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!

Anything is Possible

I have a growing backlog of things to write about on the blog, some of which will probably fade out before I get to them.  Many of them you will have already heard me talk about if you come to my yoga classes.   A bathroom remodel provides lots of opportunity for yoga practice . . . and not much time to write about it!

But today I want to go back a few weeks to a Wednesday when I was driving on the 520 and got in a car accident.  Thankfully, it was not really that serious—well, not serious to me and my body but pretty serious to the car that I don’t have anymore.  And really, one of the things I learned is that even an accident that “isn’t that serious” can leave a person pretty shaken up and discombobulated.

But one of the most interesting observations that I made was that one of my identities is Someone who Has Never Been in a Car Accident.  It felt strange and sort of like a loss to give that up.  Now I am Someone who Has Been in a Car Accident.  I contemplated that for a couple days before I realized that it was much bigger than that.  More than the loss of identity, it was being faced with my own vulnerability.  As long as I was Someone who Has Never Been in a Car Accident, I could imagine that it would never happen, that I could drive around in this fast, dangerous machine and never get hurt.  And now that delusion has been dashed.

It is sort of the opposite of (but the same as) a story that I love to tell about one of my nephews playing basketball (when he was seven, which is very cute).  It was the last game of the season and the only one I had been able to get to, so my mom and sister were giving me a synopsis, which was that Harrison had pretty much spent the whole season trying not to get the ball and when he got it, to get rid of it as soon as possible because he didn’t think he could make a basket.  In this last game, some of their stronger players weren’t there, so he didn’t have as much of a choice and, lo and behold, he did end up making a basket.  Well, he was like a completely different kid for the rest of the game—getting the ball, trying to get down court, he even ended up making another basket.  The shift was so clear to me:  he went from being Someone who Couldn’t Make a Basket to Someone who Could Make a Basket in that one instant.  We just need to experience something once to know it is possible.

So now I know that me being in a car accident is possible.  And while that is scary, it also helps me remember that anything is possible.  And that given the choice, I want to be open to possibility, which means moving toward life rather than away from it, even though there is a risk I could get hurt.  I guess it may all sound a little hallmark card or something, but acknowledging these sorts of insights when we have an actual experience of them (vs. them just being a nice idea) seems important in really letting them sink in.

How does this fit with yoga?  Well, I can only get something out of this experience through self-inquiry (svadhyaya), ego (ahankara) is involved, and it certainly seems to be related to abhinivesha (fear of death).  But really what comes to mind is something I was saying this weekend at a training, which doesn’t have a word that goes with it, but is expressed with a gesture.  I was saying, “Yoga goes like this” (imagine me starting with my hands together and then pointing them diagonally out and moving them forward, out and away) “not like this” (imagine me starting with my hands apart and then pointing them diagonally in and moving them forward, in and together).  Yoga helps us be more expansive instead of contracted.  Sounds good to me.

My Little Teacher

It started last Tuesday when I was on teacher training.  It was evening time, not yet dark, and I was in my room and there was this intermittent strange noise, part thud, part scraping, but pretty loud, like it was happening just outside my room.  Sure enough, when I looked out the door to the little balcony, there was a bird sitting on a rafter there a few feet from me.  Yes, that was definitely a bird sort of noise.  It seemed he was trying to fly through the tiny little triangular window up near the ceiling.

Well, this went on for the next couple days until teacher training was over and I came home.  For all I know, he is still there doing the same thing.  As I gathered more information about what was happening, I concluded that he was trying to land on the little tiny sill outside the window, but there wasn’t room for him there.  He spent hours and hours flying back and forth, hitting his little head on the window sometimes, flapping his wings, trying to grab on. 

At first, it was really annoying.  He woke me up those last few mornings between 4:53 and 5:10.  But mostly I felt sorry for him.  And my main thought was, “Please, Lord, don’t let me be like this bird.”  I really don’t want to be someone stuck in a pattern, just doing the same thing over and over again without the awareness or willingness to try something different, hitting my head against the wall.

Around that same time, I was reading in one of Brené Brown’s books about the difference between sympathy and empathy—that sympathy creates distance and empathy creates connection.  That fits right in with my own understanding of yoga, which is another word for connection.  It is so much more useful to see how we are the same and how even when I haven’t had the exact experience someone else has had, that I have had similar experiences that help me to understand the other person instead of just saying “poor you” (glad I don’t have to worry about that because you are so different from me).

