Georg Feurstein (1947 - 2012)

My wife and daughter are just back from our “sangha family camping trip” down to Patagonia Lake, where we spent the sweetest weekend possible with some of the most important people in our life: the Empty Mountain Sangha/Tucson Mindfulness Practice Community that we founded in our living room just over three years ago. The whole time I was there, thoughts of one of the teachers most influential upon my life were with me constantly.

Just over a week ago, I got the message that Georg Feurstein, perhaps one of the most important yoga scholars that we have been graced to have among us, was in his last days. And ever since hearing that, I’ve held him and his wife, Brenda, in my heartmind with love, gratitude and appreciation. Today, I went online, expecting to find that he had indeed passed, and apparently he died last night, sometime around when I was sitting around the fireside with my sangha, thinking of Georg with metta held in my heart. And though there is so little we can be certain about in life, I am certain that within my heartmind there will always be this place held sacred for his memory.

Long before I met Georg, there had been a meeting of minds and a form of dharma transmission through my deep devouring of his books; reading and re-reading, writing long marginalia along his words, beginning a dialogue I know will continue for the rest of my life. I hasten to add, I did not always agree with what Georg thought, taught, and believed, and that was not what he ever required of those of us who studied with him; rather, it was his integrity and deep, strong dedication to the traditions he studied, wrote and taught about that moved me, and through this, his challenge to me (to all of us) to deepen our own exploration through deep personal inquiry. He often said, “enlightenment is a whole brain experience,” by which he meant, as I now put it, that both the conceptual and non-conceptual, the rational and the intuitive, the “ah-ha” and the “ahhhh” are present in awakening consciousness.

I remember in particular when we were studying Patanjali during the one and only YREC (Yoga Research and Education Center) yoga teacher training, when many of the students were perplexed by the philosophical dualism at the heart of Patanjali’s metaphysics, confused because they had always been taught that yoga was about “union” and non-duality by their teachers who were in fact teaching from a Vedantin perspective. Many of the students doubted themselves and their understanding because “this was Patanjali” and therefore he must be “right.” Georg said, “You know, you can disagree with Patanjali. You can think he was wrong!” With this "lion’s roar," he was telling all of us not to take the teachings as ‘gospel,’ but to question and think for ourselves.

Personally, some of my fondest memories of Georg will be both the late-night conversations we’d hold in the vestibule of the training hall at Mt. Madonna, where the YREC training took place during 2002/2003, and the early mornings when Georg would be at the front-center of the room doing his Tibetan puja, Jagadish, another of the students was in the back of the room doing his practice, and I (at the time deep into my Korean Zen training) doing my practice at the front left corner of the room. I’d be doing prostrations, or chanting with my moktok, Jagadish’s soft Sanskrit chanting coming from the back of the room, and Georg’s Tibetan bells ringing softly from the front-center of the room all blending in a sonic celebration of dharma.

Actually, other fond memories from that time include lying in shavasana, being guided by Georg’s stentorian, German-inflected voice in Yoga Nidra. Or standing outside with the whole group at sunrise, chanting the Gyatri Mantra.

It was during the training that I wrote my book, and Georg was gracious enough to agree to read the manuscript. I asked him that if he thought it good enough, would he be willing to write a short forward. After reading it, he said he’d be delighted to write a forward, and so I excitedly awaited what I thought at best would be a few paragraphs of endorsement. Instead, what I got when I opened the email attachment he sent me, was a four page essay that by the end of his second paragraph, when he referred to me as his “Dharma brother,” had me in tears.

The YREC training continues to reverberate not merely in my own life, but in the lives of all of us who were fortunate to share in the experience. Through the training, I met some men and women who have truly become family over the years since. Among them, several men who continue to nourish my appreciation that manhood can mean so much more than the hyper-masculinist pretensions of so many American men. These men, true brothers in spirit, Ted Grand, Pierre Desjarins, and Patrick Creelman continue to help shape contemporary yoga in ways influenced by Georg, each in his own unique way. And as for sisters, there are too many to name! But each, touched by Georg’s spirit, enthusiasm and integrity, continue to transmit that same spirit, in their teaching and in the way they choose to live their lives.

So, as trite as it may sound, another thing of which I’m certain, is that Georg’s work will continue to inspire generations of practitioners to come. Of course, most of that influence will come through his many amazing books, and the continued work of his wife, Brenda, through Traditional Yoga Studies. But also, no doubt, his influence will continue to flow through all those students whose lives he touched.

