What I Learned at the Gym Today

I got a free three-month pass to the gym, so I’ve been going a couple times a week and doing the elliptical or treadmill or something.  I’ve settled on 45 minutes as a good amount of time—not so long that it makes it hard to go, but long enough to make it “worth the trip.”  Sometimes I don’t feel like staying for 45-minutes, it seems long and boring and I’m ready to get on to the next thing.  But if I was planning on forty-five minutes, I encourage myself to stick with it and always feel good that I did.  I have made a couple daily commitments for the month of December that are really showing me that promising myself I’m going to do something and then doing it feels really good.  In fact, I don’t even think it matters what the commitment is—it really could be anything.

There are some days that I do my 45 minutes and I feel like doing more, which seems like a good idea, right?  I’m not so sure.  It’s a sneaky way of raising the standard, so that “just” following through on my commitment starts to be not good enough.  And it also sets the stage to undermine the whole idea of commitment by moving my decision-making back to what I “feel” like doing.  If it’s okay for me to stay longer at the gym on the days I feel like it, then it will likely start to be okay for me to cut my time short on the days I feel like it.  I can imagine even making deals with myself—I leave ten minutes early today and stay ten extra minutes another day.  Pretty soon the whole thing has gone out the window. 

I caught on to this whole trick because today I had to convince myself to stay and then when it was almost time to go, I found myself beginning to debate about staying longer.  But when I paid attention to how I was feeling, there wasn’t really a big difference—it wasn’t like I had hit my zone and was having a great time.  It made me think that it’s the same internal process, just flipped around.

Now, the thing is that, of course, whatever I do is okay really—it doesn’t matter if I go to the gym at all.  AND if I have a sense that it helps take care of me and commit to doing it, then whether or not I follow through does make a difference.  I either learn that I can trust myself or that I can’t trust myself. 

The topic of the month at Samarya is ishvara pranidhana—surrender or devotion to God.  Keeping commitments would seem to most easily fit into the category of tapas or effort (and I probably did write about it that way recently).  I think it also is a practice of surrender—surrendering the small “s” self, the momentary desires and dislikes of the ego, in order to serve something bigger.  A commitment to go to the gym may not seem like “something bigger,” but what I’m talking about is a commitment to keep commitments, a commitment to be guided by the part of me that can see the big picture instead of by an endless conversation about what I “feel” like doing, a commitment to developing a relationship with something that is closer to the big “s” Self than the small “s” self.

Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?

What I was noticing with all this crazy weather (for those of you reading this in another place or another time, we are having snow and below-freezing temperatures here in Seattle) is how hard it is to not know.  Is it going to get worse?   Should I go home now?  Should we cancel classes?  Should I drive to work?  Is it going to freeze?  Is it going to get better?  Is it going to get better and then a little melty and then be frozen and way icier and worse?  I could feel my anxiety rising both yesterday and this morning as I tried to know what was going to happen and therefore what I should do, which is, of course, impossible.  I want to figure it out, but there’s no such thing—it turns out life is not like a math problem.

At some point, I just have to make a choice and see what happens.  What seems to make that even harder is the judgment that if I stay home or go home early and the weather turns out to be not such a big problem, then I’m a wimp, but if I go bravely out into the snow and get stuck somewhere I’m an idiot.  Not only is the choice between being a wimp and an idiot a crappy choice, but it’s not real.  For one thing, it’s based on the idea that I know (or should know) what’s going to happen.  And secondly, it’s making what happens mean something—that what happens with the weather and my car, for instance, means something about me.  The great thing about saying something out loud or writing down is seeing how ridiculous it is.

So the feeling of not-knowing is uncomfortable and I want to hurry up and make a decision so that I can know rather than waiting to see how things will develop.  I might even want to make up some rule, so that every time this situation arises, I just have to follow my rule—I can skip the whole not-knowing-what-to-do thing.  Or I can just keep reminding myself that there is no “right” thing to do and that I can only make the best decision I can make with the information I have at the moment and that, generally speaking, decisions are never quite as urgent as the sensations of anxiety would have me believe.

I think I will choose vairagya for our yoga word today.  It means non-attachment.  That can refer to a lot of things, but it has always seemed to me that the ultimate non-attachment is not attaching my sense of myself, my idea of who I am, my self-worth to things outside of me, like making the right decision or the weather.  I’m okay when it’s snowing, when I stay home, when I am anxious, when I don’t know.

Turning Toward

So I am just about done with the sweater and I can feel the inclination to put it away and not think about it anymore.  If I were going to guess what will happen, I will try wearing it once or twice because I put all that work into it and then it will go in a drawer and I will try to put the whole thing out of my mind.  Some part of me labels it as a “mistake” and a “waste of time.”  And since I don’t like how I feel with those labels, I want to avoid the thing that makes me feel that way, which is the sweater.  I was thinking this post was going to be about svadhyaya (self-study), but maybe it is also about dvesha (aversion, avoidance).

It makes me think of when I get a parking ticket.  It’s always my strategy to just pay it immediately, so that I don’t have to think about it and nothing will remind me.  I do think that it is a good plan in that situation—I made a mistake, I know what it was, I won’t do it again, be done with it.  Something like a parking ticket is easy to ruminate over (“I can’t believe I did that,” “Such a waste of money,” etc.), just making myself feel bad without any real purpose.

But there is a difference between dropping something or letting it go and pushing it away.  Letting it go (like the parking ticket) means I am not attached, particularly I am not attaching that thing to my sense of myself.  I am at the point where I don’t feel like getting a parking ticket means anything about me (I used to fall for that sort of nonsense, but not anymore).  When I am actively pushing something away or avoiding it, it’s because I am attached, I think it means something about it me and I don’t like it.  In my case, that’s the sweater.

So, the problem is that pushing away the things that are troublesome to me guarantees that they will remain.  If I just put my sweater in the drawer without spending any time looking at what I could have done differently, what I need to learn more about or practice, what specifically I don’t like about it, then the likelihood that I will have another unsuccessful sweater experience is much higher.  Turning away from things that are difficult or unpleasant keeps them in place—my best opportunity for change is to turn toward them.  Interestingly, brain research has shown that meditators have a shift in prefrontal cortex function from right side (avoidance) to left side (approach), which is associated with decreasing depression, anxiety, etc.

In the end, there is no problem with putting my sweater in the drawer or even deciding that I will just stick to socks and scarves and fingerless mitts.  But not if it’s just because I feel like I can’t or am afraid to look at it.  I can turn toward the sweater (or the anger or the difficult relationship or the fear or “bad habit” or whatever is causing me suffering) and see what I can see, be open to what I might learn, take responsibility for my actions, do my self-study.  And then let it go.  I don’t need to keep replaying it and berating myself—what’s done is done.  Then I get to do that whole process again next time it comes up, which could be in the next few minutes or a couple months from now—things like that don’t generally change immediately.  But what does change immediately is that the moment I turn toward it, I am not suffering.  I am in a place of curiosity, openness and acceptance and whatever it is does not have power over me.  And then, like magic, it doesn’t actually matter what happens with it.

The Learning Curve

So after I posted yesterday, I sat on the couch with all the pieces of the first sweater that I have knitted that has to be sewn together (my first two were knit all in one piece).  And as I was starting the project of seaming, my husband was describing this opportunity that he missed at his new job because he just had no idea how things worked.  We both were in agreement that it was just part of the learning curve and there’s no way to know all of these things until they happen.  Then I proceeded to get really frustrated that I didn’t really know how to sew these seams.  I looked it up on a few websites to find tips and advice, but it was kind of hard and not working at first.  It was apparent that while it was easy to have understanding for someone else in their learning curve, I still somehow expect that I won’t have one.

What I thought was sort of interesting was that it wasn’t so much that I was feeling bad because I thought I should already know how to do it (which is a common one, I think), but that because I am smart and generally capable, I should just be able to, that it shouldn’t be hard.  I don't know how, but it will be easy (a slightly different variation on the theme).  It turns out that I am just a regular person who has a hard time the first time I do something, just like I have been talking about.  I remember someone saying that everyone wants to be extraordinary, but the most extraordinary thing is being ordinary. 

