3 Voices, 4 Paths, 6 Rituals, and 8 Branches
3 Voices, 4 Paths, 6 Rituals, and 8 Branches
Life is just a bunch of math.
Truth and clarity come packaged in the quiet and the calm sounds of nature. We all have our favorites. I am partial to water sounds - excluding tsunami sounds and sounds of water that you might hear during a hurricane on the North Atlantic. My favorites are tinkling, water-rushing sounds like babbling brooks, soft cascading streams, and the lapping ocean waves of the Western Isles of Scotland. As for human voices, my solar plexus zings when I hear my son’s voice. As for music, I love hearing a clear bass-voice, like Krishna Das’ voice.
Three Voices
Even during the occasions where we do find clarity or the truth in the quiet and the calm, those pesky voices in our heads remain. I categorize them in triplicate as follows:
1) The Ego-voice: Harassing, constant, argumentative, divisive, disruptive, and patronizing. Grating monotone. Meditation obstructor.
2) The Higher power/Greater Good/God/Guardian Angels/Spirit Guide-voice: Pleasant-sounding. Deft, quiet, soft, directive but with a Dolly Parton-esque Southern drawl-intonation. Loving. Most of us must be asleep to hear it.
3) The Body-voice(s): Since we have 206 bones, 7 muscle groups, and 7 trillion nerves, the voices are multiple, and can come from a hand, foot, nasal cavity, or left buttock. Regardless of where and when, these voices are the hardest for us to hear, not because they are too quiet - actually, they can be quite loud - but because we find comfort in the denial of hearing them, knowing that we would need to do something if we acknowledged them. It is much easier to call it a name (“stupid knee”) and then go back to pretending it isn’t happening/speaking.
Four Paths
There are four paths of Yoga to explore with the goal of attaining a higher sense of peace and serenity. An individual’s temperament guides them to a particular path, but all lead to the same place - enlightenment. They are:
Karma Yoga - selfless service.
Raja Yoga - a scientific, step-by-step approach to Yoga.
Jnana Yoga - the study of the Vedas, Upanishads, and other ancient scriptures.
Bhakti Yoga - devotion expressed in the forms of singing and praying.
Six Rituals
We perform various rituals every day. We wake up and brush our teeth. We make coffee or tea. Take a shower or bath. Make the bed. Walk. We make time for prayer or spiritual connection with meditation, reflection, journaling, or reading.
Eight Branches
Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga contains eight components or limbs (I like to call them branches because the word “limb” sounds less like a tree analogy and more like reference to a leg or an arm) that comprise the whole of Raja Yoga - one of the above “paths” of Yoga - and what we in the West practice the most. We know two branches quite well - asana, the poses, and pranayama, the breathing exercises. But there are six more branches. I wrote about them here.
In addition to the voices, paths, rituals, and branches, there are other number associations in Yoga. Like the108 beads on a Mala prayer bead string. Why 108? It is a sacred number in Buddhism (number of temptations the aspirant must overcome to attain enlightenment), Hinduism (representing spiritual completion and the number of chakras in the body that we can influence), and astronomy (the sun’s diameter is 108 times the Earth’s).
We also use counting as a tool for meditation. Ram Dass famously said in an audio recording from the 1970s when referring to his early days of being initiated into the practice, “I had to count to 500 (breaths) just to get straight for the day.” (50 years ago, getting “straight for the day,” meant feeling awake and ready to go. But we now know it is much more efficient to drink coffee rather than try to count 500 breaths in a row). A string of Mala beads is one way to count breaths without actually counting numbers - you touch a bead for each breath you take. If you breathe 10 times per minute, then it takes about 11 minutes to get through a Mala bead necklace of 108 beads.
Another meditation counting technique is to simply count your breaths in the space of one minute. If you breathe in and out 10 times per minute (8-10 is the bell-curve average), then you know that if you want to hold a pose for one or two minutes, you simply need to count to ten or twenty. The effort is in not losing count - that’s the hard part. Yoga teachers are professional counters - that is how we know when one-, two-, or three-minute pose-holds are finished. Otherwise, we would be constantly staring at the clock instead of monitoring you.
Rather than performing all this counting, we can do the bead-touching technique or try the finger-touching technique using the Chin Mudra as a starting point. Touching ten fingertips; ten breaths. Touching 108 beads, 108 breaths. No counting. Time is simply passing. That is meditation.
Spotify Playlist: Water Bodies
Blessings & Comfort,
Photo Credits: | Top - Melanie McLeod | Top-middle - Elmwood Park, Omaha, Nebraska | Bottom-middle - Melanie McLeod | Bottom - Cinque Tera, Tuscany, Italy (Melissa Taylor)
Indeed... “stupid knee” ...