Kama Yoga, Yoga for No-Mind Practioners

10/2/24

Loving our Body proper

What is it that needs to be written?

Maybe yoga?

Yoga is a practice of experience and manifestation. This is what we want in our relationships, no?

Or maybe I want to share my algebraic formula on experience, that allowed me to understand Jiddu Krishnamurti’s elusive “the observer is the observed?” This too I can never forget. 

Nah, let’s do yoga first.

Why is it important? 

Your body, when you are engaged in a relationship with another, is tasked with a job much different than the rest of your world.

It needs to manage emotions, anger and depression while allowing for other new emotions, such as intimacy and love. Your body needs to be strong and attractive, some more than others depending on your relationship. And for most of us, it needs to be able to have sex.

It needs to be energetic for us to take on the day or the challenges and demands of our relationship.

It’s always important to remember that we don’t want to have to do any of these tasks.

Many of these actions or qualities are not maintained or created by the conscious mind.

We do not go through our lives maintaining our inhales and exhales.

We wouldn’t even where to start, what is even involved. Would we? No, our body just does it for us.

We may train the body to take on new forms, but it is our bodies that manage the billions of billions of chemical reactions needed to make and maintain such transformation or homeostasis.

It’s never the conscious “you.” 

Our bodies are real people. 

I’m not asking folks to improve “themselves.” 

I’m asking readers to take care of another sentient presence, their bodies, which is wholly separate from the conscious “them.”

If something can laugh and cry, wouldn’t that imply sentience? Someone that deserves our compassion?

If that is something the conscious “us” does, then we can do it on command, repeatedly, in uniform fashion such as managing the strides of our gait. 

But we cannot, can we?

If it’s not something we do not consciously do, then who does?

It’s helpful for us to ask, who actually laughs on our behalf, when we are not in control? 

All coupled relationships need to see two more living things in their home, which is their bodies, as others would see pets.

Give your body a name.

Imagine if you loved your body as much as you loved your pet, or as much as others love theirs?

All it takes, is a name, and sometimes, a “hey, hey, HEY. Hi. You need anything?”

If you want to improve your experience and connection to another person, you must know your body is there. Either it will be with you, like a lover sitting next to you while watching a movie. Or it can like that guy, that woman, that’s right there, but no one wants to be around.

And the only reason our body acts the way it does, for better or for worse, is due to our conscious relationship to our bodies.

If one were to neglect such a sentient presence that requires love, compassion and freedom to thrive, our body will begin to decay or provide you with discomfort to communicate its dire struggles to you. 

Through our negligence of our body’s cries for attention, help and love…

as we are too busy with our own conscious need for attention, help and love…

Our conscious experience (needed to enjoy or connect with anything) begins to diminish in every sense of the word.

Then, the movie that was supposed to be great, becomes a deleterious experience.

Like, ugh, you couldn’t enjoy the plot-twist due to your body’s “obnoxious” discomforts, which are just their pathetic attempts to connect with you. 

Don’t they know how hard you worked to just have the time and ability to watch this movie…?

How rude.

I need to make it so I do not live this way.

Not for any other reason except to be able to look at myself in the mirror.

Oh, how delusions can be so real.

Would anyone even believe me, if I said, Love is how I get into better shape?

They would say, that’s why you look like and perform like that…

Maybe, in my delusion, I’ll find myself the jealous one. Until then…

The Technicals

Yoga, by those that invented it, means connection.

Not the idea of connection that we know today. Language misconstrues the ideas, connotations, implications, and essence of words used in the past. Keep this definition of “connection” as loose and as open as you can.'

My next thought, upon learning this, was connection to what? It’s common knowledge today that it is connection to God. But what does that really mean?

Those that pioneered yoga believed God to be everything in existence.

So, for the pioneers, we could argue, yoga meant connection to everything.

Yoga was meant to enhance your connection to the ground, air, water, people, trees, animals, sun, moon, everything you can sense, and more importantly, everything that you cannot sense. (I hope you see now why a healthy portion of nonsense is important to a well-balanced diet of information.)

So then why is Yoga not simply skipping around and being in love, or falling in love with every single thing?

Well, this is the ultimate end goal, so the answer is, yes, it’s supposed to be. 

But secondly, the only reason you are not in this always-in-love state is because of how your mind and body is connected to your “reality”. The contemporary idea of connection is just the attainment of desire, not love. 

