Peace in Any Form Begins in Us

Take a breath.

Feel how the earth supports you? 

Gravity holding you here,

breathing with all living beings.

Here you are.

I'm here too.

Peace in any form

starts in us.

One breath in, 

One breath out.

That's the way.

Enjoy being loving.

Enjoy being loved.

Enjoy being.

Start with this breath.

Peace.

December 2016

image by Rob Meredith of Back Road Yoga Studio in former granary building, Gilboa, NY

The Beauty in Hidden Structures

We are so busy moving ourselves around in the world,  that, like buildings, we see mostly the facade in passing. One of the gifts of living in a transitional bustling neighborhood of a major city is that there is constant building and tearing down so that, along with facades, all the inner structures are revealed coming and going.

Walking to teach my morning vinyasa class, I was stopped in my tracks by this gorgeous metal support structure. Light pouring through parts of it, it's undulations, shapes, reflective nature and span was strikingly beautiful. Just half a block further on, there is another one of these -- so it isn't any one-of-a-kind marvel at all -- that is covered in all the next stages of building with no light in it, and few of its textures revealed. In a week's time, they will both be invisible above ceilings and below floors.

Class was all about this in a subtle way starting with slow rocking in the hip sockets to feel how the thigh bones seat and mindful rolling through the sitting bone supports, to reveal spinal support even as the weight shifts.  Eventually we moved into standing sequences, unfolding and refolding with the breath, and allowing the hidden structures to do their work deep in the interior of each asana (posture). Yet their presence could still be established, felt, and explored.

Walking to my next class I caught a glimpse of a building being demolished. It has stood for decades, though this demolition has been elongated over the last few years it is active once again. At the moment, the remaining structure is like a gem hiding in its case. I think of the breath, its textures, its stalwart nature, its foundational strength, its subtle delicacies.  How grateful I am to live in this moment in a human form that I can explore at so many levels, cultivating awareness of the details and technicalities and the grand scale of the overall plan!

Ironing: Present but not Perfect

The season of ironing has returned. The school year has begun, the temperatures have dropped slightly and it is time for me to catch up with the ironing pile of my husband's shirts that has waited through the summer, growing slowly. He has always worn cotton shirts, and somehow over the past 25-30 years, I've taken on the task of keeping them somewhat free of wrinkles.

It was with some surprise that having started ironing the back of the fifth shirt, I could not remember if I had completely ironed the back of the previous shirt. Stunned for a moment, I stood, wracking my brain and then I actually went over and looked at it.  I had indeed ironed it. Where the heck was I when that happened that I couldn't remember doing it? Was I on automatic pilot?

No, not on automatic, but more present in the moment than in recording the results and committing my actions to memory. As I am ironing, I am acutely aware of the texture of the fabric under my hand and the weight of the iron, feeling the heat of the steam rising, the breeze from the window. My eyes, hands and mind are synchronized with my breath and my attention is fully on what I am doing. Or so I thought. In fact, my heart is also holding the person for whom I am smoothing out the wrinkles, in some ways encircling the shoulders upon which this placate will rest, envisioning the arms and hands that will emerge from this sleeve, once it is rolled up, as it always is when my husband is in action.

So how can it be that I am so present, yet I've finished one shirt and begun another without memory and certainty?  Perhaps it is not the goal of my action to remember ironing the back of each shirt. The goal of my action is to act in the moment, transmitting my love for my husband, and this is what engages me. My physical attention is fully in the present moment, observing the weave of the fabric beneath my hand and the implications of the back pleat for my task. Will the shirt be perfectly ironed because of my full attention? Perhaps not, especially since there is quite a pile and I have evolved a speedy treatment! If I wanted perfectly ironed shirts, I would ask my husband to do it as he is the one who attachs to the specificity of physical results. This is part of what makes his woodwork and sculpture so beautifully crafted. Yet even without attachment to perfection, the task is accomplished, and my goal satisfied.

In the moment of ironing, I am accomplishing a repetitive quotidien task, acting out of love, savoring textures and sensations of being and doing, and relaxing my grip on perfection and judgment.  For me this is yoga off the mat, and I am grateful that my attention was called into question by my thinking mind so that I could see my action for what it truly is. How many times in a seated meditation does the mind ask, "what are you doing? where are you?" and answers itself, "I've taken my seat and I am meditating."  This is harder to count than even counting the breath itself!

Being: Day Lilies for One Day

All day long, from the very start, I consider the lilies and am filled with amazement and wonder. It's not just that they are incredibly beautiful, so many colors, interacting with the light as it changes all day long. No, it's not that really. It is this inevitable truth that they open these insanely perfect blooms for just this day and then, that's it. If it's a rainy day, well, that's their day. If it's burning hot or windy or full of bugs or deer eating lilies for lunch or whatever, that's their day. And they bloom their very best, regardless.

I've tried to capture them with my digital camera but the colors are not right. These lilies are alive and blooming, I mean specifically, these lilies are totally saturated in the very act of blooming all day long. How can any frozen second capture that? Like this breath, or this eye blinking? A living moment.

And in the twilight of their one day, they are luminous. Some of them are already closing their petals having had their full day of possibilities. Some of them are just beginning to peel open that first petal at dusk in preparation for full bloom at sunrise.  Some bloom into the night. When dead-heading lilies early in the morning (breaking off the spent blooms to make more space for the opening ones), one must be very attentive to those that close in the morning.  They can look so much as though they are just opening.

