Having a Choice

Today I am feeling a little grumpy.  I could talk about why, what’s bothering me, how things aren’t the way they are supposed to be.  That would be easy to do because when in a bad mood, everything gets colored by that, the mind wants to keep focusing on what’s wrong.  But what’s interesting to me is what happens next with it.

I went to the grocery store and because I didn’t feel like shopping and nothing really looked that great (because of my mood), I did a crappy job.  I spent about half as much as usual, which means I got roughly half as much stuff, which means that now I can continue to be grumpy all week long when there is nothing to eat.  I really believe every moment is a chance to turn things around.  If I had been at the store focusing on what would really help this person out, what would nurture and care for her, I would have been setting the stage for a better week. 

So in yoga thinking, we have the idea of karma, which is basically the law of cause and effect.  What’s happening now is the result of things that have happened in the past and what we are doing now is leading to what will happen in the future.  This means that every choice I make is important and is planting seeds what will sooner or later grow. 

It can be hard not to get down on yourself when you are watching yourself do something that is not so great.  It could even make a person want to just stop being aware, to go unconscious, so you don’t have to see it.  But if I see it, then there is a chance I will make a different choice and that seems worth it.

I read this great quote by Victor Frankl on the website of a fellow therapist and yoga teacher:  “Between stimulus and response there is a space.  In that space is our power to choose our response.  In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

I Love the Internet

Today, I am thinking about things I love and at the top of the list is the internet.  Which is pretty timely (though I don’t use the internet really to keep up on politics and news, but I happen to know that there is something going on about this right now).  Anyway, let me tell you about my happy findings.

I love Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology, which I think you can read in The Stranger, but I read on the internet.  This week, my horoscope quoted a poem that moved me so much, I’m going to put the whole thing right here:

FAMOUS 
by Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom
is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,
more famous than the dress shoe,
which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it
and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men
who smile while crossing streets,
sticky children in grocery lines,
famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.

I am also putting the link that was in my horoscope, that takes you to a whole blog of poetry.  There’s some good stuff in there.  And it reminded me that I love poetry and I love being moved. 

And then, just now, before I started typing this, I was reading another blog that someone told me about, which is very funny in a dark and vulnerable way.  And I was thinking I love humor and vulnerability and creativity.

So today, I’m just enjoying enjoyment, enjoying gratitude and love and appreciation.  I always associate gratitude with santosha (contentment).  Which reminds me of another blog on this wonderful thing called the internet, where we get to connect with all kinds of people we don’t even know and share ideas and bits about ourselves and make all kinds of cool discoveries.

I Love Space

I’ve never been much into the new year’s resolutions per se, but the new year does tend to lend itself toward reflection and thinking about what direction I’m going in.  I’ve been making big changes on the work frontier—my own practice in my own office.  My own space.  I love space.  In my mind, part of what this new situations affords me is the ability to have more space in my day.  My plan is to take five minutes to lie down (a practice I got from Cheri Huber, for those of you who haven’t heard me talk about it), to go on a walk, to meditate in the middle of the day or do a little yogasana (those are the poses).  I have actually been doing it, though there is room for growth (thank goodness, because there are eleven and a half more months this year).

Another thing that came to me spontaneously the other day was the idea of keeping my email inboxes  cleaned out.  The first crazy part of that is that I have multiple boxes, right?  Samarya, business, personal, phone.  It can be hard to keep up with it all (but not really).  At the end of the year, with my work transition, I deleted A LOT of old emails and even though the part of me that likes to have things “just in case” felt a little concerned, mostly it just felt great.  The other day, I suddenly thought how great it would be to keep all the emails down to just what needs response or has needed current info.  If there’s something I want to save for later, then do something with it, at least archive it, but don’t leave it in the inbox.  I realized pretty quick that the only way to keep up with this is to deal with things relatively immediately (if there is such a thing).

I was wondering which yoga concept fits best with this.  Aparigraha?  Certainly, there is some non-grasping.  Tapah?  Yes, there is some effort and discipline here.  But I think for me, it’s really shaucha (cleanliness, purity).  And that’s when I got that it is related to making space in my day.  More space.  Getting rid of the cluttered, crowded feeling.  And then I got the word “clarity.”  I think that might be my word for 2012.  I was just reading Brene Brown’s blog and she picks a word for the year and she was talking about how this year her word picked her.  I think that just happened to me.  I’m looking forward to it—the year of clarity.

The Basis for Telling the Truth

“You have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of! That is the basis for telling the truth.”  I have thought about this quote from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche a lot since I first read it a couple years ago.  Shame is such a really terrible feeling—that feeling of wanting or needing to hide or disappear or not exist.  It feels terrible and also makes it very difficult to do anything, especially anything that won’t end up resulting in more shame. 

Our topic of the month at Samarya is satya, the practice of truthfulness (which got me back thinking about this quote again).  How do we practice telling the truth (inside and outside)?  It seems like what Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche is pointing at is that not telling the truth is a symptom of a bigger root problem, which is shame.  The reason I don’t tell the truth to someone else or to myself is that I think the truth is not okay, so I have to hide it, hide me.  Can you imagine what it would be like to feel like there is nothing to hide?  No beating around the bush, no side-stepping, no spin?  It sounds pretty good to me.

Now, I’m not advocating that we should just walk around saying everything that comes into our minds.  But I think being able to acknowledge reality in my own self feels pretty good and when I am able to do that, I tend to have more clarity about what is useful or not useful to say out loud to other people.

It sure seems like a lot of yoga comes back around to this same idea (at least for me) that most (if not all) of our suffering comes from thinking things should be different than they are.

The big one for me lately is my relationship.  I have been married for almost three and a half years and it is really hard.  It seems like in our culture, it’s okay to talk about the tribulations of marriage if you are doing it in a stand-up comic sort of way, but otherwise, it’s supposed to be nice.  I know intellectually that everything in life has easy parts and hard parts, upsides and downsides, but I have had to do a lot of work to get okay with admitting that things aren’t great.  There has been shame that I am a yoga teacher and therapist and I haven’t done a better job.  And I see without a doubt that when I am denying the truth because it feels too embarrassing or scary to look at, it makes things worse.  I can’t actually work on understanding or changing anything because I’m too busy pretending it is fine.

So, as we’re getting 2012 started, maybe you can think of a shame that you are ready to let go of.  Go ahead, give it a try.  Lighten your load.