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.