This morning I'm reading Shantideva- an 8th century text that will form a frame for this weekend's deeper practice meeting. I want to be clear about the deeper practice group: there is a 12 module syllabus, with a backbone of reading and personal study, that you go through. But each time I teach, I'll be teaching from those bones, differently. Each time I'll be introducing a different text or practice for us - for you - to work with. So you can start at anytime - the backbone is there for you to work with. It's a thread you pick up and follow, regardless of whether you can make every month this year or not, the thread is there. And you should come back: the changing skin and deeper textures and tones aren't things you could understand or live with one brush through. We're trying to create community, create a sanctuary of depth practice. That is a rare thing. I'll give you a certificate and you can register as a yoga teacher once you've completed the syllabus. But that is only the surface.
Shantideva's text is a handbook for living the way.
We'll be using it because the heartwood of the book talks about the middle. The time after the honeymoon. We all fall a little in love with this practice, have moments of awe or startle or release. But those don't last. So it's important to tend to our practice, after the first fire has been lit. I think this is an important reflection for us to have, as teachers and students. How do you go on? How do you protect the practice and it's insights? How do you develop trust in the practice even when your body can't practice, or life throws you a little chaos, or you remember - because we're all going to have to remember - that there is such suffering in the world? What is the point of practice if there remains such suffering?
To me, Shantideva hears that hearts cry out: don't let me be lonely. Don't leave me. He understood, and he wrote this book.
I was talking with a friend who has had a lot of grief in his life, about my grief. We fumbled. Grief is such a hard question. It touches that bone: please don't leave me. We all want to feel secure, to feel love, to feel at home, to feel like ourselves. And we're all a little neurotic because at base, we know we might lose the job, or our health, or our family.
When we find a practice, we tend to think it'll stay. Just like when we fall in love or get a good job. We think we've finally found it.
Then life kicks in.
Shantideva helps. Come read with me, come sit. There are photocopies of Shantideva's chapters on the table in the prop room if you want to come. I want you to come.
Anyway, I came across this in one of the commentaries: bodhisattvas are passionate about awakening. I say again: this is a passionate practice. Wake up.
Today is a Monday, late in the year. I have to say this because I get confused, recently: I was supposed to be headed to New York City, yesterday, and a Zen retreat center early this morning. Instead, I'm at home nursing Ty, listening as cancer swells his abdomen and pain laces his bones. We wake and sleep all night long, The neighborhood went silent and empty over the holidays, and I cancelled my flight, and there didn't seem to be any sound anywhere. All the people went away, to family and parties and airports. I stayed. Snow fell, eventually. Time stopped. We - the dog and I - fell out of the world.
Time moves, for us, differently. Time is measured by his breath, this waking and sleeping all night long. I measure time since he last peed or ate, the hundreth time I clean up after him, the thousandth time I lay my forehead on his heart.
When I wrote to my teacher to tell him I wasn't coming, I used every word I could: cancer, diagnosis, uncertainty, responsibility. He answered simply, and intimately, as he does. Using the one word I didn't.
I'm sorry your dog is dying, he said.
I didn't say that, I realized. I didn't say the one thing. I didn't say: death.
Late in the cold, silent night I sat on the stoop and watched him limp around the yard. Put my hand on his big square head when he came back to me. Here is the gist of it: I don't know how many more times he will come back to me, anymore. It's a limited number, now, but I don't know what the number is. While on this retreat, I was to take my buddhist vows, to say out loud to my teacher I vow to follow this path, I vow to practice, I vow to practice until all sentient beings reach enlightenment. In the way of late, silent nights, it occurred to me that I am vowing: I am crossing over with this sentient being.
At four am, he fell asleep with his head on my lap. I sat still. I sat so still. I've often sat at four am, and this morning I remembered all of those times. I often joke that there was no transition period for me; I went from still being awake at four am as a drunk to waking at four am as a yogi with no interlude. The threshold of one day to another goes back a long time for me, touches a lot of people and places. This morning, my heart opened like an umbrella in my chest. I started to chant my chants, and then I sang old folk songs, and then I sang nothing at all. My throat stayed, wide open.
I wrote this much, this morning, and then stopped. I took Ty out to the woods and he refused. He looked at me as if apologizing. So I lifted him, carried him, back to the car and then the house. I took him out hours later and he left blood all over the snow. I want to write about blood on snow, but I can't find any words for it other than blood, on snow. A few hours ago, with his head up against my chest and my lips on his head, Ty died.
There is no direct lineage to this tradition, yet there is said to be a bloodline. The bloodline is the vowing, by countless human beings over time, down through time, that brings the length and breadth and abstraction of this practice to the bruisy aliveness of your own heart. We vow to use this moment, this experience, to wake up, to not be asleep, to not break. In some ceremonies, you chant all the names from the Buddha to your own teacher. Joan Halifax has a ceremony in which you chant all the names of the women ancestors, down to your very own. Bloodline ties abstract ceremony and intention to your own veins, to the reality of hot blood on cold snow. To say, right now, I use this moment to wake up.
I lost a dear friend, last February. Now Ty. Both of those beings formed me, or informed me, or something. Without their being in the world, I don't know who I am. Or, who I am isn't real any longer. All the meanings and things that tethered me to a schedule, a role, a relatedness, are undone. They are words that don't reflect reality, signposts that point to nothing, maps to things that no longer exist. I tried to study some of the work another mentor has sent me, but was absent minded and couldn't concentrate. I tried to review what I'm going to teach and couldn't understand my own handwriting. I can't remember the train of thought my notes were intended to map out. I feet lost: disconnected from my teachers, disconnected from what I am doing or why, disconnected from the ones I love.
Of course, grief is not my story. Getting lost, having the things that make our life, change, is the only certainty there is. We do something for a while. We love people or places or landscapes for a while, we say oh this is how it is, or find a practice and say oh I'm going to do this everyday, this is the beginning of the rest of my life, but then it changes. The marriage you're in today is not the marriage you started with. The body you have today is not the one you had a few months ago. Michael Stone once said he used to wonder how people go on living. We continually have to find new meanings for our lives.
Sometimes, the changes feel wonderful. You fall in love. Sometimes, they are death.
As Leslie says, you've never been this old before. And you'll never be this young again.
Bloodline is a question of how to enter where you are, now, amidst all these changes, as honestly and as bravely as you can. Because of this practice, over time, I have learned and can see how much depth there is. There is so much depth for me to move in my life, and so much depth for students to move into their own. Bloodline, a depth practice, is a way for us to not just 'know' things about yoga, or ourselves, but to really go for it, to go all the way. To keep giving ourselves to the practice, so that the practice can give you to yourself. It's so important that you not waste your own time.
You are on this threshold, too. Of time. Certain things have come to you in the last year or months, and certain things have gone away. Where you stand is a question, how to really go for it, into it, to find the deep heart of the question that is, ultimately, you. There are parts of this heart that are mechanical, routine, and rote. And there are parts of it that are wild. Parts of it that are poetic, mysterious, unknowable as a dog's deep eyes and unsayable as blood on snow. It's this part we come closer to though the bloodline. The wild bit of the heart that both loves and mourns. The part that screams out for healing. The part that is murky and unborn. The parts you suspect but can't quite explain.
I don't have much to say today other than grief, but time spins: if you'd like to go deep, deep into practice, deep into your own mind and your own experience over the past year and coming blank slate, I recommend the intensive at Saint John's January 17-22 or in Costa Rica this March. How can we let go, without ceremony? How can we make space for all that rushing newness in you, without marking space? How can you know what deeper means, if you don't open to deepening?
Costa Rica is 10% off if you book by January 31 (use GIFT4ME at check out here). Saint John's is 20% by the same date (use link below). And everyone who has NOT been to the studio in the past three months is welcome to come back at the intro rate of $30 for 30 days. Use this moment. Wake up.
Yesterday, snow, and today the cold. My body doesn't do well with cold snaps. Sudden cold seems to be the sure fire trigger to fibro flares. So I'm tender today. Sore and slow. I've never been able to figure out if sadness is a symptom, same as shouting bones and sour muscles and confusion, or if it's a natural consequence. I stub my toe and it doesn't stop that panging all day long. All day. I walk cautiously, which helps and doesn't. I am teary and sad, but also not. I am both sad, and sweetened. Things are so beautiful, I'm made sweet.
I walked the dog yesterday in the new fallen snow. It was so quiet, so still, so detailed in it's millions of black branches and millions more snowflakes. My pain doesn't bother me as it used to. I'm not as afraid of it as I once was. There are whole days I can't do asana or eat or sleep, but this doesn't seem very terrible any longer. I've learned some things. I've learned to breath. I've learned that most of the time there are things I can do, squiggling on the floor and moving my spine, opening the siezing muscles, letting my weight find a not so sore spot to drop. And somedays, I can't. I never know which day is which, until I start.
When I walk in the new snow, it seems the sound of my walking is the most beautiful sound on earth.
And then when I stop, it seems the silence is.
Someone asked if I was angry or disappointed in yoga: wasn't it supposed to heal me? I certainly have moments of that. But also, no.
No: at some point my practice became a way to work with pain, rather than a fantasy about 'curing' it. I tend to think my practice has, largely, healed my fibromylagia. But it hasn't cured it, and that is okay.
Last night, in dharma talk, I told people this practice would make their lives harder. They would become more aware of everything going on in themselves. They would see and not be able to unsee. At the same time, their lives would become much easier. They would enjoy themselves more. The world is a mess and they will know it; their minds and bodies are a mess and they'll know it; but they will have an equanimity in which those things don't belittle us or need to be pushed aside.
This morning, someone asked why we're doing 108 saluations for the solstice. Why 108, in particular. One symbolizes everything, I said. Zero symbolizes nothing. Eight symbolizes infinite relationship. There are dozens of other meanings of 108, but this is my favorite. Everything, and nothing at all.
As in, this practice is nothing. The postures don't matter much, and you'll lose all of them in the end, anyway. The meditation doesn't get you any cash and prizes. And accepting the ethics and an inner awareness doesn't necessarily make you happy. They often make life more hard.
But it is also, everything. It is the absence of fear and the walls of fear. It is a remedy to re-activity and expectation and chosen ignorance. It is a way to be in our life, pained or anxious, terrorized or privileged, with an ability to work with those things rather than suffer them. We work with our conditions, with our heart, with our bodies, and we become people able to know pain, fear, or death, without fear. Yogis will die just like everyone else will. But the time before might be spent, differently. Dying itself might be a wonder.
You can't hold or quantify the gifts of this practice. They are immaterial. Last night I said it'd be like taking a mason jar out into the snow and gathering some up, intending to keep it. Or bagging a breeze. Boxing an angle of sunlight. They aren't yours, and they don't last, and you can neither create them nor claim them.
You can only stand in wonder.
In a few weeks, I'll be leading retreat at Saint John's Abbey. You won't really get anything out of that, either. You may be working your way toward certification. You may be developing your capacity to teach, or to sit. You may learn a new chant or get some insight during meditation. You might develop. But it's only real outcome is a quality of wonder, an experience you do or don't have intimacy with, a depth to your inner life that you could never explain to another, anyway. I think it's everything. Sign up here: Spine, Soul, and Breath 2016.
Other notes:
108 Sun Salutations December 20th, 7 pm
Paula is adding a 6:30 am Friday class, starting in January.
I'm opening up more time to privates - in studio or via skype - for $108.
The Deeper Practice curricula is about to launch into the feet, which is a very good time to start, indeed. We'll meet January 9 and 10th.
The Dalai Lami responded to the terrorist attacks in Paris, like this: "We cannot solve this problem only through prayers. I am a Buddhist and I believe in praying. But humans have created this problem, and now we are asking God to solve it. It is illogical. God would say, solve it yourself because you created it in the first place . . . So let us work for peace within our families and society, and not expect help from God, Buddha or the governments."
Meanwhile, I was making preparations for a silent retreat over the New Year, during which I plan to take my Buddhist vows. Also, meanwhile, an unarmed black man was shot by the police, possibly while he was handcuffed. And while police brutality against blacks has been increasingly covered in national news, this time it was local. I haven't said much about this shooting. I've talked about the others. Someone asked why; if I was just overwhelmed, or was afraid that students would get tired of finding anxiety and pain in the studio instead of a respite, from it.
That isn't the reason. Or all of it, anyway.
I haven't spoken of it yet because this local incident also involved domestic violence. And while there was an immediate furor, protests, media coverage because all of our nerves are so frayed and this has happened so often, there was really no mention of the woman beaten by the man who was then shot. I haven't said anything because I haven't been able to find the words for this tangled, complicated problem. It is racism. It is police brutality. It is, also, domestic violence.
It is my niece's second birthday today. Also, the birth of one of my best girlfriend's first child. I was in the grocery store when I heard her daughter had been born. I was shopping for milk, but staring at the tinsel and aisles of candy cane colored cheap shit that replaced the orange and black cheap shit of Halloween. It isn't thanksgiving, yet, but Christmas insanity has descended upon commercial America. Two pictures, via text message, that made me stop in place.
I am trying to figure out what gratitude means. Or how to have it, when everything feels so very hopeless and I myself feel unable to make any difference at all. There is so much harm in the world. There is so much, wrong.
I've said, often, when I teach, that gratitude is the first thing I lose when I lose my practice. I'm not making that up. It's a palpable measure. But I'm not sure I've ever managed to say how to find gratitude in the first place.
It's often hardest for me to sit meditation or to practice asana when the world seems awful. Easier to practice asana. Perhaps because tension and heartache are things I can feel in my body and I want, in a very controlling, urgent kinda way, to work out. This is experienced truth, and I use it.
But it's probably also harder to sit meditation because I know how that works, too: you sit and the real of whatever is happening comes up. Complicated, terrible, terrorized, unsettling. When days are hard I often just want to get through them, not sit with.
Yet I teach this stuff, and I know it, and so this morning I bolted myself to my blanket and I sat.
As expected: tears, anxiety, and a whole lot of "i don't know what to do I don't know what to say I can't do anything I can't help but this contradicts that contradicts all of it and nothing nothing nothing I can't". Outright exhaustion, more tears, flippity heart and tight chest that is my brand of anxiety. Rape victim rage, domestic violence victim rage, images of infants and nieces and black friend's faces, and handcuffs, and guns, and roaring sounds in my ears.
