A few more thoughts to that modern fashion of cranking up the heater when performing asanas. The idea conveyed in the yogic scriptures is that one ignites ones agni (inner fire, notice the similarity between the English ‘ignite’ and the Sanskrit ‘agni’) to destroy the impurities and thus purify body, prana and mind. The idea that these impurities (ashuddhi) are something that you have ingested and need to sweat out is too simplistic. If you look into Patanjali the ashuddhi (impurities) are karma (past actions whose effects are lingering on), klesha (modes of suffering), vasana (conditioning) and samskara (subconscious imprint). These manifest, for example, as the obstacles to yoga (sutra I.30) but they come with a physical, pranic and mental component (sutra I.31). Rather than simply sweating, the raising of agni is a process that engulfs the whole being of the yogi, that is body (through asana), breath (through pranayama) and mind (through meditation). Of course a vigorous asana practice is an important part of this process but so is diet (to prevent that agni is converted backwards into metabolic fire, i.e. pitta), pranayamas such as Bhastrika and kriyas such as Nauli and Kapalabhati. There is of course much more to this process than can be covered in a short post. For those interested you will find more info in my books on pranayama and yogic meditation but let me mention here one baffling fact: What the medieval Hatha Yogis called the raising of agni (fire) in Patanjali’s sutra is called the conversion of mind into intelligence. It’s the same process only on the physical layer it can be experienced as fire whereas in the mind it surfaces as the ignition of buddhi or intelligence. The important fact that I want to convey here is that there’s more to raising agni than turning on the heater. If agni was raised by simply working out in the heat, every construction or landscaping worker wielding a jackhammer in the Australian mid-day heat would be as purified as a mountain spring! But that’s not how it works. I’ve done plenty of jackhammering in the mid-day heat and it didn’t purify me. Take my word for it! But there’s another thought that concerns me when I’m thinking about all these yoga shalas that are heated to the max just to eke out that extra little bit of flexibility or sweat (which also could be eked out by working with more focus and refinement): A few years back I heard there were now about 50 million people in the world practicing some of these modern forms of asana. Imagine the amount of green house emissions we could save if all of us would heat up the yoga room by a few degrees less? I don’t know how many of us yogis have noticed that a few months back NASA has finally confirmed that the West Antarctic ice sheath has torn itself loose and is now slipping into the ocean with no power on Earth being able to stop that process. It’ll be a mighty splash when it hits the ocean and this sheath alone will raise global ocean levels by 5 meters (in the US as far inland as Washington DC). 80% of the world’s population will be displaced with a lot of arable land and fresh water supplies being lost. The question now being discussed is not whether this event will happen (it will!) but how long it will take? And this sheath makes up only about 15% of the Antarctic shelf ice. As a global yogic community, do we want to contribute to that? Can’t we just work a bit more intensely and intelligently in our practice and wear a little more clothing? We‘ve had a lot of well-meaning yoga challenges recently so here’s another one: Heat your shala 5 degrees less to reduce your green house emissions-challenge. Be well! Gregor
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 06:57:45 +0000