Who is Delson? From Yoga to Buddhism - My personal Journey -From India to the US

My name is Delson Armstrong. It's a very Indian name, of course. I'm originally from India, but I grew up in the U.S., and I returned back to India when I was about 13. Before that, I was actually introduced to yoga, Hatha yoga. And my first experience with that was amazing. It was my first sort of entry point into the spiritual life and the world of meditation.

A family friend of mine offered me a book, which was a compendium of different yoga asanas, different postures, breathing techniques, mudras, basically the entire sort of lifestyle of yoga and becoming a yogi. But when I was in India, I went to an international school for about three years. And in my third year, I met with a teacher who himself was a yogi.

And he was trained under the Chinmayananda school. So Chinmayananda and Swami Sivananda, for those of you who might be aware of this. And I was very interested in understanding more about yoga. What is yoga? What do we do with yoga? He primarily taught me what's known as pranayama, a lot of different breathing techniques and some asanas. And then towards the end of my time in school, I got expelled.

So I decided I would go and travel to the Himalayas. I was invited to come to the Himalayas and study with him. So over there, I spent a great deal of time studying yoga philosophy, something known as Vedanta philosophy, and something known as Sankhya. So these are all sort of interrelated in terms of them being part of the six schools of Hinduism.

And so, Sankhya has a lot of overlap with yoga, and it also has a lot of overlap with Buddhism. So I thought I'll talk a little bit about my understanding of yoga from a more meditative and philosophical view. How many of you have read the Yoga Sutras? Good. Good. I'm glad to see that. So you'll be familiar with some of the first few verses of the Yoga Sutras. And I want to kind of break that down from how I've understood it and how it's been taught to me.

The first verse is, and now yoga begins. That's sort of the assumption that you've tried everything else, and now you're here to learn yoga. And the second one is really important to understand, because this is something that overlaps with Buddhism. It says yoga is the cessation of all mental faculties or activities. And then the third verse says, and then one's true existence is understood.

And then it goes into the different kinds of disturbances of the mind and so on and so forth. But it says that with practice and detachment, Abhyas and Vairagya, what does that mean? So I was recently, I think in March, in Delhi at this AI conclave, which was a conclave of different kinds of spiritual practitioners as well as people in the AI world. And one of the people there was a guy named Eddie Stern. I don't know anything about him, but I was listening to what he was saying. And apparently he's a very big yoga teacher. But I had a chance to have a private audience with him.

And I said, if you were to boil down the practice of yoga, how would you boil it down? And he said it's the practice and detachment. So what do we mean by that? It's the practice of learning to let go of all of the things that fluctuate in the mind, all of the things that are changing all the time in the mind. And it's the detachment from those things. So it's the practice of letting go of the changing, coming to the unchanging, and being detached from that process.

And I thought that's a great way of putting it, because that is the practice of yoga: to bring the mind to the culmination point where it completely ceases. Because once it ceases, it has the capacity to go beyond the fluctuations of all of these different reflective experiences. And there are these five different disturbances like sleepiness and memory and different kinds of perceptions and so on, which are very similar to Buddhism, which talks about five hindrances.

The five hindrances in Buddhism are craving, aversion, restlessness, sleepiness or sloth and torpor, and doubt. My experience with yoga when I was there in the Himalayas was also the study of Patanjali's eight limbs. This is very, very interesting, because nowadays you see in the West, and now even in India, you have all forms of yoga. You have leia yoga, you have kundalini yoga, you have beer yoga, you have cannabis yoga, you have goat yoga, so I've heard.

I don't know what that is and I don't want to know what that is. But there's a specific kind of yoga that's mentioned in the Yoga Sutras. It's called Kriya Yoga. For those of you who might have studied or heard about Paramahansa Yogananda and the autobiography of a yogi, that's Kriya Yoga, but we're talking about something different, which is mentioned in the Yoga Sutras. And there are three things that comprise Kriya Yoga.

