Is an ascetic approach exclusive?
An ascetic approach can be exclusive, if it's held in a manner that supports separation, or it can be another way the divine wishes to experience itself. Celibacy can either be a separative approach when a person feels that becoming involved in sexual urges will take him or her away from the divine. That view is a distancing or refusing of an aspect of Self. Or celibacy can be a natural movement in a particular person that isn't exclusive or rejecting.

An evolution.
An expression of the divine as that particular body/mind. Sitting next to the celibate could be a householder with children, and when they have a conversation, there would be no argument. They could both be Self-realized; the same realization lived as different expressions of oneness.

Jean once told a story. He lived in India for several years and met a Tibetan Lama who later wrote Jean a letter when Jean was living in Paris. The Lama said that he had two of his trained teachers who were coming to Paris; would Jean show them around? Jean said he would love to. Jean showed them all the sights of Paris, the rivers and the Eiffel Tower. But when he showed them the red light district they reacted off the wall. Jean commented that he realized then, that they weren't totally cooked!

I was with a Hindu monk a few years ago who commented: "When I see a nun in my order coming toward me, I look down until she passes by." I thought to myself: "You poor man. You just missed your Self walking by. Why refuse your Self in that guise?"

Do you believe there's evolution in yoga? Do you think everything returns to the seed of the teaching, or do you think the form evolves?
It seems both are true. There's an evolution because we see it happening. Yoga has come to the west. There appears to be many people waking up now and becoming interested in spiritual teachings. These movements feel evolutionary. However, I would say there's never evolution in consciousness. Yet there are expressions of consciousness that are evolving. The brain is evolving and perhaps one day the brain will have the capacity for this understanding of nonduality from early on. So I feel both are true, there's evolution at the material level, but in awareness, consciousness, I don't think evolution is possible.

It's like this room, the things within it are constantly changing. Furniture is moved in and out. Once it was a house where people lived; now it has evolved into a clinic. But all the while the space in this room has never changed. To me, space is similar to what we are, which is unchanging awareness.

Who we are fundamentally is spacious presence - call it anything you like - consciousness, God, awareness...no evolution is possible here. Awareness was here before, it is here during, and it will be here after all movements have come and gone. If we know our Self as that, then we're fine with the comings and goings. But if we're identified with the changing phenomena, then we're in trouble .
I thought the troubles I was experiencing in my early years could be rectified through changing this body/mind and becoming psychologically fit. I remember the day when my therapist said: "As far as I'm concerned you're done. You're a psychologically well-adjusted human being and I can't take you any further." And I said to him: "But something is still missing." And he said: "Yes, and I can't take you where you're going."

To me that's what yoga is ultimately about, the realization that changing ourselves keeps the problem in place. We must thoroughly exhaust the mind's desire to change itself until we come to this ultimate truth that who we are is unchanging awareness that is always happy, always peaceful, even during the greatest difficulty. We need to keep going until we are completely free.

I like to use the koshas as a model for how deconstruction of this personal self naturally unfolds through self-inquiry. We investigate our mis-identification with the physical body, the Anamaya Kosha, during Hatha yoga. We investigate the energy body, the Pranamaya Kosha, with the breath during pranayama.

Then we investigate these emotions that so disturb us in the Manomaya Kosha, until they completely empty out. As emotions deconstruct we come naturally to the deeper level of the Vijñânamaya Kosha, the level of belief held by the thinking mind. As we investigate mental beliefs, we come upon an uncaused joy that is naturally present as the Anandamaya Kosha.

This reminds me of a question that Jean was asked during a dialogue: "If we're already perfect and there's nothing we can do to change ourselves, then why are we here on retreat?" Jean aptly responded with: "For the sheer joy of the Self being with its Self."

Do you think joy is recognition?
Joy is uncaused, but when one recognizes one's true Self, it is pure joy. And then there may come a moment when the question is asked: "Who's aware of all of this? All of these movements?" And then all of the energy that has been outward oriented is turned back into witnessing the witness. Here, the "I" as the witness is investigated.

