I was laying on the floor yesterday (something I have been doing more lately) and I remembered an early morning in Mysore practice. I was laying on my mat at the end of my practice, my sweat cooling my skin. The firm and nourishing support of the ground underneath me. A teacher came up to me and quietly asked if I wanted weights on my shoulders. The weights used in yoga are usually cloth bags filled with 5 or 10 pounds of sand. I love them. So of course, I said yes. She placed a bag on the front of each shoulder so that the sand bag spilled off the corners of my shoulders, grounding them to the floor. She then walked off and came back with two more and placed them on the top of my thighs. Again, she left and came back and placed a smaller sand bag on my forehead so that most of the bag was sitting on the floor and there was a firm but welcome weight on my skull. My eyes were closed, darkness filled me. Although I was weighted down, I felt light as if I were floating.
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Are We Being Good Ancestors?
“I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.” ~ Danny Hillis
How would you live your life if you took the next 10,000 years into account? If you geared your actions to benefit whoever or whatever might be around at that time? We don’t know what everything will be like in 10,000 years. We don’t know how we will travel, communicate, or if the human race or this planet will even be around. But, for this essay, let’s be hopeful and say that the world will be around and there will be living beings on it, all of them our descendants in some way. How would we make choices today, knowing that we will be the ancestors one day? What would we make if we wanted it to last and be of benefit 10,000 years from now?
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What can you stop doing?
“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are." ~ Chinese proverb
We are a society that does too much. We have, on top of all of this, come up with strategies, practices, and scientific reason to convince ourselves to ‘do less’. And, why not? We need support every now and again. I have recently made big changes in my life in order to stop doing the things I really don’t want to do and find a little more space to breathe. I switched jobs and now work less and have a five minute commute, I have taken a hiatus from teaching yoga. These were the external markers of doing less. But, I have a whole lot of internal ‘things’ I do that feel like too much. I do find my thoughts darting around in all directions trying to find my next big move. It doesn’t work this way. Not well, anyhow. It’s so easy to accumulate, do too much and keep looking for new things.
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Love, Love, Love, says Percy
Mary Oliver once asked her dog, Percy, how should I live my life? Here is the response:
Read MoreLove, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.Then, go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust.
Yes, this is your practice
There is a woman I would like to thank, although I will probably never meet her. To be honest, I have never even seen her. I wouldn’t know who she was if she knocked on my door. My mother came home from spending a day with her sister. They had gone to a local place that has saunas and hot pools and cold pools and people misting scented water into your face. It’s the kind of place one might go to attempt to wring the stress right out of them.
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My Work
“You’re going to feel like hell if you wake up some day and you never wrote the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves of your heart, your stories, memories, visions and songs. Your truths, your version of things in your own voice.” ~ Anne Lamott
Among the excess and the overwhelming on the Internet, there are calm, quiet places if I look for them. A quote that puts words to an experience I can’t yet find words to, an article that takes the words right out of my mouth, or poems that remind me of things I continue to forget. It was in one of these places where I was introduced to a poem that I need to read regularly.
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The Thing About Other People (and Why We Need Them)
“There’s nothing we could know about ourselves or another that could solve the problem that other people actually exist and we are utterly depend on them.” ~ Adam Phillips
When I first began practicing yoga with others, I used to walk from my university residence to the studio in another part of town, my yoga mat bag slung over my shoulder. I would go to a class just about every day (the freedom of being a student!) and attempted to be discrete about the whole thing. “What are you carrying in the bag?” I would sometimes get asked. “An instrument?”, “A fishing rod?”, “A gun?”. “A yoga mat,” I’d say and quickly carry on away from the stranger with a perplexed look on their face.
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Mystery - A Threat to the Modern Mind
There are ten values to living yoga in our daily life – the 5 yamas and the 5 niyamas. Some of these, like non-violence and truth, are easy to agree upon. We know that a lie will agitate the mind. Inflicting violence on someone will reverberate in our bodies and will likely be followed by a torturing regret. So, while not always straight forward to follow, it’s easy to get on board the theory.
The niyama that I have had a little more resistance to is ishvara pranidhana. This is often translated as 'surrendering to god'. This word, god, brings up resistance in many of us whether we were raised with a concept of god or not. It is a word that names some thing that is, by many interpretations, unnamable, yet w know that these differences are not always easily allowed. Even within the recorded history of yoga, this niyama has been interpreted in various ways. But, there is no denying that the appearance of this term orientates some forms of yoga as theistic traditions, although much common practice and discourse nowadays abstain from this notion.
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A Long Look
Over the past couple months, I have been teaching philosophy as part of a yoga teacher training. One of the topics last week was dharana, which is a Sanskrit word that is part of the 8-fold path of yoga. Dharana is translated as attention, focus, or holding steady. This is my favorite, I said when I introduced this word, which means to say that this is an idea I am holding closely lately. Each word learned in this system is worth getting to know with more intimacy. This is the only way any sort of understanding can come.
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When There is Too Much in Our Head
While my son is in his piano lesson at our local music store, I sit in the foyer tapping and swiping away on my phone. It is two weeks away from the end-of-year concert when budding musicians play their best rehearsed song on a stage in front of mostly parents. My son flat out refuses to do this. When he first refused, I made a couple of encouraging remarks to help him get over what I thought was his nervousness. But then I shrugged. No problem, I said, we can both just watch. He doesn’t practice, not formally. Some mornings, before school, he stands in front of his keyboard banging away at the keys overtop a terrible demo-song and sometimes he’ll turn off the accompaniment to play little tunes like Ducks on the Pond or Old MacDonald. While I am looking forward to his playing improving, I don’t encourage him to practice. He is only six after all.