So yoga helps you to better connect to “reality.” This is how I think of it:

Imagine it’s the holidays where everything is perfect. But you are constantly burping, farting and hiccuping… 

It would get in the way, so much so, it would make it hard to even think about building your connection to the people, environment and experience all together. You would not be present. So if you think you are connecting ,you are not, because the fart is in the way. 

For Yoga, as an oversimplification, this fart is your identity and past karma (consequences of your past actions still affecting you, in the form of physical or mental ailments).

Yoga is designed to eliminate anything getting in the way of the inherent pleasure in life. Imagine the same situation, except for physical impediments, but mental impediments like resentment, ignorance, suspicion, jealousy, discrimination, anger. 

The conscious “you” only experiences reality between intermediaries that are seldom on the same page, such as your eyes, prefrontal cortex, nervous system, hormones, chemicals, etc. If they are all in unison, I would call that flow. 

I like the term impediments (or disorganization) over ailments. Ailments imply something is wrong. Impediments imply everything is right, something is just in the way. Or the pieces are all there and correct, the orientation is wrong. 

How we need to rethink such impediments to connection (meta-yoga?)

Bring this back to our sentient bodies and what is required of them just to love someone.

Imagine relaxing with your partner, the love of your life. Imagine holding hands on the beach, laying on cozy reclining beach chairs, holding beers like the corona commercial.

Nice right? (plug: your beach is not corona lights, it’s in Kamapuram ;))

We could imagine there to be no impediments to relaxation, but we’d be very wrong. Here is why you are not as relaxed, or in pleasure, than you could be. And you’ll see how your perception of connection, yoga and love, may be getting in the way of your ideal experience in any situation or context.

Be warned, if you start to truly see these “impediments” when you previously did not, it may reveal things you are not ready to fix and can get kind of annoying.

You’ll have to do it eventually if you want to find enlightenment, or something like that, but remember there is no rush...

Impediments to relaxing on the beach, drinking an ice cold beverage, the corona “find your beach” way:

• First off, our body is, by definition, unable to relax while you are being poisoned. Our minds may be relaxing, from an all-natural tranquilizer, while your body fights for its life. This mental relaxation is actually to keep the conscious “us” sedated and out of the way while mommy and daddy have to clean up the poison we’re ingesting via our liver and lymph nodes.

• If one cannot complete 25 full pushes and 25 ass-to-grass squats without a break, and if you spend more than 30 minutes looking at a screen several times a day, then you are not breathing expansively enough to even relax. (and these are but a few of many, many reasons to learn of your breath, even on a high level). This minimized, trapped, breathing, with its adjoining mental associations, will subconsciously invite stressful and/or lackluster feelings and images, not relaxation. In other words, just by how you breathe, your subconscious thinks you’re at work. It can never fully relax. 

• Your butt can become sore after 30 minutes, or you might feel tightness in your hips after a while. This is not relaxation, but bondage of a sort. 

• Holding hands can help us as humans feel grounded. Why? They’re mega satellite receptors that are always always on and tuned in, like our feet. Holding hands with another human releases endorphins. So, holding a cold beer will do the opposite. 

• Without yoga, we may believe putting our feet up on a lounge chair may be more relaxing rather than putting your feet into the nutritious, grounding and healing sand that can normalize excessive or slow electromagnetic activity in your body.

A part of ecstasy is knowing your body must be in a relaxed yet active form.

Think of your most ecstatic moments, you will find this to be true. In those times, your mind and your body’s mind, its sentience, are essentially holding hands through an experience, even for a few seconds, even if just to marvel at the dharmic beauty of a tree. 

All intimate relationships are started by holding hands, or touch. Yoga, in many philosophies, is to deepen the intimacy or connection to your body as you would a romantic lover, so you both can go to God, or enlightenment, together.

So what have we gotten wrong about yoga? Many do it “right” but their experience is still severely and tragically limited, most without knowing.

Contemporary yoga is meant to change, improve or align our bodies.

However, it’s never effective to seek to change something you are trying to build a connection with using willpower, grit and perseverance, especially before you have built a deep connection to it. 

Effort, in regards to Yoga, is when the mind takes the lead. But then, the body becomes second.

This is not connection, it’s dominance.

We’re trying to make love through dominance, not play.

And I don’t like that - not me, not my Indra, not my Durga, and not definitely not my Rati.

The body that deserves a name. It does not need to be changed, only loved.

