What is your fifth limb?

The classical yoga of Patañjali comprises of eight so-called "limbs" (stages/practices). Ashtanga, by the way, means eight limbs (ashta=eight, anga=limb). In his system the fifth limb is Pratyahara, often translated as 'withdrawal of the senses'. But that's not the 5th limb I want to talk about here.

I want to talk about your fifth anatomical limb - your spine. My teacher Jonathan Monks defines Hatha Yoga as the liberation of the fifth limb. But what does liberation mean, and why would you want to do that to your spine?? Liberation means the act of setting free, or being free from limits. Do you see your spine being limited? About 8 in 10 people in the western world have one or more bouts of lower back pain in their lives. It's also the most common reason for absence from work and having to go to the doctor. So developing increased flexibility, strength, and awareness in the spine is absolutely crucial for living a healthy life - especially as you get older.

Your spine is the major trunk road connecting everything in your physical body (and energetic and spiritual body, but let's not get too technical). Your legs extend downwards from it forming, together with your pelvic floor, your roots. The very important psoas muscle connects the inside of your thighs to your spine, and its flexibility combined with that of your sacroiliac joint (SI joint) and your lower few vertebrae affect how your hips and pelvis move, your gait, and your posture. The SI joint is in fact a firm favourite for discussion in the yoga literature (see this excellent article) as it can end up hurting as a result of incorrect yoga practice. In the Japanese tradition, your hara - your central engine or energy battery - sits in front of the spine, in your belly.

Your shoulders also hang off your spine. Maybe you often feel tension up here too. One of the main causes of those painful muscle knots often stem from our sedentary lifestyle containing short bursts of activity or sustained holding from a hunched or forward-head posture.

So you can see why liberating the spine is so important. In the YogaMonks practice that I've been studying this last few years, it's an absolute focus. The practice Jonathan sets for us (mere beginners) is all about opening our root - bringing physical freedom of movement to the lower spine and pelvis, awareness to our perineum (pelvic floor), softness to the belly (and hara), and an increased (energetic) connection to the ground.

And as our spines start to move more and more independently of our other limbs, many wonderful things start to happen! As this lovely article puts it, our "hips are the body's junk drawer - they hold emotional stressors when you’re not sure where else to put them, yet you're not entirely ready to release them." So increased flexibility in the hips and pelvis can have a serious effect on our emotional body, releasing stuff that might've been stored there for years.

A loose and relaxed upper spine allows your breathing to become free and easy. Eventually (so Jonathan says) pranayama starts to happen spontaneously. Pranayama is the conscious direction or movement of energy around the body, usually through the breath.

Ultimately, a liberated spine will allow you to sit comfortably in padmasana (full lotus), the body stable, solid and connected to the ground, and the mind quiet, alert, and inquisitive. And that's all we want - the rest of it just happens in it's own time.

I am a member of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Roshi, and I teach meditation, mindfulness and yoga at the ZenYoga studio in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

I'd love to hear from you

What's your relationship to your 5th limb? What have you found that helps develop this relationship? Leave a comment below, join the discussion.

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I got an article in Nature!

I was asked some time ago to write a News & Views article for Nature on a recently accepted Nature paper titled "Suppression of star formation in the galaxy NGC 253 by a starburst-driven molecular wind" by Bolatto et al. This was very exciting since it's pretty much any scientists dream to publish in Nature! Ok it's not a full article, but still, it's Nature! ...and it's pretty much the last thing I'll do for astronomy.

News & Views articles are written for a non-specialist audience, describing a full science paper in that same journal edition - what the authors did, the scientific context, the paper's shortcomings and strengths, implications and future directions, etc.

So here it is for posterity. "How to catch a galactic wind" by Mark Westmoquette.

The nice thing is they also featured it on their front cover!

Russell Brand - an enlightened teacher

Russell Brand's recent interview on Radio 4's stalwart programme Desert Island Discs (been going since 1942 did you know?) has been reported in the media (Telegraph, BBC) mostly because of his repentance of the so-called Sachsgate scandal he created a few years back with Jonathan Ross.

However, I was struck by a very different side of him.

Despite all his superficial fame and vanity, he comes across to me as someone with some pretty deep understanding of what it means to live in the present without much of a mask to cover his true self.

In spiritual practice we work to break down our ideas of what we think our "self" is, to let go of our concepts and ideas of what we/others/things are. Eventually we might rise up out of these ashes as  our true, genuine, unhindered, unrestricted, uncontained self. The more we let go of ourselves, the more we can become our true selves... Weird but true!

What I see in Russell Brand is someone who lives in that genuine flow of moment-to-moment. He doesn't claim any significant spiritual understanding, he talks a little about yoga, devotion, and the Bhagavad Gita, but to me his real teaching comes from his actions. He just lives it - is it.

