Construct of Reality

Beyond Power Yoga
by Beryl Bender Birch

From Sweat to Samadhi: The Path of Astanga Yoga

Beyond Power Yoga presents and explores the complete journey of the classical astanga yoga system, from power yoga to meditation and liberation. Bender Birch's first book, the groundbreaking Power Yoga, introduced one level of astanga yoga to mainstream America — a high-heat, high-energy mind/body workout. Now, Beyond Power Yoga presents all eight levels, or limbs, of this ancient method — a total practice for body and soul.

Drawing a parallel between astanga yoga's eight limbs and the mind/body energy centers (chakras) of Eastern philosophy, Bender Birch shows us how we can balance and heal our body, focus and relax our mind, amplify and direct our energy (prana), and ultimately reclaim our spiritual connection to Universal Consciousness. Each chapter offers specific practices to help the reader uncover and experience the insights of the astanga yoga journey.

0. The YAMAS: Exploring the Fundamentals
1. The NIYAMAS: Doing the Work
2. ASANA: Practicing the Postures
3. PRANAYAMA: Breathing Mindfully
4. PRATYAHARA: Turning Inward
5. DHARANA: Developing Concentration
6. DHYANA: Experiencing Meditation
7. SAMADHI: Living Joyfully

Presented in the down-to-earth illuminating style and inspiring voice of the author, illustrated with easy-to-follow photos, plus a special wall chart of the asana sequences, Beyond Power Yoga offers a short form of the dynamic mind/body power yoga method, then journeys through the deeper levels of spiritual practice.

One night, after I got back to California, I was on my way home from a yoga class. I was sitting in the backseat of a car thinking about going to India. At the moment, I was actually visualizing climbing a mountainside covered with wildflowers in the foothills of the Himalayas (which, not coincidentally, I would eventually do). My friend turned to me and said, "You want to go to India, don't you?" This was too freaky! "Uh, yeah," I mumbled. "Well, you'll go," she said. A year later I was on my way. How did this work? Was it just a question of creating a thought form, and then holding that until it began to manifest? I starting tracing back the string of events of the past year or so. Every event had contributed to every other event. Everything was interconnected. If it hadn't been for this, then that wouldn't have happened. If it hadn't been for that, then this wouldn't have happened. It started to dawn on me how this all worked. I started to watch a little more closely what I envisioned and asked for.

My father is dying; an Indian yogi materializes to answer my questions about death and dying. I almost die in a blizzard and a dog that as a puppy was adopted, and inexplicably returned three times in a week before he ended up with me, saves my life. I dream of going to India and haven't a dime for the trip. Suddenly I have $1,500, which is exactly how much I need to buy my plane ticket and go to India for four months. As I look back at all of this, I can see that it never occurred to me that I wouldn't get answers and action in response to the questions I asked. As a child, I was in the habit of asking God questions and expecting answers. It never occurred to me that God wouldn't explain to me about my father. It never occurred to me that I wouldn't make it to Colorado. And it never occurred to me that I wouldn't go to India.

If I had stopped to figure it out in a linear or logical way, then I would have seen that since I was earning only $5 an hour, it was clearly going to take a very long time to get this trip together. But I didn't think like that. I just assumed that if God wanted me to go to India, God would come up with the money, somehow. I didn't put a logical limit, in terms of either time or effort, on how it was supposed to come. I just figured it would be there when I needed it and I went ahead with my plans. The next thing I knew it was time to go, and I sold my Volkswagen van for $500, sold an article I wrote on acupuncture for $500, and was given a $500 scholarship to go to India from a yoga school where I was studying. Practically overnight, I had $1,500.

It started to dawn on me that there was nothing that wasn't possible, and I started to live my life like that. Perhaps that is why I was so naïve when I first went to India. It never occurred to me that anything bad would happen, so that construct of reality didn't exist for me. Luckily, God covered my ass.

