24th Feb-2nd March 2025: Ishvara Pranidhana - the telescopic perspective

In my late 30's I hit a difficult patch of life. During a particularly bad episode of chaos, faced with losing everything, I zoomed out, in the truest sense of the phrase.

Seated at my dining room table, I drifted up and away toward the ceiling and looked down on myself. Then further away I went, through the roof of the house, up into the sky. The slate tiles on top of the house got smaller, streets below shrank into vein like networks and the trees and roads became smudges of green and pencil grey lines.

As I drifted back, back, back behind the clouds, I saw now the scrunchy edge of the coastline, small white paintbrush flicked waves marking vast oceans. Shrinking. Beyond the hemisphere til the earth became a large glowing green and blue orb against the inky, star speckled universe.

I floated there looking at our tiny planet dwarfed by the infinite expanse of blackness and saw how insignificant we humans are. Conflict, money, schedule, religion, power, war, death, tears, love, sex, celebration and joy all looked different from here. Not only did this retreat give me urgent peace in that moment, it allowed a perspective that we are everything (down there) and nothing (from up here) and in the face of big trouble, it's still my go to today. 

I was reading about Astronomer and Planetary Scientist Carl Sagan this week. During the 1980's he was the project director for the selection of content for the Voyager space mission (content which is  left for any spacefaring civilisation who might come across it). He recommended the crew should record a photograph of earth as it journeyed into space. This image (above) shows a universe with no horizons, a streak of sun rays and one tiny blue dot just visible in one of the beams of light. This is earth from 4 billion miles away. The photograph inspired Sagan's book  "Pale Blue Dot" in which he talks movingly about the powerful perspective of viewing earth from space. Zooming out if you like, a new perspective on our small personal dramas. 

In Patanjali's estimated 2000 year old yoga sutras, amongst his endless lists you'll find at the beginning of the yogic path to enlightenment the ethics and moral codes for living. This is the yogi's essential yamas and niyamas: a list of ten restraints and observances. ​Number 10 is Ishvara Pranidhana: this is the practise of surrendering to God. This Sanskrit phrase translates to English as Ishvara: God or unchanging reality and Pranaidhana: paying attention to or meditating on. So literally "Paying attention to God" or if you don't believe in God, something much bigger than us.  This is a "big picture" practise which according to Shiva Rea initiates a sacred shift of perspective that helps us to remember, align with, and receive the grace of being alive. The big picture perspective -  or zooming out -  helps us to take care of the small things with love. 

We live our lives with this microscopic view, focusing on ourselves and on the tiniest details like we are the lead role in  our own movie and we tend only to lean into a  telescopic wider lense  - zooming out - when terrible things happen. Then we look up to heaven and suddenly prey to God when we were perhaps never religious. Patanjali encourages us to practise Ishvara Pranidhana daily, to dissolve the endless agitations of the mind, shifting our narrow perspective from the "i" and reunites us with our true self, the giver source: the universe or God. It brings us to the ultimate unified state of yoga: samadhi. Bliss or freedom from suffering.