Insights On Key Concepts Of Yoga- Karma Fundamentals

Karma is one of THE most important terms/concepts in yoga. It is also one of the most used yoga term by people from all walks of life everywhere in the world. Because of this wide usage the infinite depth of meaning of this concept has got very shallow. It's important that yoga teachers and students understand karma better, as then slowly others can understand and apply in their lives. In this talk I start with a fundamental tenet And in future talks I will take you to a deeper dive

Transcript

Namaste all. So what is the purpose of doing yoga? There can be so many purposes but when we join a studio and just engage in some practices if we are not introduced to the deeper the philosophical underpinnings of yoga then we can assume that we are in it to kind of stretch to release stiffness of muscles to release stiffness of joints to make the muscles a bit more you know like flexible to to liberate ourselves from the stiffness and the tightness and the rigidity which minimizes our our freedom to move this can seem to be the purpose of yoga and at this point of time and that is perfectly fine but this idea is derived from a deeper context and that is the context of karma so karma is action which is tied up with karma phala which is the result of action and then this bondage this entanglement is called karma bandha okay this this bondage with the result of karma so there is karma there is karma phala there is karma bandha and we are all deeply enmeshed entangled in countless karmas and the consequences of that karma and we want to liberate ourselves from these entanglements which has made us stiff in our scope of understanding the freshness of the moment in responding in beautiful ways it the freedom of choice even how to respond how to perceive in a different way even that freedom of choice is compromised by being so entangled in this karma karma phala karma bandha so the practice of yoga especially in the light of the stream of wisdom tradition called Vedanta which is you might have heard the word Upanishad you might have heard the word Bhagavad Gita through all these kind of amazing texts what we understand is yoga is for liberating us from this cycle of action and bondage getting tied up with the results of action so that in the most simplistic way it is like yeah how we the action or the lack of faction we apply on the different joints of our body we get kind of enslaved by what we did or what we did not do to the body and then if it is not serving as well now and if you are not able to use the body in useful ways then we need to liberate this body from the self-imposed limitations through the different patterns which we only put the body into but this idea should not be just limited to the body so the whole teaching is about liberating our awareness from getting so entangled with karma and karma bandha karma phala so this is the overarching context of the open issues and today let's just talk about let's start with this topic of karma in a definition way show karma the basic meaning you should remember is it is just movement karma by itself doesn't mean results so the popular term karma is a bitch that we are talking from the standpoint of results happening that is a separate context so karma by itself simply means movement now what kind of movement the text talk about five kinds of moments they are upward downward sideways expand contract these are the five movements of karma so these movements when they combine together they become actions for example the upward and the downward so that when you put the sideways movement also into it then up to side to down to side to up we get the circular motion so when we see fans dwelling when we see wheels rotating in the vehicles that is all this circular motion that is karma so when we look around this whole universe is called a karma kshetra it's a field of karma and whether it's planets it is galaxies it is all following this rotation and revolutions so then you can you can acknowledge this karma okay that is the upward downward sideways and then there is the expand and contract so when things are come up kind of manifesting out we can say that is expanding that's opening up into manifestation and when things are settling down from the manifested level into an unmanifest level we can say it contracting back okay so that is one way to interpret that but in another way we can also see any movement we make for example right now I'm talking so that is a karma talking is a combination of different movements so the simple thing out of this karma five movements would be the expand and contract that you can put to any movement because there is some muscles which will be contracting and then the antagonist the other muscle on the other side will be lengthening and here talking we can see the vocal cord muscles they are contracting and releasing contracting and releasing so that these sounds are made so on the mat when you're making any movement to let's say you're raising your arm up we can see okay that is a contraction of the deltoid so that takes the arm bone up and as arm bone goes up then there is a expansion and lengthening of let's say lattice much dorsi and your pectoralis major the shoulder extensors gets a little bit lengthened you know so when the shoulder is flexing so so we add a layer of information and a contemplation when you when you include this kind of teachings into your practice so then the mirror raising of the arm transcends merely raising the arm so if you're merely raising the arm you are then perhaps caught up in a judgment of how much can I raise is it 180 degree can I take it back further if not okay am I going to label my shoulder as tight shoulder and slowly the the sense of I it is getting enslaved by all kinds of labels and ideas so we can put some space there when we give other things to contemplate on so the karma teachings are beautiful in that sense acknowledging that behind the movement the expression of the movement we can say that is the expansion but behind that there is a contract and expand from the muscular point of view too so from now on even as you practice on the mat just notice these five movements whenever and wherever you can detect it so for example many movements you can clearly see the upward and downward so we can take even body part so there's a lot of arms up and arms down in the mat practices then there is the the sideways stepping you know when we step out the feet that is a there's a sideways stepping so we can see that okay upward downward and sideways and then there is this opening of the heart the expansive movements of the arm sideways and lifting the heart that that we can put it to that expanse principle and and many times whenever you're working on that mula actions and would be an actions we can say okay we need to work on contract so we can try to bring these five movements into into the moments and acknowledging that no we are with these fundamental primal movements of the universe the five moments of karma so with that I end in this short introduction to the worst field of karma and soon I'll share a short meditation on these five moments of karma never say