We think we are this personality that walks and talks and has its likes and dislikes, and yet the personality is only an appearance in who we are as awareness. The body/mind is a beautiful expression, but it isn't who we ultimately are.

You talk about explosion a lot. You also talk about deconstruction.
Deconstruction and explosion are the same word for me. All that we take ourselves to be gets deconstructed, exploded, in a timeless moment of Self-recognition. The personal self falls apart in a deep, intuitive understanding that unfolds from beyond the mind. The understanding surfaces that there is no separation anywhere, under any circumstance.

Now, with everything I see there's an immediacy of contact, where its underlying nondual nature is understood to be my nature. There's simultaneously the seeing of the so-called object and its total transparency. I think this is what the yogis talked about when they describe tratakam or gazing. Gazing at a candle, gazing at a tree, a rock, gazing at you. I look at you and you empty out of your separateness and I experience that you and I are always one. You're this lovely presence that I am, too.

I'm interested in this relationship where we come together and deconstruct the personality that gets in the way of non-separate intimacy. In this intimacy there is only awareness seeing itself, which to me has a real sense of joy and lovingness in it.

You're interested in connection.
Yes, ultimate connection where there's only spontaneous playfulness. Awareness wants to know itself through another, to play with itself. Awareness delights in losing and then finding itself over and over again.

Are you interested in change?
At the level of awareness I don't see the possibility for change. Patañjali describes this in his fourth chapter, sutra four, when he says that: "Any introduction of a new, transforming influence only erects one more barrier to knowing ourselves." The moment I introduce the notion of change, I create a barrier of separation that ultimately will have to be deconstructed. When we try to change ourselves, we are actually going away from our Self.

The fundamental realization is that we're all perfect, right now. I realize that: "Oh, I was This all along. All along I was This." Nothing I have ever done has changed or altered this fact.

And yet there is this body, with emotions, with thoughts. But when we investigate the body, emotions and beliefs, they deconstruct into their underlying nondual nature and we realize the beauty of who we really are. So I would say at one level, yes, I'm interested in change. But ultimately, no, I'm not interested in change because trying to change ourselves keeps us in the box. It's a paradox. Both movements are useful.

I would say there's a danger in meditation, of dissociation. Especially from emotion.
Yes, dissociation is a refusing to be with an experience. Refusing to be with emotion; refusing to be with thought. When somebody goes through a traumatic incident, they may dissociate, because the situation overwhelms their capacity for understanding. The mind cannot integrate the experience, so they push away from it. But real meditation pushes you more deeply into feeling and embracing the experience, welcoming it. You realize that denying the experience is keeping you in suffering, keeping you in a box.

Certainly the way some people practice and teach meditation fosters dissociation. How do you avoid that?
People may take any technique and use it for their own design. But my desire is to support people in deeply experiencing their body/mind. Feeling and experiencing every facet of life. Because I know that as they do, long-repressed emotion and mental beliefs are going to surface.

I support people to feel their emotions and experience their beliefs, to become reacquainted with them and be moved by them. As they feel and welcome these movements, they're no longer in denial, and there's a natural disidentification from the emotion and the belief. But there's no dissociation, there's only deep feeling, deep experiencing.

My joke is that in the 1960s people dissociated by meditating and trying to check into the OM Hotel. In the 1980s they crashed back to earth. They had to come back and feel what it's like to be on earth, to have a job, to raise kids, to be in the world and experience life.

Yoga should push us fully into life, not take us away. This is what yoga has to offer us in the West. In the East yoga has become dissociation. There, people take up yoga and are rewarded for leaving their family, for becoming wandering ascetics. In the West we have a different attitude. We have the attitude of the householder, having a job, having kids, being rooted.

Being material beings.
Being spiritual beings materialized in this plane. Awakening to the fundamental truth is about totally embracing life. Embracing leads to the highest realization of truth. Self-realization is compatible with being a householder with a job and kids.

Do you have any parenting tips?
Yes, I do. Every button that our kids push in us is our opportunity to come back to ourself and inquire: "What's my belief about myself that he or she is helping me see?" We must inquire, rather than tell them what to do. Though ultimately, we have to do that too because that's part of parenting. But we simultaneously inquire: "What's going on here? Why am I upset? What's my expectation?"

