When Hauling the Heavy Stuff, Give Yourself a Breather

Here I am, hauling pain, anger, disappointment, sorrow, worry ... so I seek out that space where there's love. I can turn away from the bitter taste, or savor it; wash it away with a sweet Manhattan (cherry at the bottom of the cup), or paint it on both sides of the tee-shirt I'm wearing, my anguish doesn't stop. My mind is a generator that keeps on going but I have a way to unplug it.  There's only one thing I can count on for that space in which I can tolerate myself and even love being alive, no matter what crushing weight I am hauling.  I take my focus to my breath for several minutes. One or five minutes aren't enough in bad times, but 20 minutes gives me a literal breather.

Taking the load away from the center of my focus offers me a real rest that impacts on my whole body and shifts my mind too. I can see the bigger scene, and can find my place in that scene without the same piercing pain of it.

So much of the anger, agony, sorrow comes from wishful thinking. We rerun or grab for all the scenarios we want to change, or want to banish, or where we wish we could change the script. Even physical discomfort gets worse when all we can think about is getting rid of it.  Sometimes finding a way to live with it, accommodating the situation, actually lessens or even alleviates the stress around it, and just through that mechanism, the pain itself lessens.

Doing What You Are Doing, Step Into Being Who You Are

Acting with clarity and without judgment reflects a constancy of self, an acceptance of best intention, an ability to engage with what is right there to be done with good will. Even unpleasant tasks or what might seem insignificant situations are sustaining if we are not jamming our own switchboards the whole time with judgments and confusion.

When turning clear energy toward a task, there is a sense of flow to it. This could be organizing a meeting, in a cooking or writing project, teaching or taking a yoga class, working through a tax filing, accompanying someone on a task they must do, anything really. This attribute of engagement is not judgmental, this is not a conflicted state.

If I am not resisting what I am doing, there is very little separation between what I am doing and who I am. Quite a difference when there is resistance. The mind chatters about all that is not as it should be, makes constant recommendations about this task, other tasks, other people's actions or choices, what else I could be doing, should be doing, cannot be doing, and generally gets in the way of feeling satisfied with how the time was spent or with the task itself. This takes energy too, and just like physical friction from resistance, it burns up some of the energy turned toward the task itself. Wastes energy. Pulls the action in other directions, and in a very real way separates you from who you are by spinning a web of illusion around your action.

"I did the best I could," is a statement that reflects whatever judgment is in your mind about the task. It can be said with derision, with humility, with sorrow, with pride, with any kind of emotion, really.  The statement is infused with judgment. There could be an unspoken sense of "under the circumstances" that holds a form of apology, or excuse, or blame, or self-judgment. There might be a subtext that describes a wish to have accomplished more, or the idea that someone else would have done more or better.

When you put your undivided attention into a task it isn't about "best" of anything, it is what it is. It can be a big shift to be comfortable with doing what you are doing, and not ranking what you are doing.
This is authentic action, what could be called, "right action." Full on engagement with an open mind, not a judging mind. The way this feels is not compromised by mixed internal messages and scattered judgments of the self or others now or in the past tense. This is being present in the moment, as Thich Nhat Hahn says so simply, "wash the dishes to wash the dishes."

Doing what you are doing without internal conflict releases energy towards the task that otherwise gets subverted into judgments and resistance. Doing what you are doing builds the muscles of mindfulness that keep you present in the moment in which you are actually living. Doing what you are doing literally turns everyday life into a moving meditation, of focused attention and open possibilities of being who you are.

Experiments Fail, This Moment Never Does

Since January 2013 I've been vegan minus oils and wheat gluten. This has enlivened my creativity in the kitchen, since I love to eat and the possibilities with these ingredients seem endless. The hard part is trying to make something that I used to eat full of things I no longer eat. This seems to encapsulate so many of the problems we make for ourselves.

This may sound like a kitchen story but it is a yoga story. Everything I do is an experiment, if an experiment is an action within the context of the known and the unknown. In any given moment, all I have is what my mind tells me. Like walking in a maze, the more familiar  I can be with the false turns and the dead ends, the more quickly and smoothly I can adjust my path to keep the path opening up ahead. Otherwise I can spend half the day, or the whole day, stuck in a cul-de-sac of judgment and that feeling of unworthiness will color all else. Without willingness to see the truth, there will be no growth or improvement next time, no way to duplicate a success, or avoid the same cause of a disappointment.  The easiest way to do this is to know my own tendencies and understand the conditional nature of my own reactions.

This really came in to focus with my blueberry muffin project one morning, which led directly to a blueberry scone project to change things for the better, both of which failed to produce anything resembling a baked blueberry treat I would have made in the past. Not only did the project not satisfy that goal, but eating the results gave me a stomach ache. On top of that, it was the first time I put together a blog post for my eat2thrive blog and literally deleted it after posting it. The muffins, my breakfast, and the blog post were all failures. It was no surprise that this put a damper on my mood, yet that's just where the surprise came. I could see the mood happen and let it come, and then let it go, without taking it personally.

