Bondage (Not the fun kind)

Koshas, kleshas, meditation, and the process of getting lost and found

Let’s talk about bondage. And I’m not talking about shibari or BDSM. I’m talking about the bondage of our Soul. I am not trying to bum you out. But I think that this stuff is foundational for people on serious spiritual paths. If you’re a teacher or leader of some sort, this material will help you serve people by understanding the mechanics of people's inner world. If you’re someone on the path to happiness, these teachings may give you a ring full of keys.

Yoga teaches us that the Divine Self or the Soul is perfect, but that in our human experience, we’re in some kind of basic bondage that is rooted inside of us.

Note: Patanjali's Yoga Sutra is overused in contemporary yoga. I don’t think it’s the most important text for yogis to study. The Yoga Sutra doesn’t even really pertain much to physical hatha yoga. But there are some essential teachings in the Yoga Sutra for those of us who are into inner yoga and the path of transformation.

Right in the beginning, Patanjali defines the term yoga for the sake of the text:

योगश्चित्तवृत्तिनिरोधः ॥ १.२ ॥

yogaścittavṛttinirodhaḥ || 1.2 ||

Yoga is the process of getting beyond the movements of the mind.

तदा द्रष्टुः स्वरूपेऽवस्थानम् ॥ १.३ ॥

tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe'vasthānam || 1.3 ||

Then the Divine Self identifies with itself.

वृत्तिसारूप्यमितरत्र ॥ १.४ ॥

vṛttisārūpyamitaratra || 1.4 ||

Otherwise the Self identifies with the movements (of the mind).

These foundational sutras are responsible in part for many common misconceptions about meditation. Most people think meditation is just about quieting the mind or thinking less, etc. It’s not, but that’s another article. These sutras do give us a great way to look at the various aspects of our limited self. Anything about us, like our mind, can either be a portal to our immortal soul or a blocker to our soul, what we’re translating as “Divine Self” in Sutra 1:3.

Koshas

The Sutras talk about the mind, but it goes beyond just the mind. In the system that Patanjali comes from, we have the Divine Self, and then 5 Kosha, or layers, surrounding it. We just finished a six week online course about them. The koshas are:

• Anna-mayakosha - the physical body

• Prana-mayakosha - the life force that animates the body

• Mana-mayakosha - the mental/emotional body - this is what we can think of as “the mind” in an ordinary sense.

• Vijnana-mayakosha - the body of deeply held wisdom and ignorance

• Ananda-mayakosha - a deep, luminous body very close to the Soul our "bliss body"

All of the koshas are influenced by the fluctuations or vrttis within them. It's not just that the chitta vrtti are effecting the mind and emotions. They effect every layer. When the koshas are full of fluctuations and content, or when they are inflamed, we lose track of the deepest Self. It's like we get enamored and distracted by the dramas of the koshas. We get lost. We get bound.

If you have a regular joyful meditation practice, you will have experienced that the koshas can calm down and become open gateways for our attention, at least to some extent. It feels great, everything is in balance and we’re vibing hard with our anandamaya kosha (our bliss body). But what happens when we get up from meditation and have a fight with our loved one? Or we fail at something? Or we come into contact with a person that we have a conflict with?

POOF!

Our contracted state is back! The koshas are full of clouds and choppy waves and we're lost until we can sit down again and practice. What happened?

The short answer about this is that we slipped back into a habitual way of being. In ordinary life, the koshas are more accustomed to being inflamed than quiet. Within the different layers, we have deeply ingrained habits of NOT feeling free, NOT feeling one with everything. The ancient scriptures have many great explanations of these habits. Depending on the text, they are referred to as poisons, afflictions, stains, coverings, etc. I like the word vasana. It rhymes with asana and it is sort of the opposite. Asana is a deliberate position we put our bodies in for a healing purpose. Vasana is the default thing that happens when we're unconscious. From the inner perspective, vasana is really our only obstacle.

Kleshas

In the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali has identified five main inner habits and calls them Kleshas.

अविद्यास्मितारागद्वेषाभिनिवेशाः क्लेशाः ॥ २.३ ॥

avidyāsmitārāgadveṣābhiniveśāḥ kleśāḥ || 2.3 ||

Avidyā, asmitā, rāga, dveśa, and abhiniveśa are the five kleśas.

Patanjali describes sadhana as process of getting free from the Kleshas which keep us from experiencing our deepest Self. Let's look more at the Kleshas; or I should say your kleshas:

• Avidyā is translated most simply as ignorance or forgetfulness. This is when we fail to recognize the divine nature of things. It's when we forget that everything is consciousness, that all people, places and things are sacred. We only see the surface level of things and forget everything we know about the Nature of the universe. Most importantly, we forget or fail to recognize OUR divine nature. Avidyā is the basis of the other four klesha.

• Asmitā is egoism. It's our habit of being "Me" and making things "Mine or Not-Mine". My people/not my people. My culture/not my culture. It is the deeply ingrained habit of relating everything to our false, limited self and relating to everything from the perspective of the limited self's story. It is taking things personally and believing we are our limited self.

