Yoga and Meditation – Why do we think they’re separate?

kamesvari

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I found meditation practice just after college, a skinny bald kid on the run from “ordinary” life, at a Zen monastery in New Mexico. The bare-bones practice there was stern, painful, and strangely beautiful. I fell in love with the simplicity and order, and with an 86-year-old teacher who was the first to show me how much I didn’t understand. Later, in San Francisco, I began dancing and through it discovered A?tanga Yoga. For the next decade I practiced both, but for a long time they still felt separate. This non-overlap of Yoga and meditation is the norm in both my Yoga and Buddhist communities, but early texts of both traditions show no such borders.

Classical Yoga in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali leans strongly toward medit ation, famously discussing asana (posture, lit. “seat”) in just two verses (2.46-47), and then only to describe the necessary qualities of ease and stability, and to recommend a meditation subject. It is the much later Hatha Yoga texts, with their roots in Tantra, that begin to detail the panorama of asana and pranayama exercises we know today.

On the Buddhist side, Siddhartha (the soon-to-be Buddha) studied with two ascetic “Yoga” teachers as he began his practice. He mastered the deepest yogic states (samadhi) that they knew, but sensed that because these states were conditioned, i.e. self-induced and temporary, they coul d not be the full liberation he sought. He used his yogic skills as a doorway into the investigation and clear-seeing (vipassana) that led to enlightenment. Later Buddhist teachings merged with Saiva Tantra from Kashmir to become Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhism.

The Yoga texts, both Classical and Tantric, show remarkable overlap with Buddhist meditation teachings and the traditions both support and supplement each other. The Yoga practices of energetic cultivation (pranayama) and purification of the subtle body are more detailed and precise, while the Buddhist teachings elaborate the practical details of meditation more than the Yoga texts do, offerin g concrete skills for the cultivation of absorption (dhyana/samadhi), insight (vipassana) and wisdom (prajña/jñana).

At Yoga Mandala I teach a longer Hatha Flow class to give time for meditation and pranayama (breathwork). I focus on the cultivation of concentration and inner clarity in asana, supported by precise physical alignment and teachings from the Yoga tradition. With commitment to both the physical and mental practices, Yoga can become truly transformative, a path to radiant, integrated liberation.

Contributed by Sean Feit, October 2008