So, of course, I stuck with it (the seaming) and got the hang of it, though I suspect it will look like my first seamed sweater (if it even fits—there may be another blog coming soon on that).

Not Giving Up

A while ago, I posted about being bad at something before you can be good at it. And a reader commented and I’ve been wanting to comment on the comment, but haven’t yet. And now today, it seems like the day. The getting from not being able to do something to being able to do it, as the insightful reader noted, requires not giving up. I think it is probably impossible to do something over and over again (as long as we are paying attention) and not improve. Which doesn’t mean I am going to be a virtuoso or expert, but it’s going to get easier and more streamlined. That’s just the way the brain works—it’s going to build a neural pathway for what I do repeatedly.

Now, unfortunately, what many of us have repeated and practiced is thinking, “This is never going to work,” “I can’t do this,” or “If I can’t be great at it, what’s the point?” So what we’re good at is thinking we’re not good at things. But we also have loads of evidence to the contrary. And if you are reading this and thinking, “No I don’t,” recall that you once didn’t know how to talk or walk or read or write. It’s incredible how much we are capable of!

So then the question becomes, “How do I stick with something?” Generally, when I am not as good at something, it’s not quite as enjoyable as when I am, but enjoyability is the main thing that motivates me to do something in the present moment. If I can pay attention to the little incremental changes I am making, it starts to be more enjoyable because I am focusing on what I can do instead of what I can’t. If I pay attention to what is happening right now, I am having more fun than when I am focused on some future place I want to be or some idea of what should be happening.

I didn’t have in mind what the yoga concept would be here (it could, of course, be tapas, but we’ve talked about that a lot lately)—now I am thinking of the sutra that says, “vitarka badhane pratipaksha bhavanam” (when disturbed by troubling thoughts, cultivate the opposite). If I have the habit of giving up or focusing on what’s not going well, I can create a new pattern, change my perspective and have a new experience. And, of course, at first that’s going to be hard and I won’t be very good at it.

Pretty much, the whole Samarya Center (click here if you haven’t heard of it) is an example of what can happen when you stick with something. The part that popped into my head earlier today is the kirtan that I have been leading once or twice a month since we opened almost ten years ago. In the beginning, I would often have one or two people and there must have been times that no one came. And now, there are regularly twenty or more people, which is always amazing to me (and someone recently asked if we could Skype the kirtan to her small rural town!). Looking back, I think about how easy it would have been anywhere along the way to think that it wasn’t worth it or it just wasn’t working. I kept doing it because every time I was packing up my guitar, I was thinking that I had a good time.

We don’t know for sure what the final result will be if we keep working at something, but we do know for sure what will happen if we give up.

The Tapas of Attention

So, obviously, I’ve been re-invigorated about the blog. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve posted a lot and am just generally excited about it—it moved from the “I should do that” category back to the “I want to do that” category. So I’m going along enjoying what I’m doing, feeling good, and then starts the internal judgment and nagging—“you were going to have personal anecdotes and now you are just writing about ideas,” “your life is boring so you don’t really have anything to write about,” “you’re just writing about the same thing over and over,” etc. This is crazy! In a matter of moments, I go from things being great to everything being a big mess. Except that I am paying attention and recognize all of that as bull-oney.

I noticed a similar process with the book I am working on. My first few months were full of enthusiasm and productivity, then I went through a long lull period of discouragement and relative disinterest. And now I am seeing that I really do want to write it and think it will be a meaningful contribution, but don’t always “feel” like it, so need to make a commitment to spending time on it. And this actually works pretty well. And then I start hearing about how it’s never going to get done and can sense some sort unspoken idea that I should be feeling the way I was feeling in the beginning. Voila! I’m feeling bad about it instead of optimistic as I was just moments ago. Unless I recognize that no one who wanted me to actually work on the book would be telling me that and I DON’T LISTEN TO IT.

In both of these situations, I go from being in my experience to thinking that things should be some other way than the way they are. There are a lot of yoga ideas we could bring in here, but let’s just stick with tapas. It takes a lot of effort and discipline to keep bringing my attention back to the present moment and what’s actually happening right now. My experience, though, is that life is better when I do that—it seems worth the work. A problem, sort of by definition, is when I think that something should be different. So I could even end up thinking that the fact that those thoughts arise that something is a problem is a problem, but it is just something that happens. So my tapas is not trying to make that process not happen, but seeing it, stepping out of it and focusing on something else.

We Choose to Go to the Moon

All this contemplation of tapas—it’s been a more focused month than usual on the blog.  I think because despite the fact that I am actually a very hard-working person, I am constantly feeling like I don’t have tapas.  I feel I am often avoiding hard work. 

This evening right in the middle of teaching my class, I suddenly thought of JFK’s “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech.  I participated in a training once where we had to memorize a piece of a speech and try to deliver it as much like the original as possible, to really embody it.  Even though this speech wasn’t the one I was assigned, it has really stuck with me.  “We choose to go to the moon.  We choose to go to the moon.  We choose to go to the moon . . . not because it is easy but because it is hard.”  (Click here for a link to this part of the speech).

I was thinking yesterday about how effort doesn’t have to be effortful.  Another one of these paradoxical truths.  It seems like there is something in us as humans that loves a challenge.  And that when I am in the place of enjoying the hard work, it isn’t “hard work.”  It’s sort of like when I wrote a few months ago about accepting resistance and then it isn’t there anymore.

Which sort of goes with the other thing I have been thinking about.  I led this retreat on being in the flow of life and have used a river metaphor quite a few times lately.  The idea is that there is a way to be neither fighting against the current nor passively being thrown against the rocks, but to be actively swimming in the direction that things are going, interacting with the current to play a part, but “going with the flow.”  But the more I think about it, the more I think you can’t actually not go with the flow of life.  That’s the whole trick—you can’t step outside of the flow and you can’t go against it.  Whatever you are doing, you are ultimately going with the flow of life.  Which I guess brings us back to tapas.  Some students have asked about tapas and effort vs. resistance and trying to control.  If the effort feels effortful, then it’s probably resistance and trying to control.  When I am going with life, then the tapas feels more like enthusiastic participation than a struggle.

We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard, not because we have to but because we want to, because it is fun and exciting to meet the challenges that life gives us.

Staying Awake

Every day for many many days now, there are four or five political mailers in my mailbox—large, thick, shiny postcards telling me to vote for someone or not vote for something or other.  My ballot was filled and sealed a week ago and I haven’t read any of those mailers, even before I voted—they all go straight into recycling.  I alternate between feeling irritated, frustrated, sad, and despairing and it gets to be more the longer it goes on.  It’s true that sometimes I just recycle them and don’t really feel anything or pay attention.

I can’t help but wonder if anyone has done any research to see if mailing all this stuff out has any positive effect.  Or is it just that that is what they’ve always done and they feel like they need to do something, so they keep doing it?  Of course, the only way I can even generate that possible explanation is because I know about that.  One could argue that the only reason I get upset with those mailers is because they remind me of how unconscious and small-minded I am sometimes. 

So now what am I going to do?  I guess I am going to pay attention.  If I want the world to have more conscious choice-making, then I need to stay awake and make more conscious choices.  Which brings us back around to tapas (which I’ve been talking about in recent posts).  Recently, someone used teethbrushing as an example of going on habit, saying we always start in the same quadrant.  Ever since I got my fancy toothbrush, though, I have been consciously choosing to start in different quadrants.  That’s a small practice of staying awake.  And if I think in terms of small practices, I could come up with many more ways to bring myself back to attention by doing something differently than I usually do, even silly things like using my other hand or putting things I use a lot in different places.  It might even be fun to see how long it takes for the new habit to develop and for me to go back to sleep.

The best part of paying attention isn’t that it’s the “right” thing to do and makes me a “good” person or yogi.  It isn’t even that I might be less wasteful.  It’s that I’m here for my life.  Lately, I’ve been remembering how much I love Mary Oliver’s poems.  Here are the last lines from “The Swans”:  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Taking Care of This Person

I just drove home from The Samarya Center staff retreat, which made me feel even more grateful than I already was that I am part of something so great.  When I got in my car, I plugged in my ipod and started listening to the Cheri Huber podcasts that I have been consistently listening to whenever I am in my car for over a year.  Sometimes I think I should listen to something else or that I miss listening to music.  And then I remind myself that I have clear evidence that listening to these podcasts is working for me.  I flashed through all of this when I got in the car today and thought it related somehow to what I was saying in the last post.

