Introduction
In 2003 I attended an international conference on Tibetan Medicine in Washington, DC. Among the senior lamas at the conference was one of the last people trained in the same cohort of lamas as the Dalai Lama, by the same teacher. His name was Gelek Rimpoche, and I liked him enormously. His attire and demeanor reflected the practicality of his teaching. He wore a plain Brooks Brothers suit and spoke in ordinary language. At the end of the conference, Rimpoche ascended the stage to conduct an empowerment (meditative initiation) in the Yoga of the Medicine Buddha for all present. A little ways along, he stopped and looked quietly at the audience for a moment. Then he said, "I know you all want to save the world with Tonglen meditation, but you really need to work on emotional purification first." Thus began his two-hour-long discourse on the necessity of cleansing one's own heart before undertaking any spiritual practice for the benefit of others. The risk, of course, is that the warps and impurities in the small waves of our own mindfields will invite the suffering energy we absorb from others to make us ill. It is no great trick to absorb others' pain and dis-ease (or to become trapped by our own); it is difficult to know how to handle that energy once we have absorbed it. How many times had I heard this lecture from my own spiritual guides, Swāmī Veda Bharati (1933-2015) and Swāmī Rāma (1925-1996) of the Himalayas, over forty years?! I immediately sought out Rimpoche as he left the hall and thanked him for telling this truth so clearly and for reminding me of my teachers. Swāmī Rāma was taught from childhood by a legendary Yogi of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, known variously as Madhavānanda Bhāratī, Bāba Dharam Das, Bangla Baba, Bengali Baba, Maharaj (ca. 1820-1981), and many other names. One day Bengali Baba took Swami Rama into the mountains and showed him They're for you. You'll be the richest man in India. Now son, let me an enormous pile of gold and precious gems. He said. "Take them. go. I want to go to the mountains far away (Rama, 1978. p . 181). Swamiji was wounded to the core. Bengali Baba had raised him from early childhood. "Are you telling me to accept these jewels instead of you? he cried (Rama, 1978, p. 181). Bengali Baba directed his attention to a column of fire that appeared nearby and said, "If you can go through that fire you can follow me" (Rama, 1978, p. 181). When we disciples hear this story, we imagine ourselves standing in the fire with the master. But what do we really want from our practices and from our lives? We seem to want nice, peaceful meditations, quiet children, loving and agreeable spouses-don't those sound like the gems to you? These are beautiful and natural aspirations, but they stop short of the ultimate gift of Yoga. This is the difficulty with much of the practice of Yoga and meditation that happens in the West today. These desires reflect our deepest longing to connect with the Self, the joyful underlying Being and ultimate reality that unites us all. But we do not always recognize them as such. We think we want the quiet children and easy meditations and agreeable spouses. And we often try to avoid the necessary work of emotional purification to get them. We sidestep the disturbing aspects of our personality that we have defined as "not-me" and that have become, as it were, our emotional shadow. Conversely, when we do accept and take responsibility for the whole of our personality, we find that we progress on our path and can measure that progress with its positive "side effects": greater peace in our meditations and relationships. Having come this far through the fire, though, we can again be tempted to stop our work and to settle for those side effects, the gems, when the Ultimate is within reach. Having taught in almost every corner of the world, I can testify that contemporary Yoga worldwide does not seem to have much space for this homely truth: The mind cannot concentrate and go deep. either to realize peaceful meditations or final liberation, when it is perturbed by emotional disturbances that create warps and knots in the mindfield, in the energy field, and, consequently, in our bodies. The work of cleansing our minds and hearts of these disturbances, of learning to walk joyfully through the fire, as it were, is a critical prerequisite to being able to enter the depth of meditation and open the gates of superconsciousness. The purpose of this book is to explore the different domains of emotional purification and to provide a practical guide to the process. Before we proceed further, let's clarify what we mean by purification. Rather than a rigid or judgmental approach to morality, purification for our purposes refers to cleansing or untangling the knots in our mental, emotional, and energetic fields, which obstruct our ability to enter deep meditative states. We'll begin this process by understanding the relationship between emotions and the mind's ability to meditate. This will take us next into the sources of our emotions in instinctive drives, or four primary fountains, as they were identified by ancient Yoga practitioners. Our ability to transform our relationship to the fountains and in the process to transform ourselves is well supported by recent work in neuroscience on the phenomenon of neuroplasticity. The ability of the brain to change in even dramatic ways throughout our lifetime, neuroplasticity provides a biological explanation for the central role of awareness in Yoga practice. Awareness, whether we experience it during our waking or sleeping hours, as well as a special sort of awareness, mindfulness, is what makes everything in Yoga work and is what takes us from our first efforts to the doorstep of enlightenment. This is the foundation of our work together and is the core content of Part I. Part II discusses a range of methods for applying mindful awareness to our everyday lives and Yoga practices.
About The Author
Elizabeth Licht, BFA, RYT 200, is a freelance editor, professional dancer, and Yoga instructor based in Southeastern Wisconsin. Her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dance and Honors College degree are from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she also studied journalism, Iyengar Yoga, and the Alexander Technique. She is a member of Danceworks Performance Company, a teacher at Yogal.oft, and a former UWM Writing Center tutor. Her Yoga certification is from YogaOne Studio
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