Oh, and back to the sangha I founded here in Tucson; after the publication of my book, I began to do a lot of air travel, teaching in various venues throughout the world. It got to the point where I was rarely home for two or three weeks at a time. When my wife and I were living in Eugene, Oregon for 18 months, I never met one person!  Georg wrote me a deeply moving, thoughtful email, asking me how it was that so many yoga teachers justified taking a group of privileged Americans to places like Costa Rica for what amounts to "yoga vacations" and the enormous ecological impact of air travel. He asked in the spirit of genuine inquiry, and it made me do some serious thinking. He ended his email by suggesting we teachers might have a greater impact by planting some roots and creating "communities of mindfulness."

As a result of that email exchange, I cut my air travel by two-thirds, and started the Tucson Mindfulness Practice Community. Three years later, we have 40 people participating in a nine-month study of the Buddhist Precepts, and sharing their time, energy and financial resources with the greater Tucson community. The travel I continue to do is all more deep 'training' based, and Georg came to understand what I perceive as the necessity of face-to-face relationship for the kind of teaching I offer.

And so, whether or not there are truly ‘afterlife’ states of existence from which one returns, as Georg believed, I know without a doubt that there is ultimately no birth and no death, and that Georg continues in all those who knew him, loved him, were touched in any way by him. And from my perspective, that’s one rich endowment indeed that he leaves behind.

In lieu of flowres and gifts, Georg had requested a scholarship fund be set up to enable incarcerated people the opportunity to participate in the Traditional Yoga Studies distance learning courses. More information about the fund will be posted at the website.

Book Club: "Mindfulness Yoga" by Frank Jude Boccio

Well, it had to happen sooner or later! We’re up to Chapter 11 in Freeing the Body, Freeing the Mind and that means we’re up to my contribution to the anthology. Rather than any comment I make now being merely a reiteration of what I’ve written in the essay, I thought I’d fill in a bit  of the ‘back-story’ here and leave it to you, my dear readers (there are some of you, yes?) to respond with any comments or questions. I’d be especially interested in hearing from any of you who have practiced the Four Foundations of Mindfulness through your asana practice. How has it been for you? Do you feel it has made a difference in your practice? Have you had any insights you’d like to share?

Opening Introduction:

It should be obvious that I take the position of Georg Feuerstein, that Buddhism sits firmly within the wider Yoga Tradition he speaks of in his tome entitled, simply enough, The Yoga Tradition. To my mind, it is obvious. But what you may want to know is that I came to this understanding through my own ‘self-study’ of both texts (practice-oriented, history and philosophy texts as well as my own practice and experience) before I had come across Georg’s work. In fact, it was reading his work and finding a wonderfully clear enunciation of my understanding that drew me to study with him at the first and only YREC (Yoga Research and Education Center) Yoga Teacher Training.

It should also be obvious that perhaps it’s a bit of a bête noir of mine, but it really irks me when people talk about “yoga and meditation” as if they were two things, or even “Buddhism and yoga” as if they were two completely different things! To my mind, it only makes sense to differentiate between “Buddhism and Classical Yoga” which is to say, the specific darshana or philosophical viewpoint espoused by Patanjali in the Yoga-Sutra. But buddhadharma, the teachings and practiced taught by the Buddha is nothing if not a fully realized, comprehensive, coherent model of yoga. His Nobel Eightfold Path is as much a yogic path as the Eightfold Path or the Kriya Yoga model found in the Yoga-Sutra.

This is essentially the jist of my opening paragraphs. The other main point I make there is that one of the fundamental principles of all forms of yoga shared by all is the concept of duhkha. Sadly, this concept is badly mis-understood by many in the hatha-yoga camp and has led to much confusion and straw-man parrying. All yoga arises as a response to the existential human situation – impermanence and the mortality that implies. And, all yoga postulates that we – and all phenomena – are not what we, or they, appear to be. Through this mis-perception of how things really are, we fall into duhkha.

I’ve even had a bit of a discussion with John Friend over this, as he has a tendency to put-down Buddhism’s emphasis on duhkha, saying how his path celebrates life and is about sri and “bliss.” To me, he has admitted to over-stating this, and in fact distorting the truth, because he does understand that duhkha is the First Noble Truth. If you stop at that, you are NOT talking buddhadharma, which is nirodha, the cessation of duhkha (the Third Noble Truth).

One other point I express in the essay, I wish to emphasize here, is that “yoga” means “yoking” as much as it does “union.” Those yogis who only talk about yoga as “union,” I believe both distort and miss an essential aspect of yoga as practice, for much of actual practice is the yoking, the restraining or containing of our conditioned reactivity. It is this restraint (a form of tapas) that allows for the freedom to choose a more skillful way to respond to life’s challenging situations.

