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Dṛṣṭi
— Where Am I Looking?
When you first begin learning Ashtanga Yoga, there is quite
a lot to do with just one body.
Inhale, exhale, place the feet, place the hands, and now you
are even told where to look.
Dṛṣṭi.
When I first learned this word, Dṛṣṭi seemed
very simple to me.
Looking at the prescribed point for each posture.
If the instruction was to look at the thumbs, I looked at the thumbs. If it was to look at the tip of the nose, I looked at the tip of the nose. If it was to look at the toes, I looked at the toes. At the time, I did not think very deeply about what it meant. I accepted it almost as a rule.
Because that was how I had learned it. Because that was how Ashtanga Yoga was done.
In many classes, it is easy to learn this way. In a Led
Class with dozens of people moving together, it is realistically difficult to
explain the details of each individual body.
There is a prescribed count, a prescribed sequence, a place
for the hands, a place for the feet, and a place to look.
When many people have to move together, those rules are
certainly useful for guiding the class. But forcing the Dṛṣṭi when the rest of my body was
not yet aligned for the posture was an entirely different scenario.
My eyes were working very hard to look where I thought they were supposed to look, while my neck and shoulders were telling a completely different story.
Perhaps that was why my trapezius muscles and the area around my shoulder
blades had been crying out for years.
The Nine Dṛṣṭis
of Ashtanga Yoga
Ashtanga Yoga uses nine Dṛṣṭis, or directions in which
the gaze is placed.
(In this article, I am using IAST forms that preserve
Sanskrit grammar as much as possible.)
nāsāgre — at the tip of the nose
bhrūmadhye — between the eyebrows
nābhicakre — at the navel
hastāgre — at the fingertips
pādayor agre — at the tips of both feet
aṅguṣṭhayoḥ — at the two thumbs
ūrdhvam — upward
dakṣiṇapārśve
— to the right
vāmapārśve — to the left
Each posture has its corresponding Dṛṣṭi. That does not mean staring
at the target with tremendous effort. The gaze rests there naturally, and
stays.
At first, even this is quite a lot. You have to remember the
posture, breathe appropriately, maintain your balance, and then remember where
you are supposed to be looking. There is a surprising amount to do with one
body.
But over time, I began to feel that Dṛṣṭi was not simply a matter of
where I placed my eyes. When the gaze changes, the position of the head
changes. When the head and neck move, the shoulders and spine change, and
sometimes the alignment of the entire body changes with them.
Balance changes. Breath changes. And above all, attention
changes.
In the traditional language of Yoga, this is sometimes
described as bringing the body, breath, and gazing into one direction so that
the flow of prāṇa
becomes more ordered.
Whether I call it energy, the direction of force, or the
flow of breath, there is one thing I have clearly felt through practice.
Where I place my gaze can change my entire body.
When My Trapezius Finally Softened
When I began practicing in a small group of students at my
teacher’s home, I encountered an approach that was almost the opposite of what
I had known before.
At the time, I considered myself a fairly diligent student. Almost
like memorizing a textbook, I had learned:
Ashtanga is supposed to be done this way.
Hands here, feet here, gaze here, sequence like this...
I arrived at my teacher’s home carrying quite a few of these
“rules” in my head.
But my teacher told us that Yoga was not about forcing hands
and feet into prescribed places. When speaking about Sūrya Namaskāra, my
teacher described a movement in which the whole body flows naturally, almost
like an old form of bowing practice. Every person has a different body, and
every group practicing together is different, so even the same practice may
vary a little.
That was when the “correct answers” I thought I knew began
to loosen one by one. Curiously, my trapezius muscles loosened with them. After
years of protesting so loudly, they gradually became softer and more
comfortable. Perhaps my shoulders had finally begun to agree with Yoga
philosophy.
I also began to see Dṛṣṭi
differently. Not as something that meant looking at the prescribed point no
matter what, but as
a gaze that helps the whole body find where it is going…
Thinking of it this way made it feel less as if I were
practicing with my eyes separately from the rest of my body.
When the Eyes Lose Their Way
Dṛṣṭi becomes
most interesting not when I am keeping it perfectly, but when I lose it.
In a comfortable posture, keeping the eyes in one place is
not particularly difficult. But things change in inversions or deep backbends,
when psychological tension begins to rise along with physical challenges.
Sometimes the familiar expression fits perfectly, my eyes
go blank with panic.
For a moment I am no longer sure where my body is in space. The
breath becomes unsettled, the eyes lose their destination, and the gaze begins
to wander. Sometimes it feels as though the eyes are looking for an escape
route before the body does. In those moments, returning to the original Dṛṣṭi is quite important for me. I
place the gaze again, find the breath, and check the direction of the body.
Then I ask whether I should go deeper, or whether it is time
to come back. If necessary, I let go of the desire to continue and return
safely to where I began. In my own experience, this process has helped me avoid
continuing a movement recklessly and return with greater safety and less risk
of injury.