Here is this thing that helps me and there is some part of me that says, “Now you are doing good, so you don’t need to keep doing that anymore.”  Or just generally tries to convince me I am bored or even that it has become too much of a “habit” so I should mix things up.  But all of that is not about taking care of this person—it’s just trying to distract and confuse.  As I continue to think about tapas and commitment this month, what I would really love to commit to is doing whatever I can to support and take care of this person called Stephanie.  To move from the idea that I am worth taking care of an actual experience of that that I act on and live from.  It’s pretty big and I have made progress on it and then occasionally see how far I have to go.

Participation

I had a dentist appointment this week and I was noticing a pattern in my dental hygiene efforts.  I go in and the hygienist says I need to do more (floss more frequently, use the rubber tip thing, etc.).  So I commit to being more dutiful and consistent.  And, lo and behold, the next time I go in, she says how great everything is looking.  So then I slack off.  And, no big surprise, on my next visit, she is once again saying that my gums need more attention.  And it just goes back and forth like that.

I have noticed this before in relationship to various injuries I have had.  I do a good job taking care of it and helping it heal and then as soon as it starts feeling better, I think I don’t need to do all that anymore (instead of thinking that what I’m doing is really working and I should keep doing it).

Our topic this month at The Samarya Center is tapas, which translates literally as heat and refers to the effort, determination, sacrifice, discipline that is required for our spiritual practice (it also includes a sense of enthusiasm and zeal).  It seems like part of my attitude toward hard work is that I just want to do it long enough so that I can stop doing it.  I suspect that many of us have some version of a love-hate relationship with work.  Our whole culture is telling us to work, work, work while simultaneously also giving us a message that we shouldn’t be working so hard and deserve a break.  It’s very confusing.

My actual experience most of the time when I am working at something is that I enjoy it.  Even flossing my teeth—when I am doing it, there is no problem—despite all the conversation beforehand about how I don’t want to do it and don’t have time.  That last part is when I really catch on to the fishiness of the the whole thing—I don’t have time to floss?  I have one of those electric toothbrushes that times me.  The full cycle takes two minutes.  My dental hygienist has recommended doing two cycles in the evening.  And more often than not, I don’t do it because it will take too long.  Really?  I don’t have an extra two minutes to brush my teeth?  It’s absurd.  Which is handy because then I can start looking out for that same process in other places.

So my thoughts on tapas at the moment are about keeping up the things that I am doing that are working (rather than saying, “oh good, that worked, now I can stop”) and watching out for false arguments trying to convince me not to do something.  It seems like it might be helpful to focus on the enthusiasm part of tapas to remind me that there is nothing wrong with work.  I’m thinking that a different word might be helpful too.  Cheri Huber often talks about participation.  Brushing my teeth is not work, it’s participation in life.  Maybe tapas is remembering that I actually want to participate in my life. 

(I don't want to use this blog for advertising, but I'm doing a retreat on Sunday at The Samarya Center that is related to this:  Yes! Being in the Flow of Life.  There's still room)

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I’ve been thinking about this certain idea for a blog posting, but wanted something concrete to hang it on. Then I saw a commercial that showed the exact thing I was thinking about. So I am now going to write about things I never would have thought I would mention in my yoga blog. Hear me out. There is some new tampon on the market that, in addition to its normal duties, balances out the pH in the vagina, which according to the “doctor” in the commercial and all her graphs and charts, goes out of the “normal” range during a woman’s period. Here’s my question: if this happens to all women every time they have their period, then why is it not “normal”? The “doctor” never explained what the problem with the change in pH is, just that there is now a way to “fix” it.

It seems to me that most of us are trying to figure out what is the “right” way to be and then trying to be like that all the time. Rather than being flexible and fluid, we end up rigidly trying to stick to these standards that would have us never change or fluctuate at all. This came up many times in discussions on the yoga teacher training I just finished teaching. For me personally, I realized I was having a lot of ideas about how I should not feel so tired or scattered and that if I really were taking care of myself, I would stay centered and even all the time. Now, Molly and I have made tremendous strides in taking care of ourselves on the teacher training, but it is always going to be an intensive, somewhat exhausting experience and I can see that just because I feel different during those two weeks than I do when I’m at home on my regular schedule doesn’t mean I am doing something wrong.

I am on a committee that is developing educational standards for the field of yoga therapy and our current project is to develop a definition for yoga therapy. During our discussion, we identified the main concept upon which yoga is based, which is that humans have an unchanging essence while existing in a changing form/world/circumstance. I think that is what I am talking about. We can think of satya or reality in two ways—the eternal unchanging essence and the moment-to-moment reality that is constantly changing. When I am trying to make my human form (including mood, behavior, personality, pH, etc.) be unchanging, I am headed for trouble. It makes me think of that old metaphor of the big sturdy tree and the blade of grass—the blade of grass is more flexible, so when there is a giant storm, it is able to bend and therefore not be uprooted or damaged in the way that the tree might.

So while we have the tendency to want to “figure out” the right way to do a triangle pose, the optimal breakfast, the best way to get to work, the right way to interact with my family, etc., if I continue down this path, I eventually think I know everything and my life gets very small. I am likely to get upset with anything that doesn’t happen exactly as it is “supposed to.” Doesn’t sound like very much fun. Allowing for natural change and fluctuation not only sounds like less work, but has potential for things that I don’t know about yet or can’t even dream up. Life is good.

More on Wanting

I just read this quote by Krishnamurti, “There is great happiness in not wanting, in not being something, in not going somewhere.”  I have been struggling all month with trying to articulate this very idea, which I think causes a lot of confusion amongst us aspiring yogis.  I spent a large part of my life not wanting and it definitely wasn’t an experience of happiness.  The not wanting came more from fear of disappointment, subconsciously thinking that I could avoid upset, sadness and the like by not having any desires or wants (or needs).  Clearly, that is not going to result in an experience of santosha (contentment).

It seems like yoga helps us to have the experience that we are not these human forms, that we are something beyond that, call it consciousness or whatever, AND that we are still human.  When I am completely identified with my experience as a limited human, then everything seems really important, I want things and think that if I don’t get them I will be miserable, etc.  When I only focus on the fact that this human form is NOT my true essence, I can get caught in this place of thinking that I shouldn’t have any wants or needs, that none of this everyday life stuff matters, which can make life quite difficult, because it doesn’t fit with actual real-life experience.

So I don’t think that the practice of santosha means we are trying not to want or that wanting is bad.  We can want all we want.  The practice of contentment is not caring whether I get it or not.  I can want something and enjoy wanting it while remembering that it doesn’t mean anything if I get it or don’t get it and that I can be happy either way.  So my happiness is not connected to my identity as a limited human with my wants and desires, but to my true essence as universal consciousness, which some would say is happiness itself.

That means I can be happy RIGHT NOW.  I am not waiting for something to happen that will make me happy.  I think that’s what Krishnamurti is getting at—there is happiness available to me in this very moment if I am not looking for it somewhere else.  Hard to believe since it's the opposite of everything we've been taught our whole lives.  But we don't have to believe it, we can test it out (that's what's great about yoga)—stop right now and be grateful for five things.  How do you feel?  Apollinaire summed it up nicely, “Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”

Wanting What I Have

Sometimes I think I am crazy.  It just seems like there are certain things I learn over and over again, but they don’t stick somehow.  I just spent a couple hours this morning with the Bhagavad Gita and my Sanskrit dictionary, looking things up and translating in preparation for the upcoming teacher training.  Part of me was thinking yesterday about how terrible it was that I was going to have to spend part of my weekend doing this work.  Ridiculous!  I had so much fun and even started wishing I would do it more often.

Santosha is the practice of contentment.  Contentment is not a feeling that we are trying to achieve and keep, but a state of mind that we can cultivate through practice.  I see how much time I spend wanting things to be different.  Me, my life, my day, my work, my husband, my car—it should all be some other way.  I want that, but I have this.  There's a lot of trouble in dividing everything into what I want and what I don’t want.  Santosha is being at peace and enjoying life, regardless of what “I want.”