In fact, neuro-science shows us that the impulse to act precedes our consciousness of the impulse to act by around 0.3 seconds! That means, action is conditioned, and we are unaware of our first beginnings of the impulse to act. There is no absolute, acausal free-will! However, with mindfulness, we create a bit more ‘temporal space,’ about a half second, and in that ‘gap,’ we can inhibit our action. Thus, our free-will is the ability to restrain our conditioned reactivity. This is the yoking of yoga.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Metta

Poep sa frank jude

Book Club: Brahma Viharas, Emptiness and Ethics by Christopher Key Chapple

“Brahma-Vihara, Emptiness, and Ethics”

by Christopher Key Chapple

Well, the holidays have passed, and I hope those of you who have been reading Michael Stone’s Freeing the Body, Freeing The Mind with me as part of this ‘virtual book club’ are still sticking with me in this new year!

Christopher Key Chapple is a professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and one who has done much wonderful work on Patanjali and other Yogic texts, so again I was looking forward to reading his contribution, especially as just last year I had written over 7,000 words on the Brahma-Viharas for Yoga Journal. As Chapple begins his chapter, he points out that along with the Viharas, emptiness and ethics are “three points of contact between Buddhism and classical Yoga.”

However, I was much surprised – and a bit dismayed – to find that Chapple takes the Classical Yoga approach to the Brahma-Viharas and implies that this is the same understanding in the Buddhist Yoga tradition. The translation from Yoga-Sutra I.33 he uses reads:

Be friendly with the happy, compassionate toward those who suffer. Celebrate the success of the virtuous, be even-minded toward those who lack virtue.

While I was happy to see how he translates upeksha as “even-minded” instead of the (to my mind) awful “disinterest” and “disregard” favored by many other yogis from the (Hindu) Classical Yoga tradition such as B.K.S. Iyengar and Swami Satchidananda, I felt dismay that he takes that tradition’s contextual conditions as crucial and central to the practice of the Four Brahma-Viharas! 

In fact, in the Buddhist Yoga tradition, these four qualities are also often referred to as the Four Immeasurables, and are to be practiced toward all beings, as we see in the translations of people like Georg Feurstein and Chip Hartranft who translate this same sutra thus:

The projection of friendliness, compassion, gladness and equanimity towards all objects -- <be they> joyful, sorrowful, meritorious or demeritorious -- <bring about> the pacification of consciousness.  – Feuerstein

Consciousness settles as one radiates friendliness, compassion, delight, and equanimity toward all things, whether pleasant, or painful, good or bad.  – Hartranft

I hasten to say that I am not saying the classical tradition is ‘wrong.’ For the Classical Yoga emphasis on one’s own ‘inner peace,’ cultivating these states of mind is a way of restraining or reversing what Patanjali calls vikshepa, the tendency of the mind to be distracted and outwardly directed. Patanjali tells us that when we react haphazardly or callously to what people do around us, inner disturbance is the result. These four attitudes combat that disturbance and bring us closer to a state of balanced equilibrium.

When we see happy people, cultivating a friendly attitude toward them will help forestall feelings of jealousy and envy. When we encounter those who are suffering, we should compassionately do what we can to help—for our own sake as much as for the person who is suffering. "Our goal is to keep the serenity of our minds. Whether our mercy will help that person or not, by our own feeling of mercy, at least we are helped," Satchidananda says.

Appreciating and delighting in the qualities of virtuous people will inspire us to cultivate such virtues ourselves. And finally, when we are faced with those we deem nonvirtuous, the classical yoga tradition teaches that we should strive to have an indifferent attitude toward them. Often, we indulge in judging and criticizing those who we feel are misguided. This hardly helps us maintain a serene state of mind! Commentators in the classical yoga tradition point out that the yogi should not divert attention from his or her own practice in order to try to reform those who are unlikely to heed advice. As Satchidananda points out, "If you try to advise them, you will lose your peace."

However, the broader view is the one emphasized in the Buddhist tradition, where the brahmaviharas, as I mentioned above, are also known as "the Four Limitless Ones" and "the Four Immeasurables," reflecting Buddhist yoga's emphasis on social relationships and the interdependent nature of all beings. Both of these perspectives are valuable; reflecting on the intention and purpose behind each gives greater depth to our own practice. I only wish that in the desire to emphasize the similarities between the two Yoga traditions of Classical Yoga and Buddhist Yoga, we don’t blur, bury or soft-pedal the real differences.

Other than this, I do find Chapple’s emphasis on the significance that the terms for each of these qualities have a feminine ending very interesting! Patanjali is often criticized (most often correctly, in my view) as being male-centric, so it is helpful to see a way in which the importance of the feminine principle can be found in the practices Patanjali offers.

Tomorrow I will post on the section on “emptiness,” but for now, I’d love to hear from those of you who have been reading along any thoughts you have about the Four Brahma-Viharas. For those of you who are interested in reading my articles on them from Yoga Journal, here are the links:

Maitri/Karuna: “Love In Full Bloom”

Mudita: “I’m So Happy For You”

Upeksha: “Calm Within”