This is a hard one to swallow because it takes trust. Your body has everything it needs to heal.

Any impediment to your body’s glory and ecstasy, are the man-made impediments created by your “conscious” mind neglecting your body. 

Though it may not be, it may be helpful to think of this as a blanket statement. Naturally, may say what about THIS rare case and THAT rare case, and that other 1 in a million case?  

To that question, I would ask, what about the 1 in a million case where the body healed itself confounding science, aka me. Where a miracle saved me from emergency heart transplant surgery?

We just call these cases a miracle and ignore it, all the while screaming that we, in particular, are cursed.

I know this from first hand experience because that is how my doctors defined my body’s ability to heal itself beyond the capabilities of modern science when I was 11 - a miracle.

They wrote down some notes, brought in residents and doctors from other hospitals to confirm this was indeed a miracle, and then bounced.

I was just happy they were gone so I can get back to my video games.

I would not immediately jump to selective ignorance.

But let’s just speak to the other 99% of us looking to be flexible, have less gas, acidity or anxiety.

Or, trying to make our body’s better in whatever way so we can love it more. This is what you will learn…

When exploring and listening to our bodies, we actually learn what it means to be sorry, in a way we never have before.

If you find yourself finding it hard to connect first off, it’s guilt holding you back. '

No one in this world can harm someone they were meant to love in Truth, without having to wade through knee-high rivers of guilt just to see their loved ones clearly.

Also when you are expanding your body’s capabilities inside and out, but this time actually listening to it, you will find it to be a removal process more than one of addition.

We are convinced we need something, because that is how others get paid with their 100% money back guarantees.

It’s of upmost important to your health that you understand how the need for profitability affects what information is delivered to you on any media platform, tv, radio, social media, billboards, etc. It’s not evil, just capitalism, our best guess on distributing resources. But it can easily make you regress.

You don’t need more flexibility, you need less tension.

You don’t need more strength, you need less negligence and distraction.

You don’t need more pills, you need less plastic in your body.

You don’t need postures, you need to stop forcing your body into man-made, tension-inducing postures such as sitting on a couch for more than 30 minutes.

You don’t need to apply pressure to massage, you just need to remove your muscle-mind stress from that muscle knot. Forceful massage and somatic release never actually mixed. Not until hotels could charge hundreds of dollars.

The nitty gritty neural network details of Yoga, your bio-hack.

Let’s think about this more practically however.

A big part of yoga is flexibility, meaning expanding your range of motion and being strong, fortified, yet relaxed (at least not in panic mode) in the given expanded range of motion.

The only reason you become inflexible is because of this:

When your mind is very active, it loses its ability to be present and sense and respond to discomfort from the body.

The proper response of the mind, in such bodily discomfort, is to drop all need for such tension and let the body neutralize the source of discomfort itself. For example, get up from your desk or couch after twenty or so minutes. '

But society has conditioned us to think it is more important for our brain to always be on, in constant use, under constant strain, never present, so this emergency relief protocol cannot be executed.

The stress begins to add up, like trash in an unkempt house. If it doesn’t go anywhere, it has to stay somewhere.

Osho and Yoga practitioners would say the same about feelings.

So to neutralize this strain in absence of proper procedure, as the mind does whatever it wants to do, the body overcompensates.

Overcompensation, by defintion, is never fully optimal, and always incurs a cost to be rectified later.

The body says, if the mind keeps causing this discomfort, I’ll conform to this way of being (shallow breath, mouth breathing, tight raised shoulders, excessive internal rotation, curved spine, etc.)

So, imagine one day, you have to sit on the floor because of a pooja or your political talk got you kicked off the adult table.

The mind comes to the body and says, we need to sit on the floor and so get to conforming, so we can make this happen.

The body, all-submissive, tries to conform to the floor with it’s new curved or bent form, created by your previous stress-induced mouth-heaving, but now is in discomfort again.

And this is so tragic for our bodies, especially when we see it ourselves.

Modern day yoga is this:

Strengthen your will and effort, so your mind can dominate your body properly to the form that’s needed, the ultimate form that is resilient enough to be any form.

The yoga I like to do, (maybe I’ll name it Kama Yoga, Yoga to fall in love with your body), is to put the body at the initial point of discomfort and then let the mind shut the fuck up.

And your mind will listen, not only to your command, but to future commands of your body as well.