Brené talks about how frustrating it can be to have a conversation with someone who wants understanding while insisting that you can’t understand.  I recently had a conversation like that.  It felt to me like this other person was so focused on our differences that there was no way to bridge the gap.  I totally could have handled it better, stayed more spacious.  I felt a little bit like we were both stuck in our own habits of thinking or acting.  It didn’t feel good and it didn’t get us anywhere.

Part of the reason listening to that bird was so painful to me is that I know what that experience is like.  I am really sorry that that little bird was having that experience.  And I am grateful that he came along to be my teacher.  Having that image in my mind is very helpful to me in thinking about who and how I want to be.  Not getting stuck is not just an idea—I just picture and hear that bird and I feel motivated to do whatever I can to keep growing.

My New Definition of Stuck

I have always thought of raga and dvesha (attraction and aversion) as two forces that pull in opposite directions, creating a feeling of getting tossed around.  At my first Somatic Experiencing training a month ago, the teacher talked about impulse and inhibition and how we are more or less constantly living in this place of having an impulse and then stopping ourselves from following it.  This is not good or bad, but is a fact of life.  Socially speaking, it serves a purpose for sure.  How would things work if we followed all of our impulses without consideration of the consequences?

And it is interesting to look at that place where impulse and inhibition meet.  As I started to look at this in myself and to practice my SE skills with some willing volunteers, I kept seeing this dynamic between impulse and inhibition arise.  And it usually appeared as a feeling of being “stuck.”  I feel like I am a person who has a lot of experience with “stuck,” but I was suddenly having a whole new understanding of what it is.  I had always thought of stuck as a feeling of being constricted, either by something outside of me or inside of me, that it was a unidirectional.  But what I think actually creates the feeling of stuck is that there is an impulse or desire to do something AND something stopping it, so there are actually two forces at work.  I’m not sure why I always thought that being stuck was sort of passive—it seems clear to me now that I only feel stuck if I am wanting to do something and perceive that I can’t somehow.  This feels like a really important discovery for me—maybe some of you other stuck people can let me know what you think.

So when I was thinking about how this relates to yoga concepts, I thought about raga and dvesha.  These opposing forces might pull on a person, but maybe they can also push on a person.  Or maybe both raga and dvesha manifest as impulses and our yogic ideas of how we should be are the inhibition.  Well, I guess that’s it.  Seems kind of anti-climactic.

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

I was having a discussion recently with a friend about the ideas of duality and non-duality—different branches and texts associated with yoga tend to describe things in one of these two ways.  It is funny that the “non-dualists,” who propose that all is one have to describe themselves as NON-dualists, that is, “we are this, not that,” which is, of course, dualistic.

I can see why it is difficult to take a non-dualistic view, even for some who identify as non-dualist.  It seems to be the natural thing our minds want to do—to put things into categories, especially the good/bad categories, which also manifest as I like/I don’t like and pleasant/unpleasant.  I’m not sure this can really be avoided (and really, even wanting to puts us back into dualistic thinking).  OK, I’m trying not to get to heady here.  The fact of the matter is that nature is full of pairs of opposites (or perhaps we could say complements)—night and day, hot and cold, etc.  To say this isn’t true or that one side is true and the other isn’t just seems silly.  It’s that whole yin and yang thing—both sides are part of the whole. 

I’m remembering a workshop with Daniel Siegel, the big brain guy, where he talked a lot about integration and that integration requires differentiating the parts and then bringing them together.  For him, integration is the hallmark of well-being (I feel like I’ve talked about this before in the blog, but oh well).  So, it seems like “non-dualism” is a matter of stepping back far enough to see the big picture and how the two parts relate to each other and are actually inextricable.

So, just for example, our dog, Maggie, is really cute and a really good dog overall and brings me a lot of happiness just in being who she is.  I like her.  And today, she just kept barking and growling all morning—there must have been something going on outside that was out of my hearing or something.  She was driving me crazy and I was getting really irritated.  I didn’t like her.  Both sides exist.  I challenge you to find someone that you like 100% of the time.  For most of us, the opposite is a little more difficult to see because we are conditioned to look for what we don’t like mostly, but if I think of someone I don’t like, I can find something about them that I do like or can appreciate or even something that I don’t dislike quite as much.  The two things are intertwined—two sides of the same coin.  Think about that phrase, “two sides of the same coin.”  The two sides are distinct and yet together they make the whole.  To me, that’s non-dualism.  It’s not picking one side and just saying that the other side isn’t there or something.