Not expected: gratitude.
I believe many things. But some days, there isn't any hope left. Without hope, there isn't any reason, either. And from there, just nihilism, rank and pissy.
Truths, left to their literal selves, stun me to helpless and I do nothing. Meditation is where hopelessness becomes gratitude, and then action.
Truth number one is that black lives matter. It's ridiculous that we have to affirm such a thing, enraging that we do, and yet true that we have to. It's also true that all lives matter. And it's also true that to say so as a retort to #blacklivesmatter is racist, completely dismisses the reality of racism, and redefines terms. It is also true that gendered violence is endemic, silent, and taboo. To say Jamar Clark was an abuser detracts from the argument that he was killed by the cops because he was black. To not say he was keeps domestic violence taboo and silent, less an issue than men's lives and politics. Mr. Clark's attack on his girlfriend is directly related to the fact that he was shot as an unarmed black man, yet this is just too complicated to talk about. And it is also true to say that every single victim of the terrorist attacks in France, every single one of their family members, are all just as heavy, soul and flesh wise, as my very own.
I'm saying that anyone who tells you they have an easy answer to these things isn't telling all of the truths. There isn't an easy answer to this. There is only growing evidence of a systemic problem, a sick and completely shattered society.
I am not saying gratitude is simply a realization of how lucky I am. Luck is undeserved and impersonal. I didn't earn my skin.
Realizing privilege is not gratitude.
That would be mistaking an impersonal thing for something personal.
Meditation is often misunderstood or misrepresented as being somehow a resolution. Somehow a clarifier. Somehow a truth reveler.
I think this is a dangerous misinterpretation. Meditation does not simplify. Meditation proves how subtle and complex everything is. How tangled. We can't use meditation to analyze our problems or look for answers. There aren't any answers. To keep looking for them even in our 'mindfulness' practice is to superimpose our ego, our flaws, our compulsions, and our dualistic thinking onto something that simply will not resolve. We can't 'resolve'. We have to change. There is a difference. The difference is gratitude.
The only thing meditation is any good for is honesty of what is present. And the contradictions, therein. And the feeling, thereof. I think meditation is about embracing hopelessness, not a resolution of it. Just as meditation becomes a way to embrace illness or pain, grief, anxiety, depression, and trauma.
I used to think gratitude was about simple things. Grateful to be alive; grateful for food on the table; grateful for the handful of human beings in my life who love me in their messy - our messy - ways.
This year, I don't think that definition works. That version of gratitude, of 'attitude adjustment' and the decision to be happy, feels as tacky and as untruthful as all the cheap plastic shit in the grocery store earlier today. It feels selfish and full of denial.
I think gratitude is endlessly complicated. As finely striated as muscle. Infinitely complex and far beyond my comprehension, control, or will. It isn't a thing of decision or trying. And this is good, because simplifying is an insult. Because somedays there isn't any hope left.
Gratitude is a thing more fleshy than thought. And it comes from hopelessness, unresolved, and sat with intimately. I think you only get gratitude - get hope - by acknowledging the pain of hopelessness and helplessness. By realizing how truly impersonal world hurt is, yet how personal response must be. It's the razor thin paradox between knowing my opinions cannot heal the world, and that my actions matter.
In 1996, Bernie Glassman started a meditation retreat to Auschwitz. Anybody who isn't a mediator might see this as crude spectacle, as garish, or outright pointless. Just as anybody who hasn't really sat with the concept of Dukkha dismisses 'life is suffering' as pessimistic. According to Glassman, you sit with the pain, you face it as honestly as you can, and then you come back, changed. Pain informs your humanity, wakes it, startles it. Pain is the doorway to loving action.
When I sit on the hard days, I often start with agitation, frustration, and apathy. I don't want to sit still, but to break things. Or to run away. To say screw the world and its pain, let me get the best I can on my own. That was whole chapters of my life. You can read them, elsewhere.
But now, in this chapter of my life, I sit. What shows up is both expected (anxiety, discomfort, sadness, restlessness, tears) and not (a softening, a gulping, a slowing of time, a realization I'm making fists. Gratitude).
When I stand up from meditation, awareness of moments and of feeling go with me. And then I can't be apathetic anymore. When you have really allowed yourself to feel the unresolved problems, the very unsolvability of them, each new pain is both unbearable and trifling. When I hear of the suffering of others, I care. I care. And this is the only way I have any hope.
I speak to my dog and I hear the modulations of anger, fatigue, and wavering love in my voice. I notice it, too, projected onto other drivers when I'm in my car. I notice it in the way I handle the silverware and plates as I'm washing the dishes. Noticing, I soften. The dog forgives me, because he always does. The drivers don't know any different, because it wasn't road rage but muttering. The dishes don't clash so hard, but I don't think they're conscious of the shift. I've been to protests before, and black men have died after them. So I can't quite say that my actions matter in the world. But I can't quite say that they don't.
I'm going to the protests. Tomorrow I'm buying a gift for a newborn baby girl and one for my niece. On Thursday, Thanksgiving, I will teach a gratitude asana class in the morning, go to dinner with my family, and maybe go to the protests again.
I can't, really, say that my actions resolve the issues. But they do change the world. Gratitude doesn't seem to be a realization of how privileged I am, right now. That is a completely moot point that answers nothing and resolves to apathy and doing nothing. No: Gratitude is admitting how hopeless I feel, and how much I love the bloodied world, anyway. Gratitude is a question of how willing I am to touch it, blood and all.
I can explain why we sometimes cry during savasana.
There are tears of relief, tears of gratitude, tears of exhaustion, and tears of mourning. There are 10,000 kinds of tears. Generally, we know why we're crying. Or at least we think we do. We stubbed our toe. We get divorced. Something dies.
Or there's just one straw too many; after waking up late, fielding two hundred incoming emails, having an unhelpful and largely inane conversation with tech support, your boss gives you another responsibility without having said thank you for the last three weeks of around the clock work. Then you pick up the kids and your kid's school has sent a note home that feels mostly like you're not giving enough time to the school district and the classroom, you're a failed parent, you don't dress your child adequately and their behavior reflects your own disorganized finances. When you get back to the car, a traffic cop is writing you up a parking ticket. And then suddenly there you are. Holding on the the steering wheel and crying, and crying, and crying without there seeming to be an off switch. Crying that is disproportionate to the day. Crying that has more than the day in it.
It has the whole of your career at this bloody job behind it, all seven years of your kid's life and the difficulty you had in pregnancy, the whole garbled romance and relationship with the kid's father, the failed relationships before that one and the way you tend to short sell yourself, contort yourself, try to make someone love you, and how you've done this since you yourself were seven carrying a note home from school.
Or whatever. Or maybe you have very good off switches. That would prove my point, not unmake it.
We think we know what we're feeling and why. And we tend to think we've got it all under control. But sometimes, without knowing why, we cry during savasana. Emotional release - tears or laughter - aren't actually things we understand or do not understand. The 10,000 things between relief, gratitude, exhaustion and mourning don't comply with reason and they live outside of time. They live in bone, in fat tissue, in old songs, and our perfectionism. Yoga calls them samskara. Scar tissue. Effective yoga practice softens, elongates, heals deep body tissue. Letting the breath and the light shine on the old places, the gristled tissue, the storage around your pericardium and the ballast around your lower back is evocative. It is healing. This isn't an understanding, thing, but a bodied one. Your mind and your body are not "related"; they are the same thing. It's deeper practice weekend. We're going to:
understand yogic ideas of scar tissue, neuro plasticity, character and why we keep doing the same things in our lives.
see how stress affects metabolism, cognition, and immunity
learn how to effectively practice to relieve built up tension, rather than creating more.
Explore how this moving in or toward is ultimately where the healing happens, not in the final expression of a pose. This is the vinyasa or mindful, attending, movement, more than sequence is.We'll also look at transitions in asana practice, the way we move from pose to pose and into a pose.
Thus we'll understand how to get where we're going with clarity, strength, openness, and integrity. This in terms of asana, but also in terms of life. We move differently and make different choices and ultimately, rocket ourselves into change if we move from openness, clarity, strength, and integrity.
We'll look at relaxing the diaphragm and getting better at reading our own bodies, making asana more effective
Yoga was, in fact, discovered. I assert that Yoga could no more be invented or owned than electricity, gravity or respiration. - Leslie KaminoffI sell mirrors to the blind. - Kabir
When Iyengar died, I felt an absence in the world. Absence came, as blood clusters to bruise or rain appears in the sky. Absence formed and was felt. It hadn't been there, before. Ghosts appear out of nowhere.
I started to look for a teacher.
I wasn't looking for another certification. And I wasn't looking for a different slant on the yoga tradition, as if the one prior had somehow not been right for me or I'd matured past it; I'd done all of that before. I'd done enough to know floating from teacher to teacher, relationship to relationship, day to day, is more likely avoiding the path than walking it.
That's not what I mean.
I mean I started looking for a guru.
I warn you: this is probably not a sentence you ever really want to say out loud. I'm not sure it's something you should ever lay money on. And yet there I was, all in, a suitcase and a maxed out credit card. I ended up in Truth or Consequences, new Mexico. The Or hooked me. The fulcrum, the unanswered question. Either this is real, or it isn't. I'd begun to suspect the hinge comes down to teachers.
I know this: If you're looking for a teacher, or a teaching, or a tool to hang up pictures or chop vegetables with, you'll come across both charlatans and craftsmen. Most promise a version of happiness. They promise power, a miraculous life, the life you most want to live. All that you desire appearing. Like a ghost, but backwards.
Meanwhile, a few will offer you truth. This doesn't sound as nice. In fact this sounds downright threatening. You aren't sure you want it. You'll catch yourself wondering if you really need to hang up pictures or chop vegetables, after all.
If you don't go for truth, though, there will eventually be some suffering. There will be some, if even only a little, hell to pay.
When I was a little girl, the neighbors had horses. One was a palomino named sugar. The girl who rode the horses used to stand at the gate and call: shuugeeeer, shuger shuger shuger. The mare would come with long, heavy steps. In the yoga tradition, we call it sukkha. Sweetness. Promise. Easy Freedom. Out of the sanskrit comes our indo-european: refined and bagged and hawked.
Too much sukkha, goes a quip, causes truth decay. All stability falls out and the path dissolves, sugar into water. And all you're left with is a high, a self absorbed and immature high. And after that, you're left with nothing at all.
Truth is slippery and evasive. It is not a thing. Not in the way table or plant is. And it isn't quite god. Maybe it's a pull. A force. Like gravity.
Whatever it is, it is somehow related to men like Iyengar. And Jois and Desikachar. It's probably the thing that made Jesus what he was. St. Francis for all I know.
I'm saying this as a woman who never met Iyengar.
But when he died, I realized I was standing alone amidst the bullshit. The forefathers are gone and all we've got are stepchildren and bastards. Although they are related to the practice, they are not the practice. Not quite.
So this is how it happened. I flailed about, taking up this word, guru. And I ended up buck naked in southern New Mexico.
The sky could kill you in New Mexico. The Rio Grande is the smallest, reddest little river I've ever seen. I come from the land of the northern Mississippi, where water is power and fat and black at the bottom. The Rio isn't impressive in itself, but surprisingly tawdry. What awes is the swath it cuts, miles deep, through stone, the hardness of the stone is the proof, the visible track, of thirst. Sky did that. But I was the one who felt it.
The desert on my skin was real enough. Windchimes thread the breeze in New Mexico, a glittering sound that is gone before you've really heard it and back again so often you forget it's there.
Still and all, soul is something like the desert. Pilgrims have always wandered off there. Soul is to desert as voice is to wind. We can doubt soul. We can lose our voices. But you can't much deny an atmosphere with so little humanity in it. You can see time on the mountains. You can feel what heat is, and night. Things fade in the rarefied light and yet other things survive centuries, leaving churches and cave dwellings and cowboy ghost stories trailing in the wind. Chiming it with tinny stories. Landmarks slip. The only animals around are the scrappy ones. Plants have the fibrous quality of thirsty vein. Stone and dust are so clearly the same thing you know ashes are ashes and dust is dust. You could die in New Mexico. Or go mad. Therefore, you know humanity.
If you've ever really prodded soul, or god, or the infinite, you know already that it comes down to emptiness. Emptiness and silence. My body, itself, reeled. I swear my bones began to feel sunburnt, my blood got dry, my lungs first struggled and then met the thinness by peeling. Everything inside dialated. It was something of a gutting. The whites of my eyes burned and now I've got a scar on the whites of my eyes. That's not even a metaphor. I came home from the desert with a mark on my iris that makes it look not quite whole. The word pilgrammage started popping up in all of my notebooks. The windchimes stopped bothering me after a day or two. People need to tag the invisible, I figured. They need to put glass beads or tin on it, I figured, in order stave off the madness. The sound drifts and wavers, is only half conscious, audible imposition on all that vastness. The sound mitigates the space between the selfishness of kitsch and the authenticity of looking into the world, reverently.
The consequences of untruth aren't lies, but anxiety. Lostness. Relativity that will go straight down into nihilism. It's godawful lonely. The consequences of illusion are complete pettiness and the loss of reverence, the loss of meaning.
Reverence doesn't negate the awkward, god and the devil help me. It's hard to call Truth or Consequences a town. It's a street, a bizarre little street, hugging the banks of the river and slid between the spines of mountain. It's an American town just shy of being Mexico, which in itself is all kinds of brutal truths and falsehoods. Truth or Consequences is a bunch of trailer homes parked on the ridges, a few upscale spas proprietorially constructed around the hot springs. The town, if that's what we're calling it - it had a post office so I won't argue - wasn't called anything more than Hot Springs until 1950, that weird cultural decade of manliness and subterfuged revolt. Ralph Edwards, host of the NBC radio quiz show Truth or Consequences, announced he would air the program from the first town that renamed itself after the show; someone in Hot Springs called up. Edwards visited each and every spring for the next 50 years.
The question is this: how do we translate something historically passed from guru to student to a world such as ours? What is it we are trying to translate? What happens when you're all in, naked and looking for soul, smack in the raw surface of the blanched earth of the American Southwest? Is it even possible to sit there, a toe in the water, a rock in your back, sun in your eye and take yourself seriously? Can we be fully aware of the consequences and of truth at the very same time?