I’m thinking also of Patanjali saying, “When disturbed by disturbing thoughts, think the opposite” (Jivamukti translation).  This seems like a great way to practice santosha.  If I don’t like the way things look the way I am looking at them, then I can look at them in a different way.  It’s that whole thing about wanting what you have instead of having what you want.  When I constantly strive to have only experiences that I predict will be comfortable, pleasant, happy, easy, I can’t really be content.  What I have is the whole experience of being human, which is full of all kinds of things, and if I can want that, then I am up for anything and everything.  

It's Good to Suck at Something

I went on a bike ride with my husband on Saturday, which highlighted once again my difficulty being in my own experience when I am around other people, but that is for another post.  What I’m interested in today is the fact that it also highlighted the fact that I still can’t really ride out of the saddle.  I can pedal a few times, but not for any sustained, coordinated amount of time.  The background here is that I just learned how to ride a bike about two years ago.  Literally, riding in a parking lot with my husband running alongside.

I watch my husband climb a hill up out of his seat and I can see that it is effective, but part of me feels like I’ve spent two years getting pretty good at riding up a hill sitting down, so I should just stick with that.  After all, when I do get up, it seems really hard, not just in terms of coordination but it uses different muscles, which I suppose is the whole point, but makes me tired.  As I’m writing this, I am remembering that the story about me learning to walk is that the doctor said basically I had gotten so good and fast at crawling that there was no incentive for me to walk—he recommended my mom get some kind of a stand up push toy to motivate me.

In yoga, the word we use for the effort and discipline it takes to do something hard is tapas.  Tapas literally means heat and pretty much when we do something difficult, it creates heat, like friction.  Recently, one of my yoga students said that she used something she got from me with her third graders, which is that when you are new at something, you suck at it (that’s how she said it, I don’t remember if I said it that way, but it is definitely possible).

Just in the last couple of weeks, I decided to learn to knit “continental style,” which is different and more efficient that the way I had been knitting.  It was really frustrating and annoying for a little while and I thought about just doing it the old way, but convinced myself that if I stuck with it, I would be glad and it would pay off and it did (and it didn’t take long at all).

So I thought about that on my bike ride and know that with a little bit of tapas, I can learn how to get out of the saddle.  I just have to be willing to suck at it and feel like it’s “too hard” for a little while.  I am old enough to know that staying with something familiar just because it’s familiar is a terrible reason, but it is amazingly hard to break the habit.  When I think back to how hard it was to ride my bike two years ago, though, and how much fun I’ve had since then (and how much I’ve learned about myself) I know it’s worth it.

Trying to Be "Right"

So I am still thinking about this idea of identifying with things outside of myself as a cause of suffering.  A yoga word related to this is avidya, which could translate as ignorance with a capital I—not knowing that I am consciousness itself, which Patanjali says is pretty much the cause of all the other problems I run into.  Ahankara is another good word, usually translated as ego, more literally the “I-maker” or “I-action.”  Identification is the job of the ego—I am this, I am that.

Last week, I got a big box of yarn in the mail.  I had ordered it about a week earlier and even before it arrived, I knew it was going to be mixed results (literally and figuratively).  There was a sale at an online yarn company and I was almost ready for a new project and I really love a deal.  After looking at all these different kinds of yarns and different colors, I decided to get not one but two grab bags.  Something appealing about the surprise of it, plus it’s an even better deal. 

But I realized between the time of placing and receiving the order that another big factor in choosing the grab bags was not being able to decide.  I look at lots of patterns and can’t decide what to make.  I look at lots of yarns and can’t decide what to buy.  I figured that I would get these yarns and that would help guide me in figuring out what to knit next.  Sort of the artistic idea that by creating limitations something might happen that wouldn’t otherwise happen.  Which may be true.  And it’s also true that I could get yarn I just didn’t like, which would be much less likely if I picked it out myself rather than letting someone else pick it out for me.

Ultimately, it seems to me, that difficulty making a decision always comes down to the belief that there is a “right” decision.  And this is what brings us back around to identifying with things outside of ourselves.  When I identify with the outcome of my choice, then I better make the “right” one.  Very stressful.  Fortunately, when you are talking about yarn, it’s easier to spot the faulty reasoning.  While some part of me does think this is a very important decision, another part of me can see we are talking about YARN and that whatever happens, I will have some fun knitting and probably end up with some things I like and some things I don’t like, and most importantly, my worth as a human being doesn’t depend on any of that.

I guess I’m just saying the same thing I did in the last post, but it sure takes a while for it to really sink in, doesn’t it?  The thing about being in that place where you are trying so hard to make the “right” decision is that it never ends.  So now I have all this yarn and I still spending hours looking through patterns trying to pick the “right” one—trying to use the “right” yarn to make the “right” item.  But I can see it happening and then just stop (at least for a moment).  THERE IS NO RIGHT WAY.  I guess ego, ahankara, is also the thing that thinks it can actually control life and make it so nothing unpleasant, sad, frustrating, etc. ever happens.  Which is the belief behind the belief that there is a “right” decision—if I make the “right” decision then nothing bad will ever happen, I’ll never have to experience anything I don’t want to experience.  That’s funny.  And terribly sad, because it really does cause us a lot of suffering.

I always feel like I need to say how things turned out.  Not a big surprise that I got some yarn that is great and I love, some that’s o.k. and a few things I don’t like much at all.  A lot of yarns that aren’t even quite enough to make anything, which means I get to work on overcoming the belief that because I bought all this yarn I can’t go buy more.  I’m sure there will be some future posts about the great yarn grab bag experiment.

The Set-Up

So sometimes when I ride my bike, I just want to go for a ride.  And sometimes I feel more like “training”—seeing if I can beat my average speed, that sort of thing.  Today, I decided I would go on a ride and just go whatever speed, enjoy being in my body and being outside, and take it easy on my knee that was hurting a couple times recently after I rode.  What was interesting was that part way around the lake, I started checking my speedometer and comparing my speed to my usual speed.  I could see I was being set up—if I ride “too slow” then I’m out-of-shape and should be riding more (etc.) and if I ride “too fast” and my knee hurts then I shouldn’t have fallen into the trap.  I was getting caught in a no-win situation.  So I reminded myself of my original intention and decided I was just going to stick with that.

Sometimes I notice a similar thing happening with writing this blog.  I originally set out not to set standards for myself regarding frequency or anything so that it wouldn’t turn into a chore.  I wanted it to help me pay more attention to my own self.  But still the thoughts arise that I should be posting more and I start to think, “I should just make a commitment to post at least once a week.”  Fortunately, I recognize this once again as a set-up.  There’s nothing wrong with making that commitment, but I already made a commitment that I wasn’t going to do that and when I start changing my plan in response to thoughts that I’m not doing good enough, I’m headed for trouble.  Standards that change all the time are hard to meet and ultimately just make a person feel bad for not meeting them.

I think this relates to the sutra where Patanjali says that suffering is caused by identifying with things outside of ourselves.  When I feel like my okayness is dependent on how I ride my bike or on my blog posts, my okayness is not very lasting and often altogether elusive.  But my actual inherent nature is okayness.

The other question that has recently crossed my mind regarding this blog is whether it is helping me pay more attention to my life or is separating me from my life?  Sometimes I feel like a person who spends all their time taking pictures of everything rather than experiencing it.  Ooh, another set-up.  It has to be this one way or it’s not right and I should just quit.  Not falling for it.  Really, it’s a little of both of these things (paying attention and looking through a camera) and that’s okay.  Sometimes I have something to say and sometimes I don’t, sometimes I am watching and thinking and sometimes I am experiencing and feeling, sometimes I am riding fast and sometimes I am riding slow.  And that’s okay.  I’m okay.  Regardless of how my conditioned mind tries to trick me into thinking that is not true.  And the great part is, as Carl Rogers said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

Lessons from Maggie

It seems like so much has been happening lately that there hasn’t been anything to say. And now today, I feel so full of ideas that I don’t even know which one to write about. So I’ll choose the most current occurrence, which is spending about forty-five minutes looking for my dog, Maggie. Usually we take her out on a leash, even though we don’t really need to, because she is a terrier and cannot resist chasing a squirrel if she sees one. Today we went on our usual Wednesday car ride to the grocery store—as usual, she followed me up the stairs while I carried the bags. Great. Then I had to make a second trip and thought she might as well get a bit more exercise and come with me, but this time she didn’t follow me up the stairs and by the time I got back down there, she was nowhere to be found. Argh.

