Yoga Articles

Make an Offering of Yourself

by Doug Keller

A wind rose up out of the valley and wrestled with the tips of trees. The forest was a city of junglewood, its entrance a tangle of banyan and cashew limbs that creaked against the wind, their leaves sighing. A sadhu entered the forest, the air draped about him like a thick moss -- like a dream, like a deep and heavy sleep. As legend tells it, he entered seeking the darshan of Lord Shiva, whose dark form had eluded him through countless pilgrimages to the temples of men. Now in this temple of silent eyes, teak leaves crackled like parchment underfoot as he struggled forth in search of his God.

Shiva was in the forest, watching. Yet each time the sadhu's eyes turned toward him, Shiva would gracefully turn his back, revealing the splendor of Parvati, the goddess. For indeed, as those who know whisper, Shiva and Parvati, his creative power, are as one. Parvati is but the other face of Shiva.

The sadhu was so intent upon finding Lord Shiva that he did not even notice Parvati. He saw only delicate mosses, white jasmine and knotted trees bent like sages, and not the dark tresses of his Lord within the forest creepers. Shiva circled again and again, turning each time to reveal some new wonder. The sadhu remained oblivious.

The story of Shiva and the hapless sadhu plays upon the mystery of the spiritual quest, that God is both seen and unseen. Its image of Lord Shiva hiding Himself in plain sight is honored in the tradition of hatha yoga by naming the 'rotated' or twisting poses of hatha yoga 'parivritta', after the goddess Parvati, recalling the image of Shiva's turning. In rotated poses, the yogi takes his stance and then twists, turning his back and reversing the pose. The pose is thus turned inside out, bringing to the fore the unknown -- the part of the body which is unseen, hence overlooked and mysterious. Hatha yogis are celebrants of such mysteries, known for turning things -- even themselves -- on their heads to find God. Their tradition seeks the 'unseen' experience of the divine within the 'seen', within the body itself. Their postures and practices venture into the last place one would think to look, and find there the face and gestures of the Lord. The yogi finally 'sees' when he makes an offering of his own vision, sacrificing his ordinary way of seeing things for the sake of a higher, more expanded vision.

In Anusara Yoga we make each pose an offering. But what are we offering, and how? It's not that God looks down from His heaven like a doting parent and says, "Nice Dog Pose -- thank you!" The monk in the forest must have thought -- at least for a moment -- that he was making a tough and noble sacrifice, one worthy of at least a peek at God. But acts of sacrifice truly mean little and can even be deluded, until we are ripe to see through new eyes.

In yoga, spirituality involves sacrifice -- but not sacrifice in the sense of a painful relinquishment or penance. In yoga, sacrifice is not martyrdom. The body is not meant to suffer for the aspirations of the spirit, for the body is not only the offering; it is the altar, the holy ground upon which we approach the Lord. It is in and through this body that we rise higher, not apart from it. What is the offering, the sacrifice we make? We sacrifice the sense that we are separate from God. The body is not the gulf that separates us from God; it is the bridge over which we must pass to meet Him.

My understanding of this came slowly. I knew that giving yourself on the spiritual path involves work, but I had a habit of equating hard work with suffering -- a noble suffering perhaps, but suffering nonetheless. Only after having done my practice did I understand that hard work done with spiritual intent produces inner nectar, and that such nectar is its very purpose. It was my own attitude that was keeping me from tasting it.

The ancient Vedas embellish this point, and what I read from the Vedas during that time was vital to my reaching a better understanding of my hatha yoga practice. According to the Vedas, both eternal life and the fulfillment of our worldly life are founded upon sacrifice. The Vedas do recognize that we ultimately long for immortality, and submit that this is really an aspiration for the deathlessness of the divine Self. In Vedic lore the story of our longing is told as the legendary quest for amrita, a word that means both 'nondeath' (a-mrta), and nectar or 'ambrosia.' In legend, the gods win and maintain eternal life by offering soma, the herb of immortality, as a sacrificial oblation that is transformed by the sacrifice into amrita.

Soma is the herb that is sacrificed. It's worth noting that this very word 'soma' has found its way into our language as a root word signifying the body. This makes the legend all the more suggestive for a hatha yogi. For it is not enough simply to possess soma to benefit from it. As the Vedas tell it, the gods were the first to discover that only by offering or surrendering soma to another does the giver enjoys its benefits. The asuras, the 'antigods' or demons, failed to understand just that. Asuras who managed to steal the soma took it selfishly into their own mouths and thus failed to win the immortality they sought.

