Purifying Your Love
An interview with Sarah Powers (HQP 2000)
by Raz Ingrasci, President (Edited
by Shawn McAndrew)
Sarah is a nationally recognized Yoga Teacher. She participates
in various national conferences and leads teacher training's, workshops,
and retreats, nationally and internationally. Sarah can be seen in
the December 2000 issue of Yoga Journal and on the cover of the September
1999 issue. Her web site is www.sarahpowers.com.
Raz Ingrasci: Is yoga a spiritual practice, a
physical practice, or both?
Sarah Powers: It’s a practice to free the
mind. Yoga is a jump-off point from which we begin uncovering our
true nature. Its goal is liberation. Yoga is a set of practices
that moves us toward resting in our true nature.
There are Yoga schools that have a view of liberation as way off
in the distance, and which don’t much use the physical body.
They want us to turn away from any identification of being physical.
Then there are other branches that are non-dualistic and more ancient
in which the aim of our practice is to uncover a nature that’s
already there, simply shrouded. Liberation is seen as an unchanging,
fundamental substratum of existence that we don’t pay attention
to because of our externalized consciousness and our training. Yogic
practices allow us to see inwardly what’s really going on,
not just what our intellect is preferring to understand.
RI: Isn’t that also the aim of meditation?
SP: Meditation is the main tool of yoga. The physical
practices that are so popular are preliminary practices so that
we’re less agitated and energy is clean and clear enough to
sit still and investigate the nature of reality.
RI: As a yoga teacher, you teach postures, don’t
you?
SP: Yes. Hatha yoga is a practice that uses the
body as the jump-off place. We start with what’s tangible,
relative, and continually changing — which is the physical
condition of health and stagnation — and we move our attention
into the form of being a body. So you start with the densest form
of energy and you then refine your awareness. When someone begins
yoga, just being attentive to one’s feet or how your shoulders
are as they’re moving around, can be difficult. The attention
easily wanders. Hatha yoga says, “Come be in your body, come
just pay attention to your breath, and allow the body to find its
natural equilibrium through these various postures or shapes that
rechannel and redistribute energy.” It’s the redistribution
of Prana, Prana being energy, or chi.
You just naturally feel better when the body is more enlivened
and less congested energetically. The idea is that you go from feeling
more at home in the body to then attending to something less tangible,
which is the subtle body. So there are Pranayama practices that
take the intensity of balancing your energy to a more subtle level.
The mind is intimately connected to the breath. So as we connect
the attention to the body, to the breath, the mind also comes along
and is then more willing to be present to watch its own workings.
Meditation was around long before Hatha yoga, but there were schools
of people who felt it was too advanced to just sit and watch your
mind. People were uncomfortable in their bodies. The mind was too
agitated, which would create guilt and dissatisfaction from meditation.
These yogis thought, “Okay, let’s work with the body and
the breath, and the mind will naturally come home.”
That was true for me. I tried to meditate when I was 20 and there
was no anchor, no root for me. I found Hatha yoga and it was a way
in. After 10 years of Hatha yoga, I was ready to challenge stillness
and meditate. Some people will meditate much sooner than I did,
but it took 10 years of committed practice before I was really willing
to tackle restlessness.
RI: Was the Hoffman Process part of tackling your
restlessness?
SP: Before starting yoga, Ty, my husband who also
did the Process, introduced me to writers who were looking at the
nature of reality. My entry was intellectual, because my background
was in English literature. I was in college and loved to read, so
I was interested in looking at reality with a different lens. I
would read writers, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Castenada, Seth
Speaks, and Ken Wilbur, and there was a feeling of sitting inside
their expansive views for very short pockets of time. I would intellectually
understand what they were saying. It was at that time that I became
interested in looking at all the places where I was misidentified
and stuck. So, I found a therapist and joined the Institute of Transpersonal
Psychology for a masters program. The masters program required that
we do spiritual practice with a physical base, so I started yoga.