I was mad at her, mad at me, had all kinds of thoughts about how I shouldn’t have done that, should have known better, was wasting my time. Part of me could recognize that things just happen, that the last forty times we’ve gone to the store Maggie hasn’t run off, that it was a lovely day to be walking around, but the other part of me was just annoyed. I have been realizing lately that I just try to get rid of “negative” feelings more than I would like to admit. Intellectually, I know it’s o.k. to feel them, but a big part of me still doesn’t want to and tries to rationalize myself out of them by saying things like, “There’s nothing you can do about it. Just enjoy being outside.” It’s tricky because that is true, but it can be also used to squash emotions that are also true.

So I was walking around looking for Maggie sort of flipping back and forth. There’s a difference between allowing feelings to be there and egging them on. Just thinking the thoughts about how things should be different and I want to be doing something else is neither feeling the feelings nor finding my way to a more objective witness place—it's really just egging on. After the fact, I can see that the missing step was experiencing the sensations of frustration in my body. I can do that without “thinking” at all. In this way, I can stay in the truth (satya) of my experience without indulging or denying (which happens in the head). I guess I need more practice.

Just in case you were wondering, Maggie came strolling up with our neighbor looking super-dirty. Her little beard and feet were all blackish and she had all kinds of burrs and leaves and twigs in her fur. It would seem she was off on a big adventure being a dog while I was wandering around struggling with being a human.

How We See Things

Earlier this week, there was an incident in the Tour de France between the two top guys that kicked up a lot of conversation and debate.  Amongst all the heated comments that folks were posting online, one person made the brilliant (and obvious) observation that everyone who liked the one guy to begin with was on his side and everyone who like the other guy was on his side.  Of course!  We all see things the way we see them because that is how we are looking at them. 

If you have never watched one of The Yes Men movies, I recommend it.  They are fantastic hoaxsters who tell the truth by impersonating people from gigantic corporations and saying things they would never say.  The amazing thing about what they do is that they are trying to shock people awake, but the people they are talking to are often so entrenched in their perspective that they don’t hear what they are saying (the way I hear what they are saying).  We watched The Yes Men Fix the World last night and it struck me that it is the same thing as the cycling fans.  People already know what they believe and what is important to them, so they hear what they hear based on that.

 I have been having the experience this week of feeling sad, sort of disappointed and frustrated, and have noticed that when I think something is a problem, suddenly everything that happens is evidence of what a problem it is.  I see everything in a way that fits into my view.  (If you really think about this it can make your brain feel weird).  I guess this blog post is about satya, truthfulness.  How can we even practice truthfulness?  How can I practice being in reality, when all I know is what my reality is?  It would seem like acknowledging that my reality is not everyone’s reality or even anyone’s reality is a good place to start.

I have only read a couple chapters of Daniel Siegel’s new book, The Mindful Therapist, and so far he has talked a lot about being able to move toward a place of possibilities.  (I don’t really need to say here that this is my own view at this moment in time of what I have read).  He’s basically saying that being present means being open to all the possibilities that exist in a given moment.  I think in Buddhism this is called emptiness—that any moment is full of infinite potential.

So, as a conditioned human, I am bound to take a limited perspective.  But knowing that allows me to step back and widen my view if I choose to.  And when I take that wider view, it seems I am closer to “what is” or satya.  One way of thinking about spiritual practice is that we are moving toward freedom.  Hanging on to my limited view clearly doesn’t provide as much freedom as infinite possibilities.

Where Nike and Yoga Meet: Just Do It

The topic of the month at The Samarya Center is shaucha (cleanliness or purity). This week, I have been thinking about the shaucha of not procrastinating. For instance, we have one of those pet fountains at our place, which I think is great and I hate to clean. Today, I looked at it and thought that it needed cleaning and just did it right then. It turned out, as it often does when I do things I “hate,” that once I was doing it, it really wasn’t that bad. And then I get that good feeling that comes with having done something that needed doing. When I am able to follow through on things like that, my mind-clutter definitely seems reduced—all the conversation about how I should do it, but I don’t want to, all the internal nagging is gone. Ahh, shaucha.

Something else that has been on mind is the fact that the Seattle to Portland bike ride is this weekend. My husband will be riding it (in one day!) for the second time. Last year after he did it, I decided I would like to do it this year (but in two days). Then, toward the end of the summer, I had an idea for a book and I got very excited about it. I started on it right away before the motivation passed and became more mind-clutter. Sometime in December, it dawned on me that it wasn’t realistic to work on the book and train for the STP at the same time—both would require a lot of time on my days off. I chose the book. And ended up doing neither.

Now I won’t say that I haven’t spent any time feeling bad about that (for more on feeling bad, see the last post), but I’m over that now—that’s what happened. But I am curious about how it happened. Here’s a brief synopsis: Early in the year, I lost momentum with the book—to be expected, I imagine, with a big project, energy and optimism ebbs and flows. Writing then became a “have-to,” which makes it considerably less likely to happen. When the weather started getting better (which was a non-linear progression this year in Seattle), I started having these internal battles between riding my bike and writing my book. Often, I would try to write first, because that was what I chose as my project (I had to), while simultaneously thinking both that I wanted to go on a ride and that I should go on a ride. I wouldn’t be making much progress on the writing and would wait so long to go on the ride that I wouldn’t have time or the weather would change. Eventually, I didn’t bother even going into the folder on my computer with all of the book-related stuff and by then I all I could think about was how out-of-shape I was and how hard it was going to be to ride my bike.

Basically, the mind-clutter was piled high. All sorts of lies and useless nonsense like making riding and writing an either/or, the shoulds, the procrastination rationalizations. Sorting that out is interesting, but when I look at the whole process, it seems to me that all the conversation, regardless of the exact content, was the thing that caused the suffering of inactivity. Which brings us back around to my original point about shaucha. If I want to create more clarity and cleanliness in my mind, then I can just do something instead of thinking and talking about it. It seems that as soon as I start “trying to decide” what to do, I may very well not end up doing anything. All of the debating and persuading and arguing does not create clarity of purpose or intention, it just creates mind-clutter and serves to keep me paralyzed.

I’ll end my story by sharing about my day today. I had committed to myself that I would work on the book because I wanted to, so I spent a couple of fairly productive hours on that and enjoyed it. Then I had a pause and looked up and saw how beautiful the day was and thought I’d go for a ride around the lake, so I got up, got ready and headed out. I can spend a lot of time on a ride with my mind-clutter, but I didn’t debate whether or not I’d go around the lake, I just went. And I didn’t look at my little gauge to see how fast or slow I was going, how far I’d gone, how long I’d been riding, I just rode. Ahh, shaucha.

Feeling Bad Just Leads to Feeling Bad

I’ve been wanting to post on my blog, but I have been watching the Tour de France.  Sometimes, when I am choosing that instead of writing something, I wonder if I should feel bad.  It suddenly seemed clear to me yesterday that the answer is no.  If I am practicing ahimsa (non-harming), then the answer is always no.  This doesn’t mean that I don’t have moments of disappointment or a realization that I didn’t use my time wisely or that I don’t look back and think, “I wish I hadn’t done that.”  Just that there are no circumstances that require me to be ridiculed, put down and made to feel bad.  None.  Now, I have heard this many times, but I feel like I am understanding it in some new way.  The process of feeling bad just leads to feeling bad—it doesn’t lead to making better choices (despite the fact that most of us believe that).

A couple of people in my life have led me to think lately about shame and what a powerful and devastating feeling it is.  That a person can be going through a really difficult experience and feel it is so horrible and embarrassing that she needs to hide it, which just multiplies the suffering exponentially.  We so want to be seen and loved and yet remove any possibility of actually being seen and loved by hiding who we are.  And the really awful thing is that when we expose these terrible parts of ourselves, we often find that we’re not the only one, that other people understand, that we are actually not a mutant freak.