In a yoga practice there are times when what went fine yesterday does not go well today. Our mind sets us up with hopes and expectations, with fears and roadblocks. It helps when we see this and acknowledge it. It's not enough to say, "I don't know how it will come out." It is important to fully see that it is fine to try and not know, and that this not knowing might mean something delicious or something disappointing on the road to figuring out how to make something delicious. It is the steps and stages necessary in an experiment to see what results are produced by which actions. In this way the moment is always fulfilling its best potential. Engrossed in the choices, awaiting the outcome, tasting the results, and revising the plans, all of these are complete, each in their own moment. The cloud of disappointment may come and go as the first muffin is eaten. The choice to let the inner critic have a field day, that's another matter. To see how we twist that outcome into more than the sum of its parts, is to see how we subject ourselves to our own patterns of judgment and expectation.

That turned out to be the most rewarding result of the whole blueberry muffin project. This ability to observe the mind, the mood, the pattern, and the escape from the traps, gave me a lovely day even with a triple strike out to start.  I am already scheming on the next variations to try in the puzzle of an oil-less, egg-less, gluten-free blueberry muffin.

Finding Right Speech: Traps of Blame & Shame

Recently subjected to verbal rants disguised as opinions or information, passionate distortions and hurtful jokes, I have felt terribly trapped and upset. I suffered for days from reverberations and dissonances. I hung my head in sorrow, coming to know that as offensive as it all sounded to me, as painful as it was to hear "a nice person" speak so mean, so blind, so destructive; the same was also in me. I, too, have spoken without thinking that I was forcing someone else to swallow my words. I, too, have been passionate in my opinions, pushing others into silence about their own experiences or feelings. I, too, have assumed too much without grounding, have sought an object upon which to blame a frightening outcome, have wanted to make others feel responsible for a set of conditions resulting from behaviors or choices. Being human and verbal, I, too, have felt and done these things.

I know that I live in a world that makes some human beings into property. I know that I live in a world where people believe they can own land, displacing natural habitats and tolerating that others are homeless. I live in a world where essential resources are being bought and sold all the time for profit. The truth is that these are all conditions, not finite, not infinite, just conditional. Speech also reflects the conditional moment. It is here that I can cultivate Right Speech, one of the aspects of the Eight-fold path of yoga practice.

Patterns of behavior can be recognized and understood. Opinions and blame, hate and disrespect, aggression and fear are all conditional. It is this, in part, that unifies all of us human beings -- with specific conditions, we have specific reactions or responses. Once seen, these conditions can be recognized, and reactions can be seen for what they are -- reactions. Once seen, these reactions can also be understood and the root causes can be seen and recognized too. Not everything can be changed, but much can be, and sometimes simply seeing things as they are is enough to change the conditions and enable a choice of reaction.

Listening is part of speaking. I heard my neighbor speak of so many others as flawed and wrong and stupid and mean. I heard my neighbor separate himself from others as though he plays no part in decisions and choices, relationships and actions around him. I hear him sounding helpless, in a way reviling this helplessness, fearing for the future and bemoaning his inability to solve the problems he sees -- just as he blames others for this. This is what I hear when he faults the inequity of a nearby neighbor's action, or the greed of a business or ineffectiveness of a government, or the beliefs of people in another land. It is his pain I hear when he makes a derogatory joke about people he does not know; he is ill at ease in the world in which he sees himself.

It is suffering I hear, and it is this suffering that I feel for days. I think now that this suffering is mine because, in fact, we are not separate, my neighbor and I. The urge I felt to respond as he spoke, the deep desire to shout louder than he, to drown out his suffering, to say it is not so: this is my own human condition. To be inflammatory or dismissive is so easy. To denigrate the way others live and think, to find ways to blame and fault are all coping mechanisms inside each of us, as if it protects us from feeling helpless in the face of fear and pain and uncertainty. I can do it too. The insults come out when we see ourselves as separate from "the other," or perhaps we turn hatefully towards ourselves. Jokes prompt that uncomfortable laughter to hide how offensive a remark really is.

To stop it I acknowledge the pain, though this is where I sometimes get stuck - in the pain. Being open to the infinite imperfections in all of us, this is where I begin to feel the true laughter. No one knows the way, no matter how strident they are. There is no path. Just walk and see how it is and is not. The path is under my own foot! I can let words haunt me, or see them as shells in the sand. The ocean and the wind hear nothing separate.

Right speech acknowledges the fullness of silence, seems inclusive of the pain and the laughter, lets the words be like rain falling into a pond -- already the words are the breath. Perhaps right speech is simply allowing the words to be breath, that energy and release shared with all living beings, not something we wish was finite. I cannot stop the pain my neighbor feels, but I can take the precaution of doing no harm. It does not stop by asking him not to speak to me this way or of these things. He will simply carry his pain elsewhere. What I can do is be present, and truly see him there too, knowing and acknowledging that we are not separate. That world that he paints is a world where I also live. I am continuously choosing to water different seeds in myself and my experience, perhaps making a space possible where he can hear his own voice and recognize himself. I cannot avoid myself much as I might like to run away (think of the idea of gaining strength to stay within the context of meditation), and by being present, perhaps I encourage right speech in others as I do in myself.