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.

In the Curve

It has been one week since my cat died.  He was eighteen and a half years old and had been with me my entire adult life.  Through many apartments, jobs, relationships and interests, through graduate school, periods of depression, moving to Seattle, getting married, he was my constant.  I knew him before I knew yoga and I miss him.

Not surprisingly, yoga has helped me out this week.  My friend Molly has a great saying she got from a professor in grad school, “You’ve got to practice in the straightaway what you’re going to use in the curve.”  She said last week when we were talking, “These are the moments we practice for.”  I definitely felt like I reaped the benefits of my practice as I faced the death of my beloved friend.

Despite the fact that I was feeling a lot of sadness and grief, I was also fine.  It was really clear to me.  Even when I was at the vet crying my eyes out and watching Merwin have seizures, I knew it was time to let him go and wasn’t having any wish for it to be any other way.  I was able to have my intense emotions without resistance.  I suspect that this is such an unusual situation that my vet didn’t even really understand it, mistaking my tears for an inability or unwillingness to say goodbye. I was in the reality of this painful event while also being aware of the larger reality that everything is okay. For me, this is satya, being with what is—being with my kitty, being with me, being with life, all without needing things to be different or thinking any of it is "wrong."

Ahimsa, non-harming or non-violence, was the other practice that has come in mighty handy.  Self-judgment is the most rampant version of violence around.  I have spent virtually no time re-thinking my choices, re-playing other scenarios that might have happened, questioning whether or not I did the “right” thing.  Every once in a while, I catch myself starting to go there, but I just drop it.  I feel quite sure that this has reduced the amount of suffering I have experienced.  I have still felt the pain, but I haven’t added suffering by judging myself and what I did.  This has been a big focus of my practice over the last year and I was grateful that it served me in this situation.

Yoga doesn’t make it so nothing bad ever happens.  It doesn’t mean that we will never feel anything unpleasant or difficult.  But it does bring an element of ease to even the toughest times.  To get to that place of ease, however, takes a lot of practice.  I really felt like yoga had my back over the last week, not because I am special or different, but because I have practiced.  This is possible for everyone.

I am on a committee that is developing educational standards for the field of yoga therapy and the concept of practice or sadhana comes up over and over.  What people seem to be talking about is a practice of poses and breathing and such.  For me, the truly transformative practices are those like ahimsa and satya—they change my relationship with myself, with others, with life.  And that’s pretty powerful stuff.

I am grateful to Dr. O’Hanlon at Animal Emergency Service East and Dr. Todd and everyone at the Bellevue Animal Hospital for the care they gave to my guy.  

Declaration

So since I posted my first blogs yesterday, I have been having physical sensations in my chest to which I usually give the label “anxiety.”  Naturally, I want to attribute these sensations to the blog since there is a proximity timewise that might indicate a cause and effect relationship, even though there are plenty of other things to be anxious about and, in fact, I might just be having physical sensations for no reason at all.

Anyway, what I am noticing is that I started thinking about what other people would think about my blog and when I start thinking about that, there starts to be some dread about the whole situation instead of the excitement that got me started.

Aparigraha falls under a bigger umbrella called vairagya, non-attachment.  It has always seemed to me that the biggest thing to detach is my sense of worth and okayness from things outside, like my blog and whether or not people like it.

So I am writing to let everyone (mostly me) know that the point of this blog is for me to take more time to pay attention.  Some posts will be long, some short, some insightful and deep, some not so much.  I’m doing it just to do it and see what happens and will try not to get too attached to the outcome—I will let you know how that goes.

The List

Aparigraha means non-grasping and is usually thought of as non-hoarding or non-greed.  This is the topic of the month at our center, so I have been thinking about it a lot.

I have trouble on my days off that is related to grasping.  I feel so busy at work that I eagerly await and cherish my days off, but often end up being even busier on these days than on my work days.  I have long lists of things I want to do.  Today, for instance:  write, ride my bike, knit, take the dog to the dog park, go to my nephews’ piano recital, run some errands, read, meditate, watch the first stage of the Tour of California and have some time to do nothing.  And that doesn’t even include all the things too mundane to put on the list like eating and brushing my teeth!

Sometimes this grasping after so many activities is overwhelming and I end up doing very little.  This paralysis usually involves a lot of conversation in my head about how if I do this, I can’t do that, and if I do that, I won’t be able to do this other thing.  And some amount of resentment about how I can’t just relax and enjoy my day off because of the pressure of this list of things to do (that, of course, I created myself). 

Today, I decided to ride my bike and before I could change my mind, I got geared up and headed out.  What I noticed several times during the ride was that I was checking the time and calculating when I would get home and how much time I would have before the piano recital and what I thought I could do in that time.  Fortunately, when I noticed what was happening, I was able each time to let it go and come back to riding my bike.  But it highlighted the other thing that happens when I am grasping after checking things off my list, which is that I don’t actually enjoy doing the things on my list.  It takes me out of the present moment and makes every activity just a task to be completed so I can cross it off.  Not very much fun.

At the heart of grasping is a sense that if I have more, I will be o.k.—a looking outside for happiness.  But it doesn’t work.  I can miss my whole life while I busily complete my chores and projects, only to end up at the end of the day wondering where it went and often with a whole new agenda of things to do.  There’s a control aspect to grasping for sure—if I can do enough, have enough, know enough then I’ll be prepared, I’ll be safe, I’ll be happy.  So I have my list to feel in control, but instead the list controls me.  All of these things I love to do and yet a feeling of not enough. 

I’m probably not going to stop having long lists because I do have lots of things I like and want to do.  But rather than having the list be a way to check out, I can use it as a way to check in.  When I think of all the possibilities for a day off, what do I want to do now?  What will feed me today?  I can look at the list and make conscious choices about which things I will do and really be there while I am doing them.  How would my days off be different if I could only cross off the things that I did and actually enjoyed?

A Journey of 1000 Miles Begins with a Single Step

I had been taking yoga classes for a couple of years before a new teacher came to the studio who changed my life.  Her name was Kimberly Flynn and she was from Jivamukti and she chanted and talked about all kinds of things that were part of yoga but I had never heard of.  Before I started taking yoga classes, it is safe to say that I was completely disconnected from my body.  The asana practice made me a home here in my body and I am incredibly grateful for that.  What has made an even bigger difference for me though is what I have come to think of as The Big Yoga.  Many others refer to this as “yoga off the mat.”  It’s all of the yoga practices and concepts that can be used in real life—that’s what I really love about yoga.  Aadil Palkhivala uses the term “applied yoga philosophy,” which is very apt.

I enjoy talking about yoga, which is what led me to start this blog.  I’m not interested at all, however, in talking about it just to talk about it as a purely intellectual exercise.  What is fun for me is bringing yoga concepts into real life, looking over and over again at the question of how I live my yoga.  So I am inviting you to join me in this adventure.  By committing to this blog, I hope to pay even closer attention to my own yoga practice.  I would love to have your questions and comments to stoke the exploration.

My disclaimer is that I may not always have the most traditional interpretation of things and that sometimes some Buddhism or something else will come in.  I am just sharing my experience and my understanding of things based on that experience and I don’t care about splitting hairs.  What I do care about is Keepin’ It Real.

It’ll be fun.  Let’s go!