I can only imagine this feeling of being completely in fullness in every moment. That this is the day for me. Yet it is true that this IS the day for me, and for you, and this day and this day. It seems so wildly unbelievable that we can have a chance to really live in every moment, day after day, when these remarkable and unique lilies only get one. Just one day. Live the one you're in.

bud opening, bloom closing

Transition is a State of Mind

So much emphasis is placed on college applications that the whole last half of high school is colored by this. Once accepted, there is another phase of accommodating all the changes taking place in moving to a new way of operating, often in an entirely different location. Once there's a rhythm established, many people start taking semesters abroad or as interns, getting part time jobs and turn their face towards what happens after graduation. Even semesters starting and ending, summer sessions and work study jobs coming and going, all of this seems like an enormous sequence of change upon change upon change.

It is much the same as a child learns to move in the world from sitting, crawling, standing, that hand-over-hand cruising, to walking, running, climbing (not always in that order!). To children, adults seem complete and finished as though all the pieces are set and the patterns established. To some degree this is a way of operating that many people try to adopt, sticking to their patterns, hanging on tight to who they think they are, or want to be.

But life is entirely transitional. Right down to the cells in the body, we are an ever shifting, changing organization of bits and systems. We live only in this moment, and whether we call it transitional or not, this is that moment.

When we tell ourselves we are in transition, or classify someone else as in a "transitional stage," we are emphasizing our idea that they are developing something and will not remain the way they are now.  This reflects our opinion or impression that perhaps that what is happening now is not sustainable, or that it is only a temporary way of operating or feeling. Certainly we comfort ourselves by saying that the deepest moments of intense grief are temporary, and we warn each other to enjoy the early days of childrearing as they "go so fast." What happens in the mind when we accept that every moment is such a moment, that we are constantly developing and can not remain the way we are now?

I stopped my class in mid stream in their sun salutations (Surya Namaskar), a series of yoga asana that are strung together in a fairly routinized way, though in my class you can never figure what I'm going to suggest. Each student realized that they had not placed their body as carefully as they would have if they had known they would have to stay there ... they had defined this sequence of postures as a flow of transitional movements, and discovered that this had occurred without much intelligence, relying predominantly on pattern and habit.  Yoga is a practice fundamentally of unifying, "yoking," awareness with the actions of being.

Waking up awareness is one of the darts that I throw at the balloon of habit in the mind. Cultivating conscious attention to include even the most mundane, momentary bits of life is where the vibrancy and depth of being resides. The yoga asana practice is a mechanism that can awaken an alert body and  mind, and help develop and train this level of consciousness and awareness without efforting. It takes focused attention to see that "transition" includes every moment, and that in every moment we can be completely present in the experience. We may never visit this place again, or be 19 years old, or feel confused about this particular thing, or be as broken hearted, or as proud and happy, or whatever it is. Those living with cancer know this feeling of uncertainty as a constant, rejecting or accepting the moment in all its fullness, again and again.  Being fully present in this moment is a state of mind, and thinking that this moment is just on its way to some other moment is also a state of mind, that leaches some of the potential from "now" and projects it onto "then."

Convenient to explain uncertainty and the unknown as a transition if we are not sure of what is happening and want to grasp at the next moment (or the remembered moment) as more settled or resolved or successful, etc.  This, too, is the mind setting a scene for the story we tell ourselves. It is still only in this moment that we are here, living. Impermanence is  the way of all living beings. Just look around you.

Life is not a Rehearsal: Each Moment is the Performance

Practicing, whether a musical instrument, painting, asana or other activity of mind and body, is a process of building stamina, skill, pattern, awareness, and technique. Yoga is not different in many ways from any of these other pursuits. A spiritual practice or a modality of scientific inquiry both benefit from repeating the walk along the pathways of the mind, in some ways codifying these movements into a chosen range of adaptations. We shape the way we think, our thoughts shape the way we react, act, feel. It is in this inquiry that we discover our selves and the world again and again.

Even in the practicing, though there are imperfections and sometimes struggles, it is not a rehearsal in order to get it right. The practicing is in itself the performance, but with a different audience or outcome. It is the self that performs, and the self who is transformed by the performance.

There is no moment when you are not your self. Even in moments when you might say, "I am not myself today," you are present only in that moment as the self you actually are, feeling off kilter. Our idea can shift about who we think we are, and we construct the ways in which we imagine we are seen by others.  As with playing music, it sounds beautiful to one person, boring to another, intriguing to someone and intolerable to someone else.  It exists only in the moment that you create it, and though you might record it, it lives then as a recording, played in a moment, reacted to in that moment. It is no longer your life, but a product of your life.

So with this in mind, it doesn't take much to see that what you say, the face you make, the food you put in your mouth, the way you touch another, the place you rest your eyes, all make up the life you actually live. There is no moment out-of-mind, even in the flow of ecstatic creativity that might bring out the music or the art, the breath or the dance, this is your moment. It is in this context that I contemplate the principles of right action and right speech.

Once I was in my dad's painting studio looking at some new work and he said, "Oil painting is like a rehearsal where you can keep going back and redo, or undo, or rethink, and remake; where watercolor is a performance with every stroke of the brush, this is it."

Being present in each moment is like living a watercolor, where each movement of the breath is the performance of life.  Is there pressure in this? I don't feel it that way. I see this spreads out any pressure into a general sense of upholding personal responsibility in all things, including sharing responsibilities with everyone else for the world we are making together, and accepting responsibility for the range of feelings that arise. This is not about perfection, or blocking out the "bad," but rather giving up the idea of "good" and "bad" and being here, in it right now as it is.