We can't say that there is a true yoga. Yoga has no founder, no dogma, no word of god. From the beginning, yoga was many yogas. There are no yogic popes, there was never a reformation, there are no creeds or dogmas and there are very scattered ashrams and monasteries. The line between Buddhism and yoga is sketchy. The line between this yoga and that is gray, nuanced only by trademark. There was never an attempt to impose uniformity of doctrine so much as there was an injunction to seek. But that injunction is so quiet, so fleeting, that it's hard to hear.
Yoga is a vocation, rather than doctrine. A listening and responding. Something calls. We can listen. This is yoga.
And yet I was sick of it. I was sick of the selfishness, the flimsiness, the way listening becomes an excuse to hear what you want to hear. In an odd and completely unnoticed slight of hand, 'listening' became 'singing your own song'. As the years went on, that droning cacophony swelled and now it sounds exactly like wider culture. All of the stuff that is wrong with the world. All of the alienation. The cultured unfairness. The denial. I stumbled. I took pause. We're not listening. Not to nuance. We're listening to trademark and hawking and sugar, sugar, sugar until we're stupid with our own childish energy.
Absence arrived. I got scared. I started looking. I would have gone to India, but in spite of being a very well trained and fairly successful professional in the yoga industry - I make my entire if feeble living at this, which most don't - I would have no idea where to start on that teeming subcontinent. I am absolutely and resolutely lost. So I went to New Mexico.
I can't exactly tell you what happened there. Taos, Sante Fe, Sedona and enviorns have a particular spiritual eerieness. The beauty that stuns makes it desirable. The ghosts of seers left a lore in the atmosphere, like wood smoke. It's beauty means people who can afford it lay claim to the most delicious spots. They set down ski resorts and fine dining. They wear couture sun-glasses and buy up the turquoise. They just drive through any actual Indian reservations.
I sat there in a room full of white and wealthy people practicing yoga. I had a moment of actual rage as they talked of going to the spa and then an expensive restaurant after the day ended. I had no money to go to a spa. My motel room reeked in exactly the same way motel rooms used to reek when I frequented them for tawdry, Hunter S. Thompson kind of reasons. Which would be poignant if it wasn't just honest. Honestly, it made me wonder about trajectory; if in time anything ever changes or matters in the least.
Motel rooms don't change, we do.
I got hot and bothered, sure. That's what I do. But I was also there with a kind of willingness that wouldn't let me walk away. During the day, we practiced, we sat. Mist evaporated out of the arroyos. We did the things you do in yoga. And the master teacher, was.
He saw things in me, strange wordless things that aren't muscle and aren't bone and aren't pose. A teacher, of course, sees things that we can't. He got me to feel them. He moved them. He held the meditating and I fell into it. I wept. He saw things in me, personality flaw and personal strength and hanging question, wise, that I knew damn well were there but hadn't done anything about. And he says them, invites me to face them. And where my own gumption and all my friends and doctors and family telling me so for years had not done a damned thing, when the teacher said so I said yes. okay. I will. without batting an eye. And I began.
They all went to the spa. I drove for miles and miles and miles. I pulled over and walked through cemeteries. I climbed under barbed wire fences and lay on my back on the red earth. I drove north, and south, and I ended up in Truth or Consequences, paying a few bucks for a few hours in a sulpher laced spring.
And I thought this: The teacher student relationship has always been there, always has been part of the yogic path even though now it's blown apart like a cat with a firecracker up it's ass. Vows, commitment, thread the narrative like windchimes thread air. This is a spiritual practice that isn't attached to a god, and the vows you take aren't like the catholic ones that end you in a cloister or the marriage ones that end you a legally different person. Although the vows might be that, they don't have to be. In this tradition, the vows are not about the outcome of the vows, but about the making of them. A distillery of intention. Which, when done honesty, humbles you.
It isn't what you expect. That's the point. Nothing is what you expected. But it turns out, you aren't what you expected, either. And this is the only possible way to make any difference. This is the only possible way we can change. Ourselves, or the world. We need the commitment of a spiritual practice not because of god, but because of our own mad nature. We need the commitments of a moment to moment, real and flesh bound practice because rage, fear, shame, and anger are hard and hot and heavy and fast. So fast. We need something to slow us down. We need commitment because even though we love our loved ones, sometimes we don't. We sometimes hate and resent and would strangle them if we could. Or we'd quit. Think we're better off, all alone. Vows and commitments keep us more than we keep them.
We need a teacher not because the teacher is enlightened, but because he knows we could be. Any honest transformation is a relational one. One that leaves us changed in our most intimate, most political, most human ways. Left alone, we are so drawn to our own navel that we're blind.
Once, a very long time ago, a first teacher sat behind a great big desk in Greece while I stood meek and busted for some indiscretion in the middle of the room. Both cowed and defiant. My dear girl, this man said, you're a brilliant young woman, fast on your way to mediocrity. I'm not young any more. Just recently I realized that teacher had died. I went on right head on into mediocrity but I swear his presence made me dig, try, scrabble for what little brilliance I've been able to mete out. His ghost now makes me commit to more. More gutting. More digging. More, unmediocre.
In New Mexico, my teacher gave me a metaphorical mirror. It was only having a mirror that could show me, honestly, how goddamned blind I can be. Truly, truly, this is awkward. Seeing your blindness is a kind of vision, see, but it's as awkward as laying in the desert in the mid afternoon, soaking your bones that don't have cancer or psoriasis or any of the other things silver and sulpher are said to cure. Your ailment is subtle. Your bones float in mystery.
Nothing changed in New Mexico. But I came home without what I thought I knew. Teaching is the best thing I've ever done in my life. I don't say this because I'm particularly gifted as a teacher, but because other aspects of my life are decidedly unskillful. But the truth of my being a teacher is I have to have a teacher. If I don't, I become the charlatan.
I'm going to go ahead and say this. I don't exactly know what made Iyengar Iyengar. Or Jesus, Jesus. I don't think it's what we'd expect. But I do think it was something. Something rare, and precious in that rarity, but absolutely true and as real life as a motel room if you're willing to be in one. And I think there are such teachers, now. Leslie Kaminoff's one. Tias Little is another. Michael Stone listens to me being ridiculous until I myself can hear it. Teachers are there. But most of what is passed of as 'teaching' is just not. And that's okay. If you try, you'll find the rare souls pretty easily. There are 7.3 billion of us here. One in a million is actually quite sufficient.
Listen when you're called; you come out moved. Scarred, humbled, marked and bitten by the forces of nature. Which is a better thing, a far more sthira thing, than is culture. It's a more humane thing, held and supported by another, than is the blind attempt to do it your own way.
I spur of the moment decided I should offer the Art of Self Care course a guided savasana, and then couldn't figure how to host an mp3 on the forum, so it will live here. Lucky you.
Some of the most important work we do happens in savasana. It's often seen as a time to rest. It's sometimes simply called 'final relaxation pose'. It's often skipped and students can spend years not really liking it, not feeling able to relax, or being uncomfortable with how silly it feels to lie down and do nothing, so vulnerable, such a place where tears are likely to come.
The fact that tears come in savasana might, though, be indicative of how psychologically important it is.
In savasana, we are practicing. We're practicing the final act of our lives. We're practicing dying. It's worth the time to try to die, well. There is no point to the yogic path if it doesn't culminate in that moment. The yogic path starts with that moment in mind. The instructions for savasana are relatively simple: lie down and play dead.
We either minimize it or completely misunderstand it. In our culture, death is portrayed as loss. It's the moment at which everything is taken from us.
From a mindfulness perspective, death isn't a loss but the moment we become supremely generous, and give ourselves completely. In meditation, we work to realize the instinctive clinging of the mind and the limitations of perspective. In savasana, we practice going so deeply into our own open hearted awareness that we can give back everything. We give our weight back to gravity, first. And then we give our breath back to the atmosphere. Slowly, we give the heat of our blood away to the warm elements of the universe, and when they have gone and we are bone dry, we give our very dryness. We give until we are not. And this isn't a loss, but a moment in time. It's the moment our greatest illusion passes out of our awareness and a next moment arises in its wake.
Many of us love postures, love a good yoga session, and bask in those sensations when it comes time to lie down. But the real physiological and psychological work comes in the ability to feel what was turned on in us and allow them to be flipped back off. Asana heal us and cause physiological transformation in the body. But in order to really transform, we have to let the tools of transformation go. If we don't, than we're rejecting the transformation in trying to be the person we were prior to transformation, in trying to hold on. This is yoga philosophy, pure.
Savasana quiets any agitation out of the body. Agitation or restlessness (is said to be one of the five hinderances to meditation or panca nirvavanas. The other hinderances are sloth, doubt, and clinging or what I've been calling stickiness. Stickiness can either be clinging to what we want, or the attempts we make to avoid what we don't.
Savasana brings equilibrium to the five tattvas of the body, corresponding to the five elements. What belongs to privthi or earth becomes earthy again. What is composed or flourishes with fluidity (such as the lymphatic system and the movement of Cerebrospinal Fluid and hormones through the endocrine system, especially the adryenal glands and the waters of the kidney line) is brought to an even tide. Agni tattva, which lives in our blood, digestion, organs of perception especially the eyes, is clarified of it's oily burn and residual scum. And akasha tattva, the space element, creates freedom for the mind heart to begin healing.
In somatic therapies, being able to sense how we hold ourselves against gravity and then allowing our movement through the world to become more of an embrace, a loving dance, is said to be the primary mechanism of healing. That is, it's less about rearranging our insides or alignment than it is being able to feel our alignment, including our alignment in the world, and to finally recognize that how we move on the surface of the earth can be liberating or crushing. Savasana is the absolute fulfillment of such somatic awakening. Which is probably why Moshe Fedenkries had people lie that way for 16 minutes to release the psoas and rearrange absolutely everything.
Just try it. Try it more than once. Practice it for a long time. If you want the yogic promises to start working in your body and heart, you can't skip it. In a sense, it all starts with this.
from the pradipika:
Lying flat on the ground with the face upwards, in the manner of a dead body, is savasana. It removes tiredness and enables the mind to relax.
Savasana is the corpse pose. Shav means 'corpse'. This asana has been adapted from the tantric practice of savasana in which the sadhaka sits on the corpse and practices his mantra.
This practice is useful for developing body awareness and pratyahara. When the body is completely relaxed, awareness of the mind develops. Its effects influence the physical as well as the psychological structure. It is very useful in yogic management of high blood pressure, peptic ulcer, anxiety, hysteria, cancer and all psychosomatic diseases and neurosis. In fact, savasana is beneficial no matter what the condition is, even in perfect health, because it brings up the latent impressions buried within the subconscious mind, and the mind which operates during waking consciousness relaxes and subsides. It is, therefore, necessary to practice savasana for developing dharana and dhyana. Even though it is a static pose it revitalizes the entire system.
Mostly, yoga is bullshit. This is breaking my heart.
One of my teachers says I should allow my heart to break. Another shrugs when I say I'm about ready to leave the path and start working retail. Leaving the path may be the path, he says. Neither of these feel helpful. I'm finding myself standing still in the middle of the room a lot, lately, forgetting what I meant to do or losing the motivation. I find myself pausing before the locked studio door in the mornings, looking at the key, asking some kind of question that doesn't have words.
I started to write this last week. I had been invited to a party. Since I live in bare feet and messy hair, I generally thrill at the chance to put on a dress. I've lived in New York and Paris, after all. I am a woman who firmly believes in pretty shoes. I sat down, the pretty dress on but the shoes, not. They lay on the floor in front of the closet. I looked at the shoes and I poked around with what I was feeling. The yoga people were going to be at this party. When I say that, I mean Lululemon, Yoga Fit, and Core Power. A new yoga magazine has been launched. As a studio owner, I ought to be there. I ought, really, to advertise in it. But their rates gave me sticker shock that lasted four hours and no small amount of cussing. The party was to be artfully catered. The magazine spread boasts luxury spa retreats, a few recipes, and a solid block of pretty ads with pretty girls.
My ambiguity about the party wasn't really about the party. It probably wasn't even about the magazine. In my normal mood, I would have damned the pretense but enjoyed the swank music and night out. But there was too much subtext. My mood was fragile.
The yoga world has been gearing up for something called International Yoga Day. Studios are hosting special classes. They're running sales. The internet and social media preen and belch. But no one mentions that this event is largely being pushed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Indian BJP.
A photo posted by Karin (@coalfury) on May 18, 2015 at 1:09pm PDT
Modi's government is enforcing yoga postures much in the way the third Reich pushed calisthenics. Modi is connected to a government that is selling wide swaths of his country off to global corporations - think Lehman brothers - dispossessing an already starving people living on less than 20 rupees a day. Modi is mobilizing one of the largest armies in the world against some of the poorest and hungriest people in the world. India is allying itself with the U.S. (and Isreal) against China, much in the way Afghanistan was drawn into the orbit of the U.S. against Russia in a previous cold war. We've seen how that worked out. International Yoga Day is Modi's nationalist propaganda. It's then taken up by yoga studios in the west as a very good idea. I bristled. I began to write this all down.
Then the shootings in Charleston happened, and I stopped writing.
* When I was a little girl, I really wanted a pony. I believed I would - someday, after I rode my pony to Olympian fame and wrote a Book - fall in Love and live happily ever after. I've heard that other people dream of being President. Or flying.
I'm a recovering alcoholic and the only woman I know who has two bought-as-wedding-dresses, never worn, hanging in my closet. I haven't ridden a horse in years.
It seems to me that much of our understanding and practice of yoga is this naive. It amounts to magical thinking. Suffering begins in the mind, says the superficial reading of this stuff: think positively and your suffering will end. Doors are said to open and teachers appear. Wealth is said to manifest. We will, vaguely, thrive.
Magical thinking is self indulgent, petty, and dangerous. It's a version of spirituality that hasn't grown up. Most of us stopped believing in Santa Claus and many of the tenets of 'theology' a long time ago; the archaic structures of religion no longer seem relevant in our post-modern and post-metaphysical world. We believe in science, after all. The premises of Buddhism, yoga, and 'mindfulness' suck us in like Walmart's halo over a parkinglot. Convenient. It's all the sweetness of soul, with no god in it! We can go for this. We consume it.
And why shouldn't we? It's so pretty. Who wouldn't want to meditate in Costa Rica?
Who wouldn't buy a product that packages 'happiness' backed by modern day science?
