Memorization is Cool

Last June, Sonia Nelson did a Vedic chanting workshop at our center—it was just a couple hours introduction sort of thing.  I imagine to a lot of people that doesn’t sound very interesting, but to me it sounds very awesome.  And, in fact, I had so much fun.  (If I were going to get all woo-woo, I’d say something about how it feels like something I have done in previous lives and that somehow I am supposed to be chanting, but I won’t).  Anyway, I bought her Yoga Sutras Tutorial CD and have been working with it pretty regularly during commutes since then (with some days/weeks off for Cheri Huber podcasts).

In the last few weeks, I finished memorizing the second chapter.  And I have seen many interesting things in the process.

1) Things that seem insurmountable in the beginning, if taken step by step, are actually totally achievable.  At the beginning of this endeavor, when I was probably on sutra 1.10 or something, it seemed like so much for my brain to hold, I couldn’t really see how I could learn the whole chapter.  Then when I did, I thought, “How can I possibly learn the second chapter? Will I have to forget the first one to make room for the second?” It felt like my brain was literally stretching when I started it and then, incredibly, I did actually learn the whole second chapter while still remembering the first.  Crazy!

2) Life is non-linear.  This project seems to really highlight for me how things do not go in a straight line. I learn a little chunk and really get it down, then I go back to the part before so I can put them together and I can’t remember how that part goes, or I remember the first part and can’t remember the new part anymore (even though I was chanting it just a couple minutes before).  It seems like a continual process of learning and forgetting around in circles until at some point it’s finally in there for good.  And the whole process could be quite frustrating if I were really wanting it to be orderly.

3) Having an outside guide is really important.  I’ve had the first chapter down for a while now, so I don’t need to concentrate super-hard to chant most of it.  Sometimes I can even do that thing where I chanted part of it but I wasn’t paying attention and wonder if I really chanted it (like arriving somewhere in your car, but you don’t remember the trip).  Recently, I was chanting it through with Sonia on the track where she chants it straight through and I caught quite a few places where I had gotten sloppy or mis-remembered a note or a long vowel. It made me think that’s why we have teachers or therapists or other outside people to reflect to us what we are doing.  It is easy to start to drift off into my own little world and I could imagine my version of the sutras getting further and further from the original. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to have an objective view of ourselves.

4) Memorization is cool. Memorizing things seems very old school.  I wonder if kids memorize things in school anymore.  We have much more emphasis on understanding things, which I generally agree with. Understanding something seems better than just being able to spout off information. But memorizing the sutras has been very fun.  I feel like it uses my brain in a different way and it really gets rid of the cittavrttis (the waves of the mindstuff). There is something relaxing about just learning all these sounds and not worrying about what it means. (Though I am learning more about what it means as I go).  And it feels good to have it inside me.  I would recommend memorizing something to everyone—a poem or a chant or whatever.

So I don’t know if that is interesting to anyone.  A little tapa (effort, determination), a little svadhyaya (self-study), a little ishvara pranidhana (surrender)—hey, that’s kriya yoga (sutra 2.1)!

Knitting Yoga

Last night, I had my third start on a new sweater and I think this one might stick. Ripping things out is an inherent part of knitting. If you don’t have the stomach for it, then you’ll probably stick to scarves or find another hobby. It has gotten easier for me, but it is still hard. This time, for instance, I had a couple days in on the back of this sweater and had to admit to myself (satya) that I didn’t really like the stitch that was the main stitch of the sweater (too bumpy). Even though I had spent a good little chunk of time on it, I was able to step back and see that the amount of time spent compared to the amount of time left was quite small and weeks from now those couple of days would be forgotten. So I unraveled it and wound the yarn back up on the skein.

Very early in my adult knitting career, I was knitting a hat and was probably over half done when it became clear that it was too small. I was debating about whether to rip a bunch out and make it bigger or keep going and my husband said something like, “Don’t you want a hat that fits?” Ah, clarity. I think of that a lot when I am at that point of deciding whether to take something apart.

So this particular knitting lesson seems to be about satya, that willingness to be in reality, and also vairagya, non-attachment. I get so attached to the work that I have done, it is hard to let it go, even in the face of seeing that it is not working out. And because I do that with knitting, I know that I also do it with other things. Sure enough. Right now, I feel like I am in the process of seeing how to make a life that fits. Which means being willing to stop continuing on with the things that aren’t working and either re-fitting them or trying something new. Very exciting—I’m looking forward to seeing what I will make.

I'm Here!

Where?  Well, literally, at my sister’s dining room table while my nephew is putting on his shoes to head to the bus stop.  But really, I don’t know.  I am here, but I’m not sure where that is.  I am in some kind of a gigantic transition period and have been spending time trying to re-envision my life (perhaps more accurately just to envision it).

One thing I see is that I really want to post more on this blog.  Then I wonder what gets in my way.  The usuals:  time, lack of energy, choosing knitting.  And then there is this other one that kind of sneaks around in the background:  there are so many blogs and so many yoga teachers, people don’t need another person saying the same stuff, thinking that she’s having some big insight.  Well, that’s not very nice. 

My friend Molly lent me this new book by Rod Stryker, The Four Desires, that is all about finding your dharma (life purpose).  Dharma is one of Molly’s favorite topics, but it has never really clicked with me.  I resonate more with Cheri Huber when she talks about how much suffering people experience feeling like they don’t know their purpose when maybe the purpose of life is life.   “As if being alive isn’t enough,” she says.  And the Buddhist saying that is something like, “Trying to find the purpose of life is like trying to ride a horse on top of another horse.”  Which I take to mean: just ride the horse.