Spring Buds - The Mind and Its Unfolding

How do we know when we see a bud whether it will open into a bloom or into leaves? Some plants go straight to the bloom, drawing in the energy and starting the fertilization process that the leaves will feed throughout the warm season.  Other plants uncurl leaf clusters that draw in the energy the plant needs to produce the buds that later produce the seeds to continue propagation of the plant.  Each species in its own way puts forth the possibilities and brings out what it needs. But there are unforeseen circumstances! Too much rain, too cold temperatures, and the vagaries of wind and location can challenge any individual bud, whether bloom or leaf.

And there are so many all of a sudden! One day of warm sunny weather and the world around us begins reflecting a burst of energy. It almost seems that the sun transfers this energy directly through its heat! Yet we might walk by the most exquisitely blooming purple plum tree without noticing any of the thousands of blooms. Our thoughts can keep us worrying about how long it will take to get where we are going, or planning out our errands, or replaying the scene we just left.  Perhaps one magnolia bloom catches the eye and for one instant we stop to admire this moment of blossoming.

Isn't the mind just like this? Some thoughts catch our attention, so many others flow past while our focus is on something else?  Each of us budding and blooming again and again, whether seen or unnoticed, we add to the world around us.  How do we know if this bud will be bloom or leaf? Must we attach so much importance and meaning, judgment and expectation upon that uncurled object?

Closing your eyes, imagine a bud. As your mind drifts away from this, just bring your attention back to the bud. As with softening the focus of your eyes, allow your mind to focus on this bud softly. Feel the presence of possibility in the bud along with accepting the idea that whether leaf or bloom, the bud is intact and complete.  Allow the bud to connect to all its sources ... water, rain, sun, twig, branch, trunk, roots.  Allow the bud to connect to all its processes ... opening, losing petals, dropping leaves, crushed on the sidewalk, washing into the street drains, composting into the earth. Keep your attention on the bud as you allow this broad view of interconnectedness to hover around the bud. It might feel a bit like staying focused on the breath while you are still aware of the sounds of the street, and the general sensations of the body.

Not closing off from the widest experiences of being, continue to bring your attention to the bud.  Releasing this focus after a few minutes (5-20), soften your eyelids, and allow them to part.

Perhaps you will continue to see the bud in yourself, and others around you. Full of potential, unattached to judgment and goal, yet fully connected to sources of energy and possibility.

If you crave certainty let death be that, for now.

If you crave certainty let death be that for now, for once you achieve that you will see that it is not the goal you imagined but just another moment passing.

Finding the middle path is not a grip on everything. It is like walking with open palms while you feel the gentle swinging of your hips. Pile up desires like clean laundry, used and cleaned for reuse. Then hang them on the line in the sun. Feel the wood of the clothespin. The tree roots, the hand on the machine spitting out little springs, the pleasure of the grip of pin to line that will hold desire as it flaps in the wind, changing colors.

How does it feel to see them there? Beautiful as they hang and flap. Separate from you. All lined up for you to continue in the endless cycle of craving.

Where are your feet, your hands, your hips now? Undressed from the layers of desire. Weightlessness of the middle path poses a paradox. How can you clutch at your foundation and reach outwardly when there is only this shimmering self, naked and aglow?

I like to use the words "find" and "allow" when I teach yoga.   I invite students to come with curiosity and acceptance. I know how hard this is and that we would rather wrap ourselves in the beautiful desires that mark us and make us resemble our expectations.  Freedom doesn't wear such specificity nor can it. As I see my outer self flapping in the sun, making its own shadows, I can feel the sweetness of being without all that.

Death can be seen as the ultimate degradation or the sublime elevation, the cause of suffering or the release from suffering. Perhaps it is a mirage we can use to teach us about the nature of impermanence and the clutching for certainty that so often run our emotional and psychological programs. Steve Jobs spoke eloquently about his own mortality as the predominant inspiration to make the most of his life.

What good does it do to accept impermanence? Well as long as we resist this idea that the moment is the truth of our life, we clutch at something else. We look back, we worry about what is to come, we contort ourselves and others with judgments based on what we think of this or that. 


Accepting impermanence softens the fear of loss, the fear of illness and eventual death. This is fundamentally where suffering comes from, according to yogic and Buddhist philosophies. If I need to be certain of something, let it be death for now. This will give me enough desire and craving to pin on the line and I will not care much whether the pins come loose in the wind.

Fearing the unknown Self

I remember years ago wondering what would happen to me, to my life, to the people around me, if I acted on the deepest impulses of my heart. I felt a yearning and the impossibility of giving it all up. I was presenting myself with a false choice at that point, that I would have to renounce all my ongoing connections and commitments in order to meet my heart's urge to be of service. This was a perversion of a romantic ideal of giving up everything to offer oneself to the greater good.

Meditation can feel like this too in the beginning. There is an idea that we must somehow give up our thoughts, our patterns of mind and habits in order to open this other mode that will be pure and somehow better. If that were the case no one could meditate. It is actually through quieting the reactive mind that we can see our mind work, find the patterns that support us and the ones that thwart us. Finding the self already operating and being curious about that is one of the richest parts of meditation or asana practice.

Meditation and yoga can offer an open hearted approach to oneself. These are not fundamentally problem solving strategies, not memory aids. There are possibilities for seeing personality in its ongoing negotiations. When we avoid a few minutes of putting the self at the center of our own attention we might be reflecting our fear- what will happen if what I experience changes the way I see myself? What if I am revealed as a fake? What if I can no longer rely on the patterns that have held me together?

Well, it's just like that idea that you have to leave everything behind in order to be true and good. Your experiences in yoga and meditation will add to the toolbox you can use to do what matters to you, and allow you to see the patterns that support you as well as the ones that subvert your energy.

