The Language of Angels

I often find myself saying, “My primary role as a teacher is to remind students of what they already know.”  If a student is accepted into a university program as a music major, chances are they have had someone teach them the fundamental principles of the instrument along the way.  Even as a professional, I am never free from the need to practice fundamentals: good tone production, quality intonation, rhythmic accuracy, evenness of technique…all layered with a thoughtful yet free sense of musical intention.  But without access any longer to a teacher to remind me of these elements, the responsibility to revisit these fundamentals is fully mine… it is up to me to discover and rediscover what I already know.

This point continues to be emphasized over and over again in my yoga practice.  I’ve searched, yearned, and ached to find a spiritual teacher who could tell me what to practice and how to practice…and perhaps most importantly to hold me accountable for it.  But every teacher I’ve come across, from Christian pastors to Buddhist monks, from Hindu priests to Sikh masters, have all transmitted the same message: Go within.  You already know.  Find the Will (of God).

Intuitively, I do know.  There is a deep and ever-present knowing.  But alas, I haven’t always acted in accordance with that knowing.  Why is it so challenging?

I remember so vividly listening to the sounds my son made as a newborn.  The sounds seemed to be an ethereal language, the language of angels.  I was mesmerized by it.  This wasn’t the coo of a baby learning to speak a human language, but a language beyond human, fully content, fully at peace.  Then the hunger and discomfort of being human would find its way into his little body.  The cry of his human voice would explode in recognition/perception that this new body was somehow separate from the safe haven of angels.  He was suddenly laden with physical and emotional need…primarily the need to survive.  He had been laden with the human condition.

As children explore the world, they do so with such trust and ease, touching and tasting, jumping and bending, running and climbing.  There are no perceived limits…until they become physically or emotionally hurt.  The skin is cut.  The child is scolded.  He is taught, through experience and others, about the fragility of human life.  His number-one goal becomes to guard his survival.  The language of angels is forgotten and the freedom of exploration is replaced with an underlying fear of death.  He slowly forgets that he’s so much more than human.  His adult lifetime is spent seeking to be reminded of what he already knows.

The body imprints survival responses on a cellular level, not only in what is typically defined as the mind, but in the cells of the body tissues as well.  This is the sophisticated intelligence of the entire body/mind.  For example, if a child is bullied, a human fight, flight or freeze response is initiated.  If that response is validated by survival, then the body/mind associates that behavior with success and is more likely to respond in a similar fashion when confronted by a comparable situation in the future.  If the child survived by fighting, he may, over time, develop a beneficial association between fear/anger and survival.  Otherwise, if the child survived through submissiveness, he may develop a beneficial association between fear/depression/physical contraction (protection of the heart and other vital organs) and survival.  Potentially, any perceived threat, whether life threatening or not, can trigger these survival reactions, imprinted early in human life.

Vrtti is the word in Sanskrit that refers to these “loops” of consciousness.  Each human experiences layers and layers of vrtti…from the sensory recognition of what we define as a sunset (the eyes take in patterns of light and categorize them into labeled images) to the emotional content of what we experience as love.  Vrtti also includes loops of behavior associated with survival.  Cultivating the ability to recognize these patterns, and how they have served us (and how they may no longer be serving us), is the first step in re-member-ing the totality of who we are.

Patanjali defines Yoga as “yogascittavrttinirodha.”  Yoga is moderating the loops of consciousness.  Nirodha means to moderate or regulate, not to stop or eliminate.  Yoga is not about ceasing to exist or eliminating the mind, but rather about creating an awareness that allows us to watch our experiences and to moderate our thoughts related to those experiences.  It is through that regulation or moderation of thought that we find peace, that we are re-mind-ed, and that we rediscover the language of angels.