Isvara Pranidhana

I have to talk to my yoga teacher training class about what this means to me. So I thought I’d post my notes for all of you (all three :-)). Here we go.

Isvara Pranidhana comes from a climate about as different from Wisconsin as you can get. But the theme of surrender applies universally. I say this as a committed control freak. Surrender to the divine is even more complicated. Who can control the divine? Can’t control the divine any more than I can control the weather. 

One of the positive things about Wisconsin, is that no matter how bad you are at small talk, the weather is a gift that never stops giving. So you might as well surrender because it’s bigger than you are and find your community of people to chat about it with. 

The thing is, I’m terrible at small talk. Once the weather is exhausted, I have nowhere to go. I have midwestern friends who have perfected the art of chat, but I have not, instead, I tend to launch into big topics, topics one should avoid in casual conversation. Luckily, the people who are close to me understand this. 

So, I spend a lot of time in my brain trying to create meaning and purpose for life, for the things that happen, for the things I do. I have flirted with religions and philosophies and found kernels of wisdom in each of them although I am certainly a dilettante, not an expert. 

And I think that Isvara Pranidhana can be found in any of them. 

One day, I was talking to a Christian friend about her faith and we were discussing the idea of heaven and hell. Her notion was that we create hell on earth in this life, by simply choosing to live without love. Choosing to live with love was choosing the divine, choosing to live without it was choosing hell.  And it is a choice, one can act in life from a place of love – regardless of what is returned; and one can act from a place of need or expectation – which really isn’t a place of love. 

So, now that I’ve gone on that tangent, let’s talk more about this Isvara Pranidhana. In basic terms, Isvara Pranidhana is the final of the “Yamas” and “Niyamas” of which there are five each. In his interpretation of the sutras, Satchidananda implies that if we could master this particular one, that perhaps we could pass go, to put it in monopoly terms. This final Niyama is translated variously, but as I said up front, with the overarching concept of “surrender,” specifically the surrender of the ego to the divine.

According to Anand Mehrotra, founder and master teacher of Sattva Yoga: “The goal of yoga is freedom.”  So what’s the relationship between freedom and surrender? In the wise words of Janis Joplin, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”

Sure sounds like surrender to me. Because when we act from a place of love rather than expectation, we’ve got nothing to lose – and only love to gain. 

Do I do this well? I sure don’t. For many years in this search for meaning I’ve been changing jobs, careers, locations, I’ve dove deep into fitness routines and external changes, you name the external change and I’ve made it.  I have clung to relationships because I wanted to feel safe. All of this external change is just external and clinging to relationships out of need means losing them is scary. It’s a fear based thing, not a love based thing. 

When I started on the yoga path, I realized that before I made more external change, I needed to make some internal change and as I started reading the sutras, I realized that my relationships need a new foundation – including my relationship with myself.  I started to think hard about my motivations and the answers I gave myself were difficult to swallow.  Was I acting from love or from ego? Definitely ego. 

Surrendering to the divine, to me, means surrendering to love. Surrendering to love is empowering even if there is no place for the ego. It empowers all of us. 

I have a favorite Buddhist. Some people read self help books. I read Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich wrote: “Often when we say ‘I love  you’ we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love being offered. This is because we are caught up in the idea of the self. We think we have a self. But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself a flower…. Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves… I am made of the earth, the sun, parents, ancestors. If you can see the nature of inter-being between you and another person, then his suffering is yours and your joy is hers.”

Understanding this, to me, is part of Isvara Pranidhana. Patanjali references IP in both book one, on contemplation, and in book two, on practice. In his commentary on book two, Satchidananda explains that total surrender to God is a life of dedication, of offering everything to God or to humanity and says that he adds humanity because God is the world and the world is God and that whatever we do can be transformed into worship. 

God, in this interpretation is the supreme consciousness. According to Satchidananda’s commentary on book one, verse 25, Isvara is the complete manifestation of the seed of omniscience, or all knowing and knowledge itself.

Nischala Joy Devi’s translation of this verse is as follows: “Boundless love and devotion unite us with the divine consciousness.” To me, this means questioning our motivations, acting from a place of love and practicing gratitude.

I could probably write a dissertation on this, I have so many notes and so much more to say, but for now, I’ll simply offer that today, if we all try to act from a place of love as a way to surrender to the divine – and to recognize the divine in the world around us, it couldn’t hurt.