Tias Little - Yoga of the Subtle Body: A Guide to the Physical and Energetic Anatomy of Yoga

I extol bhavn whose body is nectar and whose very form is joy.

She triumphantly shines forth at the end of a string of six lotuses.

Exceedingly lustrous in the middle way of the suumn,

She melts the moon of nectar to drink its light.

Bhavni Bhujagam of akarcarya, verse 1

T he subtle body in yoga is not only the secret to the optimal functioning and alignment of the body; it is the key to delight, love, understanding, and good relationships. And subtle this body is! At times it dissolves into pure awareness and at other times it cranks out the endless fabric of daily life. The subtle body is often represented as being populated with gods, goddesses, wheels, flowers, amazing animals, and mythological realms. It maps the nature of mind and reality with its paradoxical loops and bright seas of nectar. We must constantly remember that subtle means mysterious, irreducible, delicate, and fine. Looking into subtle things tends to temporarily suspend the thinking process into a state of open inquiry and wonder.

We all have a subtle body, because we all have a body and a mind. Our minds make all kinds of images, symbols, and tags to remember, recognize, and organize experience. We plant those in the otherwise open, radiant, and unbiased tree of the sense fields. We push and pull on these symbols, tags, and ideas for they represent and map our vital interests, needs, hopes, and fears. Even when we think about subtle things like consciousness, God, or time, our minds create a symbolic representation for them all and arrange them like objects in various relationships. Because of this seemingly ceaseless symbol-making power of the mind, our experiences and our ideas about ourselves and others can be quite imbalanced, biased, and miserable. To be honest our subtle body is at least a little miserable most of the time. This misery that the subtle body suffers is caused by an ignorance in our minds that confuses the symbol with the thing or the map with the territory, while at the same time the mind tries in vain to make the subtle gross, the impermanent permanent, and the deep shallow.

The yoga and tantra traditions of India, Tibet, and Asia are happy to turn the mind back around on itself and contemplate the interfacing of myths, metaphors, and symbols with the everyday particulars of the breath and the experience of raw bodily sensation. Mindful awareness of internal breath and associated sensations and thoughts naturally reveals context, depth, and counterbalance to any mistakes of our mapping habits. Traditional yoga practices can speed up or encourage this process by having us visualize and feel areas of internal breath using colorful imagery, or reciting and directing mantra into specific places in or around the body. This allows us to experience things on a truly subtle level where labels and referential ideas temporarily fall away and the fullness of the interconnected world shines forth. Mind, thought, and image are used together to see through the overlapping confusions in those very thought processes. Subtle body meditation can eliminate the misperceptions that create suffering and confusion in the first place. As the subtle body is balanced and its channels opened free of bias, experiences come where each particular thing, thought, or sensation already contains all of the others, even to the point where each pore of the skin might contain a delightful universe, and each sensation point reveals delightful nectar. Ultimately the subtle body, your body, is meditated upon as the sacred, astonishing, and infinite body of pure awareness, intelligence, and compassion.

The beauty of Tias Littles book Yoga of the Subtle Body is that he delights in keeping the subtlety and mystery of the mind and the body. This keeps our minds open, so we continue to look, explore, and enjoy the fresh and always new face of reality. How exciting to explore with Little the detailed nature of anatomy, physiology, and neuroscience in relation to the ancient wisdom of yoga, the chakras, and ns. This grounding of the esoteric and the profound in the nitty-gritty of the body serves to sharpen the cutting edge of any yoga practice.

Richard Freeman, Author of The Mirror of Yoga