Midday Traffic: A Lesson in Equanimity

Driving down Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn on a repair errand, heading towards the neighborhoods that reach the sea. Double parked trucks and cars, impatient zoomers tucking in between the obstacles and cutting back into the reluctantly single lane of barely moving traffic. The bus here and there, lumbering in and out of the current; slow heavy construction vehicles grinding along methodically avoiding left turn lanes and thereby blocking everything else. A very hot day it was too, the sidewalks crowded with people from nearly every nation on earth.  What a heavenly enterprise! Imagining that I could take the short time between my teaching commitments and get this thing done!

When I felt a sense of time rise up, it turned into an endless hot open field. As a low slung car with Pennsylvania plates cut back in front of me for the third time, I burst out laughing. This driver is staying busy, I thought, moving in and out as if they are getting ahead, yet every time they end up right in front of me in my sluggish journey, steadily heading towards that specific authorized local repair shop on Quentin.  Any tension about my schedule shuts down my energy and my sense of good humor, so I let it go, figuring that I made this decision well informed and with every chance of success. Anxiety about the light changing to red before I get to it closes off my good will, which I feel towards the small car in front of me full of chatting young women. Why waste my time on that? I have watched them try once to get around the dump truck and ended up back in front of me. Eventually we both made it around that truck. They are occupying themselves with each other's company, so I choose to enjoy that too. Why worry about traffic lights as we wait for the green light in tandem?

When I take a revolved balancing posture in my practice, I know that my energy lines must be open in the same way as when I drive down Flatbush Avenue in mid afternoon. Ready for anything, steady of purpose, good humored about the flailing or throbbing or whirling outliers of body, mind and context. Keeping my energy openly flowing in all directions, without judging the wobbly foot or the tangled gaze, I can find spaces in my spine as I twist, and in my mind as I watch where the struggles arise.

Noticing that impulse to want the light to remain in my favor is the same as noticing that I want my left hip to allow the same twist as my right. It might, but the desire for that only clogs up my energy and shifts my focus from being fully present. I am much more likely to lose the integrity of my spine or my footing as I reach for conditions, or for judgment or for outcome. This turning of my inner focus towards equanimity happens all along Flatbush Avenue, and throughout my yoga asana sequence. The depth of the practice is what allows me to have good will towards what is happening, and to choose where to turn my focus, keeping my attention on opening my energy, noticing where it gets caught up. So from Flatbush I find myself turning onto Quentin, and in my practice, I hold steady with energy flowing towards foundational support and endless possibility.

Traumatic Events: Hard lines, Soft Soft

This morning I feel bereft as I contemplate the shootings in Arizona that have killed several people and critically knocked a vital public servant off her feet for the inevitably long term, with unknowable recovery of her abilities to function after very serious brain injury. I look at the history of lost public leadership in my lifetime and understand that this kind of event can be quite provocative. Our nation has already allowed policies of national distrust to draw forth vitriol and hatred among us simply because we might see things differently, look different, think in a different mother tongue, have been born in a slightly different longitude.

I am the granddaughter of immigrants who fled to this country to save their lives and to enable them to achieve some semblance of their personal value rather than spend lives limited by oppressive regimes and prejudices. I can certainly see how it is that I both clamor to defend and glorify the country I live in, yet distrust any authority. Postures of power and control run on the dualities of promise or greed and fear or blame.

Most of my life I have been deeply drawn to participate wholeheartedly while at the same time harboring an equally deep distrust of that which draws me. I fell in love again and again, at least from the age of 4 when I first remember the texture of the cheeks of my new love in my half-day kindergarten class. My resistance to the war in Vietnam was all encompassing, whether feeding Veterans on Washington Mall, smothering myself and a friend to protect against teargas, building bathroom walls for the local county office of the "Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam Now," or reading everything published at that time to support my fierce arguments. It was equally important to me to try to change the way my high school taught important subjects as disassociated from living and doing, working strenuously to institute an experiment in hands-on learning within the wider community. My writing and working life has been mostly in this same all-or-nothing mode of operating. No one could be more impassioned about giving grants for public programs, or fairness in schooling, or even the benefits of a yoga practice.

Somehow my human nature continues to underline the duality of this reactive and attached behavior. In order to be persuasive, productive, needed, I have always carried the gene for tunnel vision right next the gene for distrust of structure and authority. Okay, perhaps even my own intellectual, sexual and personal structures have betrayed me in the past, drawing me deeply towards that which also hurts me, but certainly political activism will do that. I think that any deep drive to change towards a particular goal or need has that in it too. But the distrust is also a warning and leads to sabotage of purpose. The balance will remain elusive with this deeply divided way of understanding and being.

