Using Discernment
Photograph by Rami Schandall ©2021.
When I teach yoga, a frequent refrain is “use your discernment.” I ask students to choose the variation or duration of a pose that fits this moment — FOR THEM. That means that we all move differently, we are not perfectly choreographed with each other. It may look chaotic, but freedom within a container of guidance, is a central principal in my teaching.
It may feel more demanding to be asked to discern, or we may feel uncertain of the signals our bodies give. A teacher might offer insight, from their experience with many students and through their training, but the teacher never, ever, knows better than the student what is happening for them.
Months ago I was writing my way through the yamas and niyamas, the yoga precepts described by the sage Patanjali. I paused at the fourth yama, brahmacharya, sometimes translated as celibacy or chastity. This meaning would apply in a particular cultural sense, to a specific stage of life when young men who pursued religious study were expected to be chaste. They would marry later, in this tradition, and carry on their lives as householders. How to relate this precept to practitioners in our modern, secular context?
Another translation of bramacharya that works well in my mind is right use of energy. In yoga and in meditation, we spend a lot of time discerning HOW we are using our energy—on gross and subtle levels, social, interior. What is the quality of our experience, and how are are we directing our vital energy? An understanding of right use might be as simple as tending well to our body. We know the cascade of benefits that come of being well-cared-for in body, including psychological benefits, social benefits, long-term health benefits.
Yet in brahmacharya also a sense of self-mastery — which requires self-knowledge, as well as a sense of something beyond our body/mind/self. Brahm, in yoga philosophy, is the beyond-time, beyond-birth-and-death Being — the Self that is not separate. Acharya is an expert, one with mastery, and one who teaches. So brahmacharya is this principal of mastership in Brahm, a steadiness in “oneness,” not caught up in mundane desires, oriented to the divine.
Here is a much less esoteric example of discernment, from a wise man closer to our time, Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk; from Faith and Violence (1968).
I have watched TV twice in my life. I am frankly not terribly interested in TV. I do not pretend that by simply refusing to keep up with the latest news I am therefore unaffected by what goes on, or free of it all. Certainly events happen and they affect me as they do other people. It is important for me to know about them too: but I refrain from trying to know them in their fresh condition as “news.” When they reach me they have become slightly stale. I eat the same tragedies as others, but in the form of tasteless crusts. The news reaches me in the long run through books and magazines, and no longer as a stimulant. Living without news is like living without cigarettes (another peculiarity of the monastic life). The need for this habitual indulgence quickly disappears. So, when you hear the news without the “need” to hear it, it treats you differently. And you treat it differently too.
I hope you enjoy chewing on these ideas, remembering that precepts are principles to work with, and we do that imperfectly. I like to think of them as questions. How am I using my vital energy? What would be right use in this one life? Let’s ask with fondness, and respect.
