First there’s the question of logic, which seems to be what attracts many people to Buddhism. It is considered to be a logical system of thought. But I don’t trust logic. A lot of things can be proved ‘true’ by logical deduction, some of them pretty nefarious. And when there’s too much emphasis on logic, something else gets left out – intuition, inherent knowing ... whatever you call that. Then there’s the bigness of my emotional response, which doesn’t seem to have space in the middle ground. When I feel joy, I want to dance it, and somehow on this path I feel I have to constrain what I feel, tame it. Then there’s the fact that the Tibetan practices are complex and internal, whereas the practices that most speak to me are simple and physical.

So why am I prostrating and reciting Vajrasattva mantras? What’s motivating me? ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ is a personality trait, not a good reason (and a trait that can end up running me if I’m not mindful of it). I think the most potent reason I continue is that I am touched the beauty of Samye Ling and all that it stands for – an aesthetic that isn’t just scenic but emanates from a particular way of life founded on practice and ethics, a way that is balanced, kind, earthy and good-humoured. Then there’s my desire for community. I always underrate this because my primary drive is to be self-sustaining. But to be human is to be social. I also need to belong.

Samsara and nirvana are not in two different locations. Nirvana pushes up through the pores of samsara. If we don’t love samsara, we’re going to miss nirvana.

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Where do I set the boundaries in a public journal? How intimate can I allow it to be without feeling I have exposed myself – especially given that my most transformative experiences are bound up with personal relationship? My practices affect my life. They overflow into it, and my life flows back. So if I can’t write with complete intimacy, how useful is it to write here at all?

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Why do I always end up driving myself ... and then have to let it all run through my fingers, unravelling, unravelling? How do I practise with discipline and yet not wind myself up until I’m bound to the spool?

I understood something new this morning: I am afraid that if I do all these practices, if I get up at 4am every day, if I study Sanskrit and eat properly ... I will become a sort of superwoman – will become the person who lately I feel is sometimes projected onto me by people who know me only by my surfaces. And in becoming this person I will not expand but lose something of myself: my chaotic, ecstatic, out-of-control, passionate, tumultuous part.

On a rational level, I know there’s a problem with my understanding here, because what is the function of practices if not to make us more human? And when we become more human we don’t become more generic but more specifically ourselves. I have witnessed this. Superwoman is a pseud ... and yet on a visceral level she still packs a punch.

When I’ve got mired in inertia I’ve always understood this to be on some level a corrective, a counterbalance to the iron fist I sometimes run myself with. I wonder now if inertia can also be a way to sabotage myself, because on a subtle level I am afraid of what I may become. I invite myself to feel into these questions, but end up tangled in mental speculation.

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I could say that I have hit resistance to the ngöndro again, except that I don’t know whether this is resistance or genuine doubt. I skimmed through the Guru Yoga text and wondered whether I could ever sincerely profess such faith in the Kagyu lineage. There are areas of Tibetan Buddhism that don’t reflect my experience of reality, others where I simply don’t know what is real and probably never will. I could just drink down all my doubts with a large glass of water, but I don’t want to do that. I’d rather hold a space for all my unknowing, but the ngondro is directing me towards a particular view. Yes, it’s true that mahamudra demands that I ask questions, that I carry out my own investigation, but with the objective of arriving at a conclusion that is preconceived. I think I will probably never be able to espouse one belief system wholly and solely. My reality is hanging somewhere between many varieties of truth, like the big speckled spiders on the lemonbalm, who suspend the guy ropes of their webs from many different stems.

Maybe a couple of years ago (it must have been in the winter), I wrote this:

At 5am I arrive on my mat to start my practice. Outside it’s dark. I am setting sail in the lamp-lit cabin of a wooden ship. I slide into black water. The world is silent and all mine. At 6.30 dawn begins to sift down through the rooftops. A light comes on in the house opposite. I’m heading for port but I don’t want to make landfall.

I also wrote this:

Practising is like falling into the arms of an old and trusted lover. Which is to say, it is an intimate experience, full of subtleties and details, a landscape written on the back of my hand.

This being the case – and these are genuine felt impressions – why do I also experience so much resistance to stepping onto my mat? Why do I get an mired in an inertia so boggy and tractile that it feels impossible to resist?

One way I’ve tried responding to the bog is by letting go and allowing it to suck me down, peeling away the framework not just of my practices but also of the other sane and orderly habits that hold up my life – like eating well ... especially that. And there’s a certain satisfaction in surrendering in this way. There’s a kind of tantric aspect too, a thrusting aside of ethical codes: eating the meat, drinking the wine, embracing the ‘impure’, the outlawed, the taboo. It offers a connection with a more roiling and amorphous ground of reality that subsists beneath the elegant structure of the practices and remains eternally insubmissible to order. It’s primal, chaotic, and therefore an essential source of creativity, of lifeblood. But it also feels untenable as a pattern for everyday living.

This is where I start to experience a subtle – or maybe not so subtle – polarisation. I know how easy it would be for me to run my practices like a totalitarian regime. When I read the preceding paragraph I can feel how important connection with the underground is for me, because it speaks to the chaotic, subterranean aspect of myself – the ungovernable, the unpredictable, the crazy. When I reflect upon the dance, which is where my underground gets the chance to erupt and that is the practice (or part of it anyway), I experience no disjunction. I feel how the discipline – of mindfulness, of intense ongoing presence – carries into the chaos ... which resolves itself into the placeless, timeless, shapeless ... the divine ... into what we call by many words but really have no words for. I’m not sure, though, whether I know how to encompass chaos within the framework of my yoga practice, or my sitting practice, or within the practices of the ngondro.

