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The subject of the workshop at PYS was Nada Yoga, the yoga of sound. You may have heard of Nada or even taken a Nada class in your travels through Yoga Land. I can almost guarantee though that what you heard about or experienced wasn't the traditional version of the practice, but instead was a modern remake. How can you tell? Simple, ask yourself: did the practice involve audible music, either live or recorded, and was that music carefully chosen for its soothing but at the same time attention-engaging qualities-for example, Mozart works well, or Ravi Shankar, but AC-DC is a no-no-which in the end was designed to serve as a kind of meditative inducement? If the answer is "yes," then you've encountered modern Nada Yoga.

You might have noticed something slightly strange in the reference just above to "audible music." The phrase seems redundant: how can music be anything but audible? You can't have "inaudible music"-can you?-unless you mean that Patty Loveless song stuck in your head, which while technically inaudible to everyone but you, still has an audible source. Well, those of you who've been visiting Yoga Land for awhile know that the word "impossible" doesn't exist within the confines of its boundaries. I won't go into the details here, but suffice it to say that in Yoga Land, everything in the outside world, our so-called "consensus reality"-which to the yogis is merely the tip of the reality "iceberg"-has its subtle counterpart in YL. Together, these gross and subtle realms are ultimately nothing other than an incredibly intricate interplay of vibrating energies-sounds in other words-emanating from the "unstruck" Source of all, which the yogis call Brahman.

Now it should be clear that I actually mis-translated nada in the first sentence of this letter, so as not to confuse anyone right off the bat (I always wait until the second paragraph to start confusing things). Nada is more properly rendered as "subtle sound," the background sound or "dance" of the universe if you will, which can only be heard by those who have purified and opened what I call the "yoga" or "third ear." In a sense these sounds are a map, that if followed diligently in meditation, will lead us back to Brahman, who is the equivalent of our own true Self.

You may say to yourself: This is all well and good, but no way I can hear subtle sounds, especially after several decades of feeding the Rolling Stones through earphones directly into my eardrums. Relax, as I suggested you needn't have 20-20 hearing, or whatever they call it, to practice Nada Yoga. In fact, you may be surprised to learn that once upon a time, maybe 600 years ago, Nada was an important component of Hatha Yoga. How important? In the fourth chapter of the venerable Hatha Yoga Pradipika, about 38 verses are dedicated to this subject, which may not seem like a lot, until you consider that the first chapter gives 36 verses to the entire instruction on asana. The HYP's author, Svatmarama Yogendra ("lord of yoga who delights in his own self"), remarks that even those who are muda, "stupefied, bewildered, perplexed, confused, uncertain" and, pulling no punches, a "fool," will benefit greatly from Nada. He estimates that of the one-and-a-quarter crores of methods taught as vehicles to help us realize and liberate the self (a crore equals 10 million), Nada is the best way to go.

Now don't get me wrong. I've no problem with listening to music while practicing, and using that music to elevate your consciousness beyond the mundane into more etheric realms. We might even say that audible music is a preliminary form of traditional Nada. But if you want to practice the real deal, then this is the way it was done six centuries ago in the HYP.

Sit in Muktasana (Freedom Pose). Oddly, though he recommends it for Nada, Svatmarama says nothing about how to perform this pose. We need to go to the later Gheranda Samhita, where we're told to sit upright with the left heel at the root of anus and the right heel over that. Next find that little fleshy tab just in front of each ear hole (the tragus) and use your thumbs to press them over and close the openings to the ear canals (there's a bit more to this hand position, but we'll simplify things for now); as an alternative, I like to use foam ear plugs. Then, says Svatmarama, hold Shambhavi Mudra (Shiva's Seal); that is, slit the eyes a quarter open, with consciousness focused at the bridge of the nose, staring out at the world but not seeing, and not letting consciousness "leak out" through the eyes. Finally listen intently in the right ear for the nada.

What exactly will you hear? There's really no telling, but the yogis offer up some suggestions. As your meditation proceeds, and you penetrate into subtler realms of consciousness, the first sound they mention is a tinkling sound (this is from the HYP, different sources list different sounds), which results in bliss. Next comes a kettledrum and more bliss, accompanied by a newfound wisdom. A second type of drum sound follows the first, here a signal of entry into a superhuman state. Finally there's the sound of a flute, a prelude to liberation. Of course we can't take these sounds too literally, better to understand them as approximations or metaphors for ineffable sounds. You will likely hear much different "sounds," though it's important not to interpret them and try to hear "music." Allow yourself to be absorbed by the unlabeled sound, drawn more and more intently into the ephemeral and for most of us uncharted territories of Yoga Land. Sound good?