You are not a fake. Even if you feel mixed feelings or conflicts, even if you don't always tell the truth or know what you actually feel, you are not fake. All this is the surface where winds stir the water with mud, or build up momentum with wave action. What is beneath all of that is basic goodness. Nothing fake about it. Experiences have taught you this and that, circumstances confront you and you respond, based on reactive patterns of mind and emotional histories. Doesn't it add more to life to see this, accept it, and go on with a greater awareness of your choices?

In meditation and yoga practice we have a chance to see this as a built structure. we can keep building, remodel, admire, and understand. We don't tear it all down, nor do we judge what we find. It is scary to imagine that we don't really know ourself, or that what we do know will turn out to be terrible. What happens is quite different than that. There is a basic strength in your good heart from which internal shame, fear or pain,  physical ineptitude or habits can be held with grace and possibly even good humor.

If one leg is shorter than the other, perhaps investigation can reveal how to stabilize the pelvis and spine given that truth. This is not "correcting" oneself but supporting and nurturing the self as it actually is. See what is so right now, and use that to offer freedom from struggle, increase possibility rather than define your limitations.

We can fear our self as an unknown, as the undiscovered fake, or a fragile construction ready to fall apart. The first most remarkable experiment in the practice is to stay with this moment, this one moment, and in that monent experience that you are intact with everything you need.

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.

No Contradiction: Routines, Patterns & Alertness

I remember the arguments with my kids about getting their homework done. It seemed so simple to me that if they would just routinize it, it would get done, leaving them free to do the other things they wanted to do. The more they resisted it, the longer it sat before them, denying them the possibility to move on.  Isn't it the same with all distraction, procrastination and anxiety? It blocks the way between what we think we have to get done, and what we'd rather be doing. In that case, I do think that creating a routine can help.  It is partly for this reason that many people support the idea of setting aside a specific time of day for a meditation practice, or signing up for a yoga class (or practicing at home) at the same time of day every week or every day.  Knowing that it is on the schedule, that a place has been made for it, can stream line the decision making. Make the decision once, and then just follow through again and again.

At the same time, one of the revelations of meditation and yogic practice is the awareness of patterns that we have formed and that guide our behaviors mostly without our knowing of them. Cultivating awareness allows us to run into them quite directly and by seeing them, we gain insight into ourselves, into the traps we set and the strengths we have.  Perhaps it is as simple as noticing that in a seated posture, we nearly always cross our right leg over the left. Simply seeing this can help us understand why our right inner hamstrings are so tight, or why we tend to pull our low back muscles on the left. Seeing this can help us remember to mindfully cross left over right, gradually undoing the habitual training of muscles and joints into a more symmetrical and supported condition.

All patterns do not require "undoing." Knowing that our digestive system works better on smaller amounts more frequently, or by starting the day with plain water before that cup of coffee or tea, can be very useful and can protect us from unnecessarily struggles. Knowing that we tend to blame external causes when we are late for something, or get anxious about things the night before, are patterns that can be addressed and in many cases assuaged just by acknowledging them as temporal behavior and not permanent. We may see that this doesn't help us deal with anything, and that other kinds of behavioral steps can be put in place to ease the way and change the pattern. A step can be as simple as setting a timer to get you off the computer in time to get your coat on and catch the train, rather than missing that train and arriving late. Routinize a few minutes of meditation (even 5- 10 minutes) in the evening before going to bed can begin to dissipate that night-before anxiety, allowing you to sleep better and see the next morning with more equanimity.

Everything is happening in this very moment. Nothing tomorrow is happening now, nor is anything from yesterday happening now. Sounds ridiculous, but our minds and our feelings can be quite attached to this way of thinking -- about what we thought happened or will/might happen. We can be consumed by our reactions to something that is not happening now, and literally wipe out all the possibilities in this moment. I'm not just talking about the mind drifting in the middle of a conversation when you stop hearing your companion and are startled back into the moment by their silent pause, waiting for your response to something you actually didn't hear.  I'm talking about right now -- not noticing the slump in your shoulders or the effort of your eyes as you read this. The actual condition of balance in your body, the sweetness of the light around you, appreciation of the speed with which your mind absorbs all this information and catalogs it, making meaning or discarding it.

Alertness can help you gain the power of mindfulness. You can cultivate awareness in this moment, and put routines in place that support you, for example using abdominal muscles to help stabilize your pelvis and support your low back when you sit at the computer, or committing to that 10-class card so you can just sign in and go to yoga every Monday morning to start your week. Awareness allows you to acknowledge the patterns that bind you to behaviors that cause distress, like turning out your right foot when you walk which slowly stresses your hip and knee over time, or speaking over someone who is speaking to you because you are anxious to be heard. Once you learn to be alert, you have options. Being present in this moment, you can use this moment, and establish routines and patterns that support you, rather than trap you.

In Death Shyamdas Reinforces the Purpose of Life

On January 20, 2013, a beloved person in the world of bhakti yoga, kirtan and scholarship in the ancient texts of yogic life, vanished in a motorcycle accident. There were events on his calendar stretching well into the future, and memories in the minds of uncountable thousands from his presence in the past.

His was a practice of devotion. In this he was precise -- translating seminal texts from ancient languages in order to deeply understand them and as a byproduct share them with the rest of the English speaking world. In this he was spiritual -- chanting the 108 names of his beloved with no boundaries between his sense of self and the beloved.  In this he was an ordinary traveler -- juggling his busy life, his devotional practices and his own practical requirements like the rest of us.

Each moment of life is life itself. When the vacant body is all that remains and the spirit has departed, it is shocking to the rest of us. How vivid the lesson that it is only in this moment, THIS MOMENT, that our life unfolds. Chanting, studying, smiling at each other, tasting the food, seeing the mist, feeling the sorrow, opening the heart.