We've overlooked, or failed to appreciate, the more substantial and difficult teachings of this path. The prior ones. The difficult work of accepting pain as true. Ourselves as self-interested and completely, absolutely, contingent.
Sometimes, pain doesn't go away. Sometimes we are rejected. We don't thrive. How could we thrive when we don't even live up to our own standards? Green smoothies, aside. I used to think I was a pretty damaged piece of work. But any perusal of Barnes and Nobel and it's oversized self help, motivational, and DIY sections reminds me I am not the only one.
Yoga students swarm to the teachers who promise 15 day makeovers, personal power, and bliss. The modern popularity of mindfulness isn't indicative of a healing culture. It only proves how many of us are wounded.
*
Today, in India, a right wing government is pushing yoga exercises. In our Western yoga culture, yogis push yoga in the schools. I am concerned.
Magical thinking is dangerous. It pushes 'living our truth' to narcissistic action. It displaces responsibility for doing our own work onto 'the divine' or 'karma'. Magical thinking obverts self inquiry and neglects the suffering of the world.
We are dangerously loose with our stories about what 'yoga' and 'India' are. We idealize, taking what works for us while dismissing what we don't want, a kind of buffet style enlightenment. We adopt the names of Hindu goddesses or the sanskrit words for 'fire' or 'space'. We hold big festivals with reggae superimposed on Kirtan and asana teachers signing autographs to applause and sighs. We have no real idea what India is, and tend to forget that Pakistani border, let alone Kashmir and the Tamil, the Maosit uprising, megacity overwhelm and the displaced agrarian community in which IMF and microbank endebted farmers commit suicide and an overwhelming - unthinkable - number of human beings live in famine conditions. We forget that Muslims even live there. If we do remember, we remember only in the context of terrorism; we wonder what 'kind' of Muslims they are.
Tourist yogis who go to trainings and retreats in India send back Instagram pictures of themselves posing in temples, climbing on holy sites, and doing asana in front on the poor street children. Meanwhile, back stateside, the confluence of money and power results in sex scandals. What sells is emphasized over what is honest. Franchised studios shadow Starbucks like a kid brother. Local studios disappear. Advertising goes sexy. Youtube videos teach people to do advanced asana and suddenly orthopeadic surgeons and physical therapists are treating yoga injuries as often as hockey injuries. Sweaty, enthusiastic urbanites chant 'om' in spa like settings but few of them chant in protests, and while we're vaguely aware of riots in Baltimore we don't do anything other than post on Facebook about it. Yoga 'service' trips amount to a vacation to third world countries, nominally advocating but really accomplishing about as much damage as Christian missionary work did. We didn't realize a flash mob style 'om the bridge' event in Vancouver would insult First Nations people or inconvenience anybody.
We didn't think about anybody, at all.
We just wanted to feel whole.
And then the shootings happened in Charleston.
*
In trying to hold the space of the studio open to process the shooting, I felt exhaustion. As though I were holding the walls up with my shoulders. I found myself saying what my teachers have been saying, to me. I get the irony.
What I say as a teacher is always something my teachers have said to me.
I didn't invent the path.
But I know what it says: now, the heart is breaking. Now, the teachings of yoga.
*
I say this, often, when I teach: we don't practice for the good days. We practice for when it gets hard. I've wanted to say, in the national debate about mental illness, gun control, and the goddamned confederate flag, that we were racist last week, too. I've wanted to say Baltimore. Ferguson. I don't know a black person who hasn't lived with racism their whole entire lives, and if I inspect my own life I find it in there, too.
I talk about death and grief and mourning in my classes, I talk about the waste feeling of our busy lives, I talk about fear and sadness. I try to say love and strength and healing, but I say death. Grief. Ghosts. I know that in every single class I teach, there is someone who has lost someone near in the last few weeks. I know this affects a persons practice for a year and more; I've seen it, even if they are so close to their own thoughts and bodies they can't see it for themselves. I know that in every class there is trauma, financial fear, self doubt, people who have been rejected, taken for granted, people who are afraid to grow old.
I want, sometimes, to say 'feel how much I love you'. I want to say hope and I end up saying look at your life. I suppose these are the same thing.
*
There is more, subtext. I've been full of piss and vinegar at the yoga world in recent weeks. But that isn't new.
What is new is my own body going through a shift. I had thought my yoga practice and changed lifestyle 'healed', mostly, my fibromyalgia. In recent months, the pain has been steady. I'm laid up and a week later I'm laid up again. I feel betrayed. I feel confused. I wonder how I can teach if my body starts to give out. I wonder how seriously I can take the 'healing' promises, if I am losing my health. I wonder how seriously I can be taken.
There is more, still. My best friend died this spring. I wasn't expecting it and I wasn't expecting how deeply grief would move into my days.
And perhaps it is grief, only. Or grief and physical illness. But I'm watching myself lose my appetite, sleep, motivation. I realize I'm depressed. This makes me angry. I ask someone for a referral for a therapist.
This is the question: did my lifestyle of overwork and physically using my body as a business tool lead to a worsening of my chronic condition? Did grief trigger it? Did depression fray my tolerance of the (always has been there) yoga bullshit to the point of disillusion? What does any of this have to do with the shootings in Charleston, a pair of high heels, a continent I've never been to?
My teachers have shrugged. This has felt like loneliness. I keep finding myself standing still in the middle of the room, some forgotten thing in my hand. But I know they are giving me solid, and downright traditional, guidance. They are pointing me back to my own heart, asking me to stay with the question of my life, to answer not with ultimatums or theory but with as honest a next moment as I can stand.
I've been telling people, over and over again: yoga began as inner inquiry. Through all of it's variations, history, branding. Through all of those flashy characters and instagram super stars. Through it's becoming a mass practice directly because of it's association with Indian nationalism.
My writing in the last few months has been hijacked. It's all about grief. Or perhaps, more truthfully, about friendship. Maybe there is no difference: grief, friendship. When he died, I got a tattoo. This was silly. Also, not. I lay in the back of a tattoo parlor in the East Village and listened to the punk rock we used to listen to, back when the East Village was the East Village and we were 16. I get the irony. The tattoo has words, they say 'I know I have a soul, because you touched it'. This is what friends do for us. Make us better. Illuminate our stupidity. Give us a sense of home and self. The words of the tattoo are covered with more tattoo, a wordless black band.
The friend is gone and all I'm left with is this shitty tattoo. And when the hard days come, the only thing left is soul. I'd be lying if I said I can wrap my head around this.
It is impossible to step out of my body. It is magical thinking to think that my body is anything but the body politic, that there is not a direct sutra-ed thread between my body and nine other bodies lying dead in a church. There is a direct line between commercialism, economics, and terrorism. I am all tangled up.
It is maturity to know this, to go on loving when the heart breaks. I can't very well leave the path, if I am it. I might as well have some good shoes. One of the teachers says: if yoga means union, what is it we are joining? And what does that union feel like? I am not writing about rage or morbid grief. I am writing about love.
All of this - the trash of the wider culture, the bite of my own truth, the longing I hear from others - gives me the go. It touches, I think, that tender longing spot in me, that urge toward truth and balance and yes-ness. I want to rend the fabric of the false. I want to reveal the sexualized and bulemic matrix, the absurd amalgamation of goddess-nature-ecstatic dance-feel your wildness-new ageism. I want to show how our attention is tangled in the absolutes, the all or nothings, the goal setting and expectations and how much this hurts. The falsity hurts.
We have a hard time relating to pain, humans.
Everything tells us we should be happy and pain free. We are sold 'cures'. Medicinals are hawked at our symptoms, which tells us symptoms should be gotten rid of as best as possible.
Yet if we're human - and I'll just suppose for the moment that we are - there will come a time when pain levels us and can't be avoided.
Since we're practicing, we're becoming more sensitive to pain, not less. We're becoming more attuned not only to floated, inspirational moments where we feel so alive but also to the nagging voices, the days we creak, and the murky underlying issues in our hearts.
Practicing, we're more sensate not only to our own inner pain, but the pain of others. Compassion and empathy are noble and valuable things. We want to be kind. The science shows that these practices draw us open in that direction, along with healing our anxieties and soothing our depressions. This is great. This is true. But the advertising of mindfulness doesn't quite touch the bone truth of the matter: tenderness and compassion sing with ache; this stuff literally hurts. Months ago, around a death of a student's parent, two children unknown to myself, and a rash of American violence in the headlines, I said sitting with our pain opens us to humanity. Ours. Other's.
I don't know if I also said 'it hurts like hell'. Maybe I did.
Practice makes us aware of how we react to the pain of others. Good intentions aside, we're rarely compassionate. Generally speaking, other people's pain is usually worse than our own. You'd think this would elicit gratitude or sympathy. It makes us angry. The pain of strangers elicits judgement. The pain of loved ones moves us to fix, advise, or in some way 'handle' the situation.
Relating to pain is hard. The heart is tender. It bruises so easily.
Relating to the pain of other human beings generally proves we need to change the story we've been telling ourselves. A mawed heart rearranges us.
Pain forces a visceral knowing of vulnerability. I mean actual viscera. I mean the fact of dying, on top of the frailty of relationships, money, day to day grind. All out of the blue, we are totaled. The car is wrecked. The delicate balance of finances has to be rearranged and the day to day is out the window. It's gone, like a flit of paper napkin out a car window, hundreds of miles deep into a highway. Such things will never be touched by a hand again.
*
I am alone in the house. It is January. January with it's big swallowed chestedness about how I will act in the coming year. This year, I've promised myself I will write about yoga, which has historically been hard for me to do. Something of a fear of being incredible, lacking authority; something too of exasperation - how does one write things that are beyond language?; and something, too, of the self doubt and perfectionism that spoil most everyone's resolutions.
With gusto, with jazz and trumpeting, with a sense of relief and finality, I dedicated the year to writing a book.
Then I got sick.
The sunlight in my house is spectacular, mid winter. It is the idea of white, the only warmth winter has. My living room is a sundial and the light pours in the old windows, floods room after room like water bursting a dam. I love this light, this clarion solitude. It's a place of sun washed skin, and paper. The insides can come all out, haloed. All, out. Hallowed ink haloed.
Today I lay in it, not writing, sprawled gingerly, hardly breathing. I am wrapt with disgust. This is not what I meant when I said I love the light. This is not what I wanted.
*
The Sallatha Sutra has a teaching on pain. It says a practicer relates to, rather than reacts. The story explains how this still hurts.
The story is called the two darts.
One who hasn't learned these practices feels pain, and then seeks soothing. Through the mouth, sweets and cigarettes. Or though the mind, blame and indignation. This reaction is like a second dart, a second wounding, infecting the first. It tends to feed the first pain, hang around in it's own right, and become the only sensation left. Sugar balm. Nicotine stain. Resentment like a crude oil on the whites of our eyes.
The practioner ("noble, well trained") feels the pain. Knows the rising, passing. Knows reality. "Is not fettered by suffering".
But the story doesn't ever say "be happy and painfree! You'll never have to feel that way again." It just doesn't.
*
A girlfriend - not a yogi or a buddhist - asks me sweet heartedly how I am. I cite aches and pains. Mounds of kleenex. The inefficacy of medicine. The thing under my back rib that feels like a rusted blade. I explain how I try very hard not to touch this when breathing. How hard my shoulders and neck and jaw and eyes are with the effort.
She asks, all sweetheartedly, how I am doing emotionally. I gave more physical details.
I'm sorry, she says. That sounds anxious and fearful and angry. A little resignation, sadness, and uncertainty.
Yes, I said, internally wondering how she is not the buddhist and why I, the yoga teacher, slipped into complaint and didn't catch all that she just summed up in 10 odd seconds. I suppose anyone who relates, who is compassionate, is buddhist and yogi. She fingered at my bruise. She prodded, true. She related to my pain while I was shooting daggers at it.
Yes. How can I be a yoga teacher, I said, how can I possibly run a studio if I am dealing with a dumb and inexplicable and uncontrollable thing called 'chronic pain'?
My disgust is not with plegm, ache, or the muddy thinking; I am disgusted with uncertainty. I am afraid. I am disgusted by the uncontrollablity of pain.
*
Nyanaponika Thera's translation of the Salltha Sutra says:
"An untaught worldling, O monks, experiences pleasant feelings, he experiences painful feelings and he experiences neutral feelings. A well-taught noble disciple likewise experiences pleasant, painful and neutral feelings. Now what is the distinction, the diversity, the difference that exists herein between a well-taught noble disciple and an untaught worldling?
"When an untaught worldling is touched by a painful (bodily) feeling, he worries and grieves, he laments, beats his breast, weeps and is distraught. He thus experiences two kinds of feelings, a bodily and a mental feeling. It is as if a man were pierced by a dart and, following the first piercing, he is hit by a second dart. So that person will experience feelings caused by two darts. It is similar with an untaught worldling: when touched by a painful (bodily) feeling, he worries and grieves, he laments, beats his breast, weeps and is distraught. So he experiences two kinds of feeling: a bodily and a mental feeling.
"Having been touched by that painful feeling, he resists (and resents) it. Then in him who so resists (and resents) that painful feeling, an underlying tendency of resistance against that painful feeling comes to underlie (his mind). Under the impact of that painful feeling he then proceeds to enjoy sensual happiness. And why does he do so? An untaught worldling, O monks, does not know of any other escape from painful feelings except the enjoyment of sensual happiness. Then in him who enjoys sensual happiness, an underlying tendency to lust for pleasant feelings comes to underlie (his mind). He does not know, according to facts, the arising and ending of these feelings, nor the gratification, the danger and the escape, connected with these feelings. In him who lacks that knowledge, an underlying tendency to ignorance as to neutral feelings comes to underlie (his mind). When he experiences a pleasant feeling, a painful feeling or a neutral feeling, he feels it as one fettered by it. Such a one, O monks, is called an untaught worldling who is fettered by birth, by old age, by death, by sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair. He is fettered by suffering, this I declare.
"But in the case of a well-taught noble disciple, O monks, when he is touched by a painful feeling, he will not worry nor grieve and lament, he will not beat his breast and weep, nor will he be distraught. It is one kind of feeling he experiences, a bodily one, but not a mental feeling. It is as if a man were pierced by a dart, but was not hit by a second dart following the first one. So this person experiences feelings caused by a single dart only. It is similar with a well-taught noble disciple: when touched by a painful feeling, he will no worry nor grieve and lament, he will not beat his breast and weep, nor will he be distraught. He experiences one single feeling, a bodily one.
