The Yoga of Crawling Into A Cave To Hide From The World
(Pictured above is one of the 62 cavelike limestone meditation chambers in the perimiter in the Kanchi Kailasanathar Temple dating from the 7-9th centuries)
It was the morning of November 9, 2016, but for most of you the sun had not yet come up because I was 10.5 hours ahead of you in the town of Tiruvannamali in Tamil Nadu, Which is in South India pictured below.
The feeling was like all of the joy momentarily got sucked into some chamber inside of me and bolted shut inside. Over the next days we visited many sacred sites and practiced yoga, and all of those amazing things a privileged person can go to India for in the first place, but I was slipping into despair. I questioned who I was to be teaching yoga, if what I was teaching was actually yoga in the first place. I had embraced the the version of Tantric philosophy I had first encountered studying Anusara Yoga. I had already been aligned with the myth that the world was awakening, that change was coming and I was part of it, that life was inherently good, that life had my back. But now..who knew what could happen? Compound this with the fact that at midnight of November 8, the Indian government proclaimed that all of the 500 and 1000 rupee notes ceased to be legal tender. This shut down every bank and ATM (of which there are 250,000) for many days all over the Indian Subcontinent while recalibration and other such behind the scenes business was going on.
This move was said to be a crackdown on the black money market, but information leaks before the announcement allegedly benefited some of the wealthiest groups in the country. The cash shortages had detrimental effects on a number of small businesses, agriculture, and transportation, while people seeking to exchange their notes had lengthy waits, and several deaths were linked to the rush to exchange cash. I was not severely affected by this personally, but it was a shocking thing to witness. I had lost a lot of faith in humanity.
It just so happened that we had a hike planned for that day to Skandashram and Virupaksha Cave. (Pictured to the right is the entrance to the climb to the caves in Tiruvannamali at the Ramana Maharshi Ashram) These caves on the sacred mountain of Arunachala, had been used for meditation by many seekers over hundreds, posssibly thousands of years. The front of the caves had both been built out to have a room in the front for acetic living. They were both inhabited by Sri Ramana Maharshi(1879-1950), the smaller of which he inhabited for 17 years. Ramana Maharshi was proclaimed to be a guru, like being a saint in a way, and had an ashram built by and for his followers where we spent some time. Many pilgrims climb to these caves every day and they are maintained by the ashram. Sitting in silence in those caves was a very powerful experience of timelesness. The cave meditation experience is an ancient one, and many of the temples have cavelike structures built into them for meditation (see the photo at the top of the story). Entering the cave was like stepping out of the world and diving into the living current of devotion and understanding that guides all pilgrims. Imagine spending 17 years there as Ramana had, or the Sage Virupaksha from 400 years before. This sage had evolved the inner fire to turn himself to ash at the end of his life, and so his followers found him one morning, so the story goes.
Well, when I came out and walked back down the mountain, I felt a little more at peace, and i may have carried away a spark of some ancient wisdom, but the world was still the same, and sad to say I fell back into that same sense of disconnect.
Weeks later, back in Vermont, sleep is no longer a blurred mix of sacred images and abstract wakefulness. I begin to wrap my head around what has been happening internally. I finally put the experience into words for the first time recounting to my friend this sense of wanting to unplug, and pull as much of myself out of the world as I could. She tells me how the state of things has made it difficult for her to make art. It is a difficult time for so many of those who hold the ideals of peace, equality, and respect for the planet. After my conversation, the pieces started to come together. This is yoga beyond the asana (physical postures), this bringing together of the parts to form the whole. Connectivity of mind and body, form and consciousness, this flash of insight into relativity is advanced yoga. What happens to our being when our would is in a state of upheval? This loss of faith and trust is a loss of prana, of life force. When prana is not able to move through us, we lose connection to the matrix of life.
The oh so wise Dr.Robert Svaboda points out that one of the Sanskrit words for faith is vishvāsa which also means "specialized breathing." Prana moves to where you focus, so basically you feed what you focus on. Focusing on the breath moves prana into the body, and when you have faith in something, you easily and freely bring your awareness there, and are replenished by taking it in. Dr.Svaboda says that when faith is strong,"there is freedom of the movement of which promotes ease in all your other movements, mental and physical." "The second word for faith is shradhā, which is derived from the Sanskrit root hrd, meaning “heart”. To have faith is thus to “put your heart” into something, and since the heart circulates prāna throughout the body via the blood, that faith will get distributed to every cell in your body. " Many studies have shown that people with faith heal quickly and can cope with stress more successfully. This is because their life force is strong, and able to move to where it is needed.
So how to we get the prana flowing? How do we project our awareness and the sentiment of the heart back towards health and inspiration? We start small, we put ourselves out there in a localized, clearly focused way. We find a way to glimpse into the locked chamber of the heart. We practice moving the breath, creating circulation of the body, circulation of the mind (meditation).
Dr.Svaboda says "if for example we are in danger of losing faith in the political process, or in society as a whole, we can focus instead on circulating and cultivating prāna in our families and neighborhoods. No action is ever in vain, so even when a situation seems most dire, we should never surrender our faith. Not blind faith, but clear-eyed faith that knows that satyameva jāyate, “truth alone triumphs”, even if that triumph is difficult to perceive from where we are now."
I eventually realized that my time in the cave has had a profound imprint in my meditation practice. There is value in stepping out of the drama, and taking refuge in timeless solitude. Stillness allows for settling and finding truth in new circumstances and ideas. We have the power to heal inside of us through action, focus, practice, and retreating into a cave every now and then, at least until we get a glimpse of truth. This power to heal and reconnect back to faith in the journey is a great gift of yoga.