The Payback in Manali

Every twelve years in India there is a huge spiritual festival called Kumbha Mela. Devout Hindus from all over India travel to a designated city on the Ganges River. Then, at a particularly auspicious moment, determined by a team of astrologers and pundits, everyone tries to bathe in the river at the same time. This wouldn't be so bad, but generally there are well over two million people in attendance at these festivals. The year 1974 was a Kumbha Mela year and Hardwar, on the Ganges River, was the city where it was to be held, in mid-April. I had offered to cover the event for East West Journal, so after spending a month or so in and around Bombay, I needed to think about beginning the journey north (along with a few million other folks heading for the Ganges River) in order to write about and take some photographs of this unique festival.

In early April, I packed up and jumped on a train to New Delhi. From there I could take a bus and arrive in the general vicinity of Hardwar a few weeks before the masses arrived for Kumbha Mela. I kept a journal while traveling in India. Here is an entry from the train trip I took from Bombay to New Delhi: "A few hours north of Bombay, it begins to get very green, green fields, green trees and orchards. Every shade of green from lime green to deep forest green. It is the first green I have seen outside of Bombay's vegetable markets. It is breathtaking. It is one in the afternoon and people sit in the shade and watch the train go by. The sun is 180 degrees overhead. It is hot. A pig urinates. Men and women squat and watch and wait.... Oxen stand in knee-deep swamp grass... clumps of small boys watch the train.... A bicycle lies on its side in the dust.... A woman beats clothes on a rock in a small river. Saris are spread out on the grass, drying in the sun. Patches of bushes covered with assorted scraps of cloth and lengths of rags, all colors, all drying. We seem to make quite a large number of unscheduled stops, in the middle of nowhere, miles from the stations, only shacks, farms, tiny villages. A man and young boy appear in the distance. They carry a shiny brass urn and cross the fields towards the front of the train. They walk to the side of the train and some exchange goes on. The boy carries off two empty bottles. The simplicity is beyond the imagination, beyond conception. It can only be experienced."

The trip from Bombay was smooth and tranquil. The simple rhythms of the passing landscape were like a meditation mantra. When I arrived in New Delhi, it was hot as hell. My backpack was too heavy, which made it feel even hotter. Suddenly I was hot, sweaty, overburdened, and stressed. I felt too complicated. After a few days of shopping for Tibetan prayer beads and offloading some stuff at a friend's house, I headed up toward Hardwar. I was down to the bare essentials. I had a pair of rope-and-canvas shoes with recycled rubber tire soles that I had found in Delhi for 6 rupees (72 cents back then). I also had my Nikon camera and a good supply of film and felt tip pens. I wore a plain kadi sari, but now no one noticed because there were so many freaky-looking people converging on Hardwar anyway, a good many of whom were wandering around naked and covered with gray ash, that I just blended in with the circus.

By the time I arrived, there were already about five hundred thousand people in town. I spent several days photographing hundreds of arriving sadhus (monks) and other holy men and women, of all shapes and sizes and into all kinds of trips and all come to purify themselves physically and spiritually in Mother Ganges. It was still hot as hell, and it wasn't long before I had had enough of Kumbha Mela. I was due back in Bombay in a couple of weeks to walk for a month on silent retreat with a number of Jain nuns before the rainy season started in June. But first I had to see the mountains. How I ended up in Manali I don't really know, but it was a welcome change after the heat and madness of Hardwar.

I do remember someone telling me about a Tibetan refugee camp, and about a number of Tibetan lamas who had walked there, across the border from Tibet. So I honed in on this tiny village in the north of Himachal Pradesh, in the Himalayan foothills and on the border with Tibet. One thing led to another, and I ended up on a bus going from New Delhi to Chandigar in Punjab State on my way to Manali. There was an energy crisis in Chandigar when I arrived, and there was no electricity in the city. The bus schedule was shot to hell because of the lack of electricity, so I ended up camping overnight in the bus station. I struck up a conversation with Chai Baba, an Indian who was also on his way to Manali, and with a German hippie whose name I don't remember.

