Exploring Limits: Respecting The Ever-Expanding Container of Self-Study

Consider this chapter a sister to Chapter 1 on strength, where we defined strength training as a way to expand your domain of safety. A lot of the metaphors and imagery here sound more like flexibility training than strength, but they are really more similar than they are different. We’ll explore the paradox of respecting the limits of an ever-expanding container. Even as I type the phrase “respecting the limits,” it seems to have this connotation of “limits are not to be fucked with” It’s as if your limit is a foe to be feared. There’s certainly some wisdom here about accepting your limits as a means of avoiding injury. However, there is also wisdom to be found by considering your limits as a partner, rather than foe, in pursuit of growth. The difference is in your approach. 

Treat your limits with respect, and they will expand over time and teach you a lot along the way. Deny your limits, and they will quickly hurt you, physically and emotionally. Fear your limits, and they will become solid, trapping your growth. In this way, we seek to cultivate a curiosity towards our limits, as if they were a venerated mentor we wanted to study. It can be tempting to think that the value of exploring a limit is only to eventually move past that limit. However, this is an entrapment of attachment to performance and results. In a way, this is disrespectful to the limit as it is. It is as if to say the limit, wherever it is, has less value than if it were to move an inch in a direction you deem desirable. You’ll miss most of the lessons your limits hold if you’re only looking to move past them instead of listening to what they have to say. 

My teacher, Ian LeMasters, astutely declared in class the other day, “Blessed are those with tight hamstrings; they have to do so much less to feel so much more in their forward bends.” After this class, a fellow student said to me, “If you never push yourself, you’ll never know yourself.” We went on to have a discussion about how our tolerance for suffering expands our capacity for joy and how we must press against our limits with tenacity in order to understand how real they are and, more importantly, to understand how real we are. 

Malleable Mirrorballs: Limits are the Containers of Self-study

Lao Tzu has one of yoga teachers’ favorite quotes: “Shape clay into a vessel; It is the space within that makes it useful.” In other words, it is the space inside rather than the structure that makes a container useful. The opportunity lies within. Let’s then consider our limits as the structure of a malleable container for the self. There’s an important nuance here: the limits are an external tool; they do not define the self. Famous modern yogi Sadhguru says, “I am not the body; I am not even the mind.” Here, he asks us to grapple with self as being more energetic than material and more spirit than body. We’ll call this the soul self.

You might visualize the soul self as a gaseous, energetic being pressing out on a clay bubble. Like a gas, without the form and structure of a container, the self would expand into oblivion with no opportunity to run into itself and study its own properties. Of course, this metaphor is flawed because gas is itself material, but the value of this visual comes from contrasting the gas with the clay rather than taking it too literally.
Very quickly, this starts to sound a lot like the yogi’s favorite object of obsession: breathing. The breath is a very physical gaseous exchange that follows a cycle of the gas expanding the container of the body and the ensuing elimination of waste that no longer belongs. The inhale is a process of taking on so much new material and exploring where it fits from the inside out that it expands the volume of capacity of the body. Exhalation is a process of eliminating what no longer fits, providing the opportunity for an empty container for more expansive newness to explore the body. In fact, our physical body is our most fundamental clay bubble--a container of limits for self-study. This is where the spiritual value of asana practice (physically creating the shapes we in the West think of as ‘yoga’) comes from. The different shapes we contort our body into are a means of influencing where in the body can be explored with the breath. Compression of the left side of the body invites more exploration of the right side body. But of course, there are so many limits of the mind that are no less real than the limits of the body.
Like our body has limits of what shapes it can embody, our mind can only conceive of so much information or reality; our perception and awareness are fundamentally limited, and as such, our capacity to self-understand is limited. I believe the acceptance of this limited capacity for understanding is where consciousness begins. As we accept the premise that our capacity to self-understand is limited, it immediately shatters any argument that the mind is the self. One of the fundamental limits of the human mind is its obsession with patterns. The human mind is a powerful pattern recognition machine, but it is also a pattern manufacturing machine. Wielded mindfully, this pattern manufacturing can be harnessed to manifest new inventions and ways of existing and expressing. However, any owner of a human mind is familiar with the tendency of a mind, when left to its own devices, to instead manufacture less useful deep grooves of repetitive thinking that ultimately entrap you. These are not thoughts, judgments, and reactions you wish or choose to have. They are essentially psychophysiological glitches learned by the mind, extrapolating past experiences into the future because of this inherent attachment of the mind to patterns. While we have conceptually separated the self from the mind and body, the mind and body are impossible to separate from one another. This again underscores the rich opportunity that is developing an asana practice for self-study. In asana practice, we can consider the mind and body like mirrors pointed at each other. The limits of the mind have reflections in the body. The limits of the body have reflections in the mind. By staring deeper into the infinite reflection of these containers, we study the divine soul self, which somehow lies between mind and body, and transcend them at the same time.
Let’s return to the visual of the gaseous self pressing out on the clay ball and consider that the insides of this clay ball are themselves mirrors. The limits of the mind and body are malleable, which makes fully understanding them impossible. What we learned yesterday may no longer apply today, much less tomorrow. Study of these limiting self-containers must be one of insatiable curiosity about the truth available only in the present moment. This truth is explored by staring deeply into the contorted mirror walls with an awareness of the distorted image of self they provide. As you expand and move your limits, you change the shape of the container. The contours of the mirror walls are altered, providing new angles and perspectives for understanding the self, as well as new distortions. You can also imagine the mechanics of this malleable mirror ball of self-study are such that if you press really hard in one direction, singly focusing on a particular corner of your limitations, you might move it substantially, but the rest of the container behind your focused gaze is liable to change as a result. In this way, the gaze, while useful for manifesting particular results, may not truly lead to an expanded state but just a different shape to your container. 