They are known as tapas, svadhyaya and Ishvara pranidhana. I'll translate them for you. So tapas is what? Heat. Tapas is heat. It literally means heat. Svadhyaya means to study oneself, study one's actions, study one's mind. And Ishvara pranidhana is being devoted to a higher purpose. These are sort of the literal meanings of these words. But if you were to contextualize them in the process of meditation, what they are is balancing one's mental energy, having the right effort.

And svadhyaya, when we say study of the self, it means how does my mind work? How does my mind move? It's a process of mindfulness. And Ishvara pranidhana, which is the devotion to a higher purpose, is to bring my mind's attention to something that is wholesome and keep my attention on it, which is a form of collectedness.

So if we do these three things, the mind is ripe for what's known as samadhi. Samadhi means a mind that is completely even. Samadhi is same, same, same. Dhi is a short form of buddhi, which means the mind or the intellect. And it's where the mind becomes very balanced and very collected. But what Patanjali says is there are certain processes that we have to go through before we can experience these things.

And namely what he's talking about is yama and niyama. So this is the ethics part of things. Ethics and purity of mind and body. And that means do no harm, be truthful in your actions and in your speech, be devoted to brahmacharya, which can mean celibacy for some, but it can also mean just being devoted with or to a partner, different things like that. Not stealing, being content, being clean in the mind, and so on. And then once you have that, your mind has the capacity to be pretty much ready for the process of meditation, and that leads us to something known as asana. Now asana has many different

ways of being implemented in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. There are something like 84 different postures, or more than that, and they're all for the purposes of bringing stillness to the body. So what does Patanjali say about asana? He says sthira sukha asana, which means an asana is that which is stable and comfortable. So how you sit, you can sit cross-legged, you could sit in a chair, you could go in a shoulder stand if you want, you could be in a headstand if you want. If that's comfortable and stable enough for you, you can do that for the purpose of meditation.

But that is what asana is. And then that leads to something known as pranayama. Now, pranayama is usually breathing practices like alternate nostril breathing, the breath of fire, these kinds of things. But what do we mean by pranayama? Prana is the life force that runs through our body. It's the energy, one of the five different kinds of energies that help maintain the body.

So prana is the process of in-breathing, bringing in energy through the breath. There's something called apana, which is the process of elimination. There's something known as samana, which is the process of digestion. Something known as udana, which happens in the head. And vyana, which is the circulation of energy through the body, which is the circulation of the air, circulation of the blood, and so on. But here, what we're talking about is pranayama. Yama means to bring to control, to bring to steadiness.

So we are engaging directly with the prana through the breath. The breath itself is not prana. The breath is the carrier for prana. So when we're utilizing the breath, it's allowing us to utilize that energy. And we're learning how to still the mind by stilling the breath. But the process of doing this is less about being forceful with the breath and more about observing how our breathing happens, because this is in conjunction with the tapas, the Ishvara pranidhana, and the svadhyaya, the study of oneself.

When you observe how the breath moves, you become more and more in alignment with prana. This is pranayama. As this happens, the breath becomes subtler and subtler, and your mind becomes more steady. And now you go into the territory of what's known as pratyahara. Pratyahara is essentially withdrawing the mind. The image that's given is like a tortoise that withdraws its limbs and now is ready for meditation. So what are you doing by doing that? You are actually sitting down for meditation. You have stilled the body. You have asana. And now your prana starts to become more aligned as your breathing becomes softer and softer and more and more subtle. And as you do this, your mind starts to become collected.

Your mind becomes less interested in what's happening in the outside world. It becomes more withdrawn. It's secluded from all of the different noise that's happening. And then from this pratyahara, there is something known as dharana. Dharana is essentially taking an object of meditation. You bring your mind towards an object of meditation. And we'll talk more about that when we talk about TWIM, because we might do a guided meditation with that, and I'll show you.