I slept peacefully, planted between my two adopted bodyguards, Chai Baba and the German. The next morning I left very very early on the first bus out of town for Kulu Valley, just south of Kashmir. The English had planted lots of apple and fruit trees in Kulu Valley when they were a presence in India, and Manali was one of the places in the high valley where the upper-class British living in India spent their summers to escape the heat of New Delhi. How they ever got there back in the early part of the century, or even twenty years ago, is a total mystery to me! Here is the entry from my journal for April 18: "The longest, hottest, most nearly unbearable thirteen hours that I can remember... bus to Manali — packed with people. Winding moun-tain roads all the way — bumpy, under construction. 'Under construction' means Tibetan men and women digging into the mountainside and hauling chunks of granite away in baskets on their heads. The women seemed to work physically as hard as the men and all with babies strapped to their backs and the family fortune in coral and turquoise beads hanging from their necks and woven into their jet black hair."

Every few hours the bus would stop at some roadside village for "refreshments" for the passengers. Everyone would pile off the bus and head for the fields to pee. Children, chickens, goats, and bags would be unloaded and then reloaded when we were ready to go. Belongings were hanging out of every window and off the luggage racks on top and everything would get shuffled around at every stop to make room for some new passengers. Young boys selling clay cups of chai would gather around the bus. You could take the cup of tea on the bus with you, and then, when you finished your chai, you could just throw the cup out the window and it would shatter and return to dust, which I thought was perhaps the coolest thing about my whole trip to India. About eight hours into the trip, I got off the bus for a few minutes, and I left my bag, with my Nikon camera stuffed in the bottom, on the bus under the seat. A few hours later, when my first view of the Himalayan Mountains came into sight, I scrambled to get out my camera. I pulled out everything in the bag, and at the bottom of the bag was an enormous stone, about the same size and weight as my camera.

I stared at the stone. I emptied the bag. No camera? No camera! A stone! A stone? This didn't compute. How did this stone get into my bag? I just sat there with nothing registering for a few minutes. I kept looking at the stone, trying to figure out how my Nikon camera had turned to stone. Finally the whole picture began to dawn on me. Of course, part of me just wanted to go nuts, but my reluctance to embarrass myself took precedence over my desire to freak out and tear up the entire bus! I just sat there. My fucking Nikon camera had been stolen right from under my nose, and what was worse, probably by someone who didn't have a clue how much the goddamned thing was worth. This whole event, I slowly realized, was premeditated to the point that someone actually had taken my camera out of my bag and replaced it with a stone of about the same size so that I would not know my camera was missing until I actually looked in the bag. It must have been someone who already had seen my camera when I had it out somewhere. I couldn't believe it! Who? How? I felt a flood of panic. The mountains! My first trip to the Himalayas. How would I record the event?

The strangest thing happened. I just kind of looked around and said, "Well, okay, I guess I'm not meant to take any pictures in the mountains!" I was very calm. I remember starting to feel pain, but I shoved it back down. I was bloody stoic, in fact. But did I really "get" the teaching? Or did I just bury my feelings as I had when my mother died? By rights, I should have felt something. I mean it was okay to get really pissed off. It was a brand-new Nikon F. Ah well, one thing was for sure: The camera was gone. Really, what was the point of getting angry? Nothing could be done. Whom could I be angry with? God? Life? Everybody on the bus? India? Whom could I blame? I said to myself, "This is a lesson. This is a very big, painful lesson. But what is the teaching, here?" For a while, I carried the stone around in my bag. I wanted to chain it to my ankle, like shackles, to remind me of my unconsciousness. I carried it all the way to Manali. People asked me, "What is that stone you are carrying?" Ah, well, yes, you would have had to have been there!

Copyright © 2000 by Beryl Bender Birch

About the Author

Beryl Bender Birch is the bestselling author of Power Yoga and the Director of The Hard & The Soft Astanga Yoga Institute (since 1981). She is also the Wellness Director and Yoga Teacher-in-Residence of the New York Road Runners Club. She is one of the most highly regarded and well-known yoga teachers in the United States.