The Vedic moral is clear: the secret of a full life is sacrifice. And so in those times rituals were performed to offered foods such as rice and ghee (which represent soma) to the gods. These oblations rose up to sustain the gods, while the remains of the sacrifice granted to humankind a kind of immortality as well as abundance in return. Those who sacrificed received not only the honored features of a full life -- health, wealth and good and faithful companionship -- but also a life span of one hundred years, which at that time was prized as a kind of mitigated immortality.

Yet the Vedas looked beyond the promise of benefits or reward to a deeper understanding of the body and of the life we enjoy through it. The ritual of sacrifice was not a process of bartering with the gods for more time on this earth; it carried a sense of responsibility that recognized that life is a gift. According to brahmanic theory, the body we each inhabit is really on loan from the gods -- in particular, from Yama, the Lord of Death. Sacrifice is payment on the loan; a failure to sacrifice results, quite simply, in repossession (i.e. death). And so our life literally carries a mortgage (an English term that literally means 'dead pledge') -- our life is our property, yet we must repay our debt or suffer the loss of it. And what we have -- our very body and the fruits of our work -- is our means for repaying it.

There's a reason why this debt is thought to exist. Ancient wisdom has it that the universe is the product of God's own sacrifice. The early Vedas describe the universe as coming about through the self-sacrifice of the cosmic god-man Prajapati. In one of many Vedic accounts, a passage from the Satapatha Brahmana, it is said, "Verily, Prajapati alone was here in the beginning. He desired 'May I exist, may I reproduce myself.' He toiled, he heated himself with inner heat. From his exhausted and overheated body the waters flowed forth" and from those waters came all of the elements of creation.

What does this story say to us about ourselves and our world? First, that the world comes from goodness and perfection, and that the expression of that perfection in all of its variety requires that God somehow descend and disperse into manyness. This takes work, an expenditure of energy; in a very significant sense, creation of the world by God was a sacrifice. Legend dramatizes this by depicting God as Prajapati, who exhausted and even dismembered Himself to produce all of creation. Recognizing this, one specific Vedic ritual represents Prajapati as a golden person. The purpose of the ritual is to restore the body of Prajapati back to wholeness by offering back a part of what He had given to us -- our wealth in the form of offerings of pure food such as rice and other grains. The process of sacrifice is called agnicayana, the 'piling of [the] Fire [altar],' and a feature of this ritual was the installation of a golden image of a man, of Prajapati, the cosmic person. Gold is the purest element to arise from Prajapati's self-sacrifice, and gold symbolizes the purity of our offering in return to Him, in gratitude for creating and providing for us. The purity of gold symbolizes great heat and intense work. Its brilliance symbolizes the light of wisdom generated by fire; through sacrifice we ourselves shine with greater wisdom and become whole in our own understanding.

Sacrifice began with an offering of the outer fruits of labor; yet slowly there emerged in Indian thought the insight that we must also internalize this sacrifice. True sacrifice involves an inner labor. In other words, it isn't enough to simply perform the ritual on the outside, for the outer world is only a sign of the inner. This insight was inspired by the nondualist teachings of the Upanishads. Sacrifice becomes fruitful by offering to another; yet the Upanishads raised the question, Whom do we seek, and to whom do we really offer our sacrifice? They answered by erasing the line between human and divine with the teaching 'Thou art That.' If we are to locate the God to whom we are making the sacrifice and thus have the sacrifice bear fruit, we must turn within.

The development took a particular historical form in the tradition of hatha yoga, which turned attention to the inner workings of the body. The hatha yogis practiced their yoga as an inner sacrifice, a yagna meant to perfect the spirit by an inner fire. The body is the offering; its fluids are the soma, which is transformed through the processes of hatha yoga into amrta, the nectar of immortality. By drinking the nectar produced within ourselves by these processes we become immortal.

Other elements of the sacrificial fire are represented in hatha yoga as well. The inner heat arising from our practice is the fire. The breath is the wind, which fans the flame and carries the sacrifice upward to the divine -- located not in some distant heaven, but in the sahasrar in the crown of the head. Sacrifice, the yogis argued, is not only an exchange between two different worlds, between men and the gods; by inward sacrifice there is a process of self-transformation in which man realizes his own divinity.

My own experience of this process as I practiced hatha yoga in the heat of the Indian summer confirmed this. My practice intensified the heat; and the added heat came from within. I went through phases in which I sweated profusely, and the sweat was bitter and acrid, the sign of an inner purging. These phases passed as quickly and unexpectedly as they came, and each time my body was left much lighter, in the sense of being less dense. The only analogy I could think of was the process of clarifying butter; as butter is cooked with a slow and steady heat, the solids within it rise to the surface and are skimmed off. This leaves a light, transparent oil that is able to take even greater heat without burning up. Like that, my body was being clarified in the heat of the practice. The muscles were stronger yet less congested, and energy seemed to flow through me more freely. At the same time, emotions came up during my practice that seemed strangely exaggerated. They too passed, leaving me with a greater inner clarity.