My mom was adopted and as an adult found her biological mother, who was probably in her seventies by then.  Her mother was still so afraid that anyone would find out that she had had a baby some thirty years ago that she did not want to have any contact with my mom.  After she died, my mom did get in touch with some relatives who immediately said, “Oh, we always knew you were out there somewhere” and wanted to meet and spend time with her.  Everybody knew!  It makes me sad to think about this woman living in fear and shame for NO REASON.

So much of our suffering is caused by shame and the feeling that something about us is so terrible that it needs to be hidden.  Overcoming this requires ahimsa and develops ahimsa.  And a step toward accepting the unacceptable in ourselves would be to stop feeling bad about watching too much t.v. or eating too many french fries or smoking a cigarette or saying something mean.  I can recognize that it’s not what I want to do, that it’s not getting me where I want to go, that it’s not helpful or effective or healthy or whatever . . . but I don’t need to feel bad.  Real self-study can’t happen without non-violence toward myself, otherwise I hide, even from myself.

Here's a great quote by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche:  "You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of!   That is the basis for telling the truth."  So I’m here to say that at work I never wash my fork, I just lick it off and put it in the drawer for the next time.  I also pick my nose and will spend a lot of time over the next couple weeks watching bicycle racing.  How about you? 

The Real Person I Met Today

I was having a lot of yoga lessons, as usual, on my bike today—it’s better than a yoga mat for that in some ways since it’s still a pretty new activity for me.  But the one I’d like to share is my “real person” moment of the day (if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, read yesterday’s post).  I had to stop at a red light and there was a guy there with a cardboard “homeless vet” sign.  There I was, right there next to him, so of course I smiled (which I sometimes do when I’m driving, but cars make it really easy to be separate).  He asked me how my ride was and I said it was pretty good and that I was almost home.  He commented how the hill I had just climbed was a hard one and talked about how he used to ride to work and we agreed that going down hills can be scary.  When I got home I thought about how I mostly don’t think about how homeless folks had a whole life before they were homeless.  I often remind myself that there’s no difference between them and me, but I don’t think much about the reality of that.  With most people we meet, we have a tendency to think that that moment, that snapshot in time, actually sums up their whole being.  Of course, this “thought” is so quick and subtle, we don’t even recognize it.  It’s easy to look at a person who’s homeless and only see that, like they’ve spent their whole life sitting on that corner with their cardboard sign.  So, anyway, I enjoyed my conversation with that guy today.  I went back later to give him some money, but he wasn’t there.  When I see someone as a real person, it’s hard not to want to help.

How We Stay Separate

As my husband was watching the world cup game this morning, I overheard that one of Paraguay’s star players was not at the world cup because he had been shot in the head. I felt sad and then I found myself wondering about how that happens. The announcer said they have someone in custody and that it was supposedly over soccer that this person shot the player (who, by the way, is still alive). It seems to me that when someone kills or hurts another person intentionally, they have to look at this other person as if he or she is not a person. The person becomes an object rather than a human being.

I think most of us live our lives as if we are the center of the universe. I am the star of my own movie and everyone else is just a side character, a supporting actor, an extra. And it’s not very often that we really stop to think about how everyone else is going through all of their own struggles and difficulties, having all of their own experiences and insights, and that I am, in fact, just an extra in their movies. Last night, my husband wanted to barbecue—it was late and I was tired and found myself in a conversation in my head about how I wanted something else to be happening (he should have started earlier, he should have been more prepared, he should have done this on a different night, etc.). Then, he couldn’t get the charcoal started and I offered to go to the store to get lighter fluid. The story really got going during that trip to the store—he never does the shopping, he’s so this, he’s so that. It wasn’t too hard for me to notice that everything that was going through my head was about how he wasn’t “right.” And I saw that I was turning him into an object and all that mattered was the impact that this object was having on ME.

When I shifted my perspective and thought about how he is doing his best and wanted to make a nice dinner and probably wasn’t thinking about how I would be feeling when I got home from work (not because he is thoughtless, but because he is a human being just like me prone to looking at things from his own point of view), I was able to let go of my stories and most of my irritation and carry on. The most sure-fire way of staying angry at, irritated at, frustrated with, hurt by someone is to keep that person as an object, where I am only thinking about how they are impacting me and my life, not looking at him or her as a human being.

The translation of the word yoga that I like is connection. Through my yoga practice, I find I have less ability to discount another person. I can’t stay in my own little story in my own little world. Sometimes I am able to make my way out of that on my own and sometimes I need to talk to a person, listen to that person to remember that they are real. Based on my own experience, it seems like a lot of difficulties can be diffused, side-stepped or worked through more quickly and easily when I am able to widen my perspective. What I see, hear, experience is limited and other people are real human beings who see, hear and experience something different but no less valid. It’s not rocket science, but I think if we examine our day-to-day life, we might find that we are objectifying people more than we think. And certainly, if you are a news-watcher, there is plenty of evidence there. Tara Brach suggests a practice of simply looking around at people and saying in your mind, “You are real.” Try it out and see what you think.

Experiments in Non-Grasping

So, as indicated in my last post, Amma stays up very late hugging people. And since my first retreat, I have always stayed up until the very end. As a result, I end up being extremely tired, falling asleep during some of the talks and needing a lot of recovery time afterward. It occurred to me as I sat with her last Tuesday night, struggling to stay up, that the desire to stay until she leaves is due partly to the recognition of the preciousness of the chance to be with her and partly to the fear of missing something.

It seems to me that aparigraha has a lot to do with this kind of fear. A fear of not having enough, scarcity, missing something, not having what you need when you need it, etc. Aparigraha means non-grasping, non-greed, non-hoarding. And I realized that I had an opportunity to practice non-grasping, so I tried something different—on the first night of the retreat, I went to bed at 1:30am, the next night I stayed until nearly the end, but left before the program conclusion, and during Devi Bhava the following night, when Amma hugged people from about 8:30pm until 10:30am, I took a nap for about three hours in the middle. This was a pretty big deal for me. I was risking missing something and I was also letting go of my identity as Someone Who Stays Up Until the End (which, of course, I have always thought was “better” than going to bed early and shows how devoted and strong I am). The result of this experiment was . . . that it was all perfectly fine and I felt totally o.k. about my choice. I still needed quite a few extra hours of sleep when I got home, but was probably a little less depleted.

The funny thing about not wanting to miss something is that most of the time, when we do miss something, we don’t know what it was because we weren’t there. It really is such a delusional grasping to want to see, hear, experience everything. And how much of my life do I miss simply by not being present in the moment? Sometimes, someone tells us what we missed, which happened during to me during the Amma retreat. And I was able to respond with happiness for this person’s experience and reassure myself that I was o.k., my choice was o.k., it was not, actually, the end of the world.

So after sleeping in the day after I got home, I debated about what I wanted to/should do with the day. I pretty much knew I didn’t want to get involved in any work emailing, but thought about turning on the computer and doing other things, maybe just Facebook. And then I realized that I was again afraid of missing something! I hadn’t been on Facebook in almost a week—what if someone had posted something really interesting or funny? I managed to bring myself into reality. I only joined Facebook about two months ago—I was perfectly fine before that. My mind was just tricking me. So I didn’t turn on my computer at all that day. The result of this experiment was . . . I felt great. It felt like a much better way to take care of myself and life continued without any problems from not checking Facebook.

My conclusion from this week’s experiments is that Patanjali was right and non-grasping is a practice that helps bring us along toward a state of yoga. Grasping takes me away from peace and joy—non-grasping brings me closer.

On Resistance and Not Knowing

I have been having a lot of sensations in my chest over the last couple weeks that I would call anxiety.  I had been noticing it and identifying it and attaching it to external circumstances.  I was spending a lot of time “thinking” about it, playing out a wide assortment of imagined conversations and futures.  Then someone asked me a question that led me to look underneath because I couldn't answer it.

I definitely think of myself as a go-with-the-flow kind of person, yet the truth is there are a lot of changes going on around me right now and I am not going with the flow.  I know I do adapt, but sometimes it takes a while.  So this anxiety I’m experiencing is not because of anything anyone else is doing, but because of my own resistance.  I have a lot of ideas about how useless and bad resistance is, that it is a sign of being a bad yogi and that basically I should not experience it.  So I resist resistance.  I more or less force myself to go along with whatever is happening with disregard for how I am feeling about it (except for all the internal grumbling that usually accompanies this kind of situation, which I also have to feel bad about because it is not the “right” way to be handling things). 