A few months ago I saw this interview with him on MSNBC's 'Morning Joe' programme. He absolutely runs riot with the presenters! They get embarrassed, nervous, they can't control him. It's hilarious! The way I interpret this is that because he has no mask of self - he is authentically just himself - he can run circles around the interviewers who have assumed massive personas, role masks, ideas of who they are (it being US TV probably even more so than anywhere else). If you've ever met someone who has absolutely no mask, who isn't playing a "role", you'll know it can be quite disconcerting.

Interestingly I met a psychiatrist the other day who also (perhaps unusually) had a strong mediation practice. He likened the onset of a psychosis to an inflation of the ego followed by a catastrophic collapse. Without the proper support structures, understanding, and control in the body-mind of the sufferer, this spontaneous ego collapse leads to terrible problems. However, the ego has nonetheless collapsed, and the sufferer experiences an awakening, a view of the limitless true nature of the universe (i.e. what we're working towards in Zen).

In the case of Russell Brand, his seeing through the self-construct seems to have come when he was a drug-addict, through taking acid (see this interview). He now sees his past addiction as a spiritual problem - he was trying to fill a hole, find a way out, find something beyond the suffering of the world. We can all relate to that. The only thing the Buddha taught was the way to end suffering.

So it's true, you can wake up to the reality of who you really are in a number of ways. But without the right intention, support of a teacher, and eyes-wide-open understanding of what's happening, it can, at best, lead to a beautiful insight which becomes a slowly fading memory, and at worst, to psychosis.

That's why we put in those hours on the meditation cushion - to let go of our "self" to become truly ourselves. And it may be to get there we need to go through a controlled total break-down!

The Yoga of Time Travel

This week I wanted to review a book I've just finished reading called "The Yoga of Time Travel" by Fred Alan Wolf PhD.

I was lent this book by someone at our Zen group. It piqued my interest as it's on that physics-spiritualism border. In true Amazon style, I'd give it 4 stars (out of 5): It's well written, has some fascinating concepts in there that were certainly new to me, he does a great job of explaining special and general relativity with regards to weird space-time effects and time dilation, and he attempts to connect all this to a number of interesting spiritual aspects. I'm not giving it 5 stars because it's obvious he hasn't gone very deep into the spiritual side of things (his understanding is noticeably superficial), and the connections he tries to make between the hard physics of time travel (what's allowed by quantum physics and relativity) and the spiritual experiences he discusses are not so easy to follow. Plus, he totally confused me in his discussion of transportable wormholes where two people remain holding hands but get separated by space and time!

According to his website and wikipedia, Fred Wolf got his PhD in theoretical physics at UCLA in 1963. His field of research was high atmospheric particle behavior following a nuclear explosion. As time went by he got interested in the relationship between human consciousness, psychology, physiology, the mystical, and the spiritual. Now he's nicknamed "Dr. Quantum"(!) and writes books on the relationship between quantum physics and consciousness.

One of the things in the book I found the most interesting relates to our perception of time. We all have those periods where it feels like time is going at a snails pace (e.g. waiting for somebody) or when time absolutely flies (e.g. when we're enjoying ourselves). As modern humans we have come to measure time using a clock - in the old days using the back-and-forth swing of a pendulum as the yard-stick (as it were), or nowadays the vibrations of an electrified quartz crystal (e.g in your watch) or the resonant transitions of electrons in an atom (in an atomic clock). But who's to say which is the truer measure of time? We have come to think our perception of time passing is distorted when what we feel is different to what the clock says.

And that brings me onto another of the things he discusses. What really is time? One of the first physical measurements that set the "direction of time's arrow" came at the beginning of the industrial revolution. It was found that hot things cool down and in doing so heat up cooler things; you cannot heat up a cold object without doing work (the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics).

"Put the thermodynamic arrow of time together with the energy required for manual labor and you come up with the time-clock punch - the means to measure the working person's wage. Linear time became the ultimate frame upon which Western culture determines its technological progress, its labor laws, and its riches, or lack thereof."

Later in the book he suggests that our internal concept of time arises through sequential focussing and de-focussing on particular points in space-time (a thought, action, moment of reality). "Our conscious experience consists of a sequence of these focal points, sites of more specific focus separated by sites of unfocussed possibilities." … "Focal points are places in space-time where objective awareness occurs and the more blurred sites are places where objective awareness diminishes but subjective awareness persists. [Converting] a possibility into a probability corresponds to the process that produces a focussed point or "sudden awareness", while a blurred site [represents] "unawareness" or unconsciousness."