Shyamdas continues his voyage, and his teachings. A friend was hoping that he had the name of the beloved on his lips as he departed. We can't know about that until it happens to us, but I carry this strange sense that he spilled open beyond all borders in that moment, when defining a name or a beloved ceases to have meaning.

Let's live, shall we? Deeply, fully, and right now. Dig in! Open up! When our moment comes - young, old, well, sick, anticipated or unforeseen - let it be a joyous celebration for those who remain in the body, present.

For books of his translations: http://shyamdas.com/books/

Present Moment: abiding with uncertainty

Each moment crosses all the boundaries of time and space. It's a little bit like stage fright, this feeling of not knowing what will happen and caring very much about doing my best. Living with that can heighten anxiety, complacency, hyperactivity; creating a spiral of uselessness and unworthiness. In any moment, what have you done? what have you done? (How will you be measured? valued? seen?)

Acknowledging this anxiety allows me to unravel how much I worry about what others think of me, trace my need for usefulness, and at the same time see how constantly I judge myself. It is not that hard, once opening that up, to begin simplifying. Literally,  I return my energy to the universe like a borrowed library book. This reinforces my responsibility to fully engage and use that energy, knowing it is endless and recycled.

My deepest happiness comes from drawing on the authentic in myself, and when that is my source of action, I feel that I do less harm. Not waiting for anything, just being in it thoroughly, whatever it is, in this moment -  a definition of effortless being, even with physical or mental effort in the action itself. (There is a moment at waking from sleep as the mind and body reintroduce themselves, yet all the while "being" is ceaseless, and seamless. This is not a mechanical arrangement of breath and heart beat, but a deeper cultivation of awareness.)

This authenticity comes from a well of basic goodness in me, and serves as a protection even with my pockets of ignorance. (Ignorance is like a blind spot where I have yet to learn to see, from which I operate on assumptions and projections, creating illusion and taking it as truth. It seems a certain amount of this is inevitable, yet I keep working on finding the edge of it.)

Uncertainty is possibility. Uncertainty is acknowledging fear of the unknown. Uncertainty is curiosity writ large. Uncertainty is not ignorance. Uncertainty is balancing in the moment, abiding.

Satisfaction seems to imply judgment, as in being enough, measured against something else and easily deflated.  It is contentment (Santosha) that implies acceptance with gratitude of whatever we have or do not have. This is not mere semantics, it is the practice of abiding with uncertainty.

Diet Change, The Moment is Now

So after months of hearing about the film Forks Over Knives, my husband and I watched it. The next morning, as I was making our oatmeal, he told me that he was going to give up meat, dairy, oils, empty grain and sweetened products.  He didn't want to wait until his cholesterol was too high and his arthritis more painful. He just wanted to treat himself by eliminating potential causes of his health problems.

Honestly, we've eaten a vegetable centric diet for the last 10 years. We grill a lot in the summer; love yogurt, good olive oil, and cheeses of all nations.  And we cook every day.

Even so, this shift feels true and transformative. It is simply what it is. We eat our home made vegetable sushi rolls, fava bean parsley salad with lemon and olive bits, rye crisp sesame crackers with humus and a piece of red pepper, and don't miss a thing. I roasted our oyster mushrooms in the oven, and cooked the herbed shallots and zucchini in a smidgen of water. 

Did we go over and over this decision? No. Had we quietly been preparing for this over the last several years? Probably. Are we vegan? Not really.  I think we are living truthfully. Making our own inquiry, seeing where it leads.  I wonder if I will use up the turkey soup stock in my freezer? 

This feels very much like my yoga practice. Many familiar elements, always under analytical scrutiny but also flowing with the wind.  Evolution is not a plan, it is a way of being alive. So we lighten our footprints, honor the vast array of amazing nutrients out there, and feel delighted to be able to share the adventure.  Who knows what the next moment brings? (My husband offers me a handful of peanuts!)

I've never done a "cleanse" but I have a feeling I just signed up for the longer term clean up.

Empty Attic: No Object, No Fix, No Problem

I am living in the lap of luxury, teaching and practicing yoga and meditating. I have heat when it is cold, I have food when I am preparing to feed my family, and various means to provide for holidays and birthday celebrations. I can walk to my work, which has become an offering from my essential self using my energy in ways that gives what I have to give and brings back to me what I need. This is not a manipulated view of my life, but one that reflects the truth of my daily experience.

People I love have deep on-going struggles, friends of mine are suffering with terminal illnesses and the attendant treatments, entire nations in the Middle East are losing the ground upon which civil government stands, and many people have lost their homes and livelihoods in New York City, Haiti and the Philippines. This is not a manipulated view of my world, but one that reflects the truth of my daily experience.

How to position myself to accommodate these truths? The first step is to stop attaching to a particular definition of what is good or bad about what I perceive; the second is to approach each aspect of that with an open heart that accepts what I perceive without assigning blame; the third is to nurture that open heart from a state of gratitude so that all the possibilities appear rather than a one-solution frame of mind (this includes allowing the feelings to arise rather than clamp down on this one and pretend that one is the good one).

I will not cure the causes of cancer, not stop the pain of personal loss, nor create a plan for civil society or dispel confusion even in one young sweet mind. I do understand that each of us has a life span, and that we cannot know its length or purpose. We use energy every day, turning towards goals, tasks and practices to provide what we imagine as necessities, satisfactions, support, and sometimes generosity. To a large degree, we do this in whatever context we find ourselves with more or less angst or joy.