Expansive growth is developed by being able to concurrently feel yourself by pressing against the walls in all directions, asking: “How can I expand this without losing that?” or maybe equally valid, “Is expanding here worth losing that?” This process of using your limits for self-study may sound extremely difficult and confusing and it is. You must ultimately cultivate a deep sense of trust that you are able to discern truth from illusion. This trust is paradoxically built by recognizing each time you inevitably are caught in illusion and gracefully, without judgment, coming back to reality. When we speak of spiritual awakening, this is it: a constant coming back from distortion to clarity, knowing that you will ultimately fall for another illusion, another opportunity to come back to clarity, and in doing so, build that virtuous circle of trust.
In Chapter 4 on Freedom, we explored Johnny Kemps’ quote, “I cannot be doing and feeling at the same time.” I bring this quote back in this context to remind you that reality is felt, not done. Reality is felt, not done. We might do things to press on the container and see how it budges, but the understanding of reality comes in feeling into the new space or resistance that our push is met with. The feeling integrates the doing, metabolizing it into a richer understanding, leading to a better-informed next cycle of doing and feeling. 

To plan out all of your doing without iteratively pausing to feel is a foolish process of attachment to an order of operations, a sequence, a route that blocks the pores of your awareness from soaking in the nourishing nectar of truth available in each step. By truth, I mean both the truth about the external world and yourself, as well as the way your internal truth relates to this external truth, perhaps even blurring the boundaries between them. On your way to the top of the mountain you currently deem “the goal,” do not miss the perspective you gain with each step of elevation. Perhaps on the way, you’ll gain the vantage point of another more desirable mountain to climb, at which point you get to consider, “Is the mountain I’m on still worth summiting?” Recognize that no matter what you choose, if the next mountain is to be taken on, you’ll have to get down from wherever you are to make that climb. The terrain of an awakened life is not linear--it’s not even smooth--it’s rich in texture with many steep climbs. When observed by others, the awakened being seems to make decisions that do not make sense, like turning around before the summit of a mountain. However, those external observers lack the perspective of this awakened climber, who studied himself as much as the mountain.  To be clear, this is not to say, “Don’t climb mountains,” nor “constantly change course, never finishing your endeavors.” It’s more to say, climb the mountain in front of you with fervor but also don’t miss the chances to pause and open your eyes and mind to what’s possible along the way, considering that the “end” of this climb might not be where you thought it was when you started. 

