My One Wild and Precious Life

I just got back a few days ago from a week-long meditation retreat with Cheri Huber.  It was called “Not What But How,” which means we were looking at how the process of how we do things is more important than the content (the what).  I left the retreat with a renewed vigor for making the most of every day, not waiting around or holding back or feeling stuck.  I have said more than once this week that it seems that if we’re unhappy in a certain situation, we can choose acceptance or we can do something, but to sit around complaining and being unhappy is just a waste.  My favorite part of the recitation we do at the monastery is “If I am suffering it is because I am choosing something over ending suffering.”  The thing that is so big about this is that everything comes back to me—most of us don’t really want to deal with that.

So just a couple days ago, I was listening to a live recording of Cheri Huber and it was one of the people in the audience that framed it this way, which is pretty powerful to me.  He said that we spend our lives trying to survive, all the time we find ourselves in survival mode, but the fact is we don’t survive.  Right!  Somehow it has always seemed like a reasonable rationale—when I or someone else finds ourselves in survival mode, it makes sense somehow.  In yoga, we call this clinging to life abhinivesha.  But the only thing we know for sure about life is that we don’t make it out alive!  Now, I’ve said something like that before many times, but the way this guy said it really had an impact.  I’ve been thinking about the lines from Mary Oliver ever since the retreat and now I posted it in our bathroom:  “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / With your one wild and precious life?”

Here is a video that Cheri showed on the retreat this year and a couple years ago:

It is good to be re-inspired on this from time to time because when I’m just going about my day-to-day life and my husband isn’t doing what I want him to and I feel like I can’t catch up at work after my time away, I can feel the dissatisfaction and projection bubbling up.  I want things to be different.  But I don’t really want to spend my life wanting things to be different (do you see how that it is still wanting things to be different?).  So I keep saying to myself, “This is it.  This is my life.”  In every moment I have a choice.  And I choose to be amazed.  I choose to be grateful.  I choose fullness and wholeness.  I choose life.

Here’s a story about how great life is:

Pretty much from the retreat orientation forward, people kept mentioning the frogs that live in the outshowers at the monastery—little green frogs.  I was excited to see them.  Well, I only took a couple showers and on my last day as I was stepping under the water, I was disappointed that I hadn’t seen a single frog (aside from the big toad that startled me in the dark by the outhouse one night).  I went about enjoying my shower and when I was done, I opened the curtain and there on my towel right at eye level was a frog—no way I could possibly miss it.  Yay!  I even got to carry him on my finger from the towel to the bench.  Thanks, Life!

Yoga and Little League

So that nephew I was talking about in the last post just turned twelve and he is on the all-star little league team.  I went to the game today and they lost, but it was close (they’re not out of the tournament yet).  Some of their strongest players, though, have a real tough time keeping it together when they aren’t doing so well.  As soon as they fall behind or miss a play or get out, they start crying or stomping around.  And they can’t recover from that, which is the important part.  You can imagine I am not of the boys-shouldn’t-cry ilk, but for everyone, it so incredibly helpful in life to be able to bounce back, to not get so identified with the upset part that you can’t continue on with what needs to be done.  I remember hearing Cheri Huber talk once about a friend of hers who is a figure skater who said that we never see some of the very best figure skaters because they can’t handle the pressure of the competitions.

Yoga is largely about being able to control our minds, to direct and use them in the way that we want, to see the fluctuations as just that, rather than thinking that we are those fluctuations.  (That’s sutras 2, 3 and 4 of book 1).  It’s always easier to see these things at work in other people, which is maybe why we are all here—to help each other out.  Watching those kids playing baseball, it is apparent how disruptive and unhelpful it is to have your sense of yourself be so attached to the thing that is happening in the moment.  It seems to me to be part of the mind’s strong pull to make meaning.  If I drop the ball, it means I’m a terrible ball player—only it doesn’t.  I’m the same ball player I was a moment ago.  If I can see that making a mistake or blowing a play doesn’t mean anything besides that I made a mistake or blew a play, then I can move on. 

This is not to say that I never experience any feelings about these kinds of things (which I think is a common misperception amongst yoga-types), but that I can feel the feelings and let them go.  Which, by the way, also gives me a better chance of actually learning something from what happened than if I am caught up in the story about what a loser I am.  So those are my little league musings today.  They have to win tomorrow or they’re out—wish them luck!