Chapter One Effortlessness "The pose is what you are doing. Yoga is how you are being in the pose." --Rolf Gates I have chosen to begin with a chapter on effort. The remainder of the book will be about things that we do and choices that we make, and I feel that it''s important, before embarking on that journey, to explain that how we perform an action is as important as the action itself. Sometimes, even when we apply ourselves to all the right things for all the right reasons and get good results, we continue to experience the same inner suffering that drove us to seek help in the first place. It feels as though we will never be free of a nagging inner tension, a belief that as much as we want things to be okay, they never will be. This can be a permanent state of affairs but it does not have to be. With the right support we can discover something simple and easy to remember that will alter how we approach the process of change.

We come to see that how we are being is more important than what we are doing. Doing a yoga pose while attached to a specific result is not the practice of yoga, it is the practice of attachment. Attachment focuses on the results and pulls our attention away from the process and opportunities for positive outcomes that present themselves as a moment unfolds. Starting a career, ending a marriage, or raising a family in a state of attachment to the outcome, likewise, is the practice of attachment and will yield the results of attachment. We can''t free ourselves from a way of being without consciously letting go of that way of being. We must let go of what the Buddhists call our "contracted states" if we wish to experience what exists beyond them. When I first started out as a yoga teacher, I tried to teach people to be in a pose without the effort of control or attachment. These two forms of effort felt to me as if they were at the heart of most contracted states.

In my own practice, when I could identify the energies of attachment and control within me and let them go, I could access inner stillness, deepen my awareness of the present moment, and arrive at an overall steadier place on my mat and on my cushion. Control and attachment were obscuring my connection to the present moment, and when I was able to let them go things improved rapidly. I wanted my students to experience this. But it is my belief that telling someone not to do something is not as helpful as telling someone what to do. So I maintained the same intention but kept refining my language. Eventually, I began to teach students to hold a pose with the intention of effortlessness. I had been teaching yoga as the embodiment of intention for some time. I would, for example, teach students to come into the intentions of awareness and ease in their bodies, and to rest in the felt experience of those intentions.

How are these intentions being expressed? Is the energy of control there? Is the energy of attachment there? I began to ask, "Can you allow the expression of those intentions to be effortless?" Spiritual practice can be understood as cultivating the habit of meeting low-­energy patterns, like ill will or craving, with high-­energy intentions, like kindness and generosity. This process finds its true potential when we discover the ability to hold a high-­energy intention effortlessly. Yoga finds its relevance when it can impact the way we are moving through life. My personal intention for my relationships is that I embody wisdom and compassion as I relate to my students, joy and equanimity as I drive my children to school, steadiness and ease as I sit in meditation, and loving-­kindness and appreciation as I have lunch with my wife. In my experience, I can seek to embody love while also being attached to the results of my actions and still trying to control others. I can create inner turmoil with the very practices that are designed to relieve it. To express an intention effortlessly empties the intention of anything extra. I can be love without attachment, awareness without control.

This chapter explores the felt experience of effortlessness. DAY 1 Getting Set The air that travels across the Pacific Ocean before it reaches land has a special aliveness and sweetness to it. Breathing it feels like drinking the purest water. Waking in the early morning, I find a stillness that can be felt the way Pacific Ocean air can be breathed. Most days this stillness is the first thing I bring my conscious attention to. In the quiet darkness, I listen to it the way you listen to a breeze moving through fall leaves, breathing it in with my whole body. Taking my seat for meditation is a deliberate process. Steady in my connection to the earth (sits bones even), with a strong center (core), rooted in spirit (aware and engaged through the back of my torso), I offer my heart (shoulder integration) and align my will and my wisdom to the divine (ears over shoulders).

The physical effort of coming into alignment is then transferred to the inner body, which brightens as the outer body softens. The balancing of my inner body and my outer body is arrived at effortlessly. The stillness of the seat I''ve taken vanishes into the stillness of the morning. DAY 2 Knowing That I Am Sitting When I Am Sitting Once I have taken my seat, I begin the process of letting go. The momentum that got me to my seat is no longer required in the way that walking is no longer required once you have arrived at your destination. Taking my seat is a shift from thinking to feeling. The rest of my meditation practice is a continuation of that process. The first thing I feel into is my body and the fact that I can be consciously aware of it without commentary.

I spend time in the mystery of knowing that I am sitting when I am sitting. My body, and my awareness of it, brings me into direct contact with the ordinary nature of the miraculous. I am living, embodied awareness, within and expressing an eternal moment the way a wave is within and expresses the ocean. At the heart of this dynamic experience is an effortless stillness that feels like home to me. DAY 3 Just Passing Through Connecting to stillness is like connecting to silence. We come to see that stillness and silence form the backdrop of our lives and that everything else is just passing through. Sounds come and go, sensations come and go, thoughts, emotions, all of them traveling through stillness and silence like fish moving through an eternal ocean or weather traveling across an eternal sky. As I begin my meditation, my body carries with it the experience of stillness and my mind becomes silent.

I become the sky that holds the weather. Resting in the felt experience of my body, I am able to give my full attention to the weather of my life, to care for what is coming and going with wisdom and compassion, to love what is just passing through. DAY 4 Life''s Heartbeat Sound travels through silence in patterns we call rhythm. Sensation travels through awareness in rhythms. Movements arise and pass rhythmically. A funny joke, a well-­taught yoga class, the sound of anger, the pitch of joy, the rocking of a baby to sleep--­all of it is rhythm. It is said that everything in the physical universe is information vibrating at different rhythms; the study of life amounts to the study of rhythm. Time spent in silence and stillness reveals this to be true.

There is the eternal moment and there are the rhythms it holds like the sky holding weather. The first rhythm I was taught to feel into, or experience, was the rhythm of the breath. As I did so I discovered life''s heartbeat. Within the rhythm of my breathing is the rhythm of all the breaths and all the heartbeats. Within the rhythm of my breathing lies the secret that I am every being and every being is me. DAY 5 The First Breath A friend of mine told me about a teacher who said to him, "I know the last thing you will do." My friend was taken aback, but nonetheless he asked the teacher, "Okay, what will be the last thing I do?" The teacher replied, "You will exhale." I have heard my friend tell this story a few times, and it always gets a laugh and gets people thinking.

Our thoughts turn to our last breath and then, I believe, most of us reflect on our first breath. What was it like, to awaken into this world on an inhale? After a period of meditation on the body I begin to include the rhythm of the breath. Having rested in the felt experience of sitting, I begin to rest in the felt experience of sitting and breathing. As my attention moves into the breath there is always a moment of awakening to the act of breathing as I take my first full inhale. DAY 6 Sitting and Breathing Yoga practice is intensely practical and wastes nothing. To learn about life you study movement and stillness. Walking becomes a practice, standing becomes a practice, lying down and doing nothing becomes a practice, sitting and breathing becomes a practice. In the peace of the early morning, as I let go of the need to do anything or be anywhere else, I find myself sitting and breathing in the midst of a world waking up.

Birdsong moving in and out of silence, cool morning air drifting on the subtlest of currents, the smell of earth and leaves wet from ocean fog, eternal silence, stillness, and space. I have a friend whose love of ocean diving began when she realized the tiny crab she was observing at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea shared a world that stretched around the entire planet. Sitting and breathing, we begin to understand the vastness of the moment in which we exist. DAY 7 Resting I held my son, Dylan, for the first forty-­five minutes or so of his life. I watched as his eyes opened and he.