But at a certain point, I've found, we want our transformational practices to become.... well... transformational!
What makes the difference? What determines whether your yoga will tone your booty but not inform your relationships or whether it will bring you new spiritual understandings that revolutionalize how you show up to your life? This is a profound question on the path because it enables us to explore how the process of transformative practices really works and what obstacles might show up on that path. When we understand them, the obstacles themselves become opportunities for empowerment!
The Plateau
In any path of transformational practice or mastery, you're bound to hit a plateau. Athletes know about it, it's not just "hitting the wall" in a certain training session or event, it's more like a phase in your practice where you are not experiencing profound upward development. The development in these phases is glacial, is underground, may not even be visible.
Your time for running the mile hasn't budged in months! Your personal record for a lift has stabilized (or even gone backward!). The same thing happens in physical yoga or martial arts - flexibility or coordination will at times just up and stop! In the inner yogas of meditation and the subtle body, the same phenomenon is observed, one day you're vibing with the inner sound, integrating your traumas, experiencing bliss and luminosity... next day, week, month, it's just boring old sitting!
Now a Zen perspective might say "WHAT IS WRONG WITH BORING OLD SITTING!?" and this perspective is often used to point out a powerful phenomenon in how we're conditioned. Our brains are built to look for novelty. When we see something new we get a lil burst of dopamine happy drugs, then when we get used to it, we'll actually background that information and hardly even perceive it (like a ticking clock that you don't hear unless you focus on it). When we meditate on the breath, or sensation in the lower belly, many of us can usually go for a couple minutes of keeping the mind there, but beginning meditators will notice that after that the awareness of the breath will just "go away" and you'll find yourself focusing on thoughts or fantasies or the like. Your mind has gotten used to the breath and gone in search of novelty.
Anyone who has mastered something can tell you that you will need to push through this novelty plateau if you're going to go to the next level. Pianists have to be able to play those scales for years and years, runners have to just put in the time pounding the track, and meditators have to just keep coming back to the breath.
In meditation, one of the cool things that happens over time is that you can train the mind to find the novelty within the familiar. So intermediate and advanced meditators have gotten through the phase of just wresting the mind back to its object of focus, and they find now that there are infinite facets of the breath which delight the mind. You'll hear yogis speak of state experiences where there is "only the breath", or where one is "being breathed," or all sorts of wonderful-sounding experiences. Yet somehow even though these are amazing sounding state experiences, they begin to transcend the conditioning to constantly seek novelty. In a way, that constant seeking mind is one that has shut down the vivid intensity of the living moment. For a yogin who has settled into the NOW, the breath is an infinitely entertaining object because it is a dancing aliveness filling one's consciousness without obstruction!
If you're lucky, you're heart will break.
This is the title of a book on Zen by James Ford, and I find it so evocative. So far we've only really talked about how to be with the plateau stage - first know that it's a thing, it doesn't mean something's wrong, it's just part of progress and growth. Then you can settle in, learn to LOVE the plateau! But what about moving beyond the plateau, how do we progress to the "next level"?
Well, another thing that someone who's mastered an art will tell you is that just when you've learned the fine art of persevering, you've settled in for the long-haul, you've finally surrendered yourself to the plateau, then your heart will break.
In teaching massage school it was pretty predictable that once you got a few months in, students would start experiencing "emotional release". Somewhere in the deep tissue module or in energetic healing, things would get profoundly UN-BORING. Challenging memories might surface, or feelings with no stories attached, and these would move up and out into expression. Some combination of the students perseverance, and the trust built in the cohort allowed for a deeper relaxation than is usually possible, and the armor would begin to come off, piece by piece.
At this point, you'd begin to see people's lives changing. People who'd been trying for years would up and quit smoking, or drop 10 pounds, find an insight about their Life's Path. And often, people would find themselves becoming sensitive to a more subtle level of being - they'd be more empathetic, more intuitive, more in-tune with the world around them.
In yoga training too, ongoing cultivation will regularly result in a re-evaluation, sometimes even a bit of an existential crisis, in which ones entire orientation to life can shift. And beautifully, in these times, resources will often emerge synchronistically out of the woodwork to support one in advancing to this next level of openness and aliveness.
It comes down to aliveness
Really, it's all about aliveness. As Jesus said "I've come that you shall have life, and that more fully." The essence of transformational practice is a re-awakening, it's a bringing back to life those parts of ourselves that we've hidden under emotional armoring, or which were compacted through trauma.
This is not always a straightforward path! In the ancient times, this is why they said that no one should try to practice awakening the Kundalini without direct guidance from an experienced teacher. What is the Kundalini? It's the energy of our livingness. When that instinctual power comes on line, we can use it to vivify all aspects of our life - from our open heart, to our lucid awareness, and even our physical health. But as it awakens, it must also vivify all those pains and closures that had been put to sleep as we tried to keep ourselves safe.
As this process of re-awakening our livingness occurs, we need to know that something natural is happening, so we don't clinch up and re-inhibit this vital force. And we need to know how to compassionately and lovingly be with the energies, emotions, memories, and inspirations that may emerge. We need to avoid the tendency to try to muscle through and induce a type of catharsis that might actually injure us on the one side, and the tendency to shut down and go back to sleep on the other. We need to forge a middle road of self-compassion and firm resolve, that helps us navigate the profound journey of self-awakening.
So, like the expression goes: "if you're going through hell, KEEP GOING!" In our transformational practice, sometimes we'll hit a hellacious plateau, with it's interminable waiting. Settle in, surrender, and learn to love it, you may find it's quite a blissful place in disguise.
And sometimes we'll find ourselves in the hell of our own past emotions, which we shoved down or closed off because we weren't strong enough to integrate them. Well, good news, if they're coming up to consciousness, you now ARE strong enough. It's time to learn to love yourself more deeply. Find a guide who knows the path, and commit to walking it with self-compassion - it's the most amazing journey there is!
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