I apologize for all the moments when my actions have emanated from that dualistic posture, knowing it almost always caused harm. I am sorry that I, too, have at times zealously obscured truth or evolved selective deafness to the voices around me. I am grateful to be here, living long enough to just begin to understand this, hard as it is. My practice helps me find the truth, and allow it, breathing and connecting to a much larger awareness.

May we transition into a new way of being, find our way unimpeded by regret, bitterness, hatred, greed and delusion. Rest, heal, go in peace. May the suffering cease.

Losing Resistance: Loosen the Set Up

It has been hot here these past few days and I've enjoyed listening to people's opinions and positions about it. For some, the heat totally colors their reactions to everything, and for some the heat rises in themselves, too, causing waves of standing their ground, or melting down. This heat is right on time for me since in some real ways I've been investigating resistance in myself. I am coming to the conclusion that my excuses can be endless, and it is my choice whether I accept them or not, or use them as conditions to change my decisions or actions. It feels a little bit like I'm listening to a child explain why they didn't or won't, or couldn't or can't do something, and deciding, as "the grown up," whether to gently manipulate them out of that position, or simply say, "okay, I accept that, let's move on." With a child it is not so productive to say, "that's just an excuse," but with myself it helps to see them so clearly. So now I am seeing "excuse" is another word for using conditions for a particular purpose, usually in my case to resist!

My style of yoga is exploratory, a yoga of inquiry, endlessly discovering the openness of possibilities in the breath. I am in awe a bit when I read blogs of others who are dedicated to a particular practice, as with the Ashtanga yoga, or Bikram or Iyengar etc. I definitely appreciate the discipline and dedication, the depth of understanding that comes from working within a defined framework. The depth is in the details.
Often for me to imagine that yoga is a particular specific sequence of physical events is a set up for judgment. What I can or cannot do, what I am feeling in that moment might present an urge to move in a different direction. Learning to listen to this urge or inner guide has been a major part of my practice. That is one of the principles of Kripalu yoga, letting the breath, or prana, move me.

Even so, it is easy enough to resist the yoga mat! It's better to keep it very simple and not front load my expectations or requirements: be present, be alert, breathe and be ready to experience what actually happens. Perhaps watching my mind run circles around is half the fun of a practice, or perhaps allowing the dog to run off the leash will leave me in the stillness beyond the undulation of my breath. It has taken me a while to learn how to let go of the sequences, the "this-before-that" thinking and listen to the inner voice of prana = conscious breath + living energy.

Last night I was breathing quietly in my hot humid room, with a fan blowing and an idea that I was supposed to be going to sleep. Ahh, another set up. Obviously I was not going to sleep. I was resting there, aware of drifting in a sea of light sweat and wondering about the tension in my shoulders. Exactly who set the rules that I was supposed to lay in bed until I fell asleep? And who is going to enforce that rule? What if I just slip out of bed and unroll my yoga mat? Already warm and sweaty, breathing in the dark, I hovered over my mat in Adho Mukha Svanasana, finding the breath taking me through a sequence of Trkonasana (triangle) and Ardha Chandrasana (half moon) where the length of my breath spread into the night air as my body elongated, in effortless effort. I did my final hip twists in bed, Supta Padangusthasana, and let Savasana take me to the stars.

Two Strands - Two Sources

There are some things I can only understand if I get there myself. When I look back at my life I can see that in so many moments when I wish I had chosen differently, I chose the way I did because that is where I had to go to learn who I am. Usually pain was the result. I see that now as something that I also chose because I was still learning all about what being might involve. My personal yoga practice comes largely from this same source of choices and inner direction. That is what takes me into shoulder stand without my hands, a core body discovering herself no matter which way gravity is going. The results of this inner inquiry are much more joyful nowadays.

Then there are some things I would never discover at all unless I learn to see or feel what someone else is sharing with me. This could be the way the tree limbs move in the wind, the way a young man gently holds his girlfriend's hand as she removes a stone from her sandal, or the way a yoga teacher encourages me to breathe into a forward bend over a one-sided lotus foot as my ankle bone digs into my thigh muscle and my hip begins speaking to me in our own private language. My personal practice grows from this source of understandings too. In fact, each of these examples has saturated my practice lately and brought me joy.

It is not unusual for me to be surprised by what is actually happening in my yoga practice, and in the classes I teach, for that matter. There was a time in my life when I thought I was supposed to know everything before it happened or at least have a plan that would have fixed outcomes. Wow, has that ever changed! The surprise is part of the open space where the two strands meet: what I have discovered from within my own experience and that which I can absorb from outside my own little operating system. It is where my best teaching comes from, and my most expansive sessions on my own mat, or in the kitchen or anywhere else for that matter. I accept surprise with gratitude. I am learning that even when I don't "think" I am prepared for the outcomes that actually appear, really being present is enough. In fact that is all there is.