"Having been touched by that painful feeling, he does not resist (and resent) it. Hence, in him no underlying tendency of resistance against that painful feeling comes to underlie (his mind). Under the impact of that painful feeling he does not proceed to enjoy sensual happiness. And why not? As a well-taught noble disciple he knows of an escape from painful feelings other than by enjoying sensual happiness. Then in him who does not proceed to enjoy sensual happiness, no underlying tendency to lust for pleasant feelings comes to underlie (his mind). He knows, according to facts, the arising and ending of those feelings, and the gratification, the danger and the escape connected with these feelings. In him who knows thus, no underlying tendency to ignorance as to neutral feelings comes to underlie (his mind). When he experiences a pleasant feeling, a painful feeling or a neutral feeling, he feels it as one who is not fettered by it. Such a one, O monks, is called a well-taught noble disciple who is not fettered by birth, by old age, by death, by sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair. He is not fettered to suffering, this I declare.
*
A few days ago, someone brought me tulips. Their milky, fleshy white is exactly the texture of the light from the south facing windows. As I have been laid up, I move them with me, room to room. I place them on the bedside table while I sleep. In the morning I chew toast and watch them breathing. In the evening, they are with me when I soak in the tub.
I realize this is silly.
The things I do when no one is looking are out and out absurd. I do them, anyway, out of a weird and desperate honesty with myself. These little ceremonies are what I am, mostly. The best things I know of being alive.
I think of a passage May Sarton wrote in one of her journals. "When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them. They are felt as presences. Without them I would die. Why do I say that? Partly because they change before my eyes. They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with process, with growth, and also with dying. I am floated on their moments."
*
We are hardwired to resist and avoid pain. This is aversion, or dvesha. As this translation of 'the two darts' shows, dvesha run deep enough becomes resentment. Other people's pain pisses us off. Ours is an unfairness and elicits self-pity. We alternate between selfishness and self-loathing.
Dvesha, aversion and avoidance, blossoms to avidya, not seeing. Not seeing. Not knowing. Not feeling. Not able to be with life. Not able to be emotionally present even to ourselves.
Blind and stunted, we can't know reality - the beginnings and endings of things, their gratification or cessation, their escape. We don't know pain's healing.
Aversion becomes so deep, so under and habitual, it becomes the only thing we know. It becomes substratum, the underlying, the 'truth' through which we filter every grit of detail and arising experience. Every sensation is the heavy lidded one of our own unseeing.
Most of the time, I am well. I was diagnosed a long time ago. Pain was constant, if alternating between 'grim' and 'mildly incapacitating'. But it's changed. I mean, over years and years. I became what is loosely called a yogi. Over time, I became a person who eats vegetables. I am organic and damned near vegan, most of the time. Over the course of many years, my relationship to stress, sleep, money, time management, and other human beings has changed subtly and profoundly. It's now mostly balanced, honest, felt. Therefore, I am mostly well.
I believe this: yogic movement and meditation change the way the body works so wholly the very conditions of the body change; I believe what we eat has everything to do with wellness and disease, happiness and lightness or lethargy and malise; I believe the practices of a spiritual life radically rearrange us into graceful modes of being.
I believe yoga has changed my pain.
So it is hard for me to face the fact that in spite of my yoga asana, in spite of my diet, in spite of mindful effort and good intention and new years resolutions, there will be days I will be flattened to the floor and incapable of thinking through a clear sentence. I simply don't know how to relate to this.
*
Talking with a woman, recently, about chronic medical conditions and yoga, she suggested I focus my teaching there. 'Chronic pain' could be my schtick. I could advertise it.
But how, I wondered.
If we know anything about chronic conditions, it's the fact that everyone's is different. Symptoms are different; pain itself and prognoses are different. No two people experience fibromylgia (or MS, or IBS, or PTSD) the same way.
There is no 'teaching' or 'sequence' or 'pose' I could offer for fibromylagia. Just as there is no teaching that could answer to every knee, heart condition, or fear. If I were to 'market' my expertise to chronic pain, what happens to the students who don't have chronic pain? There are two dozen people around me who have 'knee pain', arthritis pain, grief pain, stress pain. The pain of loneliness, boredom, stupid meaningless life pain. Sometimes, normal people are totaled, all out of the blue.
Symptoms shouldn't be mitigated. The arising and passing should be explored. The arising and passing, of both pleasure and pain, are life.
It takes humility to be so intimate with your own life.
Intimacy with blooming and wilting flowers makes them sweet and wholly naked. Intimacy with suffering makes suffering less personal. Pain isn't personal. It's chronic.
The petals yawn, fully flushed, going yellow. They mark my hand with a shadow. I am close.
*
Relating to pain hurts. It asks me to not advise, not palliate, not fix or condone or judge, but to open. Openness is ruthless and will not end. Openness tends to demand much more of me.
Staying close to process is the only way for me to know where I am in the process; what to do, how deep it goes, what feels. Tulips keep me, my writing, my teaching, from the foolishness of black and white, hyperbole, all or nothing.
Pema Chodon says there is a longing, a yearning, a need to honor our own wounds while opening our hearts to the wounds of others. She says this is the way the heart wakes up.
*
I take the flowers with me, room to room. And a box of kleenex. And a blanket.
I cancel classes.
The tulips are four days old now. They are limp.
Most of the time, I am well. Today I write half a poem. It begins, "I love the light..."
Body is a hard thing to understand. We can name and label things. We do. But the questions of body - why? Why am I healthy, when my brother is ill? Why does this food do this? What is aging? what am I capable of? Why does illness hit, or miss? - stay stuck in mystery. Kicked into the bucket of sometimes bad things happen to good people and don't take what you've got for granted.
Except that we do.
I, do.
A few days ago a woman showed me two pictures. The first was a bag of pills - big as a person's chest, pounds heavy - that she no longer takes. This doesn't include the supplements and the over the counter stuff, she said. The second picture was of a year old German Shepard, whom she has adopted and goes running with. She couldn't walk very well when she started yoga, due to various and medically unexplained neuropathies. Was one of those who said 'I probably won't be able to do most of this, but I'll do what I can". She was shocked when things she took as fact started changing.
Yoga does this. Makes us take nothing, nothing for granted.
We've all heard similar stories. Yet I don't want yoga to come across as a miracle cure, nor myself as a healer.
Yoga doesn't miraculously cure. It only teaches us to approach our own experience as open to change. It doesn't change disease, all the time. Or even some of the time. Or at all predictably. It does, however, change our experience of being alive. It changes us.
I have fibromyalgia. It is flaring. I keep forgetting what I'm doing. I stop talking midsentence because I've forgotten words, and I trip because my back or knee or ankle gives. I think my insides are lined with cut glass. Breathing hurts. This makes me not breathe very much. Not breathing much has now thrown my neck out and a headache in and a shake into my arms. For four days now I haven't been able to sleep, think, or stand without hurting. My clothes hurt. The bed hurts. If you've noticed that I'm tongue tied and stupid, and forget things like yoga pants so I teach in jeans, or that I kinda hobble around like I'm seventy nine and arthritic, my apologies. I promise it'll pass.
But here's the thing: I can still do yoga.
Mincingly, true. Very, very slowly and cautiously, true. But I can. Yesterday, it amounted to one very ginger child's pose and half an hour crawling my way around blankets and bolsters trying to get under certain muscles and float the joints so they don't touch anything. I spent the rest of the day laying in various positions on the bathroom and kitchen floor, rubbing ointments and oils and herbs in, popping ibuprofen, alternating hot and cold. I was miserable and teary. But I had child's pose, and one archingly tender backbend.
It seems, over the years, that yoga has given me enough knowledge and sensitivity to move without making the pain worse. Which is something.
I know of nothing else that asks me to move so slowly, so attentively. Tender, but in the sweet sense of the word.
I think of all the ailments people have cited to me. Progressive and chronic diseases. Grief. Anxieties. I don't have answers. I don't know why one person falls ill, another is hit by a car, a third seems to be 'blessed' but is miserable. I know others with fibromyalgia who can no longer work, who are so debilitated by pain and pain medications that they have lost, significantly, the joy of being alive.
I don't know why I am mostly well.
Bodies are mysterious. But then again, so is everything.
Every question burns down to an unknowing: We don't know right from wrong, who deserves what, why we have this body or that problem, what happens when we die or how we ought to be living. There is no guidebook and there are no rules. You can find rules, sure; but you can also find ten other rules offering contradictory advice. Accepting rules and handed down wisdom gives some comfort, surely; a good enough map. But at some point, medicine is not going to be able to answer the more human questions of our mortality. And self help is going to fall stupidly short when it becomes a moral imperative for us to act justly, let go of our own prejudices, or help us care for our elderly.
Everything is mysterious. We are mysterious.
Does god exist? What do I believe and what does that mean? Am I in love? How do I live with cancer? with grief? None of these questions can be answered.
Right answers don't, ultimately, exist. I don't have anything ameliorative to say about this. Except that I know this yoga, and this yoga asks us to move slowly, attentively, with acceptance and humility and willingness, toward what is most achingly tender. To live in the delicate and vulnerable space of questions and uncertainty. To take up the responsibility the questions ask of us.
Each time we do, a connection is made. Something is sounded. I mean, like when you sound out the depth of ocean. Not 'understood'. Not 'proven'. But infinitely more resonate and felt than what was there, before.
This doesn't cure. It isn't a miracle. It's simply a way of living that takes nothing for granted. A tender way of attending. A way of moving without causing pain.
Someone asked how, exactly, yoga becomes the path.
Which is exactly and inexpressibly it's own answer.
When we start looking around for a path, we are on it. Perhaps we recognize we are on a path, always, some kind of a one. Towards brambles, through thickets, down deep and swashbuckled or walking around and around and around the same boulder in the middle of a field.
Hey, says some thing inside. I want a path. I want to go somewhere.
Or, perhaps, this hurts. This hurts so very much. I don't want to hurt like this any longer.
I'm okay, someone said to me today, but I'm crawling.
We are on a path, and we look around for landmarks. Exit signs. The breadcrumbs we dropped on the way in. We look and we look.
It is a hard thing to explain. You feel a bit of strength, a bit of release or joy or exhaustion on the mat. From there, questions bloom like ink in water. If you feel your strength, you will begin to wonder about - perhaps even believe in - your own potential. If you feel release, you will know that you were sore and tired and fed up and wounded. You will also know as fact that release is possible. The consequences are endless: now, what? says the seeker. If this is true, what is next?
That power is what I have seen come alive in people, over and over again. But it is also where our yoga can fail, can become a place to hide, can be a bitter disappointment. I have heard too many students speak of feeling 'blissed out' after a class, but somewhere between leaving the studio and walking back into the kitchen, the feeling is lost. We mistake the asana for the whole thing. The mat as the truth bearer. The asana, the mat, the teacher are techniques of yoga - not yoga.
Grief is more painful than is ignorance. We long for the bliss, and want to change ourselves.
I believe that this is the yogic teaching, and always has been. I believe it gives some fairly clear, if not easy, directives. It remains to be seen whether yoga in America can truly teach this, can give us teachers versed not just in how to sweat and bend but how to heal and struggle and grow, how to be brave. Bravery is not, unfortunately, something that can be bottled and sold.
I realized I was mashing recovery from addiction talk with yoga talk, as I answered her. This felt messy, at first, as though I were falling off the mat. But then it felt okay; both are spiritual quests. Both say, at their gut, that life becomes better and we become more we when we live according to spiritual laws, however secular and modern our lives might seem. Even if our problem is work related, or a broken family, or a body broken and soul tied by combat and relationships and the things sex and aging and parenting and stress put our bodies through. Our problem is time, and money, and sore knees.
Our answer is in practice.
Not of poses, exclusively, but of beauty. Integrity. Honesty. Self growth. In knowing we ourselves become better and feel better when we do the right things, even when we don't want to.
Our path, if we're ever going to find it, will not come at the end of a course or in a pretty envelope or a gift given by someone else. It will not happen in five years or at the end of a life. The path begins today, under your feet. This can be disappointing, because it means 'spiritual' and 'healing' and 'better' must involve the daily stuff of our lives. Some days, I feel I'm holding a broken toaster in my hands, and it symbolizes the whole of my life, and everyone else gets a Lamborghini. What, I want to say, this? How is this a tool to anywhere? What am I supposed to do, now?
We feel lost, sometimes, as though we have fallen off the mat, crumpled into the floorboards, lost our bearings and our ground.
But feeling lost is a first sign of being somewhere.
Yoga is simple. But it is also terribly hard. And it doesn't, because it's yoga, offer a set of to do lists or progress reports; it will not and does not because it recognizes it can't. What was right for Iyengar was not right for Jois. What was right for Gandhi will probably not be very right for you. What is right for you is yoga, but it is a yoga of your life, your body, your ethics, your diet, your energy, your integrity and sense of beauty.
Now what? says yoga, and waits for you yourself to answer.
Of course, there are some guides. I can make suggestions. I can talk about the ethics and the personal observances, what little Ayurveda I know. I can help talk out sleeping and eating and choices and physical practices. And I will, whenever I can. But even there, as a teacher, the most I can do is say 'now what?' to students, over and over again.
As though I were handing the cosmos back into their hands. They hand it back to me, and I hand it back to them. I'll hand it back over and over again. I ask them what they want to do with it.
Falling, being lost, is a very strong and good and dizzying place to be. It is where magic happens. Is this true? comes from a few moments of reflection, of experienced stretch, of quietly breathing even though you think you might fall apart. Is this strength true? This power? This calm? Is this promise real?
On this path no effort is wasted,
no gain is ever reversed;
even a little of this practice
will shelter you from great sorrow. - Bhavagad Gita
Yesterday, I posted on the facebook page:
"In the course of my yoga, there have been times I've had to dig a little deeper to get myself to practice. Things happen. The fascination wears off. Dissatisfaction or busyness pervades, even when I most want to 'feel' yoga. The body feels cold and life just seems stuck. Sometimes, all efforts toward self-care and growth seem thwarted by a big, grumpy, demanding world. This is a thing; not personal, but a truth. At times, this signals a point of incubation, of the practice or some life path going deeper. Which might involve increased resistance or doubt, a knowing that to continue means we have to let go of something we're really not ready look at, let alone let go of. Sometimes it means the body itself is acclimating; the changes a yoga practice initiates are ocean swells of rearrangement. Sometimes its a recurrence of mind junk, periods of self-doubt and self-loathing, confusion and unclarity about what we're doing".
