We ordinarily speak of the body as something we have: a particular object, enclosed by skin, moving among other objects. This is useful language. Yet sit quietly for a moment and feel what the word “body” names.
There is breathing. There is warmth, movement, pressure and changing sensation. There is receiving and releasing. The body is living activity before it becomes an idea about a thing.
In Being Yoga, this opens an inquiry into spiritual awakening: what happens when we mistake a living activity for a fixed, separate identity?
A whirlpool is the river happening
Watch a whirlpool in a river. You can recognize its form and give it a name. Yet there is no special water that belongs exclusively to that whirlpool. The water flows through; the recognizable pattern continues for a time.
The name points to an activity. It does not turn that activity into an independent substance.
The body offers a related invitation. Eating, drinking, breathing and responding bring us into relationship with the world. The boundary of the skin matters, yet the life we feel is inseparable from exchange.
This analogy does not erase the body’s particularity. It invites us to question the assumption that particularity must mean separation.
The heart: a verb spoken of as a noun
Regarding the heart, we often treat a verb as a noun. We speak of “the heart” as though the name could contain its living actuality. Yet what we encounter is an ongoing rhythm: contraction, release, filling and movement.
The heart’s structure and function can be studied anatomically. The contemplative question concerns how we understand what we study. Do we see only a thing, or also the activity through which that form is living?
The spiral and vortex are recurring images in my teaching. They invite us to feel form as movement. Their philosophical value does not require us to make every spiral the same physical process.
Feeling before the boundary is named
Listen to a sound without immediately deciding where “you” end and the sound begins. Feel the contact of the feet with the ground. Notice breathing without taking charge of it.
Experience includes relationship before thought describes separate participants. A sound, a sensation and the thought “I am listening” are known.
Can the one who knows be found as another object among them?
This is self-inquiry. It concerns the identity we assume, rather than the acquisition of an unusual bodily state. Awareness is not made larger by a pleasant sensation or smaller by an uncomfortable one.
Response without the promise of total control
Notice how a conversation can be met through a familiar conclusion before the other person has finished speaking. A tightening is felt. A judgement follows. An old response begins again.
Listening-Feeling gives that movement room to become evident. When an interpretation is mistaken, seeing the mistake allows it to be released.
This does not mean that we command every bodily process or determine everything that happens to us. The invitation is practical: meet the response that is present with enough openness to see it clearly.
It is the nature of an error to cease once seen. The work is to see what the error actually is.
Continuity without a fixed separate self
The whirlpool remains recognizable while its water changes. In everyday life, a name, a history and a familiar pattern of response also provide continuity.
We need not discard these practical descriptions. The inquiry asks whether they exhaust the meaning of “I.”
In Advaita Vedanta, the changing body and mind are known; Ātman points to the Awareness because of which they are known. Ātman is Brahman. The truth of the individual and the limitless Reality are not two separate things.
Thus, “you are a verb” is a way of loosening our fixation on a static personal identity. It is not a definition of Awareness as another changing process. The activity of the body-mind appears; the inquiry turns toward its ever-present reality.
Knowing via Being
Return to ordinary experience. Feel the next breath. Listen to the next sound. Notice the impulse to turn what is happening into something already known.
A name may still be used. A practical decision may still be made. What can fall away is the assumption that the description contains the whole of what you are.
The purpose is peace of mind, lasting contentment and well-being. Through Knowing via Being, understanding finds expression in how we listen, relate and act.
The river does not need to become water. The inquiry concerns the error that makes its forms appear separate from what they have always been.
Continue the inquiry
- Spiritual awakening through yoga, meditation and self-inquiry
- Ātman and Brahman: Two Teaching Lenses, One Reality
- The heart, its helical activity and the cosmic Oṃ
Videos, audio and companion manuscripts
- The Universe is a Verb — video
- The Living Vortex — video
- You Are a Verb, Not a Noun — audio
- The Living Vortex — April PDF
- The Living Vortex — March PDF
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