FB, HBD and True Feedback

This is how I remember this story, which is not necessarily what was said many years ago to me or what happened:  Jack Gilbert is a poet who won some prestigious award when he was first starting out, like the Yale Younger Poets Prize, and then didn’t publish anything for a long time.  I even think he moved to some other country.  When he did publish again years later, someone asked him what he had been doing all that time and he said, “Living my life.”  So all that’s to say that it has been a number of months since I’ve posted on the blog and I can only say I’ve been living my life.  Some shit has definitely gone down and maybe you will hear about it in the coming weeks or months.  As my friend and fellow yoga teacher, Megan Carroll, recently wrote in her newsletter, it’s been AFGO (Another Fucking Growth Experience).

But what I’d like to contemplate today is a recent experience with Facebook (yes, Facebook).  Last year, I had a lousy birthday and one of the things that was bringing me down was all of the birthday posts on my FB page.  At that point in time, I hardly even went on FB, but I’d get an email every time someone posted on my “timeline” and there was something about all these somewhat random people who don’t even know me wishing me a happy birthday that I found depressing (like before I even woke up, someone I barely know had posted “HBD,” it took me a while to even figure out what it meant).  So a month ago, my birthday was coming up and I actually was spending more time on FB and I was already feeling kind of lousy, so I was pondering what to do. 

I decided to take things into my own hands.  So on my birthday, I posted this cute photo of me on my first birthday.  And I got lots of comments and wishes and so on and it all felt more real and genuine to me, which resulted in a lifting of spirits rather than the opposite.  This makes me think of tapas/svadhyaya/ishvara pranidhana, which Desikachar interprets as “act, observe, be open.”  I did something different and then could observe the different results.  “Be open” is really referring to being open to whatever the results might be since we don’t really know and can’t control them.  For me, in this situation though, I really made a conscious choice to be open to receive whatever love and kindness came to me that day and I think that made a difference too. 

I have been thinking a lot about something my Somatic Experiencing teacher, Steve Hoskinson, said in a workshop this summer, that the only thing we can really do for ourselves to help with our own regulation is to put ourselves in environments where we get true feedback.  Perhaps the reason this has really struck me is that my main project in the last months has been removing myself from an environment where the feedback was not true, but unpredictable, confusing and inaccurate, where responses were not really responses to me and the present moment, but something else.  I have really felt how disregulating or disorganizing that is.

The question that I have been looking at since my FB experience on my birthday is "How often do I not put enough out there for others to be able to give me true feedback?"  This is not a new question for me, but it is highlighted in a new way right now.  By proactively posting on my birthday, I was participating in a feedback loop.  I had more of a feeling of people responding to me because I took action and this is part of what made the birthday greetings feel more genuine.  In order to get true feedback, I have to show up.  After all the word is feedback.  I put something out and then I get something back.  Act, observe, be open.  I looked up the word “trifecta” a few minutes ago and decided that it isn’t actually the right word here, but now I am going to use it anyway.  Act, observe, be open—this is the yoga trifecta.  I swear it is all you need.

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