In meditation, we encourage the de-focussing or blurring aspect, "letting go of fixed ideas I have about myself and others". Moving from a more blurred to less blurred state would represent moving forward in time, whereas increasing de-focus would conversely imply moving backward in time. Letting go implies increasing the uncertainty of an event in space-time, and, essentially, travelling backwards in time. "When we let go of old habits, we also move backwards in time... our subjective time-sense [runs] counter to objective time." - These connections between blurring and time travel are what I find less easy to understand.

Interestingly he says that travel backwards in time is not at all forbidden in quantum mechanics - and may actually be necessary for certain physical phenomena. He says that this naturally leads on to the concept of parallel universes (which he discusses quite a lot), and this is how we can solve the apparent paradoxes that arise through time travel.

After all this I'm definitely interested to read more from him, like his latest book "Time Loops And Space Twists" or "Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics" by Henry Stapp.

Fly practice

As I mentioned in last week's post, I was in Spain for a yoga retreat with Jonathan Monks and his lovely assistant / top student Beth. In the mornings, Jonathan would always go out to a particular place in the garden and do his own practice between about 7-11am. That's certainly a very dedicated personal practice - and yet he still complained there wasn't enough time to fit everything in!!

Anyway, in the first couple of days I was there he talked about the challenge of dealing with all the flies buzzing around in the garden. He said how difficult it was to be ok with them buzzing around, landing on you and crawling around. It was pretty hot, even at 8 in the morning, and the flies were fresh from a good night's sleep…

When I arrived on Sunday I set my intention of doing an hours sitting each day of the retreat. Naturally I sat inside the studio to avoid distractions. However, after hearing about Jonathan's experience with the flies, I thought I'd give it a go too.

So on Wed, Thurs and Fri I sat in the morning 2x30mins outside by the pool.

It was ok at first, no flies came. Then there was one on my arm. And one on my face. The one on my arm flew up to my ear. Then there was one on my nose trying to crawl up my nostril. Meanwhile the one on my face had crawled over my lips and was heading up to my eye. Then there was another on my other eye. And another on my ear. Bzzz, and it landed on my ear again. Goosebumps rippled down my left side. The ones on my eyes seemed particularly attracted to the corners (where I guess they could find some food… euww).

During the sitting, they would come, buzz around a bit, take off and re-land, then go. One or two would stay, feasting on the gunk in the corners of my eyes or around my nostrils. When they were still for some time I could feel the cold dabbing of their "tongue" on my skin. Around the back of my neck it was tickley, on my ears I got goosebumps, and on my eyes it was just weird.

Initially it was all about mindfulness of sensations. My whole awareness was filled with flies. It was a practice of letting go of the distraction, the annoyance and irritation, letting them be, getting on with their business of feeding. The important thing, I noticed, was the knowledge that they weren't doing any harm (if they were mosquitos the situation would have been very different!). It was actually fascinating to really tune in to all the sensations they produced.

On the second day of sitting outside, it became much easier to let them get on with it, and I started being able to come back to following the breath. Gradually I started feeling a detachment from the body and its sensations. My body is not me, these sensations are not me. Just accept things as they are and observe the moments passing without wanting them to be different. I found the 'not wanting' started releasing the tension and allowed quite deep relaxation.

Try it sometime…!

Up and down in Murcia

Why do we practice yoga? Why do we teach yoga? What are we trying to cultivate?

These seem to be the central themes of this teacher workshop/retreat I'm on with Jonathan Monks (yogamonks) and Beth Win (urban yoga monkey) here at Tara Casa near Murcia in Spain.

Aren't these the most important questions we can ask? - both as a student and a teacher?

Let me give what my answers are right now: I practice because I want to feel connection, to feel out beyond my comfort zone, to bring the different aspects of my being (physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual) into union/togetherness, and to deepen my understanding of who I truly am. I teach because I can't not(!), and I've now decided to really devote my self to teaching because I think I have knowledge enough to start helping people along this path. What am I trying to cultivate? Connection, letting go of yourself to become yourself more fully - through Jonathan's mantras of no contraction, no isolation, body in union.

I had a pretty powerful experience today with regards to what a practice tries to cultivate. Let me try to give you an impression of this through the following little example - please do try this at home!

Stand with your feet together, ankles touching. Straighten your legs (but don't lock the knees), engage your thighs and strengthen your legs. How do you feel in your body? And in your mind?
Now separate your feet hip width apart, toes facing forward still, soften and bend your knees a little, soften the undersides of your feet. Now how do you feel in your body, and in your mind?

Do you feel a difference? Jonathan's practice is based on softening, allowing, and feeling down into the ground, whereas many styles of yoga (e.g. Astanga) encourage that energetic squeeze in and up. The intensions are different. What they are cultivating is different. No judgements, they're just different.

What seems so critically important in all this is to be conscious of exactly what it is you want to cultivate (both as a student and teacher) and why.

Check back in next week for more on this incredible retreat...! I might have started digesting it properly by then!