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.”