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A Modest and Meaningful Life
“How wonderful it is that nobody needs to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” ~ Anne Frank
Harold, my grandfather, was a bee keeper, a peach farmer, a gardener, a volunteer with the Amnesty International. He, like many radical pacifists, is someone who didn’t make a huge name for himself in the way we tend to think is most important. He did not get famous or make a lot of money. He was a quiet man who always seemed to be smiling. This inconspicuous way of living is something to admire and no less meaningful or impactful than those of us whose lives and words are booming in the daily news.
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What's Well Worth Losing
I love the sounds in a coffee shop. Two men next to me in quiet conversation. Bjork unobtrusively singing out of the speakers and the milk-foamer giving off occasional bursts that sound like a television gone fuzzy. A woman laughing across the room at a joke I didn’t hear. All this company and, except for the occasional chat with other regulars, I don’t talk to anyone.
I came here to write about intimacy. I don’t know if being here is intimacy, but it is enough connection to cut the edge off the bleakness that often comes at this time of the year, after the winter silence turns stale. This proximity to others, even those who I don’t know, gives me the right amount of distraction from myself to start writing.
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When Yoga & Feminism Meet
I was a feminist before I would have considered myself a spiritual seeker. Growing up, I had an abundance of female role models who were politically active, outspoken, and unwavering in their march through patriarchy, whether they would have put it this way or not. I modeled much of their behavior, knowing that there was something we were pitting ourselves against but I could not have told you exactly what that was. To borrow a metaphor from Carol Lee Flinders, I was aware of a bad smell coming from somewhere but it took me awhile to begin discovering the source of this rotting stench.
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A Long and Nourishing Hope
“Hope — a faculty decidedly different from and far more muscular than optimism.”
~ Maria Popova
Perhaps I am only beginning to understand hope. Last year, I wrote an article on the peace of hopelessness. This reflection came from studying a moment in my life when the specific outcome I had been hoping for in a certain situation vanished. In that moment, living the circumstances that I feared the most, I became hopeless and curiously enough, I relaxed.
After the article on hopelessness was published, a cyber-friend wrote me an email saying that maybe I had missed something. Then he sent me a story he wrote about hope, which he metaphorically likened to the tiny spring in a cuckoo clock he had been piecing together during a difficult time in his life. I have remembered this and have continued to wonder about hope. Because I knew even as I published the article that I was not ready to give up hope entirely. Hope is utterly necessary.
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The Quietest of Places
"What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” ~ Henry David Thoreau
There is no such thing as silence. At least as we might initially understand it, as the absence of sound. A void. Nothing. No auditory remnants of movement, friction, or existence. But this superficial idea of silence, this kind of total lack, is not possible. Instead, the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton defines silence as an absence of noise. This, perhaps more accurate understanding implies the absence of a particular kind of sound, one that is undesired or interfering.
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Patience in the Dark
Some choices are easy to make like choosing oatmeal for breakfast or, if possible, choosing to avoid the highway during rush hour. Honey or maple syrup? Whatever is on hand, I guess. These are small and straight forward choices but bigger ones might be easy to make too. Life changing ones like where to live, who to love, what to pursue for work can be so clear to us that there’s no option of anything or anyone else.
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The Big Magical Words of Yoga
“Poets have never used the word balance, for good reason. First of all, it is too obvious and therefore untrustworthy; it is also a deadly boring concept and seems to speak as much to being stuck and immovable, as much as to harmony. There is also the sense of unbalancing that must take place in order to push a person into a new and larger set of circumstances.” ~ David Whyte
Yoga is full of big words. Words like balance, and bliss, and peace, and love saturate the market of the yoga industry. We are asked to ‘open our hearts’, ‘finder our inner peace’, and blissfully let go into the vastness of this potential freedom. While we are yearning and perhaps hopeful of these tags lines, many of us spend our first yoga experience trying to simply decipher our left hand from our right hand and wondering if our agitated minds are actually insane.
Asana: A Language of the Body
“Our bodies are the texts that carry the memories and therefore remembering is no less than reincarnation.” ~ Katie Cannon
We know that our body language shapes who we are. Each time we put our body in a position, any position, we give it a message. We also give off a message. Do you understand what your body is saying? How often do you listen to it? While any simple movement we make is a way to explore and engage with the world, exploring our bodies through yoga is one way of striking up a conscious conversation between our interior lives and our exterior surroundings.
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Room to Dance
Years ago, I was watching the Oprah show. This episode showcased a professional organizer who helped families tidy up their houses. (The problems of living with prosperity, I know.) This was about the time that a hyper-awareness of ‘stuff’ began. The kind of stuff that we buy, accumulate, and hold when we don’t really need any of it. According to the Story of Stuff Project, we began to realize that “We have a problem with Stuff. We use too much, too much of it is toxic and we don’t share it very well.” So, our living spaces, our natural environment, and I would add our psychological interiors filled up. Our lives are bursting at the seams. In response, there came about a small flurry of effort to clean up, pair down, store and organize in order to reclaim lost spaces.
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The Places That Love Us
I don’t know if this is the most beautiful place in the world or if it is my most favourite. I do know that it is the place that has loved me the longest. My grandparents bought this piece of land 68 years ago and since, built two cottages on it, had 11 children to make it a proper circus, and passed it on as a place to call our own. Now, the cottage is owned in 11 shares and while our family remains close, I have lost count of our numbers that use it on a yearly basis.
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