One day my family was going to the beach. Everybody was in the car and my young boy said: "I'm not going." I said: "Wait a minute. We're all loaded in the car, we're all going to the beach. You're coming." And he said: "No." He didn't want to go. I could feel myself getting upset. But in that moment there was also an immediate and spontaneous inquiry. I knew he wasn't the one upsetting me, it was my expectation that was upsetting me. If he stayed home, I, or my wife had to stay home with him, because he was too young. That's the responsibility of being a parent. Realizing my expectation, I said to him: "Okay. If you're not going to the beach, then I'm staying with you." I had let go of my expectation that things should be different. I was okay staying. Then, after about five minutes, he said: "Let's go to the beach."

You must have really meant it!
I did because I had let go of my expectation and was relaxed again. I was back in the now of the present moment, without expectation. I also told him there wasn't going to be any TV. So the beach became a better alternative in his mind!

There was another time... My son has a medical condition that requires an MRI every other year. We were going to get the MRI and he said: "No, I'm not gonna go." In my mind we didn't have a choice. But he didn't want to go. So I said in all sincerity: "You know, I don't want to go either." And he immediately said: "Okay. Let's go." Again he knew I meant it, that I wasn't playing. I didn't know what we were going to do, I was just open to the truth of the moment. And he responded to that openness. Our children always respond to our openness, never to our expectations.

It's the "I don't know" that's so vital, where we are truly open rather than blinded and upset by our expectations. It's true that the mind needs expectations to set up a progression of unfolding. I'm coming to Calgary, I need to get the ticket, and I'm expecting to go, so the mind has set up all these things. I was expecting to do the MRI. But then life says: "No."

In that moment of "No," the mind has to tear up the expectation. Then we're back in the unknown. The ability to do this in the immediacy of the moment keeps us from engaging in strong reactions. Upset? What's the expectation? Tear it up. Back in the unknown. Now we're open again. To me this is the impact this realization or understanding of the truth of nondualism has on the body/mind. It's practical.

How do you bring your understanding of Advaita to your psychotherapy practice? How do you bridge psychology and yoga?
It's an integrated understanding. Someone comes in with a problem. There's something in their life that they don't know how to be with. There's refusing going on. They may have experienced a trauma that they weren't able to fully be with in the moment. So they are stuck. It may be an emotion like anger that they've never learned how to be with. It may be a belief that they're unworthy.

To me psychotherapy, like Advaita, is a deep inquiry into the question: "Who am I?" We start with an object, an emotion, an experience, a belief. Inquiring, we open up the body feeling. Someone will say: "I feel sad." When I'm sitting with someone, because we're not separate, whatever they're feeling, I'm feeling too. My body resonates with theirs. Somebody sits down and I immediately feel their sadness in my chest.

You empathically connect with them.
Yes. And I might say: "Talk to me about what you're feeling right now." And they might respond intellectually. So I say: "Can you stop for a minute and feel into your chest." I'll inquire to help them experience their emotional body. I help them contact the emotion that's there, whether it's fear, anxiety, sadness, grief, whatever, until they can open completely to their feeling.

It involves tracking. They might start with confusion that opens into anxiety, that moves to fear, that's actually a deep grieving. As they open to their grieving, we inquire into the beliefs they have with respect to their experience.

Opening to their emotions and beliefs opens people into a greater sense of freedom, a working through to a resolution of what they came in not being able to be with. And that's all they may want from psychotherapy. But every once in a while a person is interested in a greater freedom. Freedom in their psychology isn't enough. They still feel something is missing. Then, we inquire more deeply into the questions: "Who is aware. Who is this 'I' that you take yourself to be?" I may also invite them to attend a meditation retreat or engage in doing yoga or some other discipline that has to do with diving deeply into Self-understanding.

Currently, I limit my practice to people who sense that there's something deeper and are interested in Self-inquiry. Then, as they're experiencing themselves, we can inquire further: "Who's aware of this experience?" This questions opens us beyond where ordinary psychotherapy goes. Every experience is then a pointer to nondual spaciousness.