Dṛṣṭi
sometimes feels less like an ornament for completing a posture, and more like a
signpost that helps me find my way back when I am lost. The body may still be
inside the posture, while the mind has already run somewhere else.
Dṛṣṭi
catches me doing it.
A Headstand in the Mirror
Mirrors are interesting things.
For quite a long time after I began practicing, the same
thing kept happening when I practiced headstand.
I rise slowly, feeling the alignment from inside the body. I
feel the pressure into the floor,
observe the shoulders and spine, find the position of the
pelvis and legs,
and follow the breath. Then, once I feel reasonably stable,
a question suddenly appears.
So how well am I doing?
Wanting to check the version of myself in the mirror, my
eyes move toward it. And in that instant, something in the flow I had just been
following seems to snap.
My balance shifts. My breathing changes. The direction of
effort changes. The alignment subtly changes. Most of all, the attention that
had been inside the body suddenly moves outside.
To exaggerate slightly, my mind has a brief out-of-body
experience.
A moment ago I was doing a headstand, and suddenly I become
the mirror, watching myself inside it. The positions of protagonist and
observer become confused for an instant. And once attention has moved outside
the body, bringing it back in is more difficult than I expect.
That does not mean the mirror is bad. A mirror can be a very
useful tool. It can show me how different what I feel is from what is actually
visible. I can notice asymmetries. I can discover that while I thought I was
perfectly straight, I was actually leaning to one side. It is much like
recording a movement and studying the video later. So the mirror itself is not
the problem.
Why am I looking in the mirror right now?
Looking in order to study alignment, and looking in order to
see how well I am doing—from the outside they may look exactly the same, but
they are quite different gazes.
Seeing the Same Trikoṇāsana Differently
Over years of practice, Dṛṣṭi began
to leave me with a wider question.
Practice naturally led me to ask:
Where am I placing my attention right now?
Interestingly, the same posture could look completely
different depending on what I happened to be studying at the time.
Take Trikoṇāsana.
At first, I see the form. Where are the feet? How far does
the hand reach down? How straight is the upper arm? But through studying
anatomy, I began to understand that the alignment of the feet was not simply
there to create a beautiful shape. The direction of the feet and the way they
press into the ground guide the knees and hip joints, and influence the way the
pelvis moves and opens.
The Dṛṣṭi toward
the raised hand is also not simply a matter of sending the eyes upward. The
neck moves. The shoulder moves. The ribs and thorax respond with it. A shift in
gaze changes the relationship of the entire body. When I began studying fascial
connections, I saw another Trikoṇāsana.
Starting from the inner heel, through the ankle, knee,
groin, side body, chest, and into the inner arm, I began to feel connections
traveling through the body.
Looking at the body through the map of traditional East
Asian meridians brings still another set of questions.
When studying the work of people who have explored
whole-body organization, sensation, and movement through approaches such as
Rolfing and Soma, the same posture begins to show another face.
When reading approaches that explore the relationship
between the body and trauma, I begin to wonder not only which muscles are
working, but also what the body is allowing and what it may be resisting.
It is the same body. The same Trikoṇāsana.
And yet the movement can change dramatically depending on
where I place my attention.
Has the body changed? Or has the one who is looking
changed?
Probably both.
Changing Just One Thing in Handstand: the Eyes
One of the postures in which I feel the relationship between
Dṛṣṭi and the whole body most
clearly is Handstand.
When I look forward, and when I draw the gaze inward toward
the tip of the nose, the first thing that changes is the alignment of the
spine. From a more neutral position, as the gaze begins to move forward,
the spine also begins to move toward extension. This does not simply mean
bending the lower back. The shoulders and pelvis open together, while at the
same time there must be enough strength to contain and support that opening. Only
the gaze has changed, yet the relationship between the head and neck, the
spine, the shoulders and pelvis changes with it.
So in Handstand, Dṛṣṭi does
not feel like merely a point to look at so I do not fall. It feels more like a
small starting point that helps determine the direction of the whole body. What
I have experienced as “proper energetic alignment” feels very far from
straining or forcing.
In fact, it feels almost like the opposite.
Like water flowing. Like the line of a dance coming alive.
There is definitely effort, but the different forces do not
seem to fight one another. The whole body connects in one direction, and the
breath and movement settle into that direction together.
In the language of Yoga, this could be described as the flow
of prāṇa. It
could also be described through the mechanics of movement. Through breath and
pressure,or through the relationships between joints and muscles.
To me, all of these descriptions are true in their own way.
Sitting Without Closing the Eyes
Perhaps because of my experience practicing Dṛṣṭi, the way the eyes are used
in seated Seon meditation felt natural to me.
When people hear the word meditation, many first imagine
someone sitting quietly with closed eyes. But in Seon practice, the eyes are
not completely shut.
The Zuòchán Yí (坐禪儀), a meditation text by the
Song-dynasty monk Changlu Zongze (長蘆宗賾),
gives quite specific instructions for the sitting posture.
