Cultivating Peace - Finding Your Centre
A Day Yoga Retreat at Yoga Junction - Saturday 20th January 2024
You’re invited to explore the essence of letting go of old habits, stresses and strains,
to enable you to discover your innate capacity for inner strength, balance and ease.
Pleas feel welcome to bring your aches, pains, tweaks and twinges…
this is a space for you to attend to the parts of you that most need support.
The yoga is subtle and powerful, suitable for complete beginners
or curious long-term practitioners.
Click below for information and booking details.
Dear Reader,
This is part two of a series on samskara, a yogic concept that enables us to see how life experiences can leave their imprint upon our being. In addition to granting us this understanding, yoga offers us many tools to identify and unwind the habitual patterns that are held within us. For that, I’m enormously grateful, as I surely have collected a lot of samskara in my lifetime, even in my teenage years I felt their grip. I remember the huge relief I experienced after practicing yoga in my bedroom, listening and following along to a record of some very basic yoga postures that I picked up in a charity shop. I could literally feel the samskara falling away, lessening their vice like hold on my body, breath and mind. Needless to say, I have been practicing yoga ever since.
Last week, I promised that we’d look a little deeper at how the samskara impressions are laid down in each kosha. Usually I would start with the body, breath and left hemisphere and build up to the more subtle kosha. However, I am going to move from the subtle to the more material in this series. So we’ll begin by exploring our most elusive and hard to describe kosha, the anandamayakosha.
Anandamayakosha is the more subtle part of our manifest being. It is the kosha that is closest to the Atman, our Soul, or Higher Consciousness. As such, there is a quality of merging into the Oneness of All that Is, which is the hallmark of this kosha. The feeling of interconnectedness and wholeness is held here in a tangible way. The degree to which we have access to this feeling or not has profound implications for our whole being, as each kosha affects all the others.
Anandamayakosha is that part of us we sense when we are experiencing states of love, bliss and oneness. The ultimate of state of anandamayakosha is samadhi, described by Parmahansa Yogananda as “A soundless state of breathlessness. A blissful super consciousness state in which a yogi perceives the identity of the individualised Soul and Cosmic Spirit.” 1
Such states are rather rare amongst human beings particularly in modernity. More common, are “peak states” of awareness, described by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. He found that often-reported emotions in a peak experience include "wonder, awe, reverence, humility, surrender, and even worship before the greatness of the experience.” In addition, he found that during the peak state experience, “reality is perceived with truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, completion, justice, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, and self-sufficiency.”2
Here are some life experiences and peak state characteristics, that point to health within the anandamayakosha:
Feeling in the flow of life
A warm radiance emanating from the heart
A profound sense of connection and love
A mind open to creative thoughts and ideas
A realisation (amidst the chaos) that all is alright with the world
A state of effortlessness - ie. Freedom from fear, doubt, inhibition and self-criticism
A sense of gratitude and appreciation
Experiencing Soul connection with a human or more than human being
Deep peace and resonant joy
These are all experiences that are belittled by words, which is the hallmark of the Absolute. That is to say… the closer we get to the Divine, the more words fail us. The experience of health within anandamayakosha is beyond words. As this layer of our being becomes more clear of negative samskara, it reveals our true Self, the Atman, and as such there is a merging with Brahman or Purusha, Universal Consciousness, from which the manifest world is created. The physicist, David Bohm, called this unknowable, undescribable aspect of reality, the Implicate Order and the manifest reality the Explicate Order, in yoga these aspects of reality are called purusha and prakriti.
As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.— Max Planck, Das Wesen der Materie (1944)
I find it incredible that such eminent thinkers and physicists have a worldview that is so compatible to the yogic worldview. Planck’s statement above shows he recognised the interconnectedness of all Life, that each of us is woven into the consciousness-infused fabric intrinsic to Life. This means that to truly care for ourselves, we must also attend to caring for each other, and for all manifest Life on Earth and beyond.
And yet despite scientists such as Maslow, Planck and Bohm exploring and writing about these more expansive ways of viewing and being in the world, our current dominant worldview remains firmly entrenched in control, power-over, isolation and competition. This worldview is maintained by colonial, neoliberal and multinational structures; mainstream media; dogmatic religious organisations; oppressive workplace cultures and practices; and political control of educational, environmental, health and social care systems, to ensure live within the hegemony of the prevailing worldview.
Needless to say living under this dominant worldview creates many negative samskara within our anandamayakosha. We may observe the effects all around us, and within us. Yet, there are routes to unwinding the holding patterns that reside in this kosha.
The first step is to become conscious that there is a part of your being that is capable of feeling flow and peak state experiences.
The second is to create the right conditions for these experiences to arise.
Here are some ideas:
Nature immersion
Deep connection with loved ones, pets and other animals
Dancing
Listening to music
Singing or chanting
Playing music or drumming
Making art
And of course, peak states can arise out of our yoga practice. If we practice regularly we start to notice that everyday life becoming more rich, effortless and flowing. This is particularly so if we seek out the support of other human and more-than-human beings.
I hope you are able to take some proper time out of the everyday world over this holiday season. Make the most of the days ahead to immerse yourself in the natural world, enjoy the company of loved ones or simply rest, be kind to yourself and nourish yourself well. If none of this is possible, then remember your yoga practice can support you in finding that peaceful state within.
When we’re able to connect within, it becomes so much easier to work with those challenging times that can arise when family members convene. More often than not, people (myself included) have no choice but to unwittingly bring their negative samskara and unresolved issues along with them to the Christmas dinner table. One thing we can do is to remember to connect with our breath, feel our feet on the ground and take a little pause before responding to those challenging family moments with perhaps a little more wisdom, compassion and equanimity.
Wishing you a wonderful Christmas Holiday!
With love and warmth, Julia xxx
Londoners - Dates for Your 2024 Diary
Yoga for Healthy Lower Backs Course
Starting Friday, 23rd February at 13:15 - 14:45, at Yoga Junction, Crouch End
Details and booking on my website
January Day Retreat
Saturday 20th January, 12:00 - 17:30, at Yoga Junction, London N8
Details and booking on my website
Yogananda, Paramahansa (2014). Autobiography of a Yogi (13th ed.). Self-Realization Fellowship. p. 123
Maslow, A.H. (1964). Religions, values, and peak experiences. London: Penguin Books Limited.
The Key to Christmas Bliss