At times I will sit together with my clients and gaze into each other's eyes, into our beingness. While gazing I have them describe what they're experiencing. Through gazing they may come to this forefeeling, this sense of open spaciousness that is their nondual beingness. Psychotherapy, from this perspective, is an exploration, more meditative than psychological, because we aren't trying to change anything.

Do you equate healing with spaciousness?
I would say there are two types of healing. There's healing into the knowing of oneself as not separate. Physical healing may accompany this realization. Or not. Certainly as one moves into this understanding, psychological movements are healed. That's a fact. That doesn't mean that residues don't remain. If someone has been traumatized, certain residues may remain, but these residues no longer bind. As emotion empties out of the unconscious into awareness, the person may continue to experience residues of the original trauma, but they will no longer be shaken as before. They know they are something greater.

Awareness is always in the background. As a person is describing their psychological or physical state, they're surrounded by spaciousness, by presence. They just don't know it. But I'm sitting here knowingly knowing, and knowing that I can't tell them about it. We just have to be patient and wade through until this understanding erupts.

Doesn't your knowledge of that awareness affect them?
It has its own impact. But I can't tell them about it because then it becomes an object. A person may be ripe in the moment to hear: "This is who you are." But their prior work has laid the ground for this moment of true understanding.

My hope is that my clients and students get so interested in the exploration that they give up the goal. In that moment they're fully open to just being here. That's when the magic happens. But the moment we say that we're going to go into this because we know deconstruction will happen, we are back in the cage. We have to be open to the unknown. Otherwise we get stuck.

It's got to be for the love of the journey and the exploration. We do know, however, that when we fully go into whatever is present, something hidden is going to be revealed. Ultimately, the notion of feeling separate gets seen through. In every case? Absolutely not; because consciousness also wants to experience itself as searching and never finding. It has occurred to me that even after this understanding of truth comes, consciousness may want to go back to sleep and forget again and be back in suffering and despair. Everything is a movement of consciousness playing with itself. I don't mean this in a trite manner, but very seriously. Everything is consciousness.

Do you go back to suffering and despair?
I haven't. Will I? I don't know. That possibility is there. Could I get divorced? Will I stay married forever? Will I have a heart attack in the next moment? I don't know.

Could you speak about the role of community?
I feel strongly that there's an inquiry into who we are, psychologically and spiritually, that we have to do by ourselves. We have to sit quietly. We have to walk in nature. We have to turn inward.

And there's another inquiry that we have to do with another person. We have to find another and say: "I have this feeling I don't understand. May I bounce my thoughts off you? May we discuss this together?" Inquiry with another pries out a deeper level of understanding than when we only do it alone. Through another's eyes we may awaken to something we hadn't seen.

Being with a group of people, in community, brings up an even deeper level of fear or misperception that we must learn to be with. Being willing to be totally open and vulnerable in a group, describing the very thing that we're afraid of, pries out a deep level of refusing that would otherwise be missed in interaction with another or when we are alone. Without community it would be rare for a person to go all the way to freedom.

When we work alone in meditation we can become stuck. We reach roadblocks. Then we must search out another to help us in our desperation. But we will go only so far with another until we find ourselves against another roadblock, stuck again. We then must search out a group of people who can help us inquire more deeply. This last movement comes out of a deep desperation where we're finally willing to be fully and totally vulnerable because we don't see any other way.

If we're not that desperate, we'll hold back the piece that is blocking our absolute freedom. We're afraid that if we really show this last piece, no one's going to want to have anything to do with us. However, when we finally bring it out, we realize the truth all along was that we didn't want to have anything to do with ourself. When we finally bring it out, we realize it never had to do with another. It was simply our separation from ourself. We didn't want to see this, but in the end, we have to or we will remain forever separate and alone.

Are you saying that without community, we're always withholding?
There's will always be a rare individual who can do it by themselves, or with one other such as the teacher. But what I see is that for 99.9% of us, we need the group, we need a community of like-minded practitioners, because the group helps us expose the deep elements within that are being held back and preventing us from realizing truth.

