Yoga Sutras Week 1 - Now begins the discovery of the eternal unity

There is a lot of gratitude being shown for the teachings at the moment. It is apparent through our commitment and our willingness to show up. Some of us come a long way to be at the ashram. Some of us walk down the road to be here but some of us catch the train at 4.30am in the morning to be sat in the cabin on a Saturday morning. One is not better than the other, it’s just worthwhile to bring attention to the lengths we go to to be in Satsang. 

In the end, you will do almost anything. We are all doing so much to be here and it is seen by the bigger energy. Your soul has called you to the teaching - that is the bottom line. Something in you is alive, ignited and seeking itself. That empowers us to do things that others might find crazy. 

Everything ultimately has to be verified within ourselves. Our lives have to be verified within ourselves. Nothing outside of us is going to be enough in the end, only your Heart. If we are clear about that, in alignment with that and true to that, the impossible becomes possible. 

1:1 Atha Yogaanushasanam 

Patanjali composed the Yoga Sutras and he was a seer, one who sees. He lived somewhere between Christ and the Buddha, 2000 to 2500 years ago, which is fairly modern as far as yoga is concerned. He performed this extraordinary feat of taking the entire Indian spiritual experiment that had been going on for thousands of years and drawing all the different expressions of the teachings together into one collection of Sutras.

It has always been the case that different teachers have given different flavours to the teachings of Yoga, but Patanjali sifted through all of these and got to the essence of what was being taught; the aspects that were universal to all these different teachings. He pulled them all together and codified them into 186 Sutras so that it would last forever. 

He knew it would last forever because the teachings are universal. Humans are mostly the same. All humans have the same problem and so require the same solution. He said that regardless of your creed, beliefs, gender or race these teachings hit the heart of humanity. 

He had his students memorise the Sutras with absolute perfection and gave them the duty of passing them down from generation to generation and here we are sat with them. They are not the only collection of teachings, but they are extremely valuable to practitioners on the path and so this season we will explore at least 9 of these Sutras, just enough to open our hearts and inspire us on the path.

The first of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras is Atha Yogaanushasanam. Atha means now. Now! It is quite common in yogic treatise for now to be the first word. Now is a teaching in itself. It is the message that everything is happening in this moment. In ten years time, whatever is happening for you, will be happening now. Twenty years ago what happened was also happening now. You can’t escape the now, but the question is, can you be available to it? Can you be here now, where absolutely everything is happening? There is nothing happening anywhere else except in our imaginations. It’s all here.   

The idea is that Life is providing everything it needs for itself, now. That includes you, by the way because you are Life, but in order to be held and served by life, in order to receive what is being gifted in this moment, requires us to be here to receive it. 

The idea with Yoga is to be somewhere else less and to be here more. Sometimes we will still zone out and that is fine it just means that we are not here and available in this now-moment and anybody who sees you zone out will know you’ve done it. We all know when someone has zoned out on us. It may be really deep and important what you are sharing with this individual but sadly, they couldn’t quite maintain their presence. You see the eyes go glazed and you know they have gone somewhere else. That is a good time to end the conversation. There is nothing happening there. It is only happening for us when we are here, where it is happening. 

To be in service of Life, to be in service of each other, to be in the field of love, to be helpful, to be kind requires us to be here. There’s no need to get hard on ourselves because it is a training. But do ask yourself - what is so special somewhere else? That is not where God is, where love is, where connection with the person that you’re with is. We are learning to hold the space where everything happens, in the now. 

When we zone out, we go out of service and that is okay. We might zone out, which means we are walking around with an ‘out of service’ sign on us, like a bus. This is what happens to a human being when we disappear. There is nothing there for us where we’re going except our illusions and when we realise that we start to see that here is a much better place to be. We see that we are able to respond perfectly to what is needed in this moment when we are here but not when we are somewhere else. If we are somewhere else, then we always have to travel back and we are always late for the moment.

I don’t want to come across too heavy on this but it is really important. How much of our lives are we going to miss? More importantly, how much are we going to be here for? This is the now message.

The next word is yoga, which means union and the final word is anushasanam, which means now we begin. So the Sutra means: ‘Now begins yoga, now I enter into a life of yoga, now I enter into the endeavour to be present in my now body in the now experience, immersed in Life.’ That is the first Sutra.

But anushasanam also means to explore. It means to be curious about this opportunity to explore Life as its arising inside of yourself. Now begins an exploration of Life, an exploration of the inherent unity of everything that is. This is Patanjali’s first invitation. 

But we cannot explore when we are trying to get everything right. Feel that one. If we are busy trying to get everything right, make it perfect and do it the way everyone else is doing it, what kind of exploration is that? To explore means to go into the unknown without the need to know in advance. It is the willingness to find out what is right which means the utter willingness to go wrong. 

It is the very thing we are inspired by in children: curiosity and aliveness. Could we not do a bit more of that in the thing that Life has created for us to live in. It is there for us any time we make the decision to explore it. 

Don’t worry about getting it right, you do not have anything to prove with your life. Not to anyone, not even to yourself. Life doesn’t have to prove anything to itself, it just gives to itself unceasingly. Why wouldn’t we explore what we have been given? Life is a living miracle and it is there to be experienced through your body. Our experience of Life will be in accordance with our connection to it. Get in there and find out how it works and feels. 

For example, in the postures, you can feel where each posture is coming from. Either it comes from Life or from your need to prove and get somewhere. The two feel quite different and we can feel that difference. Notice the operations of your ego versus the flow of Life and ask which one feels like the best one to follow. 

Jesus said: “You can’t follow two masters.” You can’t follow the ego and the divine flow of intelligence at the same time. You are going to have to start to navigate and choose what force you are following in your life. Are you following love or fear? Truth or being liked? It is all down to you. That is a hell of a teaching. 

It is all down to you.   

I wish you so well in the discovery of your Self - it is the best discovery anyone can make.