I post according to the conversations I'm having with students, and the conversations I'm having with student bodies. I posted this after someone told me the guts have fallen out of her yoga, and she missed it. Once I posted, there was a kick back. Many are struggling, a lot of us are confused and conflicted. Others have just noticed that while it used to be easy - they wanted - to come to yoga three and four and more times a week, the spark died and now once a week, if that, is all they really have time or care for. Many people want to take care of themselves, want to feel like yoga made them feel, once, but for whatever reason they just haven't gone. In years.
Sometimes the conflict is about yoga, sometimes not. But when we are seriously confused and conflicted, even our refuges like a yoga class become distasteful. Dubious. Effortful.
I posted precisely because this is a psychological reality, not a personal loss or failure. It isn't that the teacher isn't any good any longer or that the poses have gone old. It isn't- this is my, personal likely thought - that I was fooling myself all along, I was a sucker, that yoga is really just as meaningless as everything else. That I've been wasting my time. I can't do what I want to do. I do the things I hate to do. The disappointment is awful, in my mouth. Like old pennies. Rancid, old pennies.
Doubt and heaviness are a thing that happens to us, once in a while. It isn't your fault and it's isn't wrong. It means something.
We start, I said in class, by grounding. When we ground and sit still, we become aware of thoughts. This just happens. We become aware of the planning, observing, judging, uncomfortable, winding and chattering mind. This is chitta vrittri: Patanjali's twisting and tormented mind.
Sometimes chitta mutates into some whole other beast of a thing. It moves. It penetrates the body. We go cold, and dark.
As I wrote in the yoga of darkness, this doesn't mean yoga isn't working anymore, but that it is.
Often, it happens when the honey moon ends and real yoga starts. What was interesting and so exciting hits up against an edge. We realize how far our hamstrings can stretch and then the opening stops. We learned how to do a crow pose but no matter how much we engage the right muscles, our feet just never will leave the floor. We hit a point where the body really needs to be a different thing if it's going to go on, or where we ourselves really need to change our lives if we're going to keep practicing. And sometimes, we're just not sure we want to do that. Or maybe we would do, if we had any idea how.
Sometimes it happens because we are depleted elsewhere in our lives. When this is so - and it might be years in - even our refuge feels exhausting. Even sweet things taste half assed. It becomes really hard to care, let alone get up and do. We don't know what to do. We don't feel what we want to feel. The things that we loved - that we want to love - have become as burdensome as everything else. This hurts us. We're such bad mothers. We wasted our years getting into this career and don't know why any more. We forget what we loved about our lover. We disgust ourselves. We trudge on.
Sometimes, we have no idea why it feels the way it does or why we do the things we do.
Chitta seeps into the body itself, and we don't even know. Stuckness, samskara, blocks and stress are sometimes invisible to us. We can end up in the ER, thinking something is wrong with our heart, terribly wrong, and be told that we have 'anxiety', but be confused about how this could be true. Sometimes, sorrow eats our bones and we develop strange pains, neuropathies, fatigue syndromes, and when we're told it's a head thing we get pissed.
(As you should: pain in the body is real. It is not 'in your head'.)
The thing is this: what we are doing here is trying to feel into the space between body and mind, the place where they interface, to see how they tangle and observe. You cannot do this, yoga thing, and not eventually hit smack up against your personality and the reality of your life. You can't try to 'change' your self or any aspect of your days and not hit up on a deeply patterned body that wants ice cream, is depressed, feels vulnerable, old, wild, or dull. There is no separation and when we touch this - consciously or no, usually no - something very deep in us may recoil.
This is okay.
I want to say 'don't quit'. But what I need to say is that yoga is not on your yoga mat.
Yoga is a way of being alive.
And what you may need to do, warrior heart, is not pound yourself into submission or child's pose right now but be still, and listen. Be still, and know.
When yoga is seen as the feel good, flowy things we do in class you'll end up missing something. When it is seen as the feeling you get, and you get hooked on that feeling, you'll end up missing something. Yoga is not the postures, the teacher, the breath. If we try to keep it there, it will end up being a mere show of vanity and accomplishment and self-recrimination or loathing or boasting, just like everything else in life. If our yoga is not rooted in self-inquiry, non-harming, truthfulness, clarity, it becomes hollow. We will suffer.
What I need to say is ground: ground and root your practice in the yamas and niyamas. Use them like crutches, make them devotions you touch on at the end of the day, lenses through which you can actually see your day, touchstones to help you make decisions because you're so spent and confused you don't know what to do any more.
We are yogis; we're lucky; we have instructions and techniques.
What will happen is this: you'll have ways to see that it isn't, really, personal. It isn't. The fatigue and frustration. The sick of it all ness. The battle.
The battle isn't personal. You can stop fighting. Be still, and know the truth.
Real, actual practices you might use:
*use the yamas niyamas. As stringently as you use a weekly yoga class or used to. Work with your teacher. Get a book, a journal, a spiritual guide or a therapist. Start with ahimsa...do not harm. For the next week, notice harming thoughts, behavior, speech. For one week. Notice. Notice by writing, making a list, making an intention, meditating, talking with your teacher, or however you do.
If our practice is not rooted into deep psychological inquiry and the ways we're living, as much as it is rooted in body, our body is eventually going to 'betray' us.
What you'll find, in practicing the yamas and niyamas, is a deeper self and poignancy, a rush to live dharmically rather than stuck in yourself (all that 'self loathing', stuff). This is difficult, especially if where you are is self doubting right now. But listen to the truth of who you are, beyond tired. You'll suffer so long as you DONT see yourself as a divine spit of universe with mountains to move. You'll suffer so long as you can't love yourself as completely and wholly as Jesus loved, as you love your pet and a child, as you love your closest friends. This isn't easy and I'll write more on it. But it is true.
*Use all available resources. The heart of yoga is interconnection and the longing we all have for connection - an ultimate reality that we are not alone. Yet we need yoga precisely because we usually feel alone. Hire a babysitter. See a therapist. Call an old friend even though you feel shitty because it's been so long. Go see your doctor. Go to a meeting. Go to class. Hold your lover's hand and explain that all you can really handle is holding hands right now. Pray.
*The feeling that we are unsupported and need more support (affirmation, a thank you now and then would be nice, goddamn it can't you see how hard I'm working here) is an indication that our ojas is sapped. We're going to talk about ojas in this weekend's workshop. Other symptoms include: not getting real sleep and not feeling rested in the morning. Lack of care about the things we used to care about. Dull feeling in the body, in the eyes, in the hair. Bloat and brittle, or greasy and gross. Confusion, lack of knowing what it is we're supposed to be doing with our lives, inner conflict.
You're going to have to go forth, anyway. Life is going to go on. You might as well give yourself permission to feel what you feel and investigate it, invest in the process, go along for the ride. If you have to cry along the way, so be it.
*When our body is this cold and dry, we may need restorative yoga. Meditate. Practice self massage. Soak in the tub. Get a massage or a pedicure. Eat comfort food and lubricate: moisturize with coconut oil, sesame oil, shea butter or other like these, externally. Often. Thick, like. Oleate internally by getting lots of good fats. Take fish oil or flax oil. Use a lot of it on your food.
*Stay warm. Cuddle into socks, blankets, comfort clothes. Let yourself get a healthy sheen of sweet on once a day (which does not mean sweat buckets, it means healthy sheen). This can be yoga but doesn't have to be.
*Do try to get to the mat. This body mind thing is uncanny. It isn't in your head. You won't release what is happening in your heart until it's actually processed in your body. Yoga does this.
Body is the bow, asana is the arrow, and soul is the target. -BKS Iyengar
BKS Iyengar died last night. Along with Indra Devi, TKV Desikachar, and Patthabi Jois, he brought the lineage of Krishnamacharya west. I knew he was ill and in hospital a few days ago and have had a lingering shadow in my mind these past days. Grief is a funny thing. I can't say that he was my teacher; I never met the man. And I can't say that I miss him or lament much his passing; he was an elder and he lived and died well. But grief is a funny thing; it's the feeling of a passing, the feeling of the weight of a life and then the odd, light, empty space of the life being gone.
I feel it as I'm standing at my counter, waiting for the coffee to boil, and alone in a quiet house. I've already taught the morning class, left the studio, walked the dog. Yogis stand in the morning, quiet and already accomplished, while the rest of the world buzzes toward consciousness of alarms and newspapers. Of course, we have alarms and newspapers. But we find a quiet place to stand in the morning, and look at it.
This morning, Iyengar has died.
I try to call up a rough idea of what his teaching, with that of his peers, has meant to the world. I can't fathom this very well, because the blessing of their work - yoga as a global phenomena, yoga as a universal, yoga as a thing I was able to come across and now am able to teach - is a daunting thing. Millions practice. Words whispered, chanted, clung to. Bodies touched. I am grateful. I am moved.
I am moved by that shadow feeling that has been with me the last few days. A wondering what we will make of it. What happens to yoga when the fathers have died?
I mentioned this feeling to one of my teachers the other day. Abhinivesha, he said. The fear of death. This ultimate reality thing that all of us will struggle with, sooner or later. Yes, I said.
But the fear of death is really a fear of life, of life being a loss. There is the danger of getting lost, ourselves. There is the sense that we might fail. That we might come to the end of our lives and realize we missed something, we did not live rightly or fully. There is a sense of struggle and suffering and this ultimate question, as Doestoevski had it, of whether we are worthy and have made good on that suffering and those questions, or not.
My fear, my affliction right now, is not that Iyengar died nor even that I will, but a looming question of how we will carry his lineage and the teaching of tradition. Yes, we've been given the gift. We can do yoga with our dogs, with strobe lights, in any small town in any corner of the world. We can do yoga with thudding soundtrack, rubberized mats, and mala beads worn as bracelets.
The question of gifts is what you do with them.
Do they become accesories and baubles, or do they touch and change the heart?
The passing of the teachers changes the role of the students. It throws us off into a place of less direction and unclear paths. The mantle of the teaching floats a bit. If we've studied well, I think the direction, the teaching, the path, will shift. When the way outside becomes so uncertain, the way inside will have to become compass. We'll have to go deeper into ourselves to find the way through.
Iyengar and his peers taught yoga as an interior tradition, a mystic and practical pathway toward a good death. It is introspective work that honors this tradition - not the proliferation of yoga classes, brands, or the mastery of asanas. The teachers leave, the path disappears. If there is going to be a path, it has to emerge from the deep introspection and interior work of the new generation of teachers.
"The practice of yogasana for the sake of health, to keep fit, or to maintain flexibility is the external practice of yoga. While this is a legitimate place to begin, it is not the end...Even in simple asanas, one is experiencing the three levels of quest; the external quest, which brings firmness of the body; the internal quest, which brings steadiness of intelligence, and the innermost quest, which brings benevolence of spirit".
I am quiet in my kitchen. I never met Iyengar. But his path laid out a highway and I, dirty haired and hollow eyed with my thumb sticking out, desperate for a ride, was picked up along the way. Along with a motley bunch of half brained mystics, body obsessed fitness gurus, and lonely middle class seekers. We rode the bus together. The bus has stopped.
I believe there are teachers, now, doing the internal work. Reluctant pilgrims and desperate learners, both. Of course there is cacophony, there is controversy, there is Lululemon. There are thousands, millions of us, who dutifully approach the mat even when we're not sure what it is we'll find. Some will be moved, will see that we've been thrown out into the wilderness. Some will see that what we're doing here is embodying the quest.
I am quiet in my kitchen, and I've never known Iyengar. My teacher mentioned Abhinivesha. Fear. The answer to fear is greater love, bigger courage, more honesty. The answer to silence is song. Not speech, necessarily; song. Pithy, gutted love songs. When we are really quiet, the heart sings.
If we teachers listen, we'll emerge teaching. Not postures. Not as career. Not as a spiritual fad or an exercise regime. We'll come out teaching as pilgrims teach. Road weary. Calloused. On going. I listen to the quiet noises a kitchen makes. I feel the weight of a life on my own heart, as a question and answer both. Grief is a a funny thing. A feeling of weight. A feeling of absence. The song drifting up out of silence.
I had a student who severed his ulnar nerve, falling through a glass window. He rapidly began to atrophy in his hand and after two surgeries and a smattering of assessments, physical therapies, and wacky alternative treatments was told he would not regain it, ever. Movement. Ever. Hand.
We adapted his practice. His atrophy stopped. The muscles filled back out. He did chatturunga one day and wept.
Thing is, your body has thousands of nerves and neurons. We freak out about losing them. But yoga, if carefully done and practiced without expectation (we were not AIMING for chattarunga, we were focusing on 'what is still there'. But that focus on other parts of the body gave him some of his hand and wrist back), seems to do miracle things in bodies. Not regeneration, but retraining other nerves. Revealing undreamt of possibility.
I also had a student who broke her wrist falling while skiing, was told not to bear weight in her practice, and promptly quit.
Miracles, or quitting. I see both.
When people begin a (vinyasa) yoga practice, they are very likely to complain about their wrists.
I generally try to talk through the alignment of the hand and shoulder in weight bearing poses, explain something about muscles, and try to have a conversation about the difference between 'pain' and 'soreness'. Generally speaking, we come in having very weak wrists, hands, and forearms, if not pretty awful shoulder habit bodies, . All of this means that being in strong alignment in downdogs and chattaruangas is likely to be really, really hard at the beginning.
Once the body has adapted by building appropriate strength and carrying weight appropriately, this soreness goes away.
They may not complain so much about sore shoulders, but most of us have very unstable shoulder girdles in our planks and chattarungas, and will eventually end up with rotator cuff issues.
This happens, yet teachers are prone to say 'do what feels good for your body', rather than stopping the student. We've been coached and encouraged to believe that moving our body 'how we feel' is the benefit of a yoga practice. And there is some truth to this.