So dharana is bringing the mind towards one particular object. And you get into what's known as dhyana. Dhyana is translated as concentration or focus, but that's too hard of a translation. Because what that means is we're suppressing the mind. We are forcing the mind to concentrate. But what's happening here is we're letting the mind rest into an object.

And then we're allowing the mind to stay with the object. So the process of dhyana is to stay with the object of meditation as best as you can. When all these factors are coming together, you have something known as samadhi. And samadhi is essentially the mind that remains unmoving. It remains undisturbed. It is unscattered. It is collected.

Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras then goes on to talk about the different kinds of samadhi states. And he talks about there's samadhi with joy, there's samadhi with the sense of I, there's samadhi that is with an object of meditation, without an object of meditation, and so on and so forth. There are many different technical terms for these things. But they overlap with some of the things that we will talk about in reference to Buddhism.

And so when we go through this line of thinking through yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and then samadhi, we get to yoga. And so the process of yoga there is to still the mind to such an extent that there's nothing left, and the true nature of reality presents itself without filtering it through the senses, without filtering it through our concepts of what it is and what it isn't.

Yoga generally is translated as what? Anybody know? Yoke, which means to? To join together, to bind together. So this is what yoga generally is translated as. But actually yoga is pointing to the issue. Not the goal. Yoga is pointing to the issue that the mind has been joined to the unreality with the reality.

Which is known as Purusha and Prakriti. So Purusha is the unchanging. Going back to Eddie Stern's description, the unchanging. And Prakriti is the changing. So Purusha is the actual nature of experience. It's what's behind the experience. It's a substrate of all experience. And Prakriti is that which is the dance that happens on top of it. But the issue here is that they're joined together.

And the whole point of yoga is to still the Prakriti, which are the fluctuations of the mind, to come to Purusha, which is already there. It's not something to gain. It's not something to achieve. It's already present as what is known as the true nature of existence, as per the Yoga Sutras. That's sort of my little spiel on yoga, as I understand it from my experience and my journey through this process.

Does anybody have any questions before we move on? How about one story from a cave? Story from a cave? There are too many of those magical, mystical stories. You've got to have something. Well, I'll tell you one really crazy story. We traveled from Haridwar to Rishikesh. So we are traveling further up north from Haridwar to Rishikesh, Rishikesh to a place called Uttarkashi, which is even further up north. In Uttarkashi there are a lot of different ashrams. There's the Chinmayananda Ashram, there's the Shivananda Ashram, which are the more well-known ones, but there are smaller ashrams everywhere. My teacher and I, what we did was we just traveled as wanderers. There was no real goal to get somewhere.

And so we would travel on foot everywhere we went. There was this one time we took a little stop and we went down by the Ganges. So everywhere we went the Ganges was either to our right or to our left, depending how we moved around, and on this particular place there was a cave, and in the cave was this man who was sitting and just minding his own business. He saw us and he told us to come, and we sat with him. It was the weirdest thing, because in the cave was basically what you could call a living room or studio. There was a television, there was a fridge, there was a kettle.

I don't know where he got the electricity, but there it was. And this man was fairly old, and he was a yogi, he was a sadhu. And he started talking to us about the nature of creation, how the world is created, based on the four elements. So he's talking about the water and the air and the fire and the earth, and how they all come together. And he pulled out this big book called the Yoga Vasistha, which is highly recommended. It's a really interesting book, which has all kinds of stories and ideas about multiverses, about existence, about different timelines, parallel dimensions.

And it cuts through to what yoga is all about using those different concepts. And so he took some stories from there and started explaining those things, and we spent maybe 45 minutes with him. And then this is where the weird part comes up. Believe me or not, it doesn't matter, but this is my experience. So I'm walking, we're both walking away, and he says, wait, wait, hold on. And he runs to this nearby little temple, which is very, very small, almost like an altar. And he gets a little bowl made out of like these dried leaves. And he hands it to us, and he says, use this bowl and take it with you.