And yet resistance is a force that exists in the universe.  Ayurveda teacher, Scott Blossom, named it as one of the qualities of the earth element.  Resistance allows us to brake while driving; resistance to gravity allows us to walk and do handstands.  So while it does seem to me that emotional resistance usually has to give way in order for healing and growth to occur, I can also see that the universe wouldn’t function without resistance.  With this awareness, I find myself accepting resistance.  And as soon as I do that, I am having the experience of acceptance instead of resistance.  Ahhh!

The other piece of this anxiety (and also the resistance) is the universal “fear of the unknown.”  Even though I know that it is pretty much human nature to be uncomfortable with not knowing, I like to think I have a handle on it.  But it turns out, lo and behold, I am just like everyone else.  I love how I can keep knowing something more—I know it, then I KNOW it, then I REALLY know it.  That part of not knowing is very cool.

I had an experience last night that seemed to confirm my not-knowing-leads-to-anxiety hypothesis.  I am in Los Angeles to see Amma, who has been important in my life and I had seen at least once a year since 1997 until last year.  I was really missing her, so I took time off work and spent money on airfare, hotel and retreat to be here.  So I am in the hall watching her give darshan (where she hugs people for hours on end) and it is wonderful.  Then it’s getting late.  It’s after 2am and it seems like maybe the line is dying down.  I might be able to get a decent night’s sleep (decent as far as being with Amma goes).  Then more and more people keep getting in line—it doesn’t really get longer, it just never gets any shorter.  Now it’s 3am—well, it must be going to finish soon.  I can feel my irritation with all of these stragglers.  And underneath the irritation . . . anxiety.  I feel it.  I let it be there. 

It is the not knowing.  I want to know when it is going to be done.  Here I am with Amma, the place I had been longing for, the destination I had put so much effort into getting to, and I am just wanting to know when it will be done.  I don’t have anything else to do.  I don’t have to be up at any certain time tomorrow.  But I am essentially wanting it to be over.  It seems that I am anxious simply because I don’t know how much longer it will last.  Even if it were 5am or 6am, but I KNEW what the end time was, I don’t think I would have been having this same experience.  Instead of being in the experience of “knowing” what was happening in the present moment, I was in the experience of not knowing what was going to happen in the future.  It did soften with this recognition—even when Amma began calling more and more people into the line until it was stretching all the way around the back of the room.

So, I guess this is about satya, being with what is, learning how to be with myself as I am.  Sometimes people wonder whether accepting things as they are means we won’t grow and change, but I would say that this is our inherent nature.  In accepting my resistance, my anxiety, my desire to know, I am not creating an identity for myself.  For me, it is about being more present to my experience in the moment.  And that actually creates more fluidity rather than less.

Here’s a quote from Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach to end with.  Even though I’ve heard this same idea many times before, suddenly when I read it recently, I got it in a new way.  It helped me with this whole exploration that I described here.  “All our reactions to people, to situations, to thoughts in our mind—are actually reactions to the kind of sensations that are arising in our body.” 

Miraculousness is a Real Word (I Looked It Up)

I went to a bookstore today and as I was browsing around, I was amazed at how many books there were, how many books on the subjects that I am interested in and how many books about things I don’t care about at all, but someone cared enough about to write a book.  There are whole sections of the bookstore that I skip right by, but someone else goes to the bookstore and that’s where they go straightaway.

I think about this all the time—how everyone is living in a completely unique universe.  I think about it when I’m on Facebook—everyone’s newsfeed is different.  I have overlap in “Friends” with lots of people, but no one has exactly the same conglomeration as me, so no one has the same experience as me and gets the exact same news as me when they are on Facebook.

My husband is the person I spend the most time with, but the percentage of time that we are apart is pretty big, and when you consider our whole lives, there is a very small place of intersection between his life and my life.  We live in completely different universes with a small area of overlap, which we are both looking at from our own perspective.  It really kind of blows my mind.

For me, awareness of the gigantic differences in people—the differences in experiences, in interests, in priorities, in everything—helps me to have more compassion, which is the positive side of ahimsa or non-violence.  When I remember that no one else has had my exact life, I don’t wonder why other people don’t do what I would do or say what I would say.  Everyone in the world is a completely unique person, living their completely unique life and instead of being frustrated by that, I can be fascinated by the miraculousness.

Once upon a time, in my eHarmony days, I was matched up with this very conservative guy (I don’t know what that says about eHarmony) and we talked on the phone once or twice.  I remember him saying that while he really believed in his perspective, he was glad that there were people who were liberal, because it wouldn’t work if everyone were conservative.  That has always stuck with me.  Most of us want everyone to be the same as us, in some way.  We think people should believe what we believe, look at things the way we look at them.  But it wouldn’t work.  How would the world run if everyone were like me?  It wouldn’t work.  Plus it would be boring.

Okay No Matter What

So after I posted the last one, I started really thinking a lot about those last couple sentences.  “I can have the experience of okayness at any time doing anything.  Well, at least, theoretically.”  It seems to me that that really is the whole point of yoga—to be connected with my inherent peace regardless of what is going on outside.

I know yoga has helped me with this.  Just one example is that when I got married a couple years ago, it was the first time I had lived with someone.  Literally, I hadn’t had a roommate in about 17 years, and had never even been close to moving in with an intimate partner.  It became immediately apparent to me that I wouldn’t even have been able to do it before.  I don’t care if he doesn’t load the dishwasher the same way I do or squeezes the toothpaste a different way, but that stuff would have made me crazy before.  I really had a lot of ideas about the right way to do things and not much flexibility for the multitude of possible variations. 

These seem like small things, but if every little thing has the ability to throw me off the deep end, my chances for peace are quite limited.  So, for instance, I went to a yoga class today that didn’t meet my personal arbitrary standards for a “good” yoga class, but I was amazed, as I pretty much always am, that it was great anyway.  I feel like the more I practice yoga, the less I need the teacher or class to be “good” in order for me to have a good experience.  There is incredible freedom in being able to determine your own experience at any time.

Just the other day, though, I watched a documentary about some men who had been imprisoned wrongfully and were exonerated through the new forensic use of DNA.  Some of these guys had been in prison for twenty years!  I couldn’t help wondering how I would handle that.  Would I be able to create an experience of peace?  I have heard Cheri Huber talk a few times about how when she was first considering the idea of being able to be okay in any situation, she thought the hardest things for her would be being in a concentration camp and being in a wheelchair.  She would use these as her measuring stick for how she was doing.  Being in prison for twenty years when I didn’t do anything might be on my list.  I feel like I might be able to be okay, though the difference between acceptance and resignation might be hard to differentiate.  The other one would be having a progressive degenerative disease like ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease)—I work with some folks with ALS at the Bailey-Boushay House and I am not sure I could keep the peace in that situation.

So I guess it is helpful to see how far I’ve come and how far I have to go.  I know for me I have to pay attention to whether or not I am feeling peaceful simply by blocking things out or through acceptance  and integration.  Anyway, that is what occurred to me following the last post—I guess a little svadhyaya (self-study).  I’ll end with this quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.:  “Calmness is not non-feeling. . . . it is disentanglement from feelings, a clearness which is not disturbed by circumstance.”

My Morning Commute

There is a bunch of construction on one of the streets I drive on when I drive to work.  The traffic gets backed up and I think it adds some time to my commute.  The thing that is interesting to me is the number of times I have found myself stuck there and what happens.

Things in the mind happen so fast that it can be hard to tell what comes first.  I think the first thing is “Oh, right, this construction”—almost like I am there for the first time.  “Hmmm.  OK.”  Then almost immediately there is a thought that I should have remembered and taken a different route, a bit of disbelief and disdain that I am not more on top of things and didn’t avoid this, that if I were a better yogi, I would be paying attention.  I have gotten pretty good at recognizing this sort of thinking that doesn’t really serve any purpose other than making me feel bad and actually isn’t really true—it takes me out of my real experience and starts trouble.