The hardest thing for me to understand in the midst of all this was how such physical processes could have anything to do with spiritual awareness. Yet the two really do go hand in hand, and this phenomenon is what the hatha yogis set out to study. They were the first to map out and systematically explain the inner landscape of the six chakras, the energy wheels or circles of transformation that exist within the subtle body. They understood why and how the physical processes involving these chakras is vital to spiritual liberation because they understood how the subtle energies that converge upon these chakras influence our emotional and spiritual awareness. The clarification of these energies that takes place through the practice of hatha yoga is the yagna. In this yagna, each of us is once both sacrificer and deity. Each of us is Prajapati. Like the statue installed to complete the sacrifice in ancient ritual, the golden sacrificial body of the yogi is Prajapati made whole. Our auspicious debt is to restore ourselves to wholeness through yoga, reversing the process of our own dissolution and death. This is divine alchemy, in which the base metal of the body is changed into gold. As the body becomes more pure and transparent, we gain a spiritual eye with which to perceive the divine.

Swami Muktananda simply and eloquently expresses the spirit of this tradition in Reflections of the Self when he recommends the study of hatha yoga and pranayama, saying "All your nerves will be purified; your body will be transformed into gold." Baba does not use the word 'gold' as a loose metaphor; the body becomes gold, merged into Consciousness by our own process of awakening to a spiritually vibrant awareness of the Self. To the spiritually perceptive eye, the yogi's body radiates a golden glow.

When we understand that hatha yoga is a means to this transformation, we can understand it as something broader in scope and significance than just a system of exercises and stretches designed to keep the body fit. Hatha yoga originally included the whole process of transformation, both the physical practice and the grace that brings it about spontaneously. It was a tradition begun by Siddhas who were the first hatha yogis. They discovered the outer postures and inner processes of hatha yoga through their own experiences in meditation, and they incorporated those discoveries into spiritual practice.

The teachings of the hatha yoga tradition first appeared in systematic form in the tenth century through the work of a Siddha master named Matsyendranath. From his teachings there emerged the 'Natha tradition' of Siddhas. "Nath" means "Lord," and is derived from the name of Shiva; the Natha yogis embraced and expounded upon the philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism. Matsyendranath founded the hatha yoga tradition of the Natha sect and was followed by his spiritual heir Goraksanath. Goraksanath systematically put the tradition forth in writing, featuring the first detailed accounts of hatha yoga poses and techniques of pranayama, or breath control, as well as of the physical and spiritual benefits of the practice.

The Natha Siddhas were not interested in abstract or speculative philosophy per se; they were convinced that the way to the Truth was through practice and direct experience. And while they recognized that the Self has an aspect that is beyond time, change and the reach of the senses, they also argued that the Self has a dynamic aspect that manifests itself in and through the physical world. It is through the experience of this dynamic aspect of the Self, they said, that we reach the transcendent. This placed the Natha tradition of spiritual practice squarely in the physical world of concrete experience, with all of its infinite complexity. The story of the sadhu in search of Shiva captures the attitude of the Natha tradition. The yogi is called to step beyond the simplicity of rituals of sacrifice and worship in temples and venture into the tangled forest of the world -- for Shiva is also there, though we may not recognize Him at first.

One of the most revolutionary contributions of the Natha Siddhas is their understanding of the body and its relation to spiritual reality. The body is a microcosm of a much greater reality: God. The world itself is really the body of Shiva, and our own body is an inseparable part of that organic whole. An enduring part of the Natha revolution was the understanding that followed from this -- that our spiritual well-being is closely related to our own health and relationship with the rest of the world. Spiritual and physical health are both manifestations of the Kundalini Shakti, the spiritual power of the universe. Our simplest acts to maintain our health are really sacrificial acts of worship honoring the divinity that both gives us life and brings us to full spiritual awareness.

In this context, health means far more than simply freedom from sickness. Taking into account the true purpose of the body, health has a broader meaning. It is the capacity -- the steadiness or hardiness of body -- to sustain the process of transformation that takes place through spiritual awakening and practice. Jnaneshwar Maharaj, a Natha Siddha initiated in the lineage of Matsyendranath and Goraksanath, best described this process of transformation in his greatest work, the Jnaneshwari. In a passage of the Jnaneshwari, he details the process by which "one body" -- a new spiritual body -- "devours another" -- the gross physical body. "This" he says, "is the secret teaching of the Natha sect."

"Just as when molten metal is poured into a heated mold, it (takes) the form of the mold, similarly beauty incarnates in the form of the body, covered by a veil of skin.