Take pride in how far you pulled yourself up and allow this to be embodied as a confidence that you can head down and pull yourself up at least this far again. This is what it means to focus on the journey instead of the destination. The journey is the perspective you gain along your path made up equally of surveying the external terrain whilst studying your internal weather. Loving the journey is the process of pressing against your limits to find out how real you are.

Mirrors, the Color Green, and the Heart Chakra 

Before we move on, we’ll take a brief tangent to explore an interesting physics aside that will serve as a bridge to our next section: “Exploring limits in the context of relationship.”. Please understand before we go there: this brief section is not a philosophical argument but rather a fun linguistic gimmick based on the idea that the mind and body are mirrors pointed at one another. That idea itself is just one I threw out there as an interesting concept. So, if this seems like a stretch, it is.
If you point two mirrors at each other and stare deeper and deeper into them, things will appear more green. Perhaps this is due to the tint of glass used to construct most mirrors or because green is the center of the visual light spectrum. Green is also the color of the heart chakra, our energetic center of love and compassion. You can chalk this up to coincidence, but it might just be a clue that love and compassion are the essence of the soul. Kundalini yoga practices often begin with the adi mantra: “Ong namo guru dev namo,” which translates roughly to “I bow to the divine teacher within.” This divine teacher is the love and compassion within all beings for all beings. Love and compassion are the materials that make up the soul self in all of us. So far, we’ve done a lot of talking about limits and self-study, so let’s now dive into how coming into relationships with others helps us explore our limits and learn about this compassion and love that our souls are made of.

Yoga is a Relational Practice

We hear a lot in yoga philosophy (and indeed, in this very chapter) about the need to study the self and care for the self, yet yoga practice is ultimately about transcending the self. My teacher, Ian, says, “our yoga practice should never make us feel more isolated.” Yoga is a devotional practice to support the freedom and happiness of all beings. Supporting the freedom and happiness of all beings or working to eliminate our collective suffering just happens to require really understanding the emotions, reactions, attachments, and fears you’re bringing to that mission. Studying our “simple” limits through yoga asana practice is just training for studying our complex relational limits out in the real world. There’s a whole chapter (perhaps even a few) on applying yoga philosophy to your relationships. For the purposes of this chapter, we’ll dive into the different kinds of relationships that help your self-study as it pertains to understanding your limits. And even if you’re sick of it, the malleable mirror ball model is coming with us. 

Just like bumping up against some limits while exploring a yoga pose, relationships are mirrors; we both attract people who mirror our internal world and project our internal world onto the people around us. This mirroring isn’t unhealthy; it’s just the nature of two sentient beings interacting. Our human brains have a fundamental structure known as a mirror neuron, whose purpose is to allow us to mirror the behavior of those around us so that we can learn from and cooperate with one another. However, these relational mirrors are far more complex. We both have the very literal experience of reflection when others share their perception of us and the much more subtle experience of reflection when we react to the words and actions of others. This sort of mirroring is extremely complex and chaotic as you have two flawed pattern-manifesting machines who can’t even fully understand themselves trying to understand each other.  And yet, somehow, we all seem to learn about ourselves from one another. 

Through the process of expressing themselves and digesting the expressions of others, humans refine their self-understanding far beyond what they could achieve in isolation. Humans' greatest downfall is the ego, that tendency to view the self as separate from and even superior to another. We tend to evaluate intelligence on an individual level. This gives us a sense of superiority over other beings. Sure, when you compare the intelligence of a single ant to a human, it’s pitiful. But comparing the intelligence of an ant colony to that of a nation is quite different. An ant colony is so rational that it cannot comprehend the inefficiency of wasting resources and trying to wage war with another ant colony. The ants are not ideological and thus do not question the authority structure of a society revolving around a queen but cooperate for the collective good of the colony in constructing a dwelling, procuring food, and even quarantining sick individuals that threaten the collective. However, humans tend to drive the division of “us v.s. them” with irrational and catastrophic consequences. Nature has even more inspiring intelligence, like that of the trees and fungi that have supported each other for thousands of years. The intelligence of the trees in a forest is in their collective ability to weather storms, insects, and other threats. It is in their fundamental ability to merge consciousness with one another because the tree does not have a concept of self. There is no hierarchy of young and old. The trees are so evolved that they will even cooperate with other species, such as the fungal networks that transport nutrients throughout their root systems. By measure of longevity, trees' ability to support each other puts that of humans to shame.