However. I'm thinking. I've had a number of conversations recently with 'Astanga refugees' (people who blew out shoulders, low backs, with a too rigid for years on end interpretation of the Astanga system as something that 'can't be adapted'), and 'flow' yogis who have had to take months if not years repairing damage that happened when a teacher insisted they do wild thing, or 'breath through the pain' of a hamstring stretch (that tore). As 'flow' has rapidly become the dancey, groovey, showy Yoga Of Choice in America....so much so that it is pret near the only type of yoga you can get in many places.... injury has become a question.
Of course, you can injure yourself doing any sport. Or walking on icy side walks. Or lifting a child or brushing your teeth, if you're not careful.
But yoga's promise - a non-injurious practice - needs to be both re-assessed and re-claimed. We teachers need to be more careful and more trained. And we, as students, need to learn things like the difference between soreness and pain, recognize when we are tired and losing alignment, stop ourselves from going too fast too hard too often. We need to remember that yoga is not a 'sport'. It is a rigorous body training and assessment. But it is not a sport.
I need to catch this, myself. As teacher. As student.
When students get hurt, the need to change the practice or take a break from practicing is terribly hard. Painfully hard. We've come to love it so much. It hurts and is scary to lose.
Just as it is scary to think of losing our bodies, at all.
I know. I've dealt with a few relatively minor injuries - a strange carpal boss that appeared on the back of my hand and made hands and knees impossible for awhile, let alone down dog; a concussion that left me forbidden to go upside down or raise my heart rate for six months. Both these and other, even more minor injuries or illnesses, kept me from my practice or enforced a VERY drastic change to my practice. It was hard. I had all sorts of 'what if I can never vinyasa again? Does this mean I'm just done, no more headstands, handstands, ANYTHING, ever, just done?' thoughts.
It was awful.
Chatturgangas afterward felt blissy.
But I'm faced, now and then, with the difficulty of needing to say, as a teacher, 'don't practice for awhile'. Or 'don't do that pose'.
And the difficulty in myself when students don't listen.
Thing is, yoga reveals us. There's a very popular yoga teacher who runs a workshop called 'asana junkies'. I thought this was cute, when I first heard it. Just like at my 12 step meetings, there was an immediate recognition of myself in somebody else's story. I want to raise my hand and say 'busted'. I know a lot of people who get crabby if their practice is put off because of circumstances. People who go into depressions when their beloved teacher leaves or moves or takes a pregnancy hiatus. People who grumble when classes aren't sweaty enough or a substitute teacher shows up. I know that all of us - see me raising my hand, here, a 'busted!' grin on my face - have a little bit of this.
The meditation, the revelation, is the work. When I have been injured, I had to somehow deal with the fact that I may not be able to invert and arm balance ever again. I did this sometimes well, mostly poorly. Of course, in the end I AM able to do those poses.
There is the fact that someday I will no longer be able to.
The question is what are we doing, in this yoga, thing? What is it we really want and need out of
a practice? The complexity, elegance, and potential of bodies is amazing. We can spend our lives exploring this. There is a biochemical thing that happens, while we are doing this, that changes our minds and our very lives. But how is that complexity, elegance, potential, and biochemical thing related to overpushing ourselves or becoming dependent on a certain pose, teacher, style, or routine?
I don't think it is. Related. Not at all. But we get confused. We're human. That's what we do.
And I don't know that I should teach as much 'up dog down dog' as I do; or that yoga classes from east coast to west should be so full of 'vinyasa flow' standards. Not unless we get really particular about teaching the right way to do it. The right way to do it is non-injurious. We're failing, that.
Ultimately, the meditation suggests we have to accept. We have to accept it when we lose legs. This doesn't mean we stop practicing. It in no way means the elegance and potential of the body is gone; but it is DIFFERENT. It is only powerful to the level we can accept and play with body's uniqueness.
We have to learn to accept the smaller losses or ego swipes along the way - the whole do what you can but if your breathing is compromised you've passed the edge, thing. Or maybe we don't HAVE to. But if we can, if we can learn to be that sensitive to our inner bodies, to experience, to the breath, our practice will continue in its elegance until we no longer practice. If we don't, we re-create suffering. Impose the addictive, denial qualities of the rest of our lives onto our practice. Harm ourselves. Miss the point.
Practice accepting illness or injury now will make the transition to a different practice fluid and entirely possible when and if you DO lose a limb. Or your eyes. Or die.
Don't practice acceptance and those arrivals will floor you. The arrivals are coming. That's what life is.
The short, practical thing I want to say here is this: you can adapt a vinyasa class to a broken arm, toe, or a wheelchair. Really. You can. It may get a little more complex for you (and hopefully your teacher) as you have to take time and figure it out. You might have to learn more about yoga. You might have to build up different strengths and flexibilities and this might take time. It might feel hard, confusing, and frustrating. But who ever said yoga was going to be simple and easy?
When you are injured, take the time you need to heal. Don't ignore your doctors, teachers, or sensations. It's a sprained wrist, a broken leg, whatever. Struggle with this, mightily, but accept it. Then practice in a way that respects the injury, finds new ways to move, break expectations all over again. Fact: people without arms can do amazing yoga postures. Follow them and be bloody glad you just have a fracture.
The more subtle, complex thing I need to teach, practice, and encourage is this: adapt or burn. Find your own practice. There is a practice in you that is stunning, strong, powerful, deep minded. But it may not look like the class, the 'vinyasa', or what you did yesterday. Most of us have 'can be changed' and 'cannot be changed' all screwed up. There IS potential in the body and mind. And there are things we cannot change, waste energy resisting or free ourselves by surrendering. Feeling this out is your work. Work hard. Figure out what moves.
I was asked, today, if Christians could practice yoga. The girl who asked blushed, said she knew it was a silly question, but still wondered how her faith and her yoga studio were related, in the sum total of her life.
It is an odd question, but also not. Both are things that promote spiritual journeys, healing communities, a more centered soul. 98% of Americans say that they believe in God, and the vast majority of these identify with a monotheistic religion. Meanwhile, millions are practicing yoga, in studios and in livingrooms. Both are attempts to come closer to something. Both are marginalized from our daily life. Yet both speak to our live’s center.
I told her I wasn’t sure I would believe in anything, especially prayer, if I hadn’t found it in yoga.
There is something deep in us that yearns for truth and meaning. This thing has become irritated and sore in a culture of ruthless individualism, mass marketing, and social discontent. Oddly, even as we believe in the power of the individual, we seem to be a people radically disconnected from our own selves. Both traditional faith and yoga are attempts to answer that deep something. Both are valid.
But the problem with belief is that stubborn “Truth” thing. Faith becomes arrogant when it claims a better right than others. No system of thought or expression of faith holds a monopoly on insight. Yet there has to be some gravity, some reality, to a faith. Pure relativity becomes wishy washy and hollow.
The expression of yoga in our world is unique and, I think, uniquely special. It is not the same practice it was thousands of years ago. The magic is not only what it has done and will do to heal our culture and change us, but the way we are changing it. Yoga is an expression of Spirituality, and I sometimes do it in a Christian church.
I also do it on sidewalks. But that’s a different point.
Let my prayer arise in Thy sight as incense,
And the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice. -Psalm 141:2.
We tend to think of prayer, spirituality, and our ‘selves’ in intellectual ways. We are taught that religion is a thing we retreat to, find in special places, are taught by special persons. We tend to disregard the physical as a handicap, an embarrassment, and a weakness.
We lose out when we do this. Spirituality is not a thing to be found in churches once a week or in ‘retreats’ and ‘cloisters’: it is here, and it is now, or it's fake. Nor is it a teaching handed down by others, if we’re honest: religion is the song of the heart. Our bodies our our very lives, our gift received and our gift to give. Our bodies will dictate our ultimate truth. Our relationship with our bodies says an awful lot about what we think of God’s creation. The most profound connection to the divine is always experienced inwardly, as something between ourselves and god.
Ever since the Incarnation, when the Word became flesh, no one is permitted to scorn or disregard anything human, natural, or earthy, and this includes the body. The Incarnation establishes without a doubt, once and for all, the given-ness of union with God. We do not have to attain divine union. We do not have to climb out of our messy flesh into the pure Spirit of God. God has become man. Our flesh is his flesh. Our body is his body. – Carmelite monk William McNamara
How do we come to terms with our own selves? What role does shame play? Love? Hunger? What does that self of clay and ash have to teach us about salvation, grace, humility, reverence, and joy? What does it teach us of death? Why have religions across the world, throughout time, involved physical practices? And why have mystics of all faiths found union with their god through practices of prayer, breathing, posture, meditation, and selfless service?
There is a strong tendency to deny (starve, abuse, overwork, cover, hide) or disparage the body. It’s been suggested the body is the source of sin, let alone weaknesses of mind and spirit. Yet God, if we want to go the Christian route, chose to Incarnate his son. Maybe this was about suffering. I don’t know. I think it must have also been about love. Jesus was a man, full on sensual, and hungry, and tired, and aging. Disparaging his humanity also disparages our own. It opens the door to philosophies of exclusion, hatred, and violence. It is the first step toward self-loathing, shame, and losing our ‘selves’ to the judgement and possession of others.
Who are we? What are we supposed to do with this life, this body? How do we, each and personally, incarnate the idea of devotion, love for neighbor, peace, or gratitude?
We pass through life. We know youthful play, awe, thrills, and heartbreak. We taste sex. We know relationships, parenthood, and work. We know illness, trial, and loneliness. Ultimately, I think we are called to dance, and to pray. These things that are done with our hands.
In the end, I think yoga is less about athleticism than about a prayerful heart.
The yogic literature is rich with metaphor, poetry, and dancing. Even in our classes, with teachers speaking from the hip, the words they use connote emotions and values, wedding those things to the movements of the body. There are rhythms in our body, pulse and breath; there are rhythms in the universe, subatomic, tidal, diurnal; rhythm is music, and music is a way of the dance. Bodies are both passionate and pathetic.
There is a power here, a little truth, that can tell us much about ourselves if we are willing to listen.
We are fairly schizophrenic when it comes to the body. On the one hand, we idealize it. We spend billions of dollars perfecting and tweaking it. Advertising, for soap and for soup, makes use of the human form. At the same time we are a culture of shame and of judgement. It is hard for most people to think of the ‘physical’ without immediately thinking of the ‘sexual’. The body is politic. Women’s bodies are covered in chadors, undergo cliterodectemy, covered too much or too little. Men’s bodies are used as machines, and sent to war. (Of course, both of those things are shifting to universal machines and sex toys). Body, especially the truth of the body, naked or sick or aging, is a very vulnerable thing. We wince at the doctors office. We dress without looking.
I once heard a religious woman speak of the importance of praying while standing naked before a full length mirror. Christ, she said, trusted and revered human flesh enough to use it as his own. God does not love my spiritual life only,she said, but my flesh and my bones. “The body is a gift”, said the Buddha, “it is a path to enlightenment”.
I practiced today, with resistance and irritability. I noticed, throughout practice, moving from warriors to chatarangas, that my mind kept slipping to work I should be doing. I’ve learned, in meditation, not only to watch what kind of thoughts I’m having – I should be working, I will this, I must that – but that I can go further: see where the thoughts take place in my body, how the thoughts feel. It can be a revelation to realize how much time we spend with certain thoughts, “subconsciously”, and even more revelatory to realize how physically entrenched the thoughts become. Thoughts release hormones, chemicals, cortisol or endorphins. The body clenches, hangs on, resents or worries.
But I continued to practice. The strength of my arms constricted and weary, crackling with popped knuckles and wrists. My skin warming. Pinking. Sweat, soft and sheened on my joints, the peak of my forehead, the small of my back. Then, the teacher’s voice, closing a surya, said something about peace, and center, and gratitude. How good, she said, to be alive.
To realize the body as a garment of the soul, the miracle that carries these lovely brains around, is only half the mystery. To realize my thoughts and the way they grid across my nerves and joints, is not really the point. The point is that the body itself, that dancing, is good. It is so good, it beats those stress thoughts and fears and petty little brain things into quiet gratitude. Body is not a stage on which the human drama is placed. It is that human drama. Not reaction, but the creative action. Do yoga, find joy. Walk, sing, play, and be changed. Give birth, and touch the divine. Fall ill, and flirt with mortality.
Yoga is the practice of mindful movement. We feel how powerful it is, but articulating the power or realizing the huge implications isn’t something we normally do. The mindful practice of particular physical movements combines mind and body into a unified experience. Take one part away, however – for example, full attention – and the overall experience changes significantly. The yoga practitioner becomes increasingly aware of the vital role that both mind and body play in any action. First, we grow more and more aware. Eventually, we become capable of changing and influencing the experiences of our lives.
Drama and dance are as old as the human community, and have often been used in liturgy, worship, and sacred moments. This is no small thing. To move the body in a particular way, to em-body, elicits both physical and emotional change.
Aristotle called it catharsis. When I was in high school, I wanted to take part in a play. My english teacher, who was one of very few adults I trusted at that point, forbade me. No, she said. You already know how to pretend too much. To become an actor, she meant, would be changing the facts of who I was. Perhaps she could have said it differently. Perhaps, with the right mentorship, I could have used drama to affect positive change. But I think she was right to say what she did. She knew how powerful acting could be, and those were powers I could not, at the time, handle.
But I have continued to be drawn to the actor, the play. It’s not a form I know well, because it seems too real to me. A human being, embodying an experience, typically elicits the physical and emotional response in me that literally doing the thing would. When we move our bodies, when we ‘act’, our brains release those hormones, our hearts fire up the bloody rhythm, and we are changed.
Once, I saw a woman who had recently lost a child “playing” with her surviving daughter. She crawled, she made faces, she pushed little trucks around. Eventually, her daughter brought her a doll and made motions, insisting, that the woman cradle the doll in her arms. The woman’s face tensed. But she obeyed.
She took the plastic, wall-eyed baby doll in both of her arms, and her head tipped down into a gesture of tenderness, looking, for all the world, as if she were looking into a child’s eyes. Holding the doll in her left arm, she tucked at the blanket with the fingers of her right hand. I don’t think she knew it, but she began to rhythmically rock. Slow, and steady, and heavy. I don’t know what she felt, but I saw her whole composition change. My own face was wet, until her daughter rushed me and brought me over to play with her toy kitchen and stuffed turtle, whose eye hung by a thread.
