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.

Back to Basics

Everything is part of everything else, but when starting a yoga or meditation practice, it does help to narrow it down a little bit. Keeping some basic ideas in mind can invite a more relaxed attitude as we begin a new journey.

For me, yoga has a simple set of principles to begin: breath, alignment, awareness, kindness, curiosity.

Traditionally, the eight principles of yoga, in plain terms, include our relationships to the world around us (yamas) and to the self (niyamas), alignment (asana), breath (pranayama), concentration (cultivating awareness), withdrawal of the senses (developing non-attachment), meditation (interacting beyond dualistic understanding), and the integration of being beyond a separate self (bliss).

Let's be satisfied with whichever part of all this we can hold in our awareness. Start with the basics:
• paying attention to the breath, when you remember; and return to paying attention to the breath when you realize you have forgotten.
• attend to your alignment -- the way your bones stack to transfer weight to the earth and support your movements; and when you realize you have forgotten about your alignment, simply attend to the effects of that and make adjustments.
• cultivate awareness, allowing your breath to lead you in and out of your sensations, reactions, emotions, and postures. Let your mind help you by focusing one one thing at a time, developing the ability to focus by accepting that the lens slips and requires readjustment.
• be kind when you find you have shifted into remembering, replaying events, hollering at yourself, projecting possibilities, wishing things were different, going over things that take your attention away from right now. Just smile a little at your human nature and cultivate awareness of any pattern that might emerge in your internal ways of operating.
• take an interest, be curious, about how your body works, how your mind works, how your interactions and reactions rise and fall away.

Any and all of this will lead to all the rest of this, without you having to make a list or keep a chart or memorize Sanskrit names or learn physiology. Let the names become generalized, in fact, when you notice that you are drifting out of this moment, name the drift -- "drifting" -- or a bit more specifically "worrying" or "dreaming" -- and come on back to NOW. You can do this on a yoga mat. You can do this right at your desk, this minute. Or brushing your teeth.

May all the hoopla over 2011 simply open the path as you make your way.

Let's Not Talk About It

A vital part of teaching yoga is allowing students to hear their inner voices, to rest in the awareness of being, to find their reactive natures and witness themselves in action. Verbal cues can make a huge difference in directing attention and cultivating awareness, and they can also blur into a sound wall that blocks all those inner levels of investigation.

In conversation the same thing can happen, and I know that I, specifically, can be totally the perpetrator of a wall of talk. I grew up in a family where there was competitive talking -- and had to learn as the youngest in the gang, how to enter this, or even whether to enter in. Then, out of that context, I had to learn how to hear myself stomping all over the possibility of an exchange. Part of it is probably defense. Okay, I am a passionate type to begin with, but believing in what you say is not an excuse for not listening.

Believing in what you say is not an excuse for not listening.

Listening. Believing.

Believing in what you say can also mean not listening to what is inside your self. Taking a position, holding a position, knowing something so firmly, so elaborately, that it can, all of its own massiveness, block out the possibilities inside your own head, body, awareness as well as anything coming from any where else.

Silence is not a negative quality. Not talking offers a possibility, rather than a negation of speech. The mind is always full of chat, and if we let the chat fill in all the spaces, well, where's the space for awareness?

So, yes, meditation is a way of observing all of this, but yoga practice is that too, and attending yoga classes, and teaching yoga classes, and having breakfast with your lover, and walking your dog or without your dog. Even engaging in casual conversation with someone on the subway is an opportunity to observe, to listen, to find the spaces that surround the piles of words and ideas, yours and theirs.

Sometimes it is infinitely richer to listen more fully than to talk more about it. Not saying that keeping things to yourself is the deal; there are plenty of times when it is essential to share and words are one mechanism.

Words are one mechanism.

Exploring the others is a marvelous journey. So for just a minute, let's not talk about it! As Jacques Pepin says at the end of every TV kitchen episode, "Happy Cooking!" Do the doing, be the being, listen to the fullness and emptiness of whatever you come across, inside or out.

Simplifying Even the Moon

I woke up this morning to a thick fog all around the house in upstate New York. Water droplets on the screens and windows full of white glare. The view held no trees, no hills, no valley, and gave no sense of what else might be out there. What is transformation if not new understanding? As in the discovery of sub-atomic and nuclear physics, the old ideas of Newtonian principles no longer applied to everything, yet had their sway over the mechanical world we can see. Beyond that, with high power microscopes and telescopes, the view of the world became so much larger and new "rules" seemed to make things work. And there is so much we cannot see if we must take everything as it appears. As with the clearing of the fog this morning, gradually the stone wall emerged, and a height of tree beyond, and eventually the valley with streaks of hill behind it. Now the sun shines bright and I can pretend that all is revealed to me. Let's not even begin to consider the insect life, or the microbes in the soil that are nurturing and attacking the roots of everything in the garden. Just that I know this is all going on out there is like the discovery of the atom!

It helps to simplify to the core of being. I watch my blind cat function in the world with remarkable stability and happiness, or what passes for that on the scale of human emotions. He doesn't see but can hunt, he doesn't see but can jump into the chair. He will run to the sound of my voice across an ocean of not knowing, and seems secure, purring and finding my leg to rub against. He is functioning in the deepest sense. It is this that I seek on my yoga mat as well. Can I approach the moon itself, or take in the energy of a star? Can I place my weight in my foot, feeling the energy align up through my leg into my pelvis, forces of gravity holding me securely while I extend in a most natural way through my spine, letting go of the weight of my head, and supporting a lifted arm and lifted leg for Ardha Chandrasana (Half Moon Pose)? It doesn't work if I start by taking my body in parts, aim for a shape, or present myself with the struggle of "balancing on one leg." I will not get there by pushing my leg into the air and reaching for an external shape. Yet by finding the root of my soft foot resting on the earth - deeply connected to the balance in my pelvis as the foundation - and then release the energy from in the core of my body - of my being - I feel the flying moon taking form in me. The moon does not balance in the sky, nor hang. Remember, it's visible presence is a reflection of light from the sun. Perhaps I'll use a block under my hand or place my hand on a wall to enable a natural extension in my spine, with energy connecting my heel to my fingers along both flying halves. Reducing fear helps my breath and my breathing helps reduce fear. Maybe I will elongate into this flying feeling on my way in and out of Trkonasana (Triangle Pose), playful, and without goals. Like the fog, the efforting and judging can easily obscure this shining moon from sight.

I think of the people around me with their heads full of ideas, goals, and desires. I love them and wish them well. May they find ways to release these desires and find joy in what they are actually doing (not wishing for summer when it is winter and wanting the sun when there is fog)! May they allow themselves the freedom from the external goals long enough to discover what they love to do (letting the passage or ride be as much for them as the getting where they are going)! May they see in the swirl of ideas an ocean of possibility in which they breathe each breath and explore their authentic self, coming, as they eventually will, into the brilliant light of the sun once the fog clears (just being their self). I cannot make this happen, nor will all my words or yogic teachings make this available to them. Only in their own explorations will their path emerge. As their foot steps in the fog the earth rises to meet it. I see my little cat leap onto the front step, my voice being the open door. People can also find that their breath and their foundation on the earth support their wildest adventures and the softest of moments. I would invite you all to fly as the moon itself.