Because this interview is for an issue about breath, could you speak about pranayama?
I see pranayama as multi-tiered. There is a level of pranayama that is practiced for physical health. Doing pranayama daily strengthens the immune system. It can help heal the body and create vitality in the body/mind. When we use it in meditation, pranayama supports mindfulness - one-pointedness of the mind. But to me these are superficial uses of the breath.

To go deeper we need to inquire where the breath comes from. Where is the source of the breath? And where does the breath go when it ends? We need to locate the source of the breath at either end of the inhalation and the exhalation. Then the breath brings us into the mystery that is our true nature. The mind can't go here. It's left behind.

When we trace the breath back to its source, all of a sudden we are immersed in the mystery. This has a strong impact upon the body/mind. So the breath is an exquisite pointer to our true nature. I do pranayama every morning for health, but each breath always points back to the great stillness that is the source of the breath and who we ultimately are as nondual presence.

The absence of the breath is silence. But what is there when there is the absence of even this absence? Here is where we find our Self. The breath takes us to the threshold of Self-knowing. We realize the breath as a superimposition on a tremendous uncaused stillness, that is our true nature. The breath is always pointing to who we are. To me this is the proper use of breath. This is the manner in which I teach pranayama. But I also teach it for health.

Could you say more about the pause?
At first, most people experience the pause as a stopping of the breath, the cessation of breath. This kind of pause leads to a quieter mind. As we go into the pause, we may observe how the physical breath comes to an end, but realize that there is a continuation of energy here, that was underlying or giving rise to the physical breath.

After the physical breath ends, we observe this energetic quality that's still moving and we experience how it slowly dissolves and comes to a complete standstill. To experience this is a tremendous breakthrough in understanding the deeper quality of the breath and the experience of a silent mind.

But we need to keep going into the pause. We ask the questions: "Where does the breath and this energy go to? What is its source?" Here we must relinquish conceptual thinking. This is a feeling inquiry, not a conceptual inquiry. Then, in a sudden flash of insight, we may realize that we are the mystery behind the breath, because the breath is continuously coming out of and dissolving back into this mysterious source that is not separate from our Self. This mystery cannot be penetrated by the mind but can inform the mind. When we live in and as this mystery, it breaks up the crustaceans, the obscurations of the mind.

Shankarâcharya wrote a book called the Aparokshânubhûti. In it he says: "Understanding that 'everything is Consciousness is called 'exhalation'. Understanding that I am Consciousness is called 'inhalation.' Steadiness in these two understandings is called 'holding of the breath in and out'. For all others, they are only torturing their nose." He possessed a great sense of humour and the ultimate understanding of the breath.

My experience is that ratios can create stumbling blocks. There are times when utilizing ratios is important, for healing, for building a strong immune system, or for centering a restless mind. But for Self-understanding, ratios get in the way because there's intention built into them. They keep us stuck in the mind. We have to be with the breath unintentionally so that we're open to the unknown.

For health, the breath must slow down. Exhalation has to be one and one-half or twice as long as inhalation. This is well documented in western and eastern medical research. But for Self-inquiry we leave all of that behind, although, we can be doing pranayama for health and healing while we inquire. Healing and Self-inquiry don't have to be separate practices. In the end, pranayama is one integrated practice for health and Self-realization. The breath is always a pointer back to our true nature, 24,600 times a day.

© 2001 by Erin Michie


Richard’s teachings come out of his direct experience of living truth as echoed in the timeless teachings of nondualism found in Advaita, Zen and Chan. He is recognized as a leader in the field of nondualism, honored by Yoga Journal and featured in American Yoga and Will Yoga and Meditation Really Change My Life?

Richard is the founder and director of the non-profit Center of Timeless Being, co-founder and co-president of the Institute for Spirituality and Psychology, and co-founder of The International Association of Yoga Therapy.

Richard is the author of Yoga Nidra: The Meditative Heart of Yoga as well as numerous articles including “Welcoming All That Is”, in The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom and Psychotherapy.