Welcome.
My name is Andrew McElroy and I'm your guide today.
This is one for the flat stretch.
Not crisis.
Crisis at least has urgency.
I mean the other thing.
Everything is fine.
And none of it means very much.
There's no technique that manufactures meaning.
I want to say that plainly at the start.
But there is a practice that reliably changes your relationship to the question.
And it's one of the oldest instructions in the tradition.
Let us commune and practice together.
The instruction is Ishvara Pranidhana.
It appears three times in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.
And he says that samadhi is attained through it.
Usually it is translated as surrender to God the divine.
Or a higher consciousness.
A lot of times this phrasing loses people immediately.
Including a fair number of practitioners.
A more useful reading.
Is the deliberate orientation of your attention to something larger than your own preferences.
Something bigger than you as the individual.
Note that it does not require.
It does not require belief.
It doesn't require a DDD.
Ishra in Patanjali is a remarkably spare concept.
One of the sutras describes it as a consciousness untouched by affliction,
Action,
And their residue.
That's closer to a direction than a person.
You can practice orientation toward the larger thing,
Whether or not that you have a name for it.
The research here is genuinely interesting,
And I'll give it to you carefully.
Long running work at Columbia,
Led by Lisa Miller,
Has followed the relationship between personal spirituality and depression across large longitudinal samples.
The consistent fighting is that people who report spirituality or religion is personally important to them show substantially lower rates of major depression over time.
The protective effect is its strongest in people with high familial risk.
Imaging work in the same group has associated high personal importance of spirituality with greater cortical thickness in regions that show thinning and depression.
But here's three honest caveats.
This is correlational.
Spirituality is not randomly assigned.
Personal importance matters far more than the data,
Than attendance and affiliation.
And spiritual here is self-defined by the participants.
It is not a proxy for a particular tradition.
What the evidence supports is modest and real.
Orienting towards something larger than yourselves appears to be protective.
It seems to be orienting that matters,
Not the label itself.
Please sit comfortably.
This is a contemplative practice rather than a breath practice.
So the breath just needs to be easy.
One note,
If you are carrying a religious injury,
And many people are.
The word surrender may land badly.
So use orientation instead.
Orient yourself to the divine,
The higher self.
Nothing in this practice asks you to submit to anything.
And this practice does not require a belief in a particular deity.
Let the eyes close.
And let your breath be ordinary.
I'm going to ask you three questions.
Don't answer them cleverly.
Answer them the way you'd answer if no one was listening.
Which is the case.
First.
Bring to mind one thing you've cared about.
But had nothing to do with taking your own advantage.
Not something noble.
Something true.
A person.
A place,
A piece of work nobody paid you for.
Notice what happens in the body when you hold it.
Second question.
Think of a moment when you felt small in a good way.
Not diminished,
Not humiliated.
Small the way that you feel small under a night sky.
Or in a very old building.
Or holding something newborn.
Find one moment where you felt small in a good way.
Now stay with it.
And let the scale of it be accurate.
Third,
And take your time with this one.
If the thing you're doing with your life is a small part of something that continues after you.
What is the something?
You don't need a complete answer.
A direction is enough.
A word is enough.
Whatever came or didn't come.
Let it rest.
And now simply sit facing it.
That's the whole of the Rishabh Prandhan.
Not believe.
Not certainty.
But orientation.
Back to the body.
And let's scan it.
The chest.
Is there anything different there?
Meaning tends to register in the sternum before it registers in language.
Maybe in the throat.
The belly.
And notice the flatness you came in with.
Still there.
Unchanged.
All three are acceptable answers.
Meaning isn't found once.
It's a direction you keep turning back toward.
The way you keep turning back to the breath.
You turned once today.
Iti,
Until we practice together again.
