Sadhana

This morning marked the third day of a week-long Sadhana at my beloved local yoga studio.

Sadhana is a spiritual practice that entails a lengthy morning prayer at 4:30 a.m., followed by a half-hour or more of yoga, followed by an hour-plus of chanting meditation. The practice ends by about 6:45 a.m.

Though I was looking forward to it, I was definitely not thrilled when 4:00 a.m. came on Monday. After not a little grousing and groaning, I crept to the bathroom, splashed my face and brushed my teeth as quietly as I could, grudgingly trying to maintain our home’s still-nighttime stillness for my husband and son.

When I opened the front door to the dark chill of night, I realized it had been ages since I’d stargazed. I think about the stars, the Sun, the Moon, the planets all the time, under wall sconces and floor lamps, my face buried in a book. But so rarely these last few years had I breathed in the night air and lost myself in the flecks of light stippled across the open sky. I was a little skittish of being out alone in the silent dark, but with the sight of those stars, I began to inhale more evenly, more slowly.

And so I began Sadhana before I even got into my car.

Depth astrology works on the Hermetic principle, “As above, so below.” That is, the vast cosmos itself is a reflection of the individual psyche. The cycles, rhythms, timing and dynamic principles that order the stars and the planets also order each human’s way of living in the world.

As the universe goes about the business of being – of growing, flowering and dying; of pushing, erupting and flowing; of rising, shining and setting — those cycles are constantly echoed in each of us. We are born, we live, we die. We rise, we work, we sleep. Relationships bud, flower, fruit and wither. Art is created, enjoyed and destroyed or replaced or refined or transformed.

The astrological chart describes potential; it does not prescribe fate. But the potential mapped by symbols in the chart orbits something even more basic: the small, powerful circle at the center of the chart. This circle is to our personality what the axis is to each planet. It is the changeless, eternal symbol of the Divine within — the Self-with-a- capital-S, around which the planet orbits, around which the hurricane or the gentle river of each personality flows. That still, small circle is a reflection, perhaps even a fragment, of the unfathomable universal Divine that lives within each of us and that gives us the power to create our own destiny.

Astrology gives us the language of symbols to better frame and understand exactly how the vibrations of the universe settle into each person’s particular bones and particular blood — and then, being processed through the body and the psyche, recapitulate back out into the cosmos in a massive and complex cycle of in-breaths and out-breaths between the universe and the beings that live here.

The energy we generate in this exchange — lethargic or enlivened, relational or individual, empathic or violent — is released and becomes part of the universe, for better or for worse. We then breathe it back in to further create ourselves. We shape the universe with each out-breath, and we are shaped by it every time we inhale. We can look at our charts to understand the kind of breath we are prone to blow out to the world and the kind we expect to breathe in from it.

Sadhana literally means practice, and because of this I am reminded today also of the Muses. Though there were many muses over many years and many mythologies, the Greeks called the three primary ones Mneme (Memory), Aoide (Voice) and Melete (Practice). Inspiration — literally, to breathe in Spirit — overtakes us only when we have the discipline to give voice to memory over and over again. In Sadhana that means we take the words that the Gurus breathed in as Spirit — we enter, for two hours, the collective Memory of a wide, deep community — and perpetuate it in our own Voice for seven, or forty, or a thousand, days in a row.

Yogi Bhajan, who brought the Kundalini tradition to the west, said that sound — voice, music, chanting — is the most direct connection between two beings. The Sadhana prayer, the Japji Sahib (Song of the Soul), speaking directly to God, says:

The celestial jewels which You created … sing. … The planets, solar systems and galaxies, created and arranged by Your Hand, sing.

Echoing the song of the cosmos, we chant the long memory of our community in practice each day of Sadhana to inspire ourselves and the world: to breathe in Spirit. Through this practice, we not only connect with our spiritual ancestors and cleanse our own spirits, we also echo the universal vibrations of connection between all sentient beings, from the smallest one-celled organism to “the planets, solar systems and galaxies, created and arranged by Your Hand.”

Even if you don’t believe that we reflect and influence universal rhythms in the way we conduct our lives, you may still be intrigued by what Practice means in our everyday lives. Why not just go to church every Sunday and get the whole spiritual thing over with for the week? Why get up at 4:00 each morning for seven days in a row to chant in a language you don’t understand?

This, then, brings me to psychoneurobiology, which is a field about which I know just enough to be dangerous. Work in this area over the last 35 years has shown that, in Bruce Perry’s words, “states become traits” — that is, our brain cells literally form in response to our life experiences, especially our earliest ones. For instance, a child who grows up with parents who yell and scream when they’re angry will develop neurons that are shaped to recognize yelling and screaming as the normal, appropriate response to anger. A child who grows up with compassion will develop a capacity for that state.

Though children are especially vulnerable to this process, it doesn’t stop happening just because you hit voting age. Adult brains do it, too: The more we repeat a behavior, or emotion, or habit, the more it comes to define us. Every time we eat a chocolate bar to fill a hole of sadness or loneliness or anxiety, we dig a deeper rut in the neural pathway that says that’s what we must do when upset. Every time we gripe about a co-worker, our brain moves in the direction of negativity.

The Japji Sahib says it best:

Virtue and vice do not come by mere words –
actions repeated, over and over again,
are engraved upon the soul.

Without self-knowledge — through the astrological chart, through journaling, through therapy or art or prayer or chanting or discipline or self-reflection of some sort — we are prone to repeating patterns that perpetuate negativity, that engrave unhappiness upon an increasingly polluted soul. When we don’t know ourselves well, we are subject to the hurricanes and gentle rivers that comprise the personality, that whirl around the still core of the Self. In this state, we simply cannot conduct ourselves in alignment with the unfathomable universal Divine that lives within each of us.

And so every time we awaken at 4:00 a.m. for Sadhana, creep through the house, open the front door and breathe in the sharp, starry, deep night air, we repeat a pattern that engraves something different upon the soul. We affirm in Sadhana that our truth and our destiny rest not only alone in the warm, cozy bed behind us but also together with our fellow yogis, with all sentient beings and with the long, shimmering arms of the cosmos that bend to embrace us — when we choose to allow it.