Here in the last weeks of 2012 I see my operating fundamentals are: not attaching to, grasping at or hoarding meanings, goals or objects; seeing situations as causes and reactions rather than as a duality of good or bad; remembering again and again that gratitude in this moment will lead me out of confusion into clarity.

In this way I can enjoy my mysterious little part here on earth. Living in a human body fraught with its own foibles, applying my thinking as I have learned and relearned and unlearned, and surrounded by the context into which I stumbled by my birth, growth, and connections to other people. So easily we slip into the space made for us as the children of these people, living in this place, growing up here, and having these good and bad experiences.  Eventually I have come to see that all drifts away like mist, and while still honoring my ancestors and my own experiences in earlier contexts, I have much greater freedom in the moment than I ever imagined.  All the stuff clutched in my mind, attic, closet. barn, or basement can make its way back into the world without adding or subtracting from me.

Sentimental, Objects Gripping the Heart

My shelves are full of books I haven't read in years, yet as I consider them, they seem to represent my life, my experiences, my hopes, and so many stages of my growth. Less personal than diaries perhaps but in some ways just as revealing, my bookshelves really carry weight. Literally. How many have I given away, or traded in at second hand bookstores?  Like the changing seasons, I change the flavor of my reading-in-progress pile, but for the most part the shelves stay the same. I am attached to them even though the vast majority of these books simply collect dust.

A dear friend gave me this book. I read this one in the middle of a hard winter in my sophomore year at college. These were my introductions to the existence of Japanese writings; these to the deep currents in Russian literature; these to the lyrical qualities in English poetry; these to the myths and stories that form  gender awareness, this was important in my pursuit of yogic practices. These were my grandfather's. This, from my uncle's shelf. These were my children's favorites once they began reading. Here is that poet whose name I never remember, and then this one that my husband gave me ... on and on.

I stare at the bindings and allow whatever is evoked to arise. Not quite ready to clear these shelves though I've traveled and lived elsewhere without them. I can conjure up the same feelings simply by thinking about them. How much weight must I carry to hold moments of memory,  feelings about people, ideas of myself in times past? This tiny tee shirt that my son outgrew 23 years ago is still folded in the back of a drawer in a room where he no longer lives. Four delicately cut glasses, that once belonged to my husband's grandmother, stand in the back row of my kitchen shelf. They are designed for some specific drink that I can't identify and yet I feel the tug of his childhood memories. There's that little dish tucked into a top drawer of my own dresser, the small shallow ceramic where my mother once deposited tiny sea shells and beach stones.

This poignant remembering does have such a richness, like a special caramelized sauce, heated by the heart, and sweetened by memory.  I can pour it liberally over anything, anywhere. The senses respond, the emotions rise. On the one hand my experience seems deeper, but in truth, it is a repeat of a pattern of responses. And yet all of this is fantasy, just my mind making a story for me. These objects, books, even ideas, can trigger memories that are pleasant or unpleasant. Essentially I can use them or not in this way, making choices about how I remember something or use my feelings to influence this moment in my life. Do I want to spend my time in a web of reaction, replaying feelings and a story line that might change or harden with time, or can I free myself from this layer of attachment and be present now?

It seems the sentimental object is a small trap.  Once I see it, I can step around the quicksand or jump in with both feet. Having this choice definitely loosens the grip of reactivity on my feelings and behavior, and frees me to see more than that one story, understand beyond the repeated pattern, and be present. I love reading a book more than once, discovering it anew,  not measuring how much I missed or forgot, and yet savoring the familiar. I do not try to relive my earlier experience of reading that book, but allow myself a fuller, layered experience of it. It is not a sentimental journey but a new adventure.

internal discipline: not a routine matter

Every day I brush my teeth twice. I've done this for at least 50 years, not able to account for the first 8 in which I bet I only brushed in the morning since dental hygiene didn't have the ubiquitous commercial value it has since accrued. In a way, teeth brushing is part of the routine of my days no matter where I am, or what is on my schedule, both of which fluctuate regularly.  I'm present when I'm brushing, noticing what's going on, but for the most part I'm just getting it done before heading off into the day or off to bed.  This is not a matter of internal discipline, but of external routine put into place for my dental health and sense of wellbeing... I am not a hermit after all, and my mouth has a part in my social behavior.

Meditation is not the same as brushing teeth, though I've had lots of people give advice to set a specific time of day and to routinize the behavior of taking the seat of mindfulness.  I know others for whom this is a way of life, but for me at this stage anyway, the routinizing of time of day isn't happening. Surely I could schedule meditation like tooth brushing and just get it done, but it isn't in my life as a daily obligation.

Meditation is, for me, an exquisite exercise in internal discipline, a matter of choice. I do not sit in order to say, "check, done that." I do not sit in order to see how long I can sit today as opposed to how long I sat yesterday or last week or last month. There is no measure for me, no goal, no established procedure.  There is no amount of sitting that gets me where I have to go.  Many might argue that mine is not a discipline at all, being so open ended, so haphazard. Separating routine from discipline seems to be part of my practice.

Unpredictability, curiosity and the swinging pendulum of joy and sorrow all drive my practice into its daily form. Taking the time when it presents itself, and organizing my days so that that time does present itself are tandem skill sets that are always in development. Failure in either of these is deeply felt and motivates me more. Like bringing yoga off the mat, this brings meditation off the cushion for me.

My practice is fueled by unpredictability, curiosity and that swinging pendulum. It is not a book that I pick up and find my bookmark and begin from where I left off.  All I ever have is this very moment. My tight left quadriceps might rule the world one morning, or my reactivity to the daily news, or the catching of my breath in my mid lungs, or the expansion of my energy beyond my skin. There is no way to predict the multiplex of movies that will be running in my mind, or the syncopated rhythms of the world around me. I have no interest in avoiding those elements, but rather seek it all out of a deep curiosity for the entirety of being present.

