Purifying Your Love
Sarah Powers Interviewed by Raz Ingrasci
First Published in The Light News
May 2001- Hoffman Institute
Raz: Is yoga a spiritual practice, a physical
practice, or both?
Sarah: It's a practice to free the mind. Yoga
is a jump-off point from which we begin uncovering our true nature. Its
goal is liberation. Yoga is a set of practices that moves us toward resting
in our true nature.
There are Yoga schools that have a view of liberation as way off in
the distance, and which don't much use the physical body. They want us
to turn away from any identification of being physical. Then there are
other branches that are non-duaIistic and more ancient in which the aim
of our practice is to uncover a nature that's already there, simply shrouded.
Liberation is seen as an unchanging, fundamental substratum of existence
that we don't pay attention to because of our externalized consciousness
and our training. Yogic practices allow us to see inwardly what's really
going on, not just what our intellect is preferring to understand.
Raz: Isn't that also the aim of meditation?
Sarah: Meditation is the main tool of yoga.
The physical practices that are so popular are preliminary practices so
that we're less agitated and energy is clean and clear enough to sit still
and investigate the nature of reality.
Raz: As a yoga teacher, you teach postures,
don't you?
Sarah: Yes. Hatha yoga is a practice that uses
the body as the jump-off place. We start with what's tangible, relative,
and continually changing - which is the physical condition of health and
stagnation - and we move our attention into the form of being a body.
So you start with the densest form of energy and you then refine your
awareness. When someone begins yoga, just being attentive to one's feet
or how your shoulders are as they're moving around, can be difficult.
The attention easily wanders. Hatha yoga says, "Come be in your body,
come just pay attention to your breath, and allow the body to find its
natural equilibrium through these various postures or shapes that rechannel
and redistribute energy." It's the redistribution of Prana, Prana
being energy, or chi.
You just naturally feel better when the body is more enlivened and less
congested energetically. The idea is that you go from feeling more at
home in the body to then attending to something less tangible, which is
the subtle body. So there are Pranayama practices that take the intensity
of balancing your energy to a more subtle
level. The mind is intimately connected to the breath. So as we connect
the attention to the body, to the breath, the mind also comes along and
is then more willing to be present to watch its own workings. Meditation
was around long before Hatha yoga, but there were schools of people who
felt it was too advanced to just sit and watch your mind. People were
uncomfortable in their bodies. The mind was too agitated, which would
create guilt and dissatisfaction from meditation. These yogis thought,
"Okay, let's work with the body and the breath, and the mind will
naturally come home."
That was true for me. I tried to meditate when I was 20 and there was
no anchor, no root for me. I found Hatha yoga and it was a way in. After
10 years of Hatha yoga, I was ready to challenge stillness and meditate.
Some people will meditate much sooner than I did, but it took 10 years
of committed practice before I was really willing to tackle restlessness
Raz: Was the Hoffman Process part of tackling
your restlessness?
Sarah: Before starting yoga, Ty, my husband
who also did the Process, introduced me to writers who were looking at
the nature of reality. My entry was intellectual, because my background
was in English literature. I was in college and loved to read, so I was
interested in looking at reality with a different lens. I would read writers,
like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Castaneda, Seth Speaks, and Ken Wilbur, and
there was a feeling of sitting in-side their expansive views for very
short pockets of time. I would intellectually understand what they were
saying. It was at that time that I became interested in looking at all
the places where I was misidentified and stuck. So, I found a therapist
and joined the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology for a masters program.
The masters program required that we do spiritual practice with a physical
base, so I started yoga.
Mentally, I was interested in watching my mind, but not for very long
periods - sitting for 15 minutes was enough for me. The spiritual connection
was that after the practice I felt more expansive. It would last for awhile,
and over the years it would last a little longer. But eventually, the
old patterns would settle in. I would crave yoga because that seemed like
a remedy. When the Hoffman Process came to my attention, I felt like there
were strong rooted patterns that I wanted to weed out that would allow
me to blossom in yoga.
Raz: So what happened?
Sarah: I was skeptical. I came with all my
doubts and resistances because that was what I really wanted to work on.
I just let it become my full persona. I gave the Teachers a really hard
time. I have a nature that can be so discerning that I don't even check
things out. The first few days, I felt like, "they're not going to
be able to touch my stuff. I'm going to be the only one who leaves exactly
the same as I came in." For every exercise, resistance was the first
pattern that would come up. I knew very well that as long as I resisted,
they wouldn't be able to unravel me. But that resistance to looking at
and releasing my patterns was exactly what I wanted to work on. I was
resisting all the stuff I'd learned about resistance from my folks. During
that intense exercise about the parents being gone, there was the feeling
of effortlessly and completely letting go.
I then started trusting that everything we had done prior had allowed
me to get to that place, and now I was willing.
Sages talk about the main hindrance to awakening is resistance in moments
of failure, resisting who we are. Resistance was a force pulling me into
a cloud of discontent, wherein I thought that circumstances would someday
arrange into a configuration where I'd finally be happy. So Hoffman was
when I realized, "I'm tired of expecting that circumstances are going
to give it to me."
Raz: What have you found since Hoffman?
Sarah: Right after the Process, after the weekend
by myself, I went on a weeklong silent retreat with my Tibetan teacher.
It was really nice sequencing. It was like he was speaking to me, talking
about patterns. I don't remember hearing him use that language before,
but that week, it was so lovely.
I'd been on retreat with him a year before, and this was a repeat retreat,
so it was basically the same but I heard it totally different this time.
I heard it from a place that wasn't looking for answers to make me feel
worthy. I found that worthiness was already my essential nature. So, hearing
these teachings was like going from the base of "already lovable"
into the substratum of love that is all around us all the time. It was
a lovely segue to being back in my life.
Before Hoffman I'd go on meditation retreats always with this subtle undercurrent
that I was going to make myself sit with my discontent. Almost like punishment.
"If you sit here long enough, you'll get over it." After Hoffman,
there's no sense that I'm here to fight something in me, that I'm beating
myself up because I'm no good. Of course, there are moments of discontent,
and I see now that the discontent is historical. It's a pattern, it's
not really there It's just a groove that my mind was used to. Now there's
much more joy.
Raz: Many people enter yoga or meditation to
seek "enlightenment". How do you view your path?
Sarah: It's been 20 years and now it's a surrendering
path. I used to think it was a path to "do"; that there was
something to acquire. My ego got wrapped around whether I was doing well
or not. Now it feels like there have been glimpses of liberation being
so close that it's the very apparatus we use to express through. It's
nothing we can find; it's simply evoked. I'm very interested in resting
in it more and more, and less interested in the "doing" aspect,
which becomes busy and distracting.
Raz: It's not something to attain any more.
Sarah: No, that's a concept. It was something
too far away to grasp and it created its own level of suffering.
Raz: I've heard that the word yoga means union
Sarah: Yes. Yoga means, "to yoke".
It's a path that directs us to our inherent wholeness
Raz: It sounds like yoga, meditation and Hoffman
all have a similar goal, which I would call purifying your love.
Sarah: In my recognition of what I'm not, which
is conditioned patterns, what I am is so much clearer; which is what we
all are -love. Hoffman was a way of penetrating the illusion of unworthiness
that I've carried since childhood: that is a choice I no longer feel compelled
to make.
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