The larger operating system is so vast and inclusive that I can only pick up little bits at a time, except for those moments when I can no longer find a separate self and seem to be using that vast operating system as my own. An example of this might be losing the separation between bodies when sharing my breath with a student, or those moments in playing quartets when there is no need to think at all about the making of the music, our breathing and heartbeats seem to take care of it. It can happen even when hanging the laundry out on the line.

Yoga is helping me; allowing me to integrate these two strands, or ways of exploring the world of my own experience. Letting others bring their ideas into my explorations is a little like taking the shades out of the windows. The windows are there, but of little use to me until I clear away the blinds, the blockages (resistance, fear, craving, attachment, anger, story, fill-in-the-blank!). Sometimes I will pull those shades and cover a particular window, choosing to imagine the wall without it. Pain is usually the result of that kind of choice, and I suppose I will continue to make those choices until I learn enough to either open the shade myself, or make the space for some other energy to pull that shade. So my yoga practice develops both strands, and makes each of them more accessible to me. It sure has made it easier to look back at those painful choices and stop judging so.

I'm reading (slowly) a book called The Love Of Impermanent Things: A Threshold Ecology by Mary Rose O'Reilley, an author I savor. I recommend her earlier book, The Barn at the End of the World too. Early on in the first chapter she writes, "To grow in compassion for one's own life is the great task of the middle years, and it requires that, first, one must embrace with love and pity a whole reception line of relatives, then move on to the politicians. It helps to have a comic vision." Maybe that helps explain why it is so much easier for me to laugh these days.

No promises -just tackle resistance

Every week I find myself walking around the Woman's Shelter, in essence recruiting residents to join me for a yoga practice. I may find myself teaching a chair session with 6 participants, or a mat-based class with 3, or even offering a one-on-one depending on the week and who is present that week at that time. This teaching is at the core of a compassionate practice. When I ask, "Why do I come here every week?" my own answer comes immediately: "To be here and breathe with you." When the ladies present are droopy, disinterested in using energy to any purpose, disheartened about their situation, emotionally stirred up over something, or suffering physically from any number of troubles, I continue to seduce them with humor and encouragement. Why? What is all this really? What's in it for them after all?

Actually, there is nothing in the practice beyond integrating awareness of being with an acceptance of being present. This might mean literally accepting the pain in a left shoulder and simply allowing the breath to invisibly open the ribs gently without lifting the arm. This compassion towards oneself without self-pity or blame, without attachment to goal or judgment of self in comparison to others, this is the path of healing and joy, of being fully. "It's too hot," says one slumping figure. "Are you breathing?" I ask with a laugh. She laughs too, "yes, I am," and sits up a little more fully, watching with interest what might come next. This bit of self awareness has already lightened her load.

I set up chairs in the middle of the huge recreation room, the periphery of chairs and tables occupied by nearly a dozen women. "Don't give up on that hip!" I exclaim, as I lift my right thigh with my hands and gently explore the range of motion in the hip. Setting the foot down, I exclaim, "Wow that's heavy, I think I'll let the earth carry that weight." I hear a soft "amen" from one side of the room and a "that's right" from nearby. Ankle circles provoke my loud public comment, "Keeping circulation in the whole leg, and helping with balance." Gradually a couple of the women begin imitating my movements from right where they are. I begin breathing through my arm movements, speaking "Inhaling open, Exhaling release," rotating my shoulders, taking gentle rib twists, explaining as I go. I hear the soft sound of coordinated inhaling and exhaling from a table behind me. "Beautiful breathing," I say, turning and grinning at the now smiling woman who pushes her chair away from the table so she can continue with the leg movements I've begun to introduce.

And so it goes on this particular day, I am sitting in the middle of an empty circle of chairs with 4 participants who, in spite of their lethargy, fear, pain, sense of displacement, have begun to breath and feel enlivened by that breath, while in all parts of the room attention is riveted on me. Nothing else need be promised, yet all can be gained. After my hour session is over, I approach two women who seem sorry that they were not fully active. "I'll be back next week," I say. "Oh my back hurts so," says one. I hold her gaze steadily and say, "Do I know what you are feeling? No, I don't, but you do. You are the one living in this body and you are the one who can be kind and attentive to what your body needs. You can gently stretch that even before you get out of bed, staying out of the range of pain, and gently encouraging openness and relief just with your breath." Then I lay down on the floor and gently show her some suggested movements. Both women are nodding and attentive, sitting quite beautifully balanced and breathing steadily along with me. I put my shoes on and wish them all well. May your body be safe; May your heart be strong; May your mind find peace; May you be free. I will see whoever may be present next week. I know that I can do nothing more than be present to breathe with them.