Flowing with Intuition
Last month's theme of devotion and the teachings of Ishvara Pranidhana has been a rich exploration that feels like a rose, still opening, sharing its essence and beauty as it gradually unfolds. Devotion can seem to imply that we are relinquishing our sovereignty to something outside of ourselves. Yet the more I lean into this teaching, the more it opens up a flow of wisdom that is sourced from our whole Self: from every cell in our body as well as the web that connects us to all of creation. I am discovering that the fruit of living a life of devotion is a profound connection to intuition.
Clear intuition arises when we listen deeply to the wisdom of our bodies while also receiving guidance from Source. What would it be like if we communed directly with our senses without filtering them through our mind which makes meaning of our experience from the perspective of “me”? Perhaps this is the experience of yoga or union. In order to untangle the relationship between our senses, our mind and our intuition, it’s helpful to understand how our mind works. Several thousand years ago, Pantjali’s yoga sutras were written down to codify the oral teachings of yoga that have been passed down for longer than we know. The first sutra states: the study of yoga begins now. The second sutra describes the aim, the practice and the experience of yoga:
yogah cittavrtti nirodhah
yoga - union • chitti - energy field called the mind
vritti - fluctuations, turnings, waves • nirodhah - cessation or dissolution
When our thought waves dissolve, we are fully present in the NOW and experience yoga or union. To better understand how to stop the activity of our mind, many commentators of the sutras go on to describe the three components of the mind or chitti. Manas is our recording faculty for taking in sensory impressions from the outside world. Buddhi is the process of classifying or identifying the input. Ahamkar is our ego sense which stores knowledge and makes personal meaning from the input. For example, while walking through a garden we smell a flower, we identify it as a beautiful rose and then say, ‘Wow! I want to have that rose in my garden!’ Then we are off and running trying to find where we can buy the rose and dreaming of where we will plant it. Sadly, we are quickly pulled from the beauty of experiencing the rose to wanting to possess the rose. The thought waves are in full force and we have lost our connection to the now, to the rose and to our Self.
Our invitation this month is to use the awareness of how our mind works so we can invite it to take a seat and give the senses a chance to be felt unfiltered from our minds' relentless meaning-making. This makes it possible for us to feel the wind sing, to invite summer berries to dance in our mouth and to let our body be held by the soft sweet embrace of earth. From this place we cultivate our intuition, a knowing that is both deeply sourced from within and guided from the great beyond.
Moving in this way, life flows like a river whose waters may bring turbulent white water, magnificent waterfalls or deep calm pools. The key is not resisting the flow and trusting there is a destination that is our destiny. Anyone who spends time playing in rivers knows you literally must go with the flow. Fighting it is exhausting at best and potentially lethal. When I was eleven years old, I found myself tossed out of a kayak into white water and was caught in a hydraulic that trapped me underwater. My desperate effort to swim out of this vortex kept me trapped. When I finally surrendered to the flow – thinking my life was over – I effortlessly floated back to the surface, took a gasp of air and was revived. Surrendering to the flow is a practice. It asks us to unhinge ourselves from our cultural norms where we live a life that constantly reinforces our separate identity.
Last week while students were in savasana, the pose of release and integration at the end of class, I remembered an experience that I witnessed while in New Zealand last spring that captured the essence of these teachings. I had stopped to see the powerful Huka Falls and just as we arrived there was a young man walking with his kayak on his shoulder preparing to run the falls. We waited with anticipation and some trepidation as we watched the white waters roar and foam. Then to my surprise what I witnessed was so powerful and strangely so gentle. This young man took one small section of the river at a time, pulling over in the eddies to refocus and find calm before moving farther downstream. You could feel him become more connected to the river as his run progressed and as he flew over the falls it was as if he was the river: effortless, powerful and free.
May we each learn to take pause in the eddies of life: to find calm and feel rejuvenated and ready to head downstream through our life journeys.
Much love,
Sue