These next sections will describe various archetypes of relationships and how they help us understand our limits. Before we dive in, I just want to acknowledge that our real-world relationships will often blur the lines between these archetypes, but it is still useful to consider the kinds of mirrors relationships can provide by drawing what are ultimately arbitrary lines. 

Family Relationships: The Mirror of Past and Future

We share so much genetic material with our biological family in addition to (for most of us) a large amount of shared experiential history. In this way, our family's malleable mirrorball of limits is made of the same materials as ours. This makes our family especially good people to look at when considering our limits physically, emotionally, and spiritually. As we age, our samskaras(the deep grooves of conditioned thinking) get more pronounced. As such, it can be easier to recognize these patterns by looking at our elders. Might your conspiracy-gullible grandfather be an inspiration to reflect on how your own beliefs are constructed? Could you connect in your common desire to know the truth and acknowledge all the sources of manipulation and conditioning in our society that distort our ability to perceive truth? In the complaints of a mother who never seems to be satisfied, might you find some understanding of the edges around your own attitudes of scarcity? Could you connect on what makes you feel whole or safe? In a father enslaved to the pace of keeping up with the seductive call of passing pleasures, could you see how your own desire for instant gratification controls your actions? Could you support each other in being disciplined enough to manifest longer-term value over instant pleasure? Think of your family as a mirror that you stare into to understand yourself. This can give you visceral reminders of where you came from, as well as both inspiration and warning signs of where you might be headed. 

Teachers / Mentors: The Mirror of Experience

Our chosen teachers and mentors have some experiential wisdom about pushing limits in some domain that we hope to learn from. Our teachers know how to study the malleable mirrorballs we’re interested in. The best teachers will help you with practices and protocols for exploring limits in a way that challenges you to ascertain where those limits are on your own, rather than simply showing you where they are. This is because the best teachers know that most students come asking the wrong questions. 

There are countless stories of spiritual gurus whose students do whatever ridiculous tasks their guru hands them in the hope of receiving some enlightened teaching that never comes. The very core of the pain these students go through is ultimately that they believe someone else can learn their lessons for them. Their suffering is caused by a belief in some magical combination of words or medicine that will lead them to a state of blissful existence. Put simply, their pain comes from a belief that there is something to learn. Their belief is that there is something between them and enlightenment, some box to check, some spiritual achievement to unlock, or some token to receive. As if spirituality were a video game and their teacher the arbiter of spiritual success. These stories always end without some lesson passed from teacher to student, but an experience provided. The experience is one that forces the student to confront their assumptions about separateness, or achievement along their spiritual path. 

You might recall the punchline in Kung Fu Panda, where Mr. Ping tells Po “There is no secret ingredient. To make something special, you just have to believe it is special.” This punchline is just a way of trying to approximate for children the idea that external people, secrets, or potions have anything to do with our experience of the magic of the universe. Experiencing true magic is in the texture of each present moment, not some ceremony that we look forward to that in an instant, vanishes behind us. Think of your teachers as guides in treating every experience as a mirror to discover the magic within yourself.

Teammates: The Mirror of Shared Goals

Our teammates at work or in sports are by definition the people who support us in our endeavors. Our relationship is defined by explicit common goals. These common goals form a shared malleable mirrorball which we study with our teammates. They have the best picture of our strengths and weaknesses because they directly experience them. Their job is to trust our strengths and pick up the slack from our weaknesses. Working next to them with eyes wide open can be an inspiration for how much further a limit of ours could be pushed. The greatest lesson I learned early in my career from my peers was that I have a tendency to believe I should have answers instead of asking questions. Especially at work, we want to appear really competent, but this attachment to a mask of competency can hinder the collective team’s progress. This sort of tendency was one I was unlikely to ever self-observe. I’m fortunate enough to have come up in software engineering, a world where curiosity and constructive feedback are a way of being. till, I have to be reminded of this lesson sometimes. 