I am not attempting to psychoanalyze myself for 30 minutes,  to placate my emotions for 20 minutes, neutralize my political leanings in 10 minutes, nor solve my schedule conflicts in 5 minutes of silent sitting.  I never hold still in my seat; awareness of my breath moves me, continuously reminding me that I am alive in this very moment.

Developing this level of internal discipline is a great challenge, but that is what calls me to my practice. I don't expect to be a better person, or even a calmer person, as I have set aside these along with other expectations as my practice develops. My most cherished moments are the ones with no expectations and no boundaries, no interpretations of what arises, no way to leave off and bookmark it.  Success for me in this expenditure of time and energy is, I suppose, how I continue living my life fueled by just this unpredictability, curiosity and my own swinging on the pendulum of joy and sorrow. Meditation has intensified my awareness, eliminating many lines I had thought were boundary lines, as they either vanished into the mist, or emerged as entirely different structural elements.

My little local yoga studio, Shambhala Yoga & Dance Center, in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, (where I lead a 20 minute meditation from 5-5:20pm on Tuesdays before teaching a beginners yoga class) is planning to embark on its first meditation intensive experience. Several of us who teach at the Center are considering this and preparing ourselves to help structure and support a month of days of meditation practice among our fellow teachers and students. This preparation has me looking at my own practice from a more structural point of view, and thinking about how to share this ever-beginning again practice with others.  I am grateful for the spotlight on this in my own life, and am interested to see what turns up!

Money & Watering Asparagus

No one talked about money when I was a kid growing up. In truth, our family just made ends meet on the salary of my dad's job as a meteorologist/government scientist while my mom tried to keep painting with 3 small complicated kids. I didn't have much stuff and wasn't involved with spending money or managing it within the family. Oh well I did get my ten cent weekly allowance to help me learn about money, and saved all but a few pennies and opened a savings account in a local bank just as I was expected to do. That bank that actually went bankrupt when I was about 10 or 11, and they didn't have Federal Deposit Insurance so I lost the sum total of my childhood wealth - $25 as I recall. The pennies I spent went to penny candy, the memory of which remains as I can feel it right now, as though standing in front of the array of boxes and jars: this one 2 for a penny, these 5 for a penny, these 2 pennies each. Knowing that whatever I chose would be candy, knowing that I could only have as many as my 5 pennies would buy, these were the parameters within which I considered packaging, shapes, quantities, and flavors. If my older siblings were along, which one or both invariably were because I was not allowed to walk that far from home without them, there was influence according to their tastes and their ideas of "value." More for the money seemed crucial to them, where I, 5 years younger, didn't always feel that way.

Over time, I was progressively more responsible for myself financially until I was through college, paying my way with summer jobs and part time work, sharing apartments with others, and eventually selling my day times and life effort for one salary or another. As it turned out, my husband was much the same, and we joined forces with a small savings account and frugal habits of home cooking and a tendency to the cheap entertainment of walking around town, foraging in second hand record and book stores and cooking and eating with friends. Then children, then elderly parents, then managing financial affairs for my elders, then losing my parents and inheriting some of those same resources that I had so carefully managed for them.

As I stand at the edge of the asparagus bed with the hose pulled out to nearly its longest extension, I watch the drops fall onto the dry earth. I carefully soak each patch of this rectangle and move the cascade of water to the next section to give the earth time to soak up the moisture before returning to that place a second or third time. Asparagus roots grow from at least a foot deep and spread the crowns in a network close to the surface. Watering the surface is not enough to support the plant, and evaporates in the day's heat.

Broadening my view, I see the edges of the asparagus bed, our cultivated blueberries on one side and the wild raspberries on the other. A bird flits through my range of vision and awakens the realization that I am also perceiving the myriad sounds of birds, the hungry nestlings in the bushes beyond the raspberries. The opening of the downward slope glows in the bright sun, though I stand in the shade of what I know to be a birch tree behind me. I hear its leaves overhead in the breeze. Further behind me is the gravel drive (baking in the sun), the lilies, the wild grass, the road, trees, field, rocky ledge, hill, sky, onward towards where the sun rises and the moon too. I shift the hose to the next dry patch, keeping the center of my focus on soaking the new spears emerging from the bed, and encouraging the roots of the fernlike greens of the spears too thin to pick that have gone on to flower and seed. The muted hills across the valley are like dreams in a ring around me.

Staying focused on what I am actually doing, I am learning to allow my awareness to include what else is also present beyond my own action. What a shift this is from self absorption! In this way I am trying to manage my new condition of having family money that in some ways still feels unreal to me. I've invested most of the money in hopes of providing for a time of life when my husband and I will not be required to trade our time for money. I find that my generosity can express itself in new ways beyond what I can do with my own hands, presence or words, helping others with projects that require funds up front in order to keep on with their missions of building joy and possibility for others. Part of me knows that all I will ever have is living with my choices and offering possibilities to others. How much money changes this is yet to be seen. The biggest change is to offer my husband the possibility that he does not have to continue to earn more money to ensure our future financial safety, which is all an illusion anyway, but which definitely feels more secure with more resources. This is a a huge consequence of our frugal saving, and now the addition of generational savings.

