Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Ever thought about what would happen if we took those instructions literally?  We’d be in a captive, torturous, vicious cycle that we could not quit.  Of course we know better than to get ourselves stuck in the shower, unable to get to work or get on with our lives.  The yoga tradition is full of warnings against samskaras, those ‘scars’ that we make through living by habit, unconsciously.  They happen little bit by little bit, until the pattern is undeniable. 

A few months ago, my mom ended up in the E. R.  It was no freak accident that caused this trip, though.  It was her contact lens.  Years and years of wearing hard contacts had literally worn a groove in her eyeball, to the extent that one night she just couldn’t get that sucker back out.  This is a woman who abided by all of the rules of contact lens wearing…the ones that I really, really should.  And yet, here she was, in the middle of the night, with a doctor flushing that little lens of empowered vision out of her eye. 

[This kind of injury is exactly what your yoga teacher is telling you about lifting your finger pads up or dropping the head of your arm bone forward in caturanga dandasana.  You won’t get hurt today, but when it happens it will feel like it happens in a moment.]

Not all repetitive cycles are the negative type.  How many times do you stir the pot, make the bed, pick up the child?  You do it until it’s done.  And yes, it wears a groove.  There’s a certain efficiency in that.  A way that you don’t have to ask yourself, “Should I pick him up again?”  You just do.  It’s only when we slavishly follow the laundry-must-be-done-on-Saturday-and-not-a-day-before-or-after routine that we are victims. 

Mythic consciousness offers us the images of the buffalo and the cobra.  The buffalo is a dense animal, with no extra space to know anything else besides its own nature.  It ruminates, telling itself the same story over and over, unable to hear any other version of the story than the one that keeps regurgitating itself.  The saying goes, “Even if Lord Krishna plays his flute, the buffalo will still chew its cud.”  The buffalo is not aroused, but the cobra is.  Cobras are poisonous snakes, and that poison both protects them and is the means by which they can assimilate food.  The cobra eats, grows bigger, and sheds its old skin, leaving it behind, but with a new skin that will serve well.  Until growth requires a new shedding, during which we’re a little vulnerable to predators. 

Cobra consciousness invites us to the recursive process of growth.  A recursive process is one that reviews what happened in previous iterations and then adds on.  It’s the reason that you can drop in to a yoga class without already knowing everything about yoga.  The teacher starts with the basic instructions about breathing and what to do with your hands and feet.  Every time.  Even in the advanced class.  After a few poses, she tells you how to use some muscles.  In between instructions, she links things together, “Keeping that, add this.”  The review is built in, and each next step requires the steps before.   

And, beautifully, recursion refines, allowing the version that wasn’t the most optimal or most current to pass away, just like your tenth-grade biology book.  Just like old skin.  We just know more now.  We’re bigger now.  We contain more. 

 P.S. – When I was contemplating this post, I had a moment of déjà vu.  Had I written this before?  I can’t find any evidence that I had, but I must have written this a few times in my head before it finally emerged.  I guess it took a few layers of growth.  And I know that I learned while I wrote it.