I like to think of our teammates as a complimentary mirror to our families. We share explicit goals and responsibilities but we come from unique backgrounds with less shared genetic material than our families. This allows us to see how diverse perspectives approach the same problems. It can encourage us to think outside the box or consider paths we didn’t think were possible. Our teammates can inspire us to do more than we thought was possible.

In most contexts, the teammate relationship has some paradoxical character of competition. While you are on the same team, charging towards the same goals, when we work really hard alongside one another seeing and being seen in our efforts, the ego pops up and wants to be the best teammate. This can be harnessed really healthily in a positive feedback loop if it inspires better efforts towards the collective goals, or it can become bitter and destructive. The desire to run faster than my teammates during track and field practice did a lot more for my fitness than the desire to beat my rivals on race day. Being next to a bendy ballerina in yoga class teaches me much more about what is possible than practicing in solitude. Think of teammates as those who stand next to you studying what is possible in the mirror of your common goals. Don’t get in each other's way. 

The great paradox of good teamwork is learning how to harness the power of healthy internal competition without getting sucked into the trap of comparison; driving a collective vulnerable awareness of individual strengths and weaknesses to support more efficient and effective cooperation. Teamwork is trusting each other to be both brutally honest and never hurtful to the common goal. Teamwork is the process of dissolving ego with a group, built on the fundamental belief that you are stronger as a whole. When described this way, we begin to understand that the experience of good teamwork is not always a pleasant one. I sometimes believe the reason it’s hard to be friends with your coworkers is that they exist in your life for feedback, healthy competition, and pursuing goals. They aren’t there for celebrating or relaxing. Corporate entities will use win wires, kudos channels, and launch parties in an attempt to fool you otherwise. Sometimes it’s helpful to know who is good for what in your life when trying to curate a balanced existence. Win with your teammates, celebrate with your friends and family. 

Friendships: The Anti-destructive Mirror

Friends are people who want the best for us despite not having explicit shared goals. I find friends most helpful in dismantling destructive distortions in self-perception. We feel comfortable expressing our insecurities to our friends. Mediocre friends make flattering mirrors. Great friends make honest mirrors. But even an honest mirror often portrays a more flattering image than our own self-perception, which is warped by the woes of worthiness.

Romantic Relationships: The Intimate Merging Mirror

Romantic partners are the most complex mirror of all. They are part teammate, part teacher, and part friend who you choose to make family. Our romantic partners get a unique intimate view of your being through intimate sensual experiences of our essence that goes beyond what our family, teammates, teachers, and friends can observe with their senses or communicate with words. Through sexuality, we go beyond words in exploring our desires, fears, inhibitions, insecurities, and relationship to power structures. A healthy sexual dynamic shows us that it is safe to ask for what we want in this world and that it’s ok if we don’t always get it. An attuned lover will undoubtedly show you how to achieve ecstasy beyond what you could even imagine on your own and encourage you to not hold yourself back. 

The pursuit and maintenance of a romantic relationship is one that simultaneously pushes you to be and reminds you that you are someone worth loving on many different levels. It’s this reciprocal feedback loop of deeply adoring someone that creates a profound calling to love them as well as you believe they deserve to be loved. This involves rising to the challenge of embodying the best version of yourself. Steeped in the privilege of loving your beloved, you cultivate the privilege for your beloved to love you. The love languages are the most distracting thing people talk about in this realm. Romantic partnership is not a process of leaning into the affirmative words of your partner or serving them, it is not measured in time or gifts. A romantic partnership is defined by touch; it is a process of feeling each other. Romantic partnership is a process of developing trust and support for mutual self-expression and co-creation. A romantic partnership is two mirrors staring deeply into each other, giving permission--even daring--each other to expose more of themselves. It is a magnifying merger, not an acquisition or dissolution. The picture of romance is two beings screaming at each other “I like who I’m seeing. Show me more. I like what I’m hearing. Tell me more. I like when you feel me. Feel me more. This life that we’re living, it’s what’s worth living for.” But to a passerby, it just looks like a tender, silent kiss. The intimate merging mirror is one of amplification of that which resides within by pulling it to the surface. It tests our limits of bravery not to hide, and our ability to see ourselves in another and feel another in ourselves.