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Enlightenment Journal | Winter 2011-2012

our yoga to give us exactly what we want every moment. We need to be able to 

gain mastery over that all too commonly tenacious human vector that drives 

us to want, to hold, and to grasp. We have this idea that we want things to be a 

particular way and we have to be able to let that go.
There are, just in the first section of the Yoga Sutra alone, twenty different, 

discreet, wonderful ways in which we can use our thought and our intention for 

the higher goal of freedom. 

Rev. O’Brian:

 The two practices that you mentioned in the beginning, abhyasa, 

steady practice, and vairagya, dispassion or nonattachment, are such a beautiful 

pair because one helps to direct our attention inward and the other helps to curb 

our tendency to get too involved in things that are going on. 

Dr. Chapple:

 Those are like two wings of a bird, twin practices that allow us to 

sustain a life of yoga. Another we can recognize in this regard would be the 

four-fold practice of friendliness (loving-kindness or maitri), compassion, 

sympathetic joy, and equanimity. These are really the cornerstones of an ongoing 

spiritual life because, in addition to lifting up and delivering us to these places of 

wonderful deep experience of samadhi, yoga is perhaps even more so considered 

as how to live daily life. These practices, combined with the very specific ethical 

precepts, are really the key both to the pathway that leads to samadhi and the 

pathway that leads out of samadhi, so that when we move out of our meditation 

and back in the world of words, these are our guidelines for an ongoing path of 

spiritual practice. 

Rev. O’Brian: 

This path of yoga took me out of the world as I knew it, out of the 

world as a mundane place, and brought me back to the world as the domain of 

the sacred. That awareness is profound in terms of changing how we relate to 

nature, to our world, to everything and to everyone. It is really what is needed to 

stop the exploitation of nature. Of course, in the first stages of the eight limbs we 

have all the ethical principles that also help us take a look at how we are in the 

world. 

Dr. Chapple:

 Yes, and what we have worked with is to think about how those 

precepts, beginning with nonviolence, invite us to uncover and to bring forth 

into the world our higher Self. And by being careful about our diet, being careful