Embracing the “True Teacher within”: Core strength for everyday life
Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:00AM Yoga Yoga East Sheila Gill
Have you ever lost a teacher whom you absolutely loved? A teacher whom you felt brought out all your best qualities? A teacher who made you shine brighter than ever before and taught you to see strengths in yourself that you didn’t even imagine you had?
My nine-year old son had this experience during his Grade 3 year. He came home happily sharing the highlights of his days. Gradually we saw him growing in areas that had once been challenging. But in mid-March, all this expansion into greater confidence began to backslide when the beloved teacher was obliged to take a sick leave for the remainder of the school year. A series of replacements followed. None came close to filling the void left by the departure of our son’s ‘true teacher.’
In the wake of this loss, my sensitive boy’s grieving seemed endless. In one conversation he admitted his classroom now felt like ‘nothing’. “Nothing good is left with Madame B. gone,” he would moan. But how could that be? I asked. All the same children are in the room! Admittedly, much had changed. The behavior of many of the kids had gone way south. The new style of teaching was radically different to what had come before. That said, my gut told me that something besides the external circumstances was aggravating his suffering.
Last week I myself felt a little pang of loss saying goodbye to my own beloved local Anusara® yoga teacher, who has set out for several weeks of travel. Will my practice suffer in her absence, I wondered? Will I be able to hold strong on my own? It was then that I remembered something about the perils of our relationships with our most wonderful teachers.
When a teacher has great clarity about her students’ goodness, and when she skillfully affirms again and again the student’s own power, we students sometimes miss the point and see all the light in the room as an attribute of the teacher alone! It is like the Zen story about the finger pointing at the moon. The student becomes entranced with the pointing finger (the teachings, the teacher, the method, the context) and misses actually seeing the moon itself! And like the moon, the best of teachers are so steady and clear that they faithfully mirror our goodness: they shine our light back to us. But when the favorite mirror is absent from our lives, where is a student to turn?
Let’s take a cue from the first line of our Anusara® invocation: the starting point of our practice.
Om Namah Shivaya Gurave
I offer myself to the Light, the Auspicious One,
who is the True Teacher within and without
I love this devotional statement because it tells the student exactly where to turn. It teaches us how to respond to a challenge we will face again and again on the great big yoga mat of life. Whether we are very young or very old or somewhere in between, the tests of circumstance will throw us back onto our own strength, often before we feel ready. If we have not taken the offerings of our teachers back full circle—that is, if we haven’t followed the source of the moonlight back to the Sun of our own great Hearts—then we will feel bereft when our guides leave us. We will feel lost and abandoned, and like my young son, lacking the necessary strength to go forward.
The invocation tells us to begin moving out of this darkness by turning courageously inward, toward the source of the Light. And here, too, we absorb a meaning of the word “Guru,”embedded in “Gurave” at the end of the invocation’s first line. We must move through the “Gu” (the sticky darkness, the loss, the disappointment) in order to make our way towards the “Ru” (a liberating ray of light). In the case of my son, our task has been to remind him daily of what he himself had accomplished in the presence of the beloved Madame B. How it was always him at the center of those bright acts, him lighting up that heartfelt joy in learning.
And this is why we work the Principles…
And this is why we work the Principles when we practice. The first line of our invocation insists that we take the teachings full circle: that we make the teacher’s awareness of our gifts our own. With the First Principle (Open to Grace) we intend to open up to a revelation that the goodness is inside us all along, and all around us. We are not, and are never, ‘cut off’ from the Source. We set our foundation firmly to initiate a tangible reconnection to this inner Light. We breathe more fully to physicalize the truth of our intention and we immediately get a bit brighter inside.
Next, we need to journey more deeply inward to meet our inner teacher. When we consciously work the Second Principle, Muscle Energy, we bow deeply and literally to that inner light. We hug skin to muscle and muscle to bone, moving toward the core lines of our limbs and torso. We draw in to the midline, moving toward the singular core of our body, from feet to crown. (Remember, our ‘core’ in Anusara® yoga is not only at the midriff! We create a remembrance of the Heart throughout the full length of our embodied being.) Finally, we draw all our peripheral parts toward the focal point of each pose. For example, in standing poses like Ardha Chandrasana we draw from feet and hands and head into the core of the pelvis, and from there we extend out through the bones, shining our inner light back out into the world.
Faith in and knowledge of our inner power is the core strength
we are going for in our practice.
This last aspect of Muscle Energy is profound. We draw everything from the world outside of us into our core at the focal point. We welcome even the dark, heavy, sticky stuff of our life experience and we take radical responsibility for integrating that experience into something that serves our own, and others’, upliftment. In many of the standing balances we make this teaching very literal. Practice Warrior III with hands at the wall, arms extended, or in the middle of the room. Make the lifted leg and distant foot 100% your own—draw it in to your belly and fuel your power to extend! More experienced students can try Handstand at the wall, lowering one leg at a time into Pike. Maintain a continual awareness of the inward nature of your strength that absolutely requires an embrace of all of you. (This will become very apparent when you try to Pike both legs at once!) Make the effort of drawing in to your core a literal darshan with this ‘True Teacher within’. (Have a vision of the “Auspicious One” whom we chant about every time we practice.) Recognize how the freedom of the lifted leg depends entirely upon the strength of its relationship to the inner guide.
The word ‘core’ comes from the Latin word ‘cor’, meaning ‘heart’. Any time we cultivate faith in our own goodness, our own light, our own ‘True Teacher within’ we are deepening our relationship with our own Heart, and with the Universal Heart present in everything all around us. Faith in and knowledge of our inner power is the core strength we are going for in our practice. But don’t just take my word for it. Come to class this week. Reunite with the Light of your Heart, and work your core like never before. Think of your favouritest teacher ever, then get onto your mat and do ‘em proud!
Namaste,
Sheila Gill
Anusara-Inspired® Yoga Teacher