And wherever you go in your travels, share what's in this bowl with others. And in the bowl were these sugar candy crystals. And so we would take some, and then as we were walking, sometimes we would hitchhike, and there would be a jeep with six other people, and we would share it with everyone else. But that was a never-ending bowl. It never ended through our journey.

Believe me or not, but that was one of the weirder experiences I had with them. Anyway, I want to talk a little bit about what we do here and what kind of practice we teach. I think it's important for you to know how I came into this teaching, which is basically, I studied, as you know, yoga.

And then I studied Kriya Yoga as taught by Yogananda and other teachers from those lineages. I practiced that very diligently. I went way too hardcore on myself and just studied and practiced for seven, eight hours a day. It's not something I would recommend. There should be balance. There should be a way of practice and then living the practice and then going back to the practice. But I was basically obsessed about the aspects of yoga that dealt with moksha, which is just leaving everything behind.

Anyway, I practiced Kriya Yoga for a while, and then I was introduced to Mahamudra and Dzogchen Buddhism for a bit. And then later on, I lived in San Diego for about six years, and about halfway through my time there, I was going back into the Yoga Sutras, and there's a section in the Yoga Sutras called the Vibhuti Pada, which is Samyama. Samyama is the joining together of dharana, dhyana, and samadhi to focus your mind on a specific object for the purpose of fully understanding certain capacities.

I was practicing and trying to figure out what this was really all about. And I came across two things, which are Yoga Sutra 1.33 and Yoga Sutra 3.24. And they both were related to what are known as the Brahma Viharas. 1.33 says that the way to stilling the mind is through loving kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. When one is able to bring these states up, the mind naturally starts to calm down.

And then in 3.24 it says by imbibing the mind, or infusing the mind with one of these states, the person's nature becomes that. So when you infuse the mind with loving kindness, you are loving kindness. When you infuse the mind with compassion, you are compassion, likewise with joy and equanimity. And my interest was, who is teaching this? Is there anybody out there who is teaching this process of loving kindness? These four Brahma Viharas, as they're known as.

And so I googled that, and I found on YouTube a few different teachers. But I came across a teacher named Bhante Vimalaramsi, who I think some of you recognize the name. And I was listening to his videos, and there was one video that he, it was actually not even a video, it was an audio on YouTube, of his description of the path leading to something known as Nibbana or Nirvana in Sanskrit.

The way he was describing it was so meticulous and so simple and easy to follow. And then he was explaining the process of Nibbana and what happens after Nibbana, and this experience of relief. You could feel it in his voice when you heard it, when he was talking about it. And that was, I have to learn from this person. I have to know how to exercise the Brahma Viharas from this person. And I looked online, and there were online retreats, but he himself wasn't giving an online retreat. But I saw the next best person to teach is amongst us, David Johnson.

And so I waited patiently until there was a slot open for his retreat, online retreat. So I signed up. And then the rest is history. I kind of went through 10 days with him, and he'll tell you the rest. But basically, I had a wonderful experience doing it. And it became my practice after I did it. And later on, I had a chance to meet with David and some of his friends. He was coming to San Diego where I was staying at the time, as I said. And then he mentioned that Bhante would be in California later that year.

And so we spoke about that. And I had a chance to meet Bhante Vimalaramsi in 2016 or 17. One of those, I think it was 17. And I had a great conversation with Bhante. David was there and another person. And we talked about some really deep aspects of the teaching of Buddhism. And then Bhante asked me if I would be interested in teaching.

And I said, with his blessing I would be, with his permission I would be. And so I started becoming an online twin teacher, where I would do email sort of back and forth with students for a while. But I was still sort of working full-time in San Diego. And it wasn't until early 2020 when I decided to go back to the mountains and go back with my practice, and I was there in a cave again.

