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.

Misperception

I have been wanting to write something about viparyaya for a while now and had an experience at the PT recently that is a great example.  I was having a pain in my foot and some concern about a possible baby bunion beginning, so I went to see Barb Canal (the most fabulous physical therapist who has helped me immensely many times).  The only thing I had really figured out is that it seemed like when I supinated my foot more, it felt better, so concluded that it had to do with my pronating tendency (for those of you not familiar with these terms, pronating is when the foot rolls in and supinating is when it rolls out).  Within a few minutes in her office, I found out that everything I had perceived wasn’t really true—that my big toe was not going in so much as the rest of the toes were going out, that the internal rotation of my hip was the thing to pay attention to rather than the weight distribution of my foot.

Viparyaya is misperception, also referred to as error or mistake, and is one of the five activities of the mind according to Patanjali—the most common one.  While it’s easy to hear the word misperception and think that’s bad and we should avoid it because it’s the wrong thing to do, the reason it’s the most common mental activity is because most of the time we don’t really have a choice about it.  It’s the best we can do until we get more information that points us more toward what’s really happening. 

I feel like the main thing I try to do when I teach yoga (or anything) is to direct people back to their own experience and return the authority to where it rightfully belongs rather than let it rest with me.  Then I have an experience like the one in Barb’s office and I think back to so many things that I totally thought I understood or had figured out only to find out later that I really didn’t, and I have a moment of doubt about whether or not we can trust our own experiences.  But I’m actually quite sure that that’s what we must do.  My own direct experience truly is my best place to look (vs. other people and sources), but I must simultaneously remain aware that it is probably viparyaya.  

I always remember a story someone told once on our teacher training about moving and not being able to find these wine stoppers she’d had.  She knew just what she was looking for and kept looking in all the places she thought they would be until she finally gave up and bought some new ones.  When she went to put them away, there were the old ones—she thought they were white, but they were actually gray, so she didn’t even see them, right there where she had looked a million times.  Everyone has a story like that.  My view is limited not just by what I think I know, but by what I do know, what I don’t know, by my past, etc.  It’s like wanting a kid to understand multiplication before they know how to do addition.  I can only see or know what I can see or know in any given moment.

So my aim is to be open to new information, to allow my perception to change, rather than thinking I have something figured out.  To be able to trust myself and at the very same time know that there is so much more out there that I can’t even grasp, that whatever I am experiencing right now is not the end of the story and that probably at a later time I will be able to see pieces of the picture that I can’t see now.  Misperception doesn’t mean I am doing it wrong, it’s just that until I am enlightened, it’s mostly all I can do—what’s helpful is knowing that that’s what’s going on.

I was trying to talk about this whole idea in class recently and somehow during the conversation, a student said, “But what if you really, really do know that there is something wrong with you.”  And I said, “That’s the biggest misperception of all.”  That is how the mind sees things and interprets them and then uses the misperception to confirm itself as truth.  Patanjali gives this an even bigger word, avidya (spiritual ignorance).  So even when we are caught in this trap, if we can remember that it is a misperception, even if we can’t see how and can’t see our way out, we can know that it’s just not true, simply because we’re not perceiving anything accurately, because our mind is limited compared to the vastness of all that is.

Socks

I really like warm socks.  My feet tend to be cold all winter, so nice warm socks are really important to me.  My best pairs of socks are the ones I knit myself—they are really warm and have lasted longer than any store-bought socks I’ve ever bought.  (Since I mostly take my shoes of inside, it doesn’t usually take very long to start wearing out the bottom of the heel).  When I first started knitting socks, I thought I would never buy a pair of socks again.  But then I realized that I like knitting other things too, so I recently found myself at the store looking for socks.

A few years ago (before I was knitting socks), I taught myself how to darn a sock from a video on YouTube.  I was really pleased with myself—it always seems terrible to throw out a pair of socks that are perfectly fine except for the hole in heel, especially if you like them.  So after visiting several stores in search of socks to meet my specifications (which are apparently unreasonable—thicker than a dress sock, thinner than a hiking sock, not mostly acrylic, not too expensive), I finally sat down earlier today to mend a sock that I already have.  I think I haven’t worn these socks in over a year because I wanted to darn the heel, but kept putting it off because it would take too long, was too boring, I wanted to do other things, etc.

In about an hour and fifteen minutes, I had it done.  That’s less time than I spent shopping for new socks and I’m not adding to the landfill and I get to have that nifty feeling of being handy.  So what’s the deal? How do I get tricked into this same situation time and time again?  Just the number of blogs I’ve written about it is enough to wear anybody out.  Something I want to do, something I enjoy both the process of and the result of, yet don’t do. 

There’s reality (satya) and then all the stories.  And as long as I am willing to listen to and believe the made-up stories about my socks and my life, I am in trouble.  There is a story about wanting or needing “free time,” but I am not even sure what free time is, since something is always happening.  And there are many stories about what is more important, worthwhile or desirable than something else.  For example, it’s better to be working on my website than mending my sock or it’s better to go on a walk than mend my sock.  At least that’s the story until I make that choice and then the story changes to how I’m working too hard or wasting my time.  See, that’s why you can’t trust the story—it just changes to whatever makes you feel bad.

So instead of evaluating and assessing and deciding, I could just do whatever is the next thing that needs to be done and enjoy it.  What a concept! 

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)!