Now imagine a third presence, a deep-seated awareness that is only that, like a spot light, like Sauron’s Tower. This is the “real” you yoga practitioners will try to lead you to.

With your awareness, awareness being the God to your mind and brain (thanks Satyakam), your mind will say:

“So body, this lousy human, with their awareness, put the bat signal here.

So, now I’m here. But….now that I’m here, though, I see the problems I caused. I’m sorry.

(Of course it will be sorry because your mind and body are soulmates, connected by your awareness, their God.)

I’ll drop everything and every need to think, and just try to serve you here and now. We’ll fix this together.”

This happens every time. As long as you get out of the lovers’ way.

Your body has a mind too. Many call this spirit “Durga.” I would name your own spirit yourself and keep it a secret. But such a spirit will always communicate:

“YOU THINK YOU CAN WALK IN HERE ALL THI- you know what…we need to build some trust.

And that only happens with you staying here long enough for me to know that you won’t just fly out again. T

hen we can get some work done, because I need you…”

Then your body, which you have named by now, will begin their work.

They’ll tell the brain…

all subconsciously, way too fast for you to consciously pick up

(fortunately with no need for you to eavesdrop),

all while you’re just trying to be present:

“See all this tension here…

Now do you see these ropes and glue keeping all these muscles together.

It’s all held together by muscle-memory, the only band-aid solution and tool I had at my disposal. And I had to put it in place when I had to deal with your shit!

So now, I need your help in untangling this muscle-memory because it’s a product of both of us, and like turning two locks at the same time in an obnoxiously cooperative escape room, we both need to untangle this one spot, at the same time, together”

This is how my parents cleaned up their closets…<3

It’ll feel like muscle knots are tied together with tape, and just by listening to it, accepting it, the tape slowly removes away.

Your body will squirm and move about, your mind will squirm and move about, but with your awareness on any tightness in your body, your lovers will stay dancing in center-stage until love can flow through that part of your body again.

If done successfully, it’ll feel like a re-union. Celebrations, balloons, tears and laughter, everytime.

That is all yoga is, untangling the baggage caused by the disharmony in the relationship between your conscious mind and the mind of the body.

Both your body and your mind have everything they need to get back to zero.

Love in this relationship is required, not the addition of will, effort, techniques, or skills.

Your body, with your conscious mind, and your awareness holding it’s hand and having it’s back, will always heal.

You will find that your body’s operating system has only a few objectives: heal, grow or enhance your experience.

When it’s doing the opposite, it’s due to a (programming) bug created by the mind that’s causing it to function improperly.

This is true everytime.

I like to think of my health as a balloon. It’s only because I’m holding it down that it’s not going up, and all I have to do is relax my grip... (My Rati, logo idea!!)

The next misconception about yoga is thinking the postures make the connection, and not that the connection makes the postures.

There’s a legend that someone asked Shiva what postures to focus on, and Shiva provided only four. My thinking was these postures would be very diverse, some for lower body, some for upper body, trying to ensure to hit every muscle in every way.

I found out that three of his postures were essentially the three simplest ways of sitting on the ground.

I immediately though, if postures were so important, how could there really just be one important one, all else being secondary?

And then I learned, the reason Shiva’s postures are so simple is because these postures are the best way to eliminate any tension (in the physics sense like torque, pressure, contraction, etc.) that can keep your mind from ascending like a balloon.

For kings, the only posture to care about was the “tree” pose, simply due to the fact that it was so arduous. That’s it.

But when someone did this as long as possible just to get stronger, trying not to sleep, eat, drink, or defecate just to keep standing on one toe for as long as possible, after 6 months, they reached enlightenment. It was pretty nifty for them.

Just one posture for Godliness through connection of the abundant material, elemental and even imperceptible, intangible energies of the Universe at our disposal. What a deal…

So how do I think of postures?

I sit on the ground however I want to.

And then I let my Indra (the name of my mind) and my Durga do their thing.

When they’re dancing together, they will move the body on their own accord. It won’t be you.

It will all feel like most subtle of reflexes, feeling like an unwinding. But your body will be doing it, not the conscious you.

If kama yoga is gains interests for readers…

I’ll write in detail what my approach is that allowed me to get into a much deeper squat, remove emotional trauma, improved my breathing, clear mental blocks, and come to the realization I have to write this newsletter.

So just poke me if it’s interesting and I’ll keep developing this process as I continue my training. Indra does not wait up for my shenanigans. Nor do these voices in my head and heart.