People sometimes object to astanga vinysasa on the grounds that it’s responsible for a lot of injuries. There’s some truth in this. Inexperienced teachers who adjust over-enthusiastically, coupled with A-type students who try to force their bodies into postures, can make for a high-risk combination. Wherever aggression and will predominate over readiness to surrender, there is potential for harm. However, my friend Angela suggests another way of looking at all of this. She says that the gift of astanga is to reveal to us the places where our body is weak or out of balance and then to offer us the opportunity either to heal these places or to create a state of chronic discomfort there. My own experience of practising astanga vinyasa bears out this view.

In Sanskrit the name for the primary series is yoga chikitsa, which is usually translated as ‘yoga therapy’. But yoga chikitsa isn’t therapy in any simple sense. In order to be truly therapeutic the primary series requires of us that we practise it with a little wisdom. Fortunately – paradoxically – a function of yoga chikitsa is that practising it grows our wisdom. That is to say, you may enroll for an astanga class with the intention just of firming your buttocks or feeling a bit less stressed, but quite soon you find that you are learning things about yourself, about your habits and your motivations. You begin to see where you are living in a way that does not truly serve you, and – almost without your willing it – you begin to choose more skillful ways of being.

At one stage I used to refer to my practice as ‘the path of pain’. I was joking, but only a bit. The path of pain was nothing to do with masochism. I tried really hard not to hurt myself, and I got intensely frustrated when I hurt myself anyway. Initially, I did my best to ignore my pain, hoping it would go away. (I had been involved in classical dance, so this way of dealing with discomfort was second nature.) However, the more I tried to ignore my pain, the more it waved its arms around. I have Ehlers Danlos (hypermobility) Syndrome, so it’s quite easy for me to injure myself. I didn’t like this. I would watch more robust types pushing their bodies apparently without deleterious effect and resent the fact that when I tried to practise in a similar way I ended up with chronic tendonitis, strained ligaments, subluxations and a torn meniscus. The more I tried to push forwards, the more – in my eyes – I was forced backwards, into a practice increasingly ‘limited’ by injury.

Pain became a path when I started to understand that when I am injured, injury is the practice. Knowing this was one of the key transformational moments of my practice. We work with what is, not with what we wish it were or the way it was yesterday. When I completely embrace the way things are, a shift happens in my orientation. I am on the road of reality. Here, now, step by step, moment by moment. And when the practice is what is, it’s no longer just about injury any more. Everything becomes the practice.
 
That injury is a great teacher is almost a truism, but it took me a while to understand how profound these teachings can be. They are not simply biomechanical in nature but have also to do with how we are in our whole life, as we manifest in our body. Yoga is the mirror that reveals to us the truth about our way of being. The way we hurt ourselves on the mat is the way we hurt ourselves in our life.

For this reason, it seems to me particularly important that we keep practising when we are injured. By this I don’t mean that we should carry on regardless, denying the pain or trying to ‘breathe through it’ – which will only exacerbate the injury. There is no place for this in yoga. Going ‘through’ the pain (in this context, anyway) signifies going beyond, that is, overshooting the place where the work is. It means missing the point and is often a form of avoidance or a symptom of attachment to the practice as a demonstration of physical prowess.

What I do mean is that we simply continue to step onto the mat, with our injury and with our mindful attention, and find appropriate ways of interacting with whatever is happening. This may involve modifying or completely changing our practice. Well, that’s OK. We change or we modify and we embrace all of that. Which means also embracing our reaction to needing to change or modify – our genuine reaction, including the nasty bits that we’d rather sweep under the yoga mat: our anger and our resentment and our sense of loss and our fear ... or whatever it is. If we just stop practising until the problem has (we hope) gone away, we remain forever ignorant of the knowledge that it has to communicate to us. Since this knowledge is always something that we really need to know, the pain will continue to recur, in one form or another, until we pay due attention to it.

Working with injury demands our sensitivity, our honesty and our patience. It demands that we love our injuries, spend time with them, respect them, listen to them. This is what’s happening now; this is the pathway. This is the teaching.

Well, I set up this blog a few days ago but seem to be reluctant to post anything on it. So ... blog, here goes ...

A lot of my resistance around the ngöndro has dissolved – at least temporarily – and I'm riding on the momentum of the practices. It's like rushing downstream over the rapids. True, there are still a few lumps of ice bumping up against the raft, but mostly there is this fluid, easy energy. No, I don't expect it will stay like this – that's the nature of impermanence. And sweet though it is to coast on the river, I don't really want to carry on floating; it could become a bit facile. While maybe I can be a little too attached to difficulty, there's a lot of real merit in the obstacles that make me storm and vow to stop practising, because they force me to crawl through difficult holes, and getting stuck and snagged on the brambles is what enables me to understand what's real and where I am deluding myself.

Over the past few months, as I've sat and practised and danced and lived, I've been engaged in observing my own resistance - to everything, on some level. And at some point, while sitting yesterday, I suddenly became aware of the ludicrousness of it – of myself resisting myself, which is what it all boils down to. Because I'm not only the resister – who I identify with – but also whatever I resist against. I think that I am resisting an instruction or a teaching or a norm or an expectation ... But there is no compulsion in the instruction or the teaching or the norm or the expectation. The sense of compulsion is created by my mind, which wants to resist and yet at the same time feels it is being coerced to obey – and which, in some small part of itself, also wants to obey. I create a tyrant, a dogmatist, split myself in two and then rebel against him. The solution is to flow with things a bit more, to be looser, to break down the sharp edges, to allow in shifts and changes and movement. If I unlace the tyrant's corsets, he will dance with the rebel.