I stayed there for a very short period of time because the pandemic hit. But during that time, there were other students of the TWIM practice who started communicating with me, contacting me. And that kind of grew into where people kind of heard more about me. And I started doing YouTube videos when I was in Cambodia, and then doing three-day retreats, and then 10-day retreats. And then it just worked itself out, and I became a teacher.

And here I am now. So what is this TWIM that we're talking about? It stands for Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation. When we talk about Tranquil Wisdom Insight, Tranquil is that part of the mind that has experienced serenity. It is basically akin to Samadhi. In the Pali, this is known as Samatha, where the mind is very quiet and tranquil. And the wisdom insight is the mind will reveal to you through intuitive insight the understanding of how existence works. Because as you start to study your own mind, as you start to see how your mind creates a personality, creates the ego structures, creates the identification with different things, you start to notice how the mind also causes its own suffering.

And that's the whole basis of Buddhism, is to let go of the causes and conditions that create that suffering. So that's the wisdom insight part of it. So this is what's known as Samatha Vipassana. You may have heard of Vipassana as its own thing, but you need both in order for your mind to actually fully experience the cessation of suffering.

Tranquil Wisdom Insight Meditation primarily deals with what's known as the Brahmavihara meditations. And the Brahmaviharas, as I said earlier, are four in number. Loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. Loving-kindness comes from the Pali word metta or the Sanskrit maitri. And it actually means to be a friend to yourself and a friend to others. Treat yourself as you would a friend, your best friend. So you have goodwill for them. You see the goodness in yourself and you see the goodness in others. And you wish well for all beings. This is what loving-kindness is.

Compassion is the recognition of one's own suffering and others' suffering. And therefore there is a resonance there. There is an empathy there. You don't look down on them, but you recognize that suffering and you wish them free of that suffering. Joy is actually what's known as empathetic joy. Mudita, and empathetic joy, is essentially celebrating in the happiness of other beings. It's a wonderful antidote for jealousy and envy.

The celebration of the happiness of others. And equanimity is a mind that is clear, collected, and free of any agitation. It sees things as they are without adding or taking away anything. It remains undisturbed by the fluctuations of what's happening internally and externally. But we start off with loving-kindness, and in the practice of loving-kindness we deal with a more somatic kind of experience. So it's less about using a mantra like, may I be happy, may other beings be happy, as you may have heard of in other kinds of practices. And it's actually

Imbuing the entire mind and body with the feeling of loving-kindness. So you may use in your mind words like, may I be happy, may I be well, may I be free of suffering. You may use it for others, but when it comes to those words, you want to feel those words. They should come from the heart, and sometimes the words might not be enough.

What you may want to do is bring up a wholesome memory, an image that might bring a smile on our face. And by the way, smiling is so important to this practice of TWIM, because it brings immediate presence of mind to whatever is happening, and it uplifts the mind. So it makes it ripe for feeling that loving-kindness.

So you can use an image like, we saw Duke and Sukkah in the dining hall. They definitely bring a smile to our face, and there's a certain warmth that's there. That feeling of warmth, that feeling of, that I want to just squeeze Sukkah. That loving-kindness is the feeling that we want to let the mind experience.

It feels like warmth in the heart, but it's like the mind is basking in that. By the way, there's no difference between the mind and the heart. It's one and the same thing. A modern sort of way of looking at it is it's the mind and it's the heart. But the word for mind in Pali and Sanskrit, there are many different ones, but there's chitta. But chitta can refer to consciousness, it can refer to mind, and it can refer to the heart.

So it's really the heart, the heart-mind or the mind-heart. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about the mind or the heart. So you're infusing the feeling of loving-kindness, and you're letting your mind rest in that feeling. And if you can let the mind just rest there, that is your object of meditation, to stay with that. But invariably, you will get distracted at one point or the other.

But worry not, the Buddha had come up with a plan of action, which he called right effort, and which is now, in the modern context, the six R's. So what we're doing here is we sit down for meditation, we put a smile on our face, bring up a wholesome image, bring up a wholesome memory, say to yourself, may I be happy, whatever works for you. For one person, it was, I recognize the good in myself. That felt really good to them. So just use what works for you.