I have practiced yoga through many different things in my life, and the lives of people around me. It hasn’t always been easy, or necessarily joyful. Sometimes, it almost seems dull. But at some point in the practice, or in feeling the practice in my body throughout the day, the verdict is fairly standard. This is my body.
We can't help but measure ourselves, wish things were different, make grand gestures and ultimatum type statements about how we want our lives to be. This time of year it comes as 'resolutions'. We reflect on how things have been going or what has passed and set some goals or dreams for the future. There is good in this. It is important to grow.
There's the fact, too, that resolutions are promises broken, more often than not. They are one more thing to beat ourselves up over. We know what it is we need, what we need to change, but are stumped and frustrated and hurt because we don't know how to break out of where we are. Most of the things we've been taught don't actually work very well: try harder, make a list, go on a diet, set up a schedule.
Why is it we want to change so much, but cannot? Why is it we become our own worst enemies? Why is honest change so hard and so rare?
Yoga has very direct answers to these human questions. We can't or haven't changed because we have karma. Karma being our habits of mind, feeling, and behavior.
We change our karma in recognizing the kleshas, by seeing with clarity where it is that we are stuck. Through persistent practice, meditation and mindfulness, through clarification and purification of body, mind, and relationships we start to hack through the dense dark matter of karma. We begin to see.
There are five kleshas or obstacles, five barriers to the self and to happiness. They are the path, the threshold, both the obstacle and the obstacle's overcoming. They obstruct our lives and our vision. For the next five weeks I'm going to teach each of the kleshas, as well as ways to break through them, as a way toward deeper self knowing and self practice.
Abhinivesha is fear. Fear - or what most of us would recognize as anxiety - determines much of our presence in the world. Seeing fear, knowing it, knowing where anxiety is in our body and how often it's seeping into our thoughts, is a cornerstone of yogic practices.
Opening ourselves up in spite of fear is both the goal and the way to the goal.
Backbends, tonight, as fear mongers and also release of fear.
In upcoming weeks, we'll look at all of the kleshas: abhinivesha (fear or anxiety), asmita (false identity or confusion about who you really are), raga (attachment), dvesha (aversion), and avidya (blindness or ignorancence; not being able to see reality). Avidya is the source of all the other kleshas, the granddaddy of human suffering and confusion. The way to strengthen our resolve, build our character, change our lives and practice yoga is to continually enlighten. To transform. To hack through or blow on or tentatively consider the idea of lifting the veil of our own blindness.
I spoke, it being thanksgiving, of gratitude. I said it is a particular kind of attention; gratitude is a way of seeing and being in the world. As such, it has nothing to do with circumstances or things. It has to do with us. Gratitude is not an attainment or a thing that happens to us; it is an innate capacity we have, a thing we practice or do not. Like all capacities, it can flourish. It can atrophy.
This is the heart of yoga, I said. This is the point. The capacity to stop, shift, and pause at any given moment, in any situation, and touch on the breath. To shunt our attention away from our habit mind into our wider mind and more vulnerable heart.
I did not say this was easy.
It is hard to let go of conditions, blame, coping skills, excuses, competition, entitlement, and control. It is terrifying to let those go and accept, instead and suddenly, that the path has to do with self and reality. It goes right down the line of our sternum to our soft spots. Self responsibility, self mastery, self soothing, self determination, self motivation, self control, self expression, self knowing. Not selfishness - but letting the self break open and seeing what is there.
To linger, attentively, gratefully, in any moment will strip away our arrogance. Those things for which we may be grateful - children, family, safety, food, the age we are and the health we have - show themselves for what they are: conditions, frailties, current expressions of constant change. Little breaths of grace for which we have no real authorship and no end control. They are given us, but might not have been. They are not ours. Those things for which we might be grateful but aren't swell and burgeon in their mystery: wheeling snow, the way a highway is empty on a holiday morning and you are on it. The sunlight, the bare trees, the deafening quiet. A moment, alone.
Listen. I had a horrid holiday. Things which I thought I had gotten over, things I didn't want to think about or feel, positively smacked me into stillness. And more than stillness; they so washed over the nooks and crannies of my brain and the fibers of my body I was reduced to a seedy, snotty, sniveling depression and then ashamed of that depression. Sex and babies and age, relationship and money and longing to be loved. Tender spots for us all, surely. I have a strong tendency to resist what is tender.
Let me be blunt. A relationship that was supposed to unfold to a wedding this New Year's Eve fell apart. In its falling apart, I am suddenly back to financial fear and insecurity, an insecurity I haven't felt for a long time and thought wouldn't come again. A sister had a child, which rather than making me feel love and hope and generations made me feel old, made me remember children I have aborted or given to adoption. A surge and roil of shame for the things I've been and done and seen, bitter grief for the fact I can't have those chances back, time has passed, I may never have children or partner or family,hit me blunt wise. The anniversary of a friend's suicide, exactly on Thanksgiving, returned all sorts of memories and the unalterable fact that his presence is only an absence, now. The birthday of an old, dear, alienated from me love intensified that thing, that aloneness, that fact that time has passed and left me standing, dumb, where I am.
All, all things I am rationally aware of and fully believed healed, processed, handled.
But when the days came, and the sudden horrible cold and dark of Minnesota winter, when that infant was actually born, my wheedling and mature mind was hijacked. I crumpled. Grief and depression are not concepts. Grief is a taste in the mouth and a collapsing of the lungs. Depression is your body, gone horribly wrong, you mind rotting and broken and unworking, and no one else knowing. Emotion is a reality you live in, distinct from the realities of other human hearts.
Emotion is our reality, our wider mind and more vulnerable heart.
I skipped the actual thanksgiving meal because I couldn't bring myself to go. And felt guilty for doing so. I minced through what contact I could. I sat, in a big empty house that is suddenly mine and mine only, and I watched the first snow of the year appear in the sky. With my forehead on the window pane. Snow has no straight way down.
It is hard to stay with your breathing, then. It is hard to teach yoga, hard to walk a dog, terrible to eat and to swallow. The snow is real, you see, and the empty house, and the new born infant. The fact is grief, but also, oddly, bellowingly, a love for that baby that is tactile and teary. The question isn't what god in his cruelty makes this or what karma will balance it out again nor what it should be nor what it all means; the question is what happens, now? What is this, who am I, what is here?
My teaching, strange and raw, had a kind of clutch in the throat. But also a kind of naked. I moved, myself in practice, as if I were dying. As if I were praying. I think, I suppose, I was.
I taught Anjayeasana. The deep version, where it is hard to breath, where your heart pounds hard enough to drown you. You try to lift that heart, up. The word, anjayeasana, I forgot to say out loud as I taught, means offering. Not perfect, not pretty, but a ripped heart, the hard to take breath, offered.
To stay has a kind of humility to it, a kind of purity, and the world breaks open with questions. What am I to say to the sister (I love you, and it's panging)? What am I to teach (Feel your feet, listen for breath)? What do I do with this loneliness, these empty hands (tell someone. Make a sound in the silence. Take the cup they offer)? How am I supposed to live in this empty house, all mine, all empty (unpack the boxes, write the falling snow, live here and write this down)? Why did my friend die (I don't know, and I don't know why I'm alive, am. Alive, alive, alive.)
It is hard, at times, to be grateful. To practice self compassion, self determination, self motivation, self knowing means surrendering without knowing where it goes. To willingly slide into vulnerability and uncertainty. To take reality, whole, and swallow.
Surrender is fierce. As anything that will change us must be. All projects, any love. All healing.
To give our selves into the unknown is wild. To show up. To be changed in ways we cannot imagine, past our control, more than we intended. This is the practice and like snow, like sky, it has no straight way down.
This kind of surrender has a way of knocking us, windless, to our knees.
Which may be the final meaning of reverence.
What I have found isn't answer. I want to tell you how beautiful, how quiet, a highway gone empty can be. The reverence, the ground, holds. Your heart breaks, snow falls. The sacred is this way; humane, snotty, captivated by snow and highways and the smell of an infant's thin and many veined skin. Her breath, I tell you, is sweet. My breath is sharp with longing. We are creatures who breathe, until we can't.
“Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” -Carl Jung
I once had a student who started to drift away and began to look sheepishly apologetic when she did come to class. She avoided my eyes and had an invisible wall around her mat. She used to ask questions or chat after class; now she was the first out of the room and gone from the studio by the time I'd left my mat. Eventually, though, we did talk a little. She told me things were busy. She talked about her kids. Then she looked somewhere into the middle distance and said she didn't know, really; yoga just wasn't working any more.
Sometimes, she said, all I feel in child's pose is anger and disappointment.
Yoga has a corner market on feel good words. I recently had a massage therapist tell me we were both in the 'feel good industry'. The promise of 'enlightenment' tends to make us think we will be more spiritual, and this somehow means we'll be a little less freakish about time, our kids, our money. There is truth to this. Yoga can show us how good it feels to be alive.
But yoga will also show us exactly how badly we feel. Usually, when honest emotion starts to come up, students leave. They skip class or decide yoga wasn't what they wanted. They say 'it's not working any longer'. The emotion itself keeps them away; they're 'not in the mood', 'too busy', or 'too depressed to move'. They will - trust me, this is real - feel guilty for feeling so crummy when others are just trying to get their savasana on.
This doesn't indicate that the yoga isn't working, but that it IS. The end isn't this negativity, this disappointment. But negativity is part of the path, and it has to be gone through if you want to understand it, to understand yourself, at all. If you don't, you'll be shutting down half of your experience of life, and probably the best strengths you'll ever find. If you don't, you'll continue to skip, overcompensate, repeat, and lull. You'll segue irritation into nicety, stuff it, and it will erupt later as rage toward an intimate or yourself.
Most of us have spent the majority of our lives stuffing and repressing our feelings, rationalizing them, avoiding them, or sublimating them into exercise, food, cigarettes, television, shallow relationships. Women are taught not to feel anger because it's not nice, not feminine (or too feminine and bitchy, emotional, hormonal and out of control). Men are supposed to feel competence, all the time. In our efforts to feel better, many of us start shutting it off, wholesale, in favor of pop psychology or easy spirituality. It's called spiritual bypass. It's an attempt to avoid painful feelings, unresolved issues, or truthful developmental needs with such words as 'everything happens for a reason', 'god's ways are not our ways', or 'choose happiness'.
There will be a yoga class, someday, online or at your local studio, where your teacher will start singing. She'll say 'exhale' as if there's something orgasmic about it. She might allude to the goodness of your heart, your hamstrings, or the light inside.
If you are like me, this may make you clench your bandhas like a fist. There may come a day you lower down into child's pose, "sweet, receptive, safe" child's pose and feel nothing but boredom, irritability, and dis-ease. You keep lifting your head off the mat, looking at the clock. There may come a day your brain starts swearing at the lovely yoga teacher saying something vapid about love in your newly blossomed chakra.
Here is the thing. Yoga is not about bliss, but about honesty. Spirituality is not certainty, but the longing of the heart. Enlightenment is not 'letting go' of bad feelings, but understanding them, what they're doing to us, and how they are expressed in the body. Non-harming and forgiveness are not about feeling generous or big enough (bigger than and condescending), but knowing the difficulty of right actions and assuming responsibility for the difficult. Forgiveness often comes directly out of acknowledging how bloody bitter we are. Love is not joy, all the time. Sometimes, love hurts. Love is raw.
Yoga is a love story. Not the fluffy, romanticized love story, but the real one. The kind that leaves you changed.
Emotions are doorways, ways in. The goal is not to exist without shadows, to become so spiritual we no longer feel fat, bored, envious, or impatient. The goal is to swallow hard as we take on willingness to go into the dark.
Because yoga asks you to work with both your body and your mind, the inevitable result is going to be messy. There will be times the body itself will start in on anger, hot and fast, trembly, without the reasoning mind having a clue what is going on. There will be days the boredom or loneliness seem so sharp they may actually wound. There will be five thousand ways your mind will tell you it isn't worth it, it won't work, that love is not real.
Yet, yoga has probably already given you a clue to this. You've probably already felt how love - whether it be romantic or ethical, compassion, right living, making a solidity of your name - is the only thing that is real. The highest and best in human beings is subtle, mysterious, and tied directly to the shadows. Life is both unbearably cruel and devastatingly sweet, often at the same time.
The shadows will show up. Go there. Apathy, acedia, what Christian mystics called desolation, existentials call despair, moves when we move toward it. It isn't the passage of time that heals us, but the passing through experiences.
There are hundreds of things telling us to 'get over it', to 'think positively', or to 'let it go'. Be wary of these as the roadside distractions that they are.
Yoga is the love story where in things fall apart. God moves away, often at the same time he takes away the ground. First goes this, then goes that. Gone are the thrill of the first months of yoga class, the ease of learning something new every time you walked in the door. Gone is the schedule that allowed you class three times a week. Gone is the strength in your shoulders, the ability to keep on a diet. Gone is the confidence of conversion.
And then a small movement in the heart. And then two.
This morning I'm reading Shantideva- an 8th century text that will form a frame for this weekend's deeper practice meeting. I want to be clear about the deeper practice group: there is a 12 module syllabus, with a backbone of reading and personal study, that you go through. But each time I teach, I'll be teaching from those bones, differently. Each time I'll be introducing a different text or practice for us - for you - to work with. So you can start at anytime - the backbone is there for you to work with. It's a thread you pick up and follow, regardless of whether you can make every month this year or not, the thread is there. And you should come back: the changing skin and deeper textures and tones aren't things you could understand or live with one brush through. We're trying to create community, create a sanctuary of depth practice. That is a rare thing. I'll give you a certificate and you can register as a yoga teacher once you've completed the syllabus. But that is only the surface.
Shantideva's text is a handbook for living the way.
ided savasana, and then couldn't figure how to host an mp3 on the forum, so it will live here. Lucky you.
Some of the most important work we do happens in savasana. It's often seen as a time to rest. It's sometimes simply called 'final relaxation pose'. It's often skipped and students can spend years not really liking it, not feeling able to relax, or being uncomfortable with how silly it feels to lie down and do nothing, so vulnerable, such a place where tears are likely to come.
ng, powerful, deep minded. But it may not look like the class, the 'vinyasa', or what you did yesterday. Most of us have 'can be changed' and 'cannot be changed' all screwed up. There IS potential in the body and mind. And there are things we cannot change, waste energy resisting or free ourselves by surrendering. Feeling this out is your work. Work hard. Figure out what moves.
