stories

One of my favorite yoga teachers has a frequent saying in reference to heat, sweat, and any other mental or physical obstacles you encounter in your practice.  He says: "these are just stories." When he says that, it also reminds me of something that one of my delighfully snarkastic friends from the occult world often says, if you try to rationalize something.  He shrugs with the quip: "That's your story."

Many things happen in life.  They may or may not have relevance in my practice.  Yet, the liberating thing about practicing in the hot room is that -for at least 90 minutes- I don't have to be my story.

Sometimes this is really hard.  Earlier this year, I wrote a story of my yoga life thus far, that I was thinking about re-sharing as a starting point for this blog.  It was my story then - in that moment. It's still a part of my history... but it's not the only story about my yoga... and, perhaps more importantly, every time I show up to practice - there's a new story and a chance to release from it.  Things, as they seem, are always changing.

One of the first times that I became accutely aware of the way personal 'stories' are mutable occured about 10 years ago, early in my occult career, when a group tried to get a series of classes going at Coph Nia with Phil Hine's Group Explorations in Ego Magick.  There are 4 sets of exercises, meant to be done with the same group.  The class leader originally intended to have the working span over 4 months. We ended up repeating the first set of exercises for three, until the class leader finally got a complete group together to participate and we finished out the working in 4 consecutive days.

In that first set of exercises, you have to write a 3rd person "character sketch" of yourself and list 6 strengths and 6 weaknesses. Each month that we repeated the first exercise, new and different things came to the forefront of my 'sketch' and my feelings of strength and weakness varied depending on how I was feeling and what I was experiencing at the moment of writing. This illustration of how your story at any given moment isn't attached to Self or necessarily to your True Will opened something up for me.  For a long time it was just an idea and I didn't have the fortitude to change or release the story - but little by little I had more witness consciousness of it, at least.

Phil Hine writes that, "Ego Magic is concerned with increasing one’s ability to make realistic assessments of one’s own self-image and identifying and modifying behaviours and cognitive patterns which are dysfunctional".  A decade later, I'm beginning to see more fruit from this working and from other magical and yogic work.

This type of self-reflection and study that Hine describes also reminds me of one of the traditional Hindu niyamas (practices) - Svadhyaya.  Translated commonly as "self-study" - it actually means reading to yourself but has come to mean, in the way of multivalent language and centuries of telephone-game like teaching across different cultures and religions, study of self, self-reflection, or self-knowledge.

While this practice of reading the Vedas to yourself has changed over time into self-knowledge, the command to "know thyself" is not a new age concept. Inscribed on the temple of Delphi, γνῶθι σαὐτόν or gnōthi sauton permeates the work of of many Greek and Roman philosophers.  This bidding at Delphi was mythologically ascribed to Apollo - god of the Sun, source of Light and Life - illuminator of all things within and without.

Aleister Crowley takes up the injunction in his tome Magick, attributing it to AIWAZ - his own Holy Guardian Angel: "He bade "Know Thyself!" and taught Initiation."

Knowing yourself (or your Self) isn't the same as being familiar with your story - that "I" that we constitute doesn't aid in discovering True Will or  k & c of HGA.  In fact, Crowley writes in Diary of a Drug Fiend: “I've often thought that there isn't any "I" at all; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion.”

Recognizing that you tell yourself stories and that they are mutable is kind of the jumping off point for letting go of dross - witnessing it like a little thought in meditation and then letting it pass to reveal a path toward your HGA, your Self, your genius. Crowley writes in Eight Lectures on Yoga, that:

Knowledge itself is impossible... In order to conceive the simplest possible object, we have to keep on inventing ideas, which even in the proud moment of invention are seen to be unreal. How are we to get away from the world of phantasmagoria to the common universe of sense? We shall require quite a lot more acts of imagination. We have got to endow our mathematical conceptions with three ideas which Hindu philosophers call sat, chit and ananda, which are usually translated Being, Knowledge and Bliss. This really means: sat, the tendency to conceive of an object as real; chit, the tendency to pretend that it is an object of knowledge; and ananda, the tendency to imagine that we are affected by it.

I can always count on Crowley for an astute and wise joke that will show more depth about the concepts than a slew of yoga teachers and lofty texts. He shows us how some ideas about Knowledge and "I" are futile.  Yet, there is something "above the abyss", states of mind that "cannot be expressed, for they are above knowledge."  You have to let go of all your stories to cross that abyss.  You cannot hold back even a tiny bit of attachment to make that crossing.

I'm certainly not there yet, but in the last few months I've found considerably more witness consciousness about my hatha yoga "story" that peels away layers of a bigger story of my past. The work I do in my body has been playing out in my mind and my magical work in interesting and fruitful ways.

Crowley writes of this relationship between yoga and magick in Eight Lectures.

Am I then supposed to be saying that Yoga is merely the handmaiden of Magick, or that Magick has
no higher function than to supplement Yoga? By no means. it is the co-operation of lovers; which
is here a symbol of the fact. The practices of Yoga are almost essential to success in Magick -- at
least I may say from my own experience that it made all the difference in the world to my magical
success, when I had been thoroughly grounded in the hard drill of Yoga. But -- I feel absolutely
certain that I should never have obtained success in Yoga in so short a time as I did had I not spent
the previous three years in the daily practice of magical methods.

I feel my practices becoming more of a true "co-operation of lovers".  I feel a renewed sense of inspiration and determination after a time of feeling rudderless and aching physically and mentally. I know the stories behind those feelings, but I am not composed of them. As my teacher says, "they're just stories."