Being with Certainty
Mary Taylor
We make plans for the day, set meetings for the week and we schedule work, holidays or celebrations sometimes years in advance. It’s probably a good thing to think ahead, to dream of a future in which we’re fully engaged. Yet, life itself is not a certainty for any one of us, as we learned last summer when our dear friend Maty Exraty unexpectedly passed away.
Maty was forward thinking, dedicated to practice, determined and one of the best teachers modern yoga has known. Perhaps more than any other single force, her vision shaped what yoga all over the world is today. She was the first to cross imaginary boundaries of superiority and non-communication that had been drawn in the sands of our minds between lineages of yoga. As one of the founders of Yogaworks, Maty was brought together under one roof related yoga traditions so that students could not only “find their teacher,” but also so they could learn to practice discriminating awareness. Plus, she had a great aesthetic and loved to shop! So not only did she shape the way we thought about yoga, she pioneered the idea of having a yoga boutique within studios. Suddenly yoga became stylish with room for a diversity of people seeking different threads of meaning; even those of us who were not quite sure we fit into the stereotypical hippie archetype that had filtered onto the main stage of yoga during the 60’s an 70’s. Maty was fierce and, somehow at the same time, loving beyond words. When she died suddenly on July 9, 2019 there was a shock wave that rolled like a rapid tsunami through the world of yoga. And even in death she was a great teacher, reminding us of the Buddhist sage Atiśa’s teachings that we will all die, that with each passing breath our life becomes shorter, and that though we do not know when death will arrive, it will come whether we are prepared for it or not. We’re reminded again and again of these truths with the passing of other iconic teachers like Ram Das, great thinkers like Freeman Dyson, or the thousands who have so far died of the coronavirus.
Learning of these deaths continues to water an awareness of the importance of life for both Richard and me. They bring to mind the question of how we can live and best use whatever time we have left to contribute the most we possibly can to this world. They remind us that waking up so we can contribute is an ongoing process, not a singular event. Death is a reminder to tame today’s runaway mind so we can see what needs to be done and work from a place of stillness and stability rather than one of fleeting ideals and graspings. So we practice. Death is the ultimate wake up call to once more let go of preconceptions, prejudices, fears and expectations and a reminder to offer it all, especially knowledge, into the fire of pure awareness as we look at everything more deeply and once again. Perhaps most importantly, encountering death underscores the power of relationships that are couched in a willingness to truly listen to and see others knowing that in so many ways we are all one and the same. So we continue to practice. For yogis we practice asana, pranayama, chanting and so on as a stabilizing foundations to help us engage in living life fully in context of our relationship and responsibility to serve others.
The power of practice is not just a yogic thing though. Towards the end of his life, the great philosopher, Plato, remarked that we should take the opportunity to practice dying more often. In his work he had pursued an understanding of what constitutes a virtuous life and had written extensively on ethics, education, politics and even friendship. Central to all of his teaching was the deep conviction that truth is the taproot of a healthy life. It’s no surprise, therefore, that as he neared the time of his own death, Plato would have wanted to comprehend the truth that lay at the core of his experience, engaging in the process of death as fully and as honestly as he had engaged in life. Lucky for any of us who practice yoga, every time we finish our yoga practice we have the opportunity to do just as Plato advised. We carefully arrange the body, still the mind, settle the gaze inward, and calm the breath for the final pose. But as we set up for Śavāsana, we aren’t usually thinking, “Great! Another chance to practice dying!” It’s just so much easier to slide back onto the mat, toasted by the practice, or exhausted from our circumstances, and take a nap. Or, worse yet, to rush through the final pose and get back to “real” life.
It’s not only a rigorous practice or an abundant life that can keep us from wanting to practice dying. The thought of death, especially our own or that of our children or other loved ones, is scary! What is death, anyway? We know that when someone else dies, that’s it. They’re gone. We might still be able to hold their intimate belongings; their wallet, their eyeglasses or the leftovers they didn’t get to in the fridge. But where did THEY go? Did they just vaporize, or are they in heaven? Could they be traveling through the Bardos, or are they waiting patiently on a bench just outside of life for their next instructions?
One of the most frightening aspects of someone else’s death is that it forces us to face an unavoidable fact about our own precious life: It’s a one-way street. When and exactly how our last breath may arrive is never a certainty, but a great truth about life is that it ends. So someone we know dies and we pledge to make every moment count. We live life to the fullest and bring honorable intention to all of our actions. But then the taxes come due, we meet a new friend, the cat pukes on the piano. Life goes on. Little by little we fall back into mundane habits of every day existence and the secure delusion of our own immortality. Why bring ourselves down by thinking about–let alone practicing for–the inevitable?
“Everything’s impermanent, and we’re all going to DIE!”
