“See better, Lear”! – The Earl of Kent in King Lear, Shakespeare: Act 1, Scene 1
After he’s told to get out of his sight by King Lear for standing up for Cordelia and speaking the truth, the Earl of Kent urges Lear to see better. Seeing better, clear seeing, looking closely, taking a closer look, so as to see the larger picture, this advice the loyal counselor gives his king is one we find in the teachings of yoga. The Sanskrit word for looking closely is upekșa (from upa = to go near, toward + ikșa = to look at) – going near to look at. The implied instruction suggests that upekșa is an invitation to see better so that we can engage with our situation with perspective and clarity.
Lear’s capacity to see better, to see clearly was obstructed because he was blinded by stubbornness, pride and power. Stubbornness, pride, power, anger, jealousy, fear, prejudice – the list of obstacles that give rise to our blind spots goes on.
A blind spot is an area in our range of vision that, for whatever reason, goes unseen. Blind spots prevent us from seeing fully, impairing our ability to relate to the immediacy of our experience with perspective and ease. Blind spots are of the realm of avidyā (a= not + vid = to know, feel, experience, recognize). Avidyā means delusion, ignorance, mis-knowing. It refers to a persistent, unrelenting, deep-seated misperception and is the first and root-cause of all the kleshas – wave patterns, interferences, afflictions we get caught up in.
Recently, an Israeli student whom I have known for over a decade said I was the first person he had ever met from the Arab world when he arrived in New York. He shared with me how after some time of sustained yoga practice, the rigid beliefs and fixed ideas of “abstract danger” that he held about “people like me” dissolved, allowing him to realign himself with reality and to “see” me as a person he could connect to with ease rather than with fear.
The āsana practice has many components, one of which is dṛști or gazing point. There are nine dṛștis corresponding to various parts of the body. With the gaze focused in one place, dṛști improves mindfulness and brings about a feeling of oneness – the mind becomes full of one thing, enabling us to experience a moment of full integrity of being. The process of bringing the gaze to a place of ekāgratā, i.e. single-mindedness on our mat allows us to develop awareness and perception throughout the body. With bodily awareness, we begin to see beyond the limited range of our eyes. We begin to see with feeling. “Every pore of the skin has to become an eye.” writes B.K.S. Iyengar in ‘Light on Life’. When feeling the āsana with each cell of our being, we feel in the present moment, refine our vision, pierce avidyā, and find ease in the body, ease in the mind, ease in our relationships.
The āsana practice invites us to develop sensitivity, so that we can stretch our minds as far as the eye can see, and then takes it a step further by softening what is rigid in our heart so that our vision extends as far as the heart can see. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in Le Petit Prince: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” The mind may guide the body to come into an āsana but the heart has to feel it too. Feeling is the landmark of our human, sentient existence and the dawning of clarity. May we practice so that we can feel the whole of existence in our own being.
