What Does it Mean to Stay on the Point?

The other day I had a phone conversation that I can only describe as disturbing. Without going into the details, it left me feeling unhappy, angry, and doubting myself for a few days (it was a terrible conversation!). I was completely pulled off-center, or off the point.

My teacher Manorama talks about staying on the point all the time: for yoga, it’s the whole point! (ha ha, I’ll be here all week, please tip your waitress). Staying on the point is a vast topic that we could discuss until the end of time, but in essence to me it means staying with the truth of our highest Self, staying connected to the pulsation that is Life, staying with the One that we all are, even as life bounces us around.

So here’s what I’ve been playing around with in my mind ever since the phone call: does staying on the point mean divorcing ourselves from our experiences? Are we supposed to be walking around bracing ourselves against any encounters that might interfere with our natural serenity (Remember that Seinfeld episode? – “SERENITY NOW!!”) and as a result end up disconnected from the world around us? Is the only place for a yogi to maintain that serenity a deep dark cave in the side of a mountain? Should we all stop what we’re doing and go there right now?

When we get disturbed, we are experiencing a kind of resistance to the reality of what is going on in a particular situation. We are disturbed by it, quite often, because it seems like something that is out of our control. Another person expressing anger at us, the passing of a loved one, our feelings or ego getting hurt, none of these things are included in our idea of how life should be. We resist them, and we suffer.

I took a class with a great teacher a few days ago, Eddie Marashian (look him up if you come to LA), and he told a story of a puppy he had as a child. When the puppy was taken to the vet to get its shots, it struggled so violently as it was being held down that it actually injured itself and died.  And truly, resistance builds up in the body as tension, as illness, as injury, as chronic pain. I don’t think the person I had the phone conversation with was in any way disturbed by it, and yet I walked around for a few days feeling terrible in body and mind.

So what do we do? We do our best to stay on the point, but here’s my point: staying on the point is not about being rigidly attached to an idea that the world is supposed to be flowers and rainbows and singing animals all the time. It’s not about becoming a hermit and avoiding any interactions with the world around us in an attempt to preserve some sort of serenity. That’s not real serenity anyway, if it’s so fragile that it cannot be challenged. The world challenges us every day, and it still would even if we were hiding in a cave.

Had I been able to stay on the point during this conversation, I would have found a way to create some kind of compassion for this fellow human being who was simply doing his best in the moment. When we practice living like this, we get to use the experiences of our lives as learning tools. We may find that compassion in the moment or upon later reflection (as I eventually did, with much help from the wise people around me), but either way we get to use our experiences to stay on the point.

YS  II.33 vitarka badhane pratipaksa bhavanam

When disturbed by negative thoughts, opposite ones should be thought of.

(translation by Sri Swami Satchidananda, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali)

[Side note about the sutra: this doesn’t mean if something bothers you, pretend it’s not happening and think about flowers and rainbows and singing animals! It means find another way to see the situation and experience the moment. See if in that moment of anger/upset/frustration/whatever you can flip it around and find another perspective.]