And you bring your attention there, right? And you stay with your mind being in that feeling of loving-kindness. And you may stay there for a little while, and you might notice thoughts are there in the background. But your mind's attention is still with the feeling of loving-kindness. So you're not really distracted. Your mind is sort of aware of stuff happening in the background, plus with the feeling of loving-kindness.

But if the mind's attention goes completely away from the loving-kindness, and now you're thinking about this or that, you're no longer feeling into the loving-kindness, now you're distracted. So how do you deal with that distraction? When you notice, that means you recognize you were distracted. This will happen at some point. You realize, oh, my mind was somewhere else. It's no longer in the feeling of loving-kindness. I recognize I'm distracted. It's the first step.

The second step is release. What are we releasing? We're releasing our attention from that distraction, and then bringing it back to the mind and body. And then we relax. This is very essential to the practice. In Buddhism, in the Pali Canon, which are part of the sayings of the Buddha, the wisdom teachings of the Buddha, he talks about tranquilizing the body, tranquilizing the mind.

So tranquilizing is relaxing. So we're relaxing any tightness and tension that might be present in the body, any tightness and tension that might be present in the mind. Now, don't ask me how to relax. You guys should probably know how to do that. You feel that. You feel into the body. You know what it feels like to be tight. You know what it feels to let go.

So you relax, and then you come back to the smile. If you're smiling, great, let's re-smile. And then you return back to the feeling of loving-kindness. And you stay with it. And you repeat the process whenever you get distracted. So what is a distraction? A distraction can be something like a craving for something. Like, you're thinking about something, you're planning something.

You're wondering about something. It could be aversion, right? Maybe you're hearing somebody talk outside of the hall, and now your mind's attention is there, and you're irritated by that. Or it could be some kind of ill will or animosity you might have towards someone or something that happened to you in the past. It could be restlessness, agitation in the mind, thinking too much.

It could be sloth and torpor. There is a certain level of tiredness or laziness or dullness in the mind. It feels like you're meditating, but then actually your mind has fallen asleep, or what's known as doubt. So the word doubt here, it's not doubt, not just doubt in yourself or anything else. It's about the lack of discernment of what is actually happening in the mind. Is there a wholesome state or an unwholesome state? Is the mind with its object, or has it gone somewhere else?

That doubt leads us towards further proliferation of these thoughts. And so using the six R's, we're gently guiding the mind back to the present moment. And the anchor for the present moment is the feeling of loving-kindness, which is the object. And then from there, for about the first ten minutes, you're with yourself. And then the rest of the practice, you're using a spiritual friend.

Now, that doesn't mean a friend who is necessarily spiritual. It just means a friend that you admire, somebody that you like, somebody you think of, who brings a smile to your face. Generally, they are of the same sex. They are alive, and they're not a relative, because that complicates things initially. We have all kinds of mixed baggage when it comes to our relatives.

But with a friend, somebody that you admire, it could be somebody you know personally, or it could be somebody that you admire from afar. When you bring that person into mind, you may visualize them in front of you, smiling. Or if you're not really visual, that's okay. You can imagine, or you can just intend that the feeling of loving-kindness that you're staying with is for that spiritual friend. Some people like to bring the spiritual friend and put them in their heart and let them bask in that feeling of loving-kindness.

And you do this for the rest of the sit. And you want to sit for a minimum of 30 minutes. So this is the practice. And every time you notice your mind is wandering off, you just use this as your guidepost. Bring the mind back in this way. A gentle bringing back of awareness into the present moment, back to your object.

You guys have any questions about this? Initially, there is. When you start off with this practice, you will start off first with yourself for the first 10 minutes, and then with the friend. And the friend is just a way of extending that loving-kindness outward. And then later on, you will start bringing other people and things.