As if the lovely hues of the evening sky were transferred to the body, or as if an image were fashioned from an inner radiance of the spirit, it seems to be the very incarnation of peace.

This is how the yogi's body appears when Kundalini has drunk of the nectar. Even the god of death is afraid to look at it. Old age vanishes, the knot of youth is loosened, and the lost bloom of childhood reappears. Whatever his age, the term youth should be interpreted as strength. Such is his incomparable fortitude.

Listen! Although the body has the appearance of gold, it has the lightness of air, for no particles of earth or water remain in it."

Though Jnaneshwar speaks with a poet's voice, he is describing quite accurately the transformation that takes place through the practices of yoga by the grace of the Kundalini Shakti. The kundalini is the fire, while the offering is not just the actions we perform through the body, but the understanding behind our efforts, which he calls a "wisdom sacrifice." Ultimately, the offering is this; in all acts and practices to see God in oneself and others, and to act without expectation or selfish motive.

In particular, Jnaneshwar describes how the yogic practices of posture and breathing or pranayama, offered with right understanding, bring about this transformation by the fire of the Kundalini Shakti. The process itself is mysterious, defies explanation, and is very real. Its outcome is that the body becomes filled with nectar and takes a new and radically different birth. This new body is strong and deathless, made of light and lightness itself. One who does these practices with devotion, he says, is rewarded with experiences of pure and perfect knowledge -- the nectar of the sacrifice. For such a one, "there remains only the essential Self in which there is no longer any difference between the fire and the sacrificer. As they are satisfied with the nectar which remains from the sacrifice, and as they attain the state of immortality, they are easily united with God."

I remember the power that Jnaneshwar's words had for me as I read them. I studied his meticulous descriptions of the sitting postures, bandhas and forms of breath control or pranayama of hatha yoga that feed the fire of the kundalini. This was before I had undertaken a complete practice of hatha yoga, and as it turned out, his words provided the inspiration for me to begin. During the monsoon I read his words and practiced them before going out to do my work in the gardens of the Siddha Meditation ashram in which I was staying. One morning as I practiced the vajra or 'thunderbolt' posture as he described it, all of the elements of posture and breathing came together strongly and spontaneously. My breath, which had become balanced through the pranayama, suddenly drew into me very strongly. It was locked into my body through the posture and drawn upwards. From somewhere inside, a pinpoint of light leapt up and exploded in a shiver of white light in the crown of my head that permeated my body. My breath was somehow suspended within. It had disappeared into subtle passages within me like water into sand, and it seemed as if there was no longer any need to breathe. At the same time, my awareness shifted and expanded to include everything around me; there was no longer any separation between myself and my surroundings.

Within a few moments my body released the breath and returned to its normal way of functioning. But even as I went to the gardens, this awareness remained with me. I remember crossing the great field surrounded by trees next to the ashram, and being acutely aware of the clouds above and everything around as not being 'things' apart from me. I felt that I was looking down through the clouds at the same time as I looked out upon the field through my eyes. I felt a single force of awareness running through my body, moving blood and breath and pulsing through the trees, in the sunlight, and in the wind.

I experienced this state as something very refined and intimately connected with my breath. As long as I remained centered in the breath, watching it as it flowed in a perfect balance between inbreath and outbreath, the experience remained. Yet as I became occupied with my duties, my breath became more uneven and this state began to fade. It's difficult to be a universe and a gardener at the same time; the experience is so expansive that your body is literally shaken by it, yet so delicate that it must be handled like a fragile seedling in the palm of your hand.

It was not long after that experience that I first began a full practice hatha yoga, because the experience had taught me how vital it is to receiving and holding this state. I was fortunate to begin with at least a germinal understanding of the true nature of the practice. "Hatha" is traditionally translated as "force," yet I understood that the experience we seek is far to powerful to be forced; it has to unfold naturally through grace, or else it is overwhelming. Though hatha yoga is a strong practice, it is not to be practiced aggressively to 'make' spiritual growth happen. Grace is a very real force that works through us when we do the practice. The practice of hatha yoga gently urged upon us by the Siddhas is part and parcel of the process of that unfolding. A gift as precious as God's grace requires a golden vessel. This vessel, the body, becomes golden only by sacrifice, by giving of oneself through the practices of yoga. This same vessel becomes golden and filled with nectar in return.

Yogic practice that is open to the possibility of -- and is enlivened by -- grace reveals much that we do not ordinarily recognize -- about ourselves, our bodies, about true health, strength and sacrifice, and about the presence of God within all of these. This legacy of the Natha Siddhas is the understanding that through the body we complete the circle of creation, offering back to God what He has granted us -- a body and a life made golden by His grace.

Thanks to www.DoYoga.com for permission to reprint this article.