Yet it’s quite possible that Plato’s recommendation wasn’t a morbid suggestion that we brood about our own non-existence. Maybe he was proposing that by understanding death, we could gain insight into life and the fact that impermanence is a fundamental truth of life. This idea of impermanence as a core concept to understanding life is also a central theme in Classical Indian and Buddhist teachings. In fact, it’s not uncommon for beginning yoga students to toss up their hands in despair, and run for the workout gym, rather than sticking with yoga and this seemingly negative tone that lies at the core of Indian philosophy; “Everything’s impermanent, and we’re all going to DIE!”
From the Western perspective in which a superficial approach to death is embedded in our culture, it’s difficult to see through our own fear of death and get excited about the idea of impermanence. However, consciously or not, as we practice yoga we’re already developing awareness of the nature of impermanence. For example, we’re in a yoga class and the teacher gives us that sly smile, announcing our least favorite pose--Navāsana. We could go to the bathroom again. That works. By the time we got back last time the dreaded pose was over, and we casually stepped into the downward dog. Nobody knew. Or maybe this should be the class where we dip our toe into the sea of impermanence. Where we stick with the instruction. We let our dread rise. We watch our legs shake, and amuse ourselves with sarcastic thoughts about why the teacher is torturing us again. And eventually we find ourselves back in the downward dog and we notice that our fears, our thoughts, our avoidance techniques, our physical feelings and sensations, even our ego came and went. Lesson one in impermanence. The fact that nothing lasts forever is a good thing, particularly in Navāsana. By sticking with our yoga practice we gradually begin to feel safe watching our feelings, thoughts, sensations, emotions, pains, insights and everything else come and go. We start to see flux as a continuous pattern, and we begin to recognize that virtually everything has parts we may like and parts we may abhor, but that nothing is fully one or the other and certainly nothing is without change. This insight into the nature of impermanence, affords the opportunity for endless depth of experience.
Nonetheless, it’s perfectly natural to slip back time and again into a fear of the ultimate impermanence--death. In the third verse of the Sadhana Pāda of the Yoga Sūtras Patanjali describes the five Kleśas. These are the afflictions that are said to be the root causes of human suffering. The final Klesa is abhiniveśah, a fear of death or clinging to life. It is said that from the lowest of insects to the most highly realized human there exists an almost reflexive, primordial fear of death. This fear is different from the rational fear of death that we experience when we jump out of the way of a speeding car to avoid being killed. Abhiniveśha is more of an abstract fear of the idea of death. It is a fear rooted in ignorance and therefore it becomes a source of great suffering.
We are ignorant about death in part because it’s a once in a lifetime experience. We can see others die, but the actual experience of death is the ultimate unknown. A more insidious aspect of our ignorance is what is referred to as avidya or the ignorance we experience because we perceive ourselves as separate from everything else. Although we have a separate physical boundary from other things, we are also part of the universal whole. Avidya is our inability to hold onto this paradoxical idea of being both completely separate and intrinsically part of something far beyond the boundaries of our own corporeal “self”. The inability to honestly feel this paradox can cause suffering in regards to comprehending death. A sense of separateness furthers expansion of the ego (asmita)and our tendency to grasp for those things that are pleasurable and support the ego (raga), while we avoid those things we find unpleasant (dveṣa). In this way, feeling rooted in separateness is a prime breeding ground for avoidance and fear of death–abhinivesha. It’s part of human nature to suffer due to the Kleshas. As is pointed out in the Yoga Sūtras, the way to free ourselves from these afflictions is through insight accessed through stillness of mind, or meditation.
“Death is not the worst that can happen to men.”
From a yogic standpoint, Plato’s counsel to practice dying is just what we look for in every practice. We cultivate meditative awareness of the present moment as we watch our own thoughts, feelings, sensations and emotions arise and disappear within a yoga pose. We train the body and mind–especially in the corpse pose–to stay attentive and alert without holding on, as we allow everything to be just as it is. We begin to see that whatever arises and falls away is simply part of a pattern of creativity and impermanence that continuously unfolds throughout the practice. The more clear attention we give to this process–without trying to change or manipulate things–the more fulfilling the experience becomes. We find an extraordinary sense of nourishment through the simple act of bearing witness to circumstance. Cultivating this sense of our own participation in an impermanent pattern we call life meets the ultimate challenge when one day we’re presented with the “circumstance” of death’ the death of a friend, a family member, a pet or our own immortality plops itself down, slap dab in the middle of an otherwise reasonable day.
At that moment we have the opportunity to run in fear, to wallow in sorrow, or perhaps to cut ourselves off from the entire event as we move ahead in denial. But if we’ve been practicing being present with what arises, we find that our options are limited. What feels best is to stay present with whatever thoughts, feelings and emotions arise. Rather than seeing the death that intersects our life as an unfair act of god inflicted upon us as a separate individual, because we’ve seen ourselves as part of a bigger pattern, we are able to breathe into the knowledge that death is a profound part of the natural impermanent pattern of a healthy life. We have the skill to return again and again to being present with whatever arises within the experience of death. The truth of death provides motivation to wake up to each moment more fully, more openly and with greater compassion, rather than walking through life with blinders. Thank you, Maty.
