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TEACHINGS | EASTERN HORIZON 17

current moment through increased or a much more serious injury. By not really be open to the yoga. Deep
body awareness, which greatly bringing mindfulness to bear on the exploration of the condition can be
enhances the meditation experience, injury, it becomes clear that your slower and more frustrating than
while mindfulness practice brings body’s natural balance has been just trying to get rid of the symptom,
new insights and meaning to your disturbed due to certain conditions but it can also be a far more
hatha practice. coming together. The discomfort meaningful and enduring experience
is just a message warning of this because it requires that you come
One of the benefits that can accrue imbalance. There is no reason to into contact with your Self, and from
to you if your hatha yoga practice contract or organize around the this contact wisdom grows.
includes the element of mindfulness discomfort; rather, you can use
is the ability to start making wise it like a navigational tool whose Caring vs. Attachment
distinctions in both thinking and diminishment will indicate that you
behavior. This ability to make are on the path of healing. Once Making wise distinctions in the
distinctions is sometimes referred this distinction is made, the wise realm of the emotions is even more
to in vipassana meditation as “clear course-with the help of your yoga challenging. Try being mindful of
seeing” or “clear comprehension.” teacher and maybe a doctor and how little distinction you make
Achieving this access to clarity is a well-trained bodyworker-is to between caring about something
most important in making those start investigating the underlying or somebody and being attached to
hard decisions in life which muddle conditions, including how you hold that thing or person. The Buddha
the mind so much that you no longer and move the body, your emotional taught that one of the fundamental
know what you really care about. life, and your beliefs concerning your characteristics of the universe is
However, it can be hard to grasp body. You can change the underlying anicca, meaning that everything
these distinctions when they involve conditions so that the whole chain of changes. We all know that this is
the emotions, so it is helpful to cause-and-effect is altered. true from our own experience, yet
start to see how they work in terms often we hold onto something or
of the body and your hatha yoga There is another reaction to injuries someone as though what we care
practice. For instance, when you that yogis who don’t make wise about should be exempt from this
have a recurring injury or one which distinctions between symptoms and fundamental law.
happens without a clear origin, underlying conditions often have,
it is important that you make the and this one drives yoga teachers There is a wonderful story that
distinction between the symptom to distraction. A yoga student will makes this distinction between
and the underlying condition. come to class and tell the teacher caring and attachment in a very
she has such-and-such an injury and wise way. There was once a yogi
It is very tempting when dealing therefore she does not do x, y, and who had the job of tending to his
with a recurring back injury or a z poses. End of discussion. The yogi teacher’s food bowl and cup, the
mysteriously injured shoulder or is constructing her identity around latter being the only object the
hip to approach your yoga teacher what is merely a symptom, making student had ever witnessed his
wanting to just be fixed, to be it into a permanent unchanging Self. teacher seeming to care about.
relieved of the discomfort and the What’s so frustrating for the teacher One day while washing the cup,
limitation it imposes. It’s easy to is that the student has no interest in the yogi’s mind wandered and the
focus your attention on the symptom exploring the underlying conditions cup smashed to pieces on the floor.
and contract your identity into to see if it is possible to bring about The yogi was horrified because
the discomfort. So often in these change. The essence of hatha yoga this cup had been his teacher’s
situations yogis succeed in getting is the exploration and evolution of teacher’s cup, and he in turn had
the pain to go away in the short term the body. How ironic that a student received it from his teacher. So three
only to end up with a chronic pain would choose to do yoga and yet generations of mindfulness lay in