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The Power of Spirit through the Practice of Yoga

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From the NITYANANDA INSTITUTE NEWS Fall 2003

We Think We Know

by Rachel Gaffney

Relating to the guru is one of the most challenging issues for students of Eastern traditions who live in the West. This, right off the bat, is a sort of condundrum. After all, the mentor/student relationship is at the heart of Christianity, a given in the world of music, and permeates our medical and educational systems. In my experience, if you want to learn how to code software, there is no faster way than working with those who write the best.

So why is it so hard for us as students of spirituality, and how is it that Westerners assume they don’t need teachers? There are certainly pat answers to this question: our culture is one of independence, a person’s spiritual growth is their own event, and some gurus have taken advantage of students are a few common ones. Each of these has elements of truth to it. But if we get down to what’s at the heart of it, we can’t help but find two closely-tied allies—egotism and arrogance. And if we drill down one layer deeper, I’d suggest that behind both of those is an even more primitive emotion, fear.

Before I say anything more, I want to point out that I don’t use the words egotism, arrogance or fear with any sense of judgment. We can’t help it—it’s our nature to have all three of those forces shape almost every action and choice in our lives. They’re part of the package that comes with being in a human body. They’re not inherently negative. It’s the extent to which we believe in them that creates the problem.

Let me give you an example. As a hatha teacher, I have found that my students have the hardest time with the breath. They struggle with breathing techniques and neglect the breathing part of the practice. They resist because breath is so core to our state, so shaped by patterns and trauma, that it’s inherently challenging to work with. But another part of it is that we think, for God’s sake, that we already know how to breathe. We do it all day long, every day. Maybe we could get better at it, but do we really need a teacher? Just how hard could breathing be?

In fact, breathing, as any seasoned yoga teacher would tell you, is the subtlest and most delicate of all the activities associated with asana. It takes years of practice, discriminating self-observation, and the guidance of a skilled practitioner to use it well in asana and, by extension, in meditation and daily life. The more we practice it, the subtler the tuning of it gets.

I think there is a parallel in how we think and feel about our lives. We think we already know how to live. We’ve been doing it, after all, for our whole lives. We’ve been successful, to a greater or lesser extent, by clinging to those patterns that we think get us what we want. We feel we know better than anyone else how to live our lives.

Sadly, it usually takes a crisis to break us out of this fundamental misconception. Sometimes it is a health crisis, or the recognition of an addiction. Sometimes it is the loss of a loved one. And these crises are really the greatest blessing because all our assumptions are called into question, and suddenly, quite irreversibly, we see that we really don’t understand anything at all.

These moments of recognition will occur more than once in our lives. Each realization is baptism of sorts, and it seems we need refresher dousings from time to time. Because, thanks to the resilience of egotism, arrogance and fear, after each one we start thinking that now we know how to live. Our minds close in a slightly different, if more elevated way. In the worst case, our spirituality becomes a different form of closed-mindedness, an arrogance of godliness. While I don’t think this happens for most people—the sheer magnitude of the mystery of life prevents that—we tend to fall asleep again in smaller ways. We start to think again that we are our own best teacher.

While there is some truth to that—it is only us that can transform ourselves and only through the inner guru—there is a great distance between living from the direction of the Inner Self and living from the ignorance of thinking we know best. It’s this distance that the external guru is the key to crossing. The former is the highest state available, the latter delusion. We don’t cross the gap in a week, and we don’t cross it alone. The ego is so crafty—you have to give it that—we simply cannot see clearly, for a long time, when we are fooling ourselves. We dive into decisions not ultimately in our best interest because we are afraid, or greedy, or worse. We get caught in the passion of the moment and make choices from which we must extract ourselves later at a painful price.

So this is really why you have a guru: to save you from yourself. And while a true guru will never force anything upon you, at the same time, if you have gone to him as an honest student, he will not let you fail. He is a vast storehouse of patience and love and generosity, and from that love he can guide and stabilize you until that time when you take guidance from your own highest source.

Perhaps it is here that we see both the chasm that Westerners feel towards gurus, and the bridge by which we can cross it. Because we think of teachers as purveyors of specific techniques, information or knowledge, we cannot reconcile ourselves to the idea of someone who would direct our life choices. But in fact a true spiritual teacher rarely plays that role, and the direction I receive is far more subtle and energetic. I almost never go to my teacher about choices of that nature, and yet his energy illuminates the process I use to make those choices. That energy extracts a standard from me I could not muster on my own. It factors in love and compassion when fear and greed would have their way.

For any of you for whom the chasm is still in need of crossing, I will say this: close your eyes and feel back into a time when you were unconditionally loved, just as you are. Feel a little further into the moments when you drew upon that love to bring out strengths to face things you didn’t think you could face. Hold to that feeling—to that energy—just a little while and you will know the blessing it is to have a guru.

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