So what’s happening for me now is that all of this is fitting together.  Each one of us is a completely unique manifestation of life (or consciousness or God or whatever), so everyone has the same dharma in a way, which is to completely be that unique manifestation.  (The fact that it is unique is what makes everyone’s dharma seem to be different).  I know some of you have heard me talk about something like this before, but I'm having some new understanding of it (mainly, that it actually applies to me, rather than being a nice idea or true for everyone else).

Owning that life is expressing itself through me in a way that is different from anyone else means I don’t need to worry about anybody else’s blog or even if anyone is reading mine.  So I’m going to commit to more frequent posts (and see what happens).

(p.s., I hate to advertise on the blog, but I am also working on a book and if you’d like to help me, I’m doing a “guided self-study” email class on ahimsa (non-violence)—click here)

Say No to the Hamster Wheel

I’ve been reading a therapy magazine; this issue focuses on grief and dying in this age of “advanced” medical technology.  The world we live in is just so different from the world even sixty years ago.  It used to be that people just died.  Now everything gets stretched out and it’s not clear at all that this works out better than the old way.  Take something like the pacemaker, which I’ve always thought of as a relatively benign and helpful device, but which will just keep ticking away for ten years, regardless of how sick the rest of the body is getting.  And nevermind the whole disgusting system of insurance that encourages putting them in folks who may or may not really “need” them.

Of course I am not saying we shouldn’t use any of this stuff or that “western medicine is bad” (a common refrain amongst yoga-types), but the system/society/culture never stops to assess where we are going and it is difficult to fight the tide as an individual.  The underlying assumption is that we should stay alive at any cost (literally and figuratively).  It seems like all of this technology and medication would make us feel safer somehow, but it actually creates more and more fear and striving to keep from change and aging, which is the essential nature of being alive.  (Sort of the same way that all of the communication technology we have doesn’t save us time, it just gives us more to do).

So this was the frame of mind I was in when I was watching t.v. last night.  Now, I am usually quite entertained by pharmaceutical commercials, especially the ones that list off all of the possible side effects and contraindications.  But last night I got creeped out.  First, the woman talking about something you can take for “inadequate eyelashes,” then prescription eye drops for chronic dry eye, then special face cream that rejuvenates your stem cells in your skin to get rid of your wrinkles.  Life will be good if we can just take something for everything we don’t like and make it go away.  Just thinking about it makes me tired.  (I’m sure there’s something I can take for that).

So this brings us to some of my favorite yoga topics.  We were talking about abhinivesha (fear of death) just a couple posts ago.  And satya, which we can think of as practicing being in reality.  Do we really want to spend all of our energy trying to fight reality?  Because that’s what we’re doing.  Now, it’s important to distinguish between acceptance and resignation.  As someone who can easily slip into Eeyore mode (oh well, there’s nothing I can do about it anyway), let me be clear that’s not what I am recommending.  Yoga has a lot in common with that Serenity Prayer—you know, changing what you can, accepting what you can’t.  But where do we draw the line?  It seems to me that when I can feel myself getting on a hamster wheel, that’s a good sign to stop and check in.  I don’t want to live my life on a hamster wheel.  And, despite all my conditioning, I really don’t want to just avoid everything uncomfortable or unpleasant.  Partly because even with all the eyedrops and creams, it is futile, and partly because I am a human being and I actually want to have the experience of being a human being, even though sometimes it scares me.

To Be or Not to Be Offended

So, I have sometimes prided myself on being a person who doesn’t get offended.  Sure, I get annoyed and think people are dumb and all that, but I don’t really get offended by something.  Getting offended comes from taking something that someone says or does personally, like they are doing it ON PURPOSE to hurt ME.  There are just so many faulty assumptions in there, the biggest ones being that other people are actually making conscious decisions about their words and actions (most of us seem to be unconscious a large part of the time) and then that they would consciously make those decisions based on how it would impact me (in fact, no one really is paying attention to or cares about me and my life).

So it seems that being offended comes from the ego (ahankara).  (The irony of saying I pride myself on not getting offended is not lost on me).  I am wrapped up in my own “I” and all the identities that go with it and think the whole world revolves around me and so end up feeling offended when something doesn’t fit with my vision of how things should be.  It perhaps goes hand in hand with our lawsuit culture where a person sues for any sort of slight or accident, trying to put blame on someone because we should be able to go through life without anything bad ever happening to us.  (Before you get offended, I realize that some lawsuits are perfectly legit—I’m just saying that sometimes we’re just human and make mistakes or fall down).

Anyway, all this is really a lead up to introduce you to this blog I found called Recovering Yogi.  I’m sure there are many “yogis” who would be offended by this blog, but I think there is a lot of funny stuff in there.  I don’t agree with everything in it, but I like the Keepin’ It Real aspect.  Sometimes they are even talking about me, but I still think it’s funny.  I’ve always thought our sense of humor resides in our witness aspect, that part than can step back and observe objectively.  The ego definitely doesn’t have a sense of humor.  So, here’s a link to a recent post, which is mild on the snark-o-meter compared to many of the posts, making it a good entry point, I guess.  Hope you enjoy!

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!