Yoga Sutra 1.1

Even in the study of anatomy, we can glean a lot of inspiration from the yoga philosophy text and one text in particular I'd like to talk about, very famous in the yoga world, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. And even in that word, we all know or hopefully we know that by now the word yoga often gets translated as to yoke together, to unite, to reunite. The word sutras, we probably actually know if you've ever gone to a doctor and you had a wound, right, they sutured the wound, right, it means to heal the divide, to bring together, right, to heal. And Patanjali was the fella that compiled it, that transmitted it and it was an oral tradition, so it was taught from teacher to student and because of that, they had to be short phrases, little sutras, little threads or aphorisms that could be remembered, repeated and remembered and also to be discussed in groups, in sangha with your teacher because they're purposefully a little vague, a little sticky sometimes. And so it's really beautiful to get a bunch of different translations, a bunch of different interpretations of the yoga sutras and sit with them and read them and dissect them and share them because as we evolve and as our understanding evolves, our understanding of these texts evolve.

The yoga sutras of Patanjali is written in or compiled into four chapters or padas and the first chapter is the chapter on Samadhi and so Patanjali doesn't pull any punches here, he starts big, he starts with bliss, nirvana, samadhi, this enlightenment state and I think that's on purpose. The way I interpret it is that this is not so far away, we sometimes think of enlightenment as in my first training, I had a teacher that said, sit, meditate, be quiet, don't move, you're not gonna reach enlightenment but maybe a thousand, ten thousand lifetimes from now, it might happen. This is really devastating because I don't have that kind of time. So I think another interpretation of samadhi instead of this far away kind of magical place of communion, union or bliss, when you look at the little word that makes up samadhi, these two little words, these seed sounds, it comes to mean sama, equanimity, balance, de to perceive or hold. So to hold this equanimity and my next teacher, Alan Fingers said, no, samadhi is easy, samadhi, here are some techniques, here are the tools, it's sustaining samadhi, bringing it back into your living, back into your relationships, this is the tricky part.

So in the samadhi pada, this first chapter, first page of the book, it says, ata yoga anu shasanam, I do the best I can with the Sanskrit, I apologize if it's not perfect yet. But this phrase, my first teacher talked about it as, now we start the practice, now ata meaning now, now the exposition of yoga can be made, now here we go, which seemed kind of like a throwaway line, like I have opened the book, I'm with you, I'm here, let's go. But it says now is the exposition of yoga. Our interpretation though is, it's not like a fairy tale, like once upon a time, it starts with now, now is the time for this yoga stuff, now is the time for this to heal the divide, now is the time. My teacher Alan Fingers, slightly different, he says, ata yoga anu shasanam, only in the moment of now can yoga happen, only in the moment of now in presence can we find that healing of the division, the division is actually, the mind will insist on it, but it's not reality.

So now when we're in the present, not bouncing into what happened before, not projecting into what comes next, but now when we're present is when yoga happens. I think this is a much more friendly way to view this sutra, it's the one that I'm currently resides in my heart, that in this moment of now, in this posture, in this breath, in this moment, in this relationship, yoga is happening.