I have concluded that it must not really be that important to me whether I end up in that traffic or not because if it were important, I would probably remember.  I remember lots of things.  In actuality, it doesn’t cause me any difficulty, I haven’t been late to anything, I’m just there in my car amongst the other cars, listening to Cheri Huber podcasts.  There’s nothing wrong.  This very minor experience has confirmed for me that something isn’t a problem unless I think it’s a problem.  And there is some part of me that would make everything a problem, but I don’t have to fall for it. 

Asmita (I-am-ness) is one of the kleshas or obstacles to happiness.  This refers to lots of things, but part of it is thinking that I can control things, that things depend on me.  I think this relates to my traffic experience.  Asmita is thinking that I can have the experience I want, the right experience, if I do everything right.  In this frame of mind, I have to be extremely vigilant all the time because every choice has dire consequences.  As it turns out, the experience I have doesn’t have anything to do with what I do.  I can have the experience of okayness at any time doing anything.  Well, at least, theoretically.  It seems to be true when I drive down 148^th morning after morning.

The Pause

So, pretty much as soon as I posted that last one, I was having mixed feelings.  I was concerned that it seemed trite and minimizing.  It really can seem so ridiculous to be faced with all the suffering and troubles in the world and to just try to be more compassionate and understanding in my own life.  It is true though, that in my experience, this is my best shot of making a difference.

Anyway, within a couple of hours of posting, I was confronted with the fact that I had done something wrong that was hurtful to someone close to me.  Now, I have been accused a couple times in the last year of doing things that I hadn’t done, things that were perceived differently than the way I experienced them, but this was not one of these.  This was me having knowingly committed a wrongful action—confirmation that the sameness and potential of all of us is real, not just an idea.

I am not going to share the specifics because when I started this blog, I decided that just because I wanted to write a blog didn’t mean that everyone in my life agreed to participating in it.  The blog is about my experiences, struggles and insights and talking about people I know in this public forum would not be practicing asteya (non-stealing).  So without discussing content, I am going to share a bit about the process I have been going through, which has been illuminating for me.

I acted out of selfishness, disregard for the potential impact on someone else and denial or blocking out some pieces of information (interestingly, the same qualities I projected onto others in my last posting).  So how did I end up letting these parts of myself make the choice in this situation rather than other parts of myself?  It seems like one factor was urgency.  I was feeling overwhelmed and desperate to do something and felt it needed to be right away.  The sense of time pressure rarely contributes to the best decisions.  Even when something feels urgent, there is actually time to pause, time to sit with the whole situation before acting.  I understand and have compassion for the part of me that was caught up in urgency, and I know that I could have paused, which would have allowed me to see that there were choices and probably would have led to a different course of events.

The other main contributing factor was my willingness to believe assumptions and rationalizations.  We humans can pretty much rationalize anything.  I don’t know whether or not I can stop my mind from coming up with these ways to explain why it is okay or even right to say or do this or that.  But I can recognize these as just one perspective on the situation and see if I can generate some others, including some that aren’t easy or don’t get me what I want.  I have to be willing to own the fact that I rationalize in order to be able to see when I am doing it.  Quite often, people may say things that aren’t totally consistent—in one moment, a person says one thing and, at another time, she says something that seems contradictory.  This is fertile ground for rationalization.  Rather than assume I know what someone wants, how they feel, how they will feel when I make a certain choice, I could actually check it out.  So, if I really want to do the right thing, to live my yoga and to cause the least amount of harm and suffering, I have to step out of the limited viewpoint and experience of this person called Stephanie and take a wider view.  Again, this requires a pause.

So with this svadhyaya (self-study), I feel like I have some idea of how I came to do what I did.  I admitted I was wrong and apologized for it without any qualifications or excuses.  I know that I did not purposely hurt this person and totally accept responsibility for the fact that my actions did do that.  That is pretty much all I can do.  And yet, I keep thinking about it and thinking about it.  I replay the conversation, I create other conversations in which I defend what I did or grovel for forgiveness and everything in between, I go over what I did and what happened and go into the future, imagining all kinds of scenarios that could unfold.  In some weird way, it seems like some part of me thinks if I replay the whole thing enough times, it could somehow have a different ending. 

But even more, it seems like some form of punishment.  I did something wrong and I need to be punished in order to make sure that I really know I did something wrong and don’t do it again.  So I better keep thinking about it so I can remember how bad I am and what a mistake I made because otherwise I could forget.  I think this is a common and strongly-held part of our conditioning.  And even though my mind is busy at work with this belief, I know I don’t buy it.  I don’t need to feel guilty to learn something from this.  Feeling bad doesn’t make me a good person, literally or figuratively.  And not feeling bad doesn’t mean I don’t care.  It’s even possible that feeling bad could keep me from taking action.  I am disappointed in myself.  And I am going to practice pausing more, so I can make better choices, whether big or small.  I can only practice in the present moment, though, so when the yammering in my mind starts, I bring myself back to my breath and pause.

Be the Change You Want to See in the World

Driving really can bring out the worst in me.  Suddenly, I am impatient, judgmental, prejudiced, angry, generally lacking in understanding and caring.  It’s a good reminder for when I think I’m reaching some great level of yogic-ness—all the qualities I may have thought I had transcended somehow are, of course, still there.  Driving doesn’t make me impatient or judgmental—those are things that already exist in me that come up in this situation.  Actually, all qualities exist in me and in everyone—we each have the potential to be loving and generous and an equal potential to be arrogant and hurtful.

There have been a couple times lately that I have been talking to someone where the question came around to “How could someone do that?  How could they be that way?”  The first was, you may have guessed, about the crazy gulf oil “spill” (which sounds more like a glass of milk than millions of gallons of oil).  It is so terrible that people could have known about this potential problem but given the go-ahead anyway.  The second, less horrifying on a global level, was Floyd Landis.  Landis is a professional cyclist who had his Tour de France victory taken away and was suspended from the sport for drugs.  He vehemently claimed it wasn’t true, taking money from fans to support his defense and writing a best-selling book, then after four years of fighting the allegations, just this week, he admitted that he had, in fact, been doping.

Things like this really seem unbelievable and I find myself pointing the finger and creating distance between me and “those kinds of people.”  Which is mostly a waste of time, if not worse.  I can think about how they are so selfish or small-minded or short-sighted or wrong, but it doesn’t change anything besides making the world a more judgmental and angry place through my addition of judgment and anger.  Both of these incidents seem to involve an unwillingness to see or accept the truth, which would fall under the category of satya in yoga.

Now, anything that exists in the universe exists in me.  And when I step back, I know that there is nothing that anyone does that I don’t also have the potential to do.  Can I really say that I have never looked the other way when I thought something was wrong?  Can I really say that I have never convinced myself that something wasn’t true when deep down I knew that it was?  Can I say I have never made poor choices in service to maintaining an idea about who I am?  That I have never been greedy?  In fact, when I look at Floyd Landis or the BP execs and think that I don’t possess any of the undesirable qualities that they have exhibited, I am doing the very thing that they did—denying the truth. 

I don’t believe these are bad people, just as I am not a bad person when I call people names when I am driving.  I would like to think that were I in the shoes of someone at BP who agreed to a dangerous plan, I wouldn’t do what that person did, but there is no way to know.  I improve my chances of acting skillfully by accepting that those parts of me exist and that I have that potential.  Then when I am in a situation that elicits my selfishness or denial, I can see what is arising and make a choice about it.

The definition of yoga in the Yoga Sutra is “restraining the modifications of the mind-stuff” or calming the fluctuations of the mind.  I can’t calm anyone’s mind but mine.  So when I’m hearing about things happening in the world that are disturbing, I turn my attention back to myself.  This is not because I don’t care about the world but precisely because I do.  If I want more awareness in the world, then I can work to be more aware.  If I want more truthfulness in the world, I can be more truthful.  If I want kindness, I can be kind. 

I know this can sound like a bunch of woo-woo baloney, but the name of the blog is Keepin’ It Real and I’m telling you this is real.  Check it out for yourself—give out compliments all day one day and see if the world doesn’t seem like a happier place.  Let me know what happens.  Remember, the Buddha said, “A jug is filled one drop at a time.”  We can change the world one moment, one thought, one action at a time.