courage, determination, awareness and absorption"[27] are necessary. These are the qualities of Hanuman, who in baring his heart (many images show him parting his ribcage as though his hands were opening curtains across a stage) reveals the Lord Rama enthroned at its center. And it is here that the performer reflects, or transmits a radiance that is the property of the shape she is inhabiting. The pose itself is radiant.
While the discovery of mirror neurons posits a fertile relationship within the human dyad I and Us, and suggests that we understand each other vitally through "neural imitation," the theory of rasa constructs a trinitarian exchange in which the reflection yogi-to-audience takes place through the asana (or flow of asanas). On the other side of the stage sit the viewers who are in the event (culturally, even ritually) fully trained and informed, ready to witness and actively receive the performance as the offering intended. The audience is not a disparate group of onlookers, but a community of participants or guests, those who are invited to partake in a great banquet. In a (Western) liturgical sense, we would say that the audience is a congregation.[28] Here, the stage (indeed the entire theater) becomes a consecrated space. The poses themselves, when performed at this level of commitment and integrity, may mediate the relationship yogi/audience and make possible an experience of "enlarged consciousness."[29] In such moments, new pathways beyond neural mirroring and imitation are opened, and the physical/emotional is transcended. As the yogini (sahrdaya — one of attuned heart), through her skill and utter, concentrated devotion, gives access to the poses, so the poses give the spectator (rasika — one who experiences rasa) access to the contemplative dimension. This then, is "yoga, the gathering inward of all energies, both physical and mental, so revelation can take place."[30]
As a Westerner, a yoga practitioner and a Buddhist with a Jewish/Christian background, I shuttle perhaps indiscriminately and with superficial learning, between vocabularies, concepts and practices I do not fully understand. Even were I to understand with any depth of experience at all, it would be difficult to embody so many different religious traditions.[31] Are the states evoked in these several traditions at all similar? Do the states which arise when the Cistercian monk is kneeling in meditation correspond to the yogini's Samadhi in Swastikasana or the Buddhist's zazen with legs folded in Padmasana? I wrestle with this. For the moment, I've concluded that since I enjoy playing in comparisons, though this be a fitful game at best, I'll blink with my butterfly of curiosity, and drift awhile yet in this landscape of thought and imagery, practice and longing.
When Brother David Steindl-Rast writes, "The sacraments … are not self-contained boxes conveying divine grace. They are focal points of that divine fire which makes all of life sacramental,"[32] I may find in parallel that a contemplative state, whether experienced in solitude or in performance, comes about when the asanas are embodied sacramentally. Perhaps it is a burning, and perhaps the incandescence produces the very radiance of the asanas. When Morandi says that matter (bottle, box, pose or bread) has no intrinsic meaning, I would suggest that when passed through the fire of sacrament, it becomes effulgent with significance. So too, a person, moved through the asanas, however roughly, beautifully or temporarily, may be transformed in the instant, made r(R)eal. A contemplative practice, lodged within its 3000-year-old rasic tradition and shared with an "attuned" heart, is the gift offered.
This thinking and writing is a kind of groping (for the night pillow lost behind my head), a rearranging (a box, a vase on a table in daylight). It's a trusting too, in matter and in spirit. We have a history together, as things and species, simultaneously multiple and unique. Habitual patterns (of thought and behavior) obscure but do not extinguish intimacy. Awareness dawns gradually or suddenly. Looking for words, I find instead a painting, a dance or the graceful unfolding of a yogasana. Each asana is a harmonious invention, which can lead me into cooperation with the enormity of volume and breath. It's a composition made up of approach, sustaining and departure — it traces the inexorable patterns of life and death. Within this harmony I can be maker and doer, giver and receiver, and for a moment, the heart's vision clears: "The long history of life has given us tools to live in the face of mystery, tools that we only partially know we have, gifts of the creativity that we can now call God."[33]
[1] Urdhva: upward, Hasta: hands.
[2] Stuart A. Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion, Basic Books, c. 2008, p. xi
[3] Metropolitan Museum, Giorgio Morandi Exhibition, 9/16-12/14/2008
[4] Edouardo Roditi, Giorgio Morandi, Morandi, Bandera and Miracco, eds., Skira, Milan, Italy, 2008, p. 354
[5] "Meditation" is used to refer to Morandi's paintings because it is available as a familiar term in contemporary parlance for a state of flowing concentration. Morandi himself (Roditi, p. 349), said in an interview he was by "temperament" and "nature, given to contemplation."
[6] Fr. John Hardon's Modern Catholic Dictionary, © Eternal Life
[7] Vatican, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Part II, Section 1, 1128
[8] New Catholic Dictionary
[9] B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life, Rodale, c. 2005, p. 204
[10] Camel Pose, Tree Pose.
[11] Jean Leclercq, Contemplation, Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages. Ed. André Vauchez. C. 2001 by James Clarke & Co. Encyclopedia of the Middle Ages (e-reference edition). Distributed by Oxford University Press. Swarthmore College. 21 April, 2009
[12] David Carpenter, Spiritual Practice East and West, unpublished manuscript, Philadelphia, PA: St. Joseph's University, 1990, pp. 5-6
[13] Ibid. A treatment of the differing translations and interpretations for Patanjali and the various Buddhist schools regarding Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi is beyond the scope of this essay.
[14] Iyengar, The Tree of Yoga, Shambhala, Boston, 1989, p. 48
[15] "Yogah cittavrtti nirodhah," Barbara Stoler Miller, trans., Yoga, Discipline of Freedom, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995, p. 29
[16] The full program is published in the proceedings of A Yoga Symposium: Practice in Body, Mind and Spirit, Swarthmore College, March 30, 2008
[17] Hanuman's Pose, Upward and Downward Facing Dog Poses, Standard Forward Bend from Standing Pose, Mountain Pose and Reversed Wheel Pose.
[18] Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff, How the Mind Works: Revelations, New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 11, June 26, 2008,
[19 - 22] Rosenfield and Ziff
[23 - 25] Kapila Vatsyayan, India: Philosophy of Indian Dance, International Encyclopedia of Dance, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, vol. 3, p. 462
[26 - 27] Iyengar, Tree of Yoga, p. 54
[28] The theory of rasa discusses the "sharing circuit" between dance, music and speech. Its focus is on theatrical matters, not yoga poses. Natya writes, "The state of consciousness (rasa) embodied in the poem is transferred to the actor, the dancer, the reciter and to the spectator." (Vatsyayan, op. cit., p. 463). Rasa means taste, juice, and both performer and partaker share in its sweetness. For an extended discussion, see Richard Schechner, Rasaesthetics, The Drama Review, 45.2001, and from a Christian point of view, see St. John in the Wilderness, Adult Education and Formation: The Eucharist as a Meal
[29] Vatsyayan, p. 464
[30] Ibid. p. 462
[31] See however, Lex Hixon, Coming Home: The Experience of Enlightenment in Sacred Traditions, Anchor Books/Doubleday, New York, 1978
[32] David Steindl-Rast, Holy Ground, Parabola, Vol. VII, Number 3, p. 80
[33] Kauffman, pp. 285-6
This essay was first published in the proceedings from A Yoga Symposium: Practice in Body, Mind and Spirit, presented under the auspices of the William J. Cooper Foundation, the Department of Music and Dance and Swarthmore College on March 30, 2008 at Swarthmore College (500 College Avenue, Swarthmore, PA 19081, www.swarthmore.edu). The complete written proceedings, as well as the video of the day's activities, are held at Swarthmore College Library. Copyright 2008 by Sally Hess.