The body should not lean to the left or right, nor tip
forward or backward. The waist and spine, head and neck are kept upright. The
ears align with the shoulders, and the nose with the navel.
Then it says very simply about the eyes:
目須微開.
The eyes should remain slightly open.
When I learned seated meditation from my Seon teacher, Ven. Woongsahn,
I was taught much the same way.
The gaze naturally falls toward the floor a short distance
ahead. There is no need to force the eyes into an especially sharp focus. If
they become tired, they can close briefly and then open again. The point was
not to struggle to keep the eyelids open at all costs My teacher told me that practicing
with the eyes open can be very helpful in ordinary life.
That made immediate sense to me. I had already been
practicing Yoga with my eyes open all along. Meditation is not about closing
the eyes and making the world disappear.
The world is still in front of us. There is light. There is
sound. But simply because something appears does not mean we have to follow it.
Dṛṣṭi in
Ashtanga Yoga and seated Seon meditation are not the same practice. Their
methods are different. Their histories are different. Their contexts and aims
are different. And yet, through both practices, I sometimes meet a similar
question.
My eyes are open, but what am I following?
Placing the Body First
One thing that interested me when reading the Zuòchán Yí
was that before saying much about what to do with the mind, it gives very
concrete instructions about the body.
How to sit, where to place the waist, how to hold the head, how
to position the eyes.
Ashtanga Yoga has something similar.
Place the feet. Place the hands. Place the spine. Place the
breath. Place the gaze.
And then, watch how the mind moves.
Through practice, I repeatedly feel that body and mind are
not completely separate things.
When posture changes, breathing changes. When breathing
changes, the mind changes. When the eyes wander, attention scatters with them. When
the gaze settles again, the body begins to return as well.
So what I now call “proper alignment” is a little
different from making the body perfectly straight in a photograph.
Body and breath, force and prāṇa, gaze and attention, not
drifting too far apart from one another, while moving farther away from the
feeling of forcing and straining.
Like water flowing, like the line of a dance continuing, the
whole body naturally finding one direction. To me, that is proper alignment.
Can Equanimity Be Trained Through the Eyes?
At first, I thought Dṛṣṭi was
simply a method for concentration.
Now the word equanimity also comes to mind.
When everything is comfortable, looking at one prescribed
point is not very difficult.
But what about when I am shaken? When I am afraid? When
something is not working? When I feel as though I am falling behind the person
next to me? When I receive praise? When someone makes me uncomfortable? Can I
still return without being swept away?
Not being shaken does not mean that nothing ever happens. It
means noticing that I have been shaken, and returning. Scattering again, and
returning again.
Dṛṣṭi
sometimes feels like that to me. The practice is not becoming someone whose
gaze never wavers. It is noticing when it has wandered. And returning.
I experience something similar when I practice with other
people. Sometimes people openly express dissatisfaction with their posture, their
movement, or simply with the body they have that day.
“I can’t do this.”
“This part just won’t work.”
In those moments, there is not always a need to push harder
into the same posture. We may lower the difficulty, reduce the depth, try
another way of moving, or sometimes borrow a movement from an entirely
different series. I try to make the atmosphere a little warmer and more
spacious. Often, the expression on the other person’s face changes almost
immediately.
“Oh, I can do this.”
“This way works. It actually feels good.”
And what happens next is even more interesting. Without
being told, they begin experimenting on their own. They move a little
differently, change the angle, try another possibility. The body has not
suddenly become somebody else’s body. Nor have they suddenly conquered the
posture that seemed impossible a moment ago. Only the place they were looking
from has changed.
From “what I cannot do” to “what is possible right now.”
When the gaze changes, the atmosphere changes. And when the
atmosphere changes, movement sometimes changes with it. Perhaps equanimity is
not a state in which nothing ever shakes us, but something closer to the
ability to find a place to look again, even while we are being shaken.
Where Am I Looking?
When I first learned Dṛṣṭi, the
question was very simple.
Where am I supposed to look?
The tip of the nose. Between the eyebrows. The navel. The
fingertips. The toes. The thumbs. Upward. Right. Left.
There was always a prescribed answer. But after years of
practice, the question gradually changed.
What am I looking at right now?
And after a little more time, another question appeared.
Where am I placing my attention right now?
It is fine to look in a mirror. It is good to study the
body. To look at muscles, fascia, meridians, movement, and even to look again
at my own body in a recorded video. All of these can be useful forms of study. The
important thing was never to see nothing.
To keep the eyes open, to see, and at the same time to
notice what I am following.
The eyes can remain in one place while the mind travels very far away. And the
opposite is also possible: many things can appear before the eyes without the
mind following every one of them.
On the mat, I still look where my teacher tells me to look. I
look toward the tip of the nose, toward the thumbs, toward the toes. It is the
same Dṛṣṭi as
before. But now another question sometimes follows just behind the gaze.
Where is my mind looking right now?
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