Mentally, I was interested in watching my mind, but not for very
long periods — sitting for 15 minutes was enough for me. The
spiritual connection was that after the practice I felt more expansive.
It would last for awhile, and over the years it would last a little
longer. But eventually, the old patterns would settle in. I would
crave yoga because that seemed like a remedy. When the Hoffman Process
came to my attention, I felt like there were strong rooted patterns
that I wanted to weed out that would allow me to blossom in yoga.
RI: So what happened?
SP: I was skeptical. I came with all my doubts
and resistances because that was what I really wanted to work on.
I just let it become my full persona. I gave the Teachers a really
hard time. I have a nature that can be so discerning that I don’t
even check things out. The first few days, I felt like, “they’re
not going to be able to touch my stuff. I’m going to be the
only one who leaves exactly the same as I came in.” For every
exercise, resistance was the first pattern that would come up. I
knew very well that as long as I resisted, they wouldn’t be
able to unravel me. But that resistance to looking at and releasing
my patterns was exactly what I wanted to work on. I was resisting
all the stuff I’d learned about resistance from my folks. During
that intense exercise about the parents being gone, there was the
feeling of effortlessly and completely letting go.
I then started trusting that everything we had done prior had allowed
me to get to that place, and now I was willing.
Sages talk about the main hindrance to awakening is resistance
in moments of failure, resisting who we are. Resistance was a force
pulling me into a cloud of discontent, wherein I thought that circumstances
would someday arrange into a configuration where I’d finally
be happy. So Hoffman was when I realized, “I’m tired of
expecting that circumstances are going to give it to me.”
RI: What have you found since Hoffman?
SP: Right after the Process, after the weekend
by myself, I went on a weeklong silent retreat with my Tibetan teacher.
It was really nice sequencing. It was like he was speaking to me,
talking about patterns. I don’t remember hearing him use that
language before, but that week, it was so lovely.
I’d been on retreat with him a year before, and this was a
repeat retreat, so it was basically the same but I heard it totally
different this time. I heard it from a place that wasn’t looking
for answers to make me feel worthy. I found that worthiness was
already my essential nature. So, hearing these teachings was like
going from the base of “already lovable” into the substratum
of love that is all around us all the time. It was a lovely segue
to being back in my life.
Before Hoffman I’d go on meditation retreats always with this
subtle undercurrent that I was going to make myself sit with my
discontent. Almost like punishment. “If you sit here long enough,
you’ll get over it.” After Hoffman, there’s no sense
that I’m here to fight something in me, that I’m beating
myself up because I’m no good. Of course, there are moments
of discontent, and I see now that the discontent is historical.
It’s a pattern, it’s not really there. It’s just
a groove that my mind was used to. Now there’s much more joy.
RI: Many people enter yoga or meditation to seek
“enlightenment”. How do you view your path?
SP: It’s been 20 years and now it’s
a surrendering path. I used to think it was a path to “do”;
that there was something to acquire. My ego got wrapped around whether
I was doing well or not. Now it feels like there have been glimpses
of liberation being so close that it’s the very apparatus we
use to express through. It’s nothing we can find, it’s
simply evoked. I’m very interested in resting in it more and
more, and less interested in the “doing” aspect, which
becomes busy and distracting.
RI: It’s not something to attain any more.
SP: No, that’s a concept. It was something
too far away to grasp and it created its own level of suffering.
RI: I’ve heard that the word yoga means “union”.
SP: Yes. Yoga means, “to yoke”. It’s
a path that directs us to our inherent wholeness.
RI: It sounds like yoga, meditation and Hoffman
all have a similar goal, which I would call purifying your love.
SP: In my recognition of what I’m not, which
is conditioned patterns, what I am is so much clearer; which is
what we all are — love. Hoffman was a way of penetrating the
illusion of unworthiness that I’ve carried since childhood:
that is a choice I no longer feel compelled to make. ø
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