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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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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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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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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Get to Know Loneliness
Writing is lonely. It is quiet, except for maybe the sound of keys clicking away or the soft scratch of a pencil on paper. But, when a writer realizes that they need to write, it doesn't come from a place of silence. We write because our mind is so loud and unruly that something has got to give. If there was any other way to sustain ourselves, we would probably choose it. Writing is a last resort.
To write, we need to be alone. We need to know how to move beyond the distraction of the chatty women in the coffee shop, the unmade bed in our room, and write. We need to be so interested in this aloneness that we build our lives around it. What is so scary about being not-so-close to people? I don’t mean we have to get rid of all people, things, and outings in our life. It is also not to say that we don’t want to be heard, eventually. We all want to be heard. We just have to say something first.
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Be Generous With Your Attention
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” ~ Simone Weil
I remember putting my two-year-old son in his car seat for what was probably the 500th time.
While I was thinking something like, “God damn, I can’t wait until he can buckle his own seat belt,” he put his slight hand on my arm and whispered “Whasat?”
I glanced all around and looked back at his face, which was bright with wonder. It took me a few moments to realize that he was talking about the chirping sound of the cicadas ringing on that hot summer day, a sound that I didn’t hear until he pointed it out. The sound was lovely, it was right there, and I didn’t even notice.
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More Than One Way to Sing the Alphabet
You walk around the corner looking poised, tall, and calm. You’re not. Most people you can fool. Some you can’t and try to stay far away from. Usually it’s because you love them. Now, it is a man with dapper shoes, a messy house,and quotes onthe bathroom mirror, who waves at you in a way that you mistake for wanting a high five but instead he gives you a hug. He wasn’t what you asked for. Or maybe he was. Yes, you asked for him; one of the people in the world whom you can’t fool. You flounder. He puts his hand on you to be still. He hears but doesn’t listen to any of it because you don’t make sense. He smiles and gives you a kiss. You’re quiet.
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