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.