• Rāga is sometimes defined as attachment. It is also defined as desire. We want things, we want situations, we are attached to things and people being, acting in a certain way. Desire is the cause of anger. If you reflect on it, any time you are angry, it is because some desire is thwarted. There is no other cause for anger. Also, desire will always bring you back into the ego, for only "you" can have a desire. As soon as there is a desire, there is separation, there is a me who is wanting and something "else" that is the desired object. Here we are not talking about needs. We are talking about wants that are born out of the basic spiritual sense of incompleteness.

• Dveṣa is aversion. Aversion is negative desire. In other words: what you don't want. Your aversions are the people, places, things, and situations you want to avoid. Dvesha is the feeling that you want to run, hide, defend yourself. Your dveshas are the things that make you cringe. Want to find your dveshas? Think about what you find most ugly or undesirable. The feeling of fear is often related to dvesha. So is dread and avoidance.

• abhiniveśāḥ There is no good English word for abinavesha. It is usually translated as and "fear of death" but it is much deeper. It is our most basic aversion to change of any kind. We cling to what is, and fear what is unknown. And yes, we do fear death in a core way. This is abhinivesha. It is our core tendency to hold onto who we think we are and resist change. We cling and suffer because, alas, everything we cling to is temporary, including our own incarnation.

So here is Patanjali's version of bondage in a sweet nutshell.

As soon as we forget what we really are, as soon as we fall out of our power, we are in ávidyā. And from there we cascade through the other kleshas. This is the big point I want you to get here because THIS is why meditation works to alleviate human suffering. All kleshas, all inner suffering, is based on ignorance of the Soul.

Meditation

Meditation is many things. One of the great things that it is is a neutral gear for our "me machine". Consider this for a second: when you are being you (the little you), you are basically playing a role. You're married, you're single, you're a woman or a man, you're a mom, a professional, etc. And each and all of these has a whole way of being. Each one has motivations, past experiences, prejudices - vasanas. Like characters in a play, each role has it's own schtick.

These vasanas are most strong when we are engaged in the primary activity of the role. When you're parenting, you are very much Mom. When you're working, you are very much the professional. But what happens when the job is done? Ideally, we would be able to drop that role and assume whatever we need for the next task. The roles themselves aren't bad. They help us to perform in the world. Where the tricky part comes is when we get LOST in the role, and when we can't let the role go. So we have the mom being a mom, long after the parenting is done. We have the professional who can't stop thinking about work, even after he's left the office.

So we meditate. We sit down. We stop acting. Of course, if we are identified with the role of a yogi or meditator or spiritual person, we might get lost again, but at the very least, we have the chance to pull back and try to be no one. Then the fun begins. Most of us have a hard, if not impossible, time really being no one. We are so used to always being someone.

The typical characterization of meditation is a wrestling match with the mind. It's so wrong and really doesn't help people. More than a wrestling match with the mind, meditation is a process of softening and relaxing the identifications of the ego. The mind is fine. The mind is super dynamic and creative. It can assume any form. It's like a magnificent fountain. The thoughts of the mind are totally innocuous except that and to the extent that they come from the ego and reinforce the ego's many identifications.

Think about it. When you're meditating and your mind is jabbering on, what's it jabbering about? It's jabbering the agenda of your ego or one of the sub roles we discussed. Mom is jabbering thoughts about the kids. The professional is jabbering thoughts about work, the tax payer about taxes, the trauma victim is reliving their trauma.

The Soul is pure energy. It just has power and expanse and freedom. It has nothing to think about. Again, I am not painting a picture of a barren quiet silent inner landscape. It is all very dynamic and alive. It is dynamic life itself in there. The the distracting feelings, run-on stories, and thought-trains we get lost in in meditation are the result of forgetfulness, avidyā. And it's all "suffering". Many of the identifications themselves are toxic an negative. "I suck at meditation" "I suck at life", “people suck” and so on, but even the ones that are non-toxic, neutral or positive are still taking us away from the bliss and power of the Self.

What if I Can't Stop??
Often you can't. Often, the mind and the ego have a lot of momentum. And, like a bicycle wheel that keeps spinning, even after we stop pedaling, the mind may keep jabbering and the emotional body might keep feeling shitty feelings, even after we let of of the false identification, like when you get a song stuck in your head. But that's fine. Then we get to observe what's going on with detachment.

Lost and Found

The goal of this work isn't to be a neutral, neutered smiling zero. We are embodied, we are in life, we are swimming in the ocean of samsara. The work in Big Heart Meditation is to do that without being lost, without losing sight of what's real and who we are. This is what we mean by being lost-and-found. We take something like meditation practice that helps us stop being “me” and experience our deeper Divine Self, then hold that awareness as we play on the playground of life. We learn about our different dimensions, our koshas, our kleshas, and learn how to take care of them so that they are open portals for our attention instead of barriers.

How does this land for you?

Where do you get lost?

What helps you get found?

I am offering a six week online course that gets into all this next month.

You can find details here.