When the asparagus grows too tall, it loses its sweet succulence. I cut it anyway, for the health of the bed, and make broth from the inedible (at least for me) stalks. This is also not something I learned as a child, where we never had a vegetable garden, nor did my mother enjoy cooking (though she loved to eat beautiful fresh foods). My parents were basically first generation of immigrant parents who were not farmers but intellectuals and tradespeople. Probably their grandmothers (or their neighbors) had small kitchen gardens, but that was not what came to America with the next generation. There was an emphasis on intellectual pursuit and freedom of expression, not surprising given the oppression, segregation and limitations set on them from whence they came. There was one branch of cousins that experimented with farm life, attempting to take on agriculture and social structures in the Midwest in the early 20th Century. Mostly it resulted in advanced degrees in scientific fields among the offspring of that clan.

So I stand at the edge of the asparagus bed, feeling sure that the money in the retirement account will be subject to the vagaries of our political and cultural unrest. I am just as sure that the heritage of my ancestors in some way showers down upon the asparagus crowns deep in the earth as I shift my hose onto this quadrant for the third time. The weather has been so hot and dry (blazing wild exuberance and despair in fires out West); the sweet crispness of the raw asparagus is startling and deeply moving. Perhaps the idea of independence is turning away from control towards the freedom to broaden awareness and take in a fuller view. It is this vision that I wish for the people living now. This is their only moment to be awake.

Ahimsa & Non-Attachment

Judgmental thinking is by its nature negative, isn't it? Every time I think, "I ought to be doing x-y-z," or "I can't x-y-z," I am in a small way judging what I am doing. The idea that there is something other than what is so, other than what I am actually doing, that would be "better" for me to do, reeks of wishing I was other than what/who I am. This is harmful to me. It is not the same thing as choosing to do something different; it is negative thinking about what I am doing. It seems small and without substance most of the time, but it reaches deeply into devaluing the self. There is a sense of insufficiency, of making mistakes, that the thought or act is not the "right" thought or act. Attaching judgment like this to the self leaves little room for acceptance and the growth that naturally occurs when those "good/bad/should have" barriers to possibility are left open.

I felt joyous this morning, and noticed that with surprise and amusement since today is the first anniversary of my father's death, one week after my mother's death last year. How was I "supposed" to feel? The sun lit up the dew on the grass, illuminating the delicate petals of the crabapple against the intense blue sky. Images of the hospital room appeared in my memory, of those last hours at my Dad's side, in which we gazed into each other acknowledging the transition taking place. Nodding at this as memory, knowing the physical man is gone, I walked into the kitchen and began cutting the one grapefruit remaining in the refrigerator. It was an unplanned celebration. Every morning my father's morning ritual was just this, a half a grapefruit or a slice of melon depending upon the season. A deep pleasure filled me, relishing being alive as the flavor burst forth in my mouth. I remember him telling me that it was that first bite of grapefruit that would get him out of bed in the morning.

Perhaps on this day I "ought to be" sad, and there are moments in any day when I find that can be the dominant feeling, yet I am essentially grateful for this human experience in its fullness. Glad I was able to connect to my parents before I lost them. Glad that I was present for the moonlit night and this sunlit morning. I am not attached to my sorrow or my joy. I am not looking for symbolic capsules in which to place my heart. Yet the crabapple my mother gave me is now in full bloom, and the perigee moon (the fullest moon of the year when the moon is closest to the earth) rose last night, just as it did on the solstice last year when my father ruptured his esophagus. And there was one grapefruit left in the fridge this morning. It was delicious.

It's All About "Me," Yoga Is Seeing the Self

After the Super Bowl football match, a TV show aired called "The Voice" in which talented singers are sought to compete for judges who go on to create teams and eventually whittle them down to what they deem to be "the voice" deserving their promotion. Well, that's the gist of it anyway. It is wonderful to hear people singing. Yet I continue to be bothered by the idea that our culture emphasizes the individual to such a degree, pressuring each person into a life-long battle to create themselves in comparison with others, without ever learning the importance of looking into the strategies and techniques of that construction project. Many people feel isolated and under siege for a good part of their lives in this endless struggle, with a few finding a path to peaceful acceptance of their own structures, and an ease of being among others who differ in some ways and are similar in so many ways.

Yoga could be taken as being all about "me" but in the sense of developing a keen level of awareness in an individual to see their own construction and understand the ebb and flow of the reality show we continuously play for ourselves. Our projections in to the next moment, as well as our carefully designed memories and dreams, begin to train us to follow our thoughts like a dog chasing a car down the road. When we attempt to hold our mind to a single point without giving way to this impulse, we begin a new intimacy with the way our mind works, and glimpse beyond the stories to a supported, open ended sense of self. A yoga practice can take a person beyond that series of stories and reactions into a way of being that Buddhists might call "peaceful abiding." I might also call it equanimity, or freedom from the daily traps I set for myself.

There are moments when the great success is simply noticing that the mind is dragging me off someplace away from the moment I am actually living. This is the dawning of awareness! When that awareness can turn my attention back to this moment, this is mindfulness! It would be an understatement to acknowledge that I spend a good bit of time on the seesaw between awareness and what I could call mind-chasing, yet even a few moments when awareness enables me to be fully engaged, mindfully aware, have changed the way I operate in the world, and respond to the circumstances and events around me.

The practice of yoga includes the asana, those physical forms that awaken the body and are so helpful in leading the mind to awaken. Asana practice is one of the "eight limbs" of yoga, the others include practices of restraints and observances that help guide our relationship to our self and to others (representing 2 of the 8 limbs), a similar practice related to cultivating awareness of the breath and its properties (one of the 8), the cultivating of awareness through mindfulness and the practices of withdrawing from the reactivity of the sensory perceptions (2 more), studying the mind through meditation (another 1), and finding just that equanimity and freedom in the process (the bliss of the 8th limb).