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.