So who cares?  What does this have to do with anything?  Well, I can just speak for myself.  I don’t really think it matters what you call it, but in my experience, when I can hold opposing viewpoints or perspectives, when I can accept the complexity and multidimensionality of any person, object, experience or situation, I have more peace.  I have less compulsion to do something, to get something, to get away from something, to make things different.  This ultimately results in fewer waves in my mind (citta vrtti in yogaspeak).  I am not caught so much in the push and pull of raga and dvesha (attraction and aversion).  It may seem counterintuitive that by acknowledging the attraction and aversion inherent in all things, inherent in life, they have less power over me, but that is how it works.  (And by the way, that’s how it works with everything—it’s the things we don’t acknowledge that keep us trapped).

In the spirit of “keepin’ it real,” I will offer you something practical:  a favorite Samarya game called Upside/Downside.  Just spend a day looking for the upside and downside of everything and see what happens.  Like right now for me:  boy, this dinner is taking a lot longer to cook than I thought.  The upside is that my husband is getting home much later than he was planning, so dinner is not sitting around waiting for him getting cold or getting overcooked.  The downside is that I am hungry and I am tired of cooking dinner.  I’d love to hear from you about how this little activity goes.

As I was writing, two quotes came to mind, so I’ll put them here:

The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.  –Anne Lamott  (I’ve been thinking of that one a lot lately and this seems like as good a time as any to share it)

All men are deceived by the appearances of things, even Homer himself, who was the wisest man in Greece; for he was deceived by boys catching lice: they said to him, “What we have caught and what we have killed we have left behind, but what has escaped us we bring with us.” –Heraclitus (the epigraph in a book of poetry by W. S. Merwin)

Since Leaving the Jury Room

I have been thinking a lot about responsibility since my jury experience.  While I have a great deal of compassion for people’s suffering and struggles, I do believe that we are responsible for our actions.  And I think we have a responsibility as a society to the members of our society.  We are interconnected and need to support and care for one another.  It seems that many of the problems we face today arise from our ability to disconnect from each other and from the consequences of our choices.

I don’t think punishment works.  I don’t think it works with kids and I don’t think it works with adults convicted of crimes.  It doesn’t promote healing, learning, growth or transformation.  Nevermind the death penalty, which is completely horrifying.  So here I am, sitting on a bench in this courtroom thinking about my participation in this whole thing.  I’m feeling very uneasy about the fact that I could be making a decision that would at worst kill someone and at best take away a big chunk of his life in a meaningless sort of way.  What we are told is that our job is only to determine the facts of the case and whether or not the defendant is guilty of the crime.  Essentially, we are to compartmentalize our role in the process and not worry our pretty little heads about what happens after we are done.

This doesn’t feel good to me.  I have put a lot of work into getting more connected not less.  But I have this very strong undeniable sense that “getting out” of this based on these thoughts and feelings (if I could) would be exactly the same thing.  I see that not being on the jury does not disconnect me from what is happening, the same way not being the judge does not disconnect me from the sentence.  On the jury or off, I am connected to this.

Now, for the record, while I don’t know much about other countries’ judicial systems, I feel pretty sure that ours is better than most.  But it has problems.  For instance, this young man on trial had a lawyer who seemed so much less capable than the prosecuting attorney, I assume because he couldn’t afford anyone better.  That doesn’t seem fair.  I probably have fewer issues with the judicial system than "correctional" system, but I guess the point of this whole post is that it is all connected.

I don’t have an answer or any way to tie this all up.  I just looked up “responsibility” in the online Sanskrit dictionary and “no results were found.”  I’m quite sure that doesn’t mean that there was no notion of responsibility in ancient India, but that it was conceptualized differently.  For me, the whole practice of yoga leads to me taking responsibility for my own actions, my own life, to stop projecting things outward and look inward to see what is going on.  Perhaps this post is about karma, the law of action and reaction—whatever I do, there is a consequence.  I also think of avidya (ignorance), the first klesha (obstacle to happiness or cause of suffering).  Ignorance is not seeing that everything is connected in essence.  Dharma—I just thought of dharma—that is one form of responsibility.  That is the question I have been wrestling with.  What is my duty, my responsibility, the right thing to do?

I don’t know.  But coincidentally, the movie that arrived in my mailbox recently was a documentary called What I Want My Words to Do to You about Eve Ensler doing a writing group in a women’s prison.  It did reinforce for me that people are beautiful and full of potential.  Maybe I will get involved with teaching yoga in prison or something.  I just made a donation to the Washington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.  I wouldn’t have thought when I went to the courthouse last Monday that it would lead me here.