Making the offering, Being the offering

I've been enjoying poems from Gregory Orr's 2009 collection, "How Beautiful the Beloved." There is simplicity and deep resonance of losing oneself in the grace of love at the same time yearning to hold what will inevitably be lost. Everything is impermanent.

"All those years
I had only to say
Yes.

    But I couldn't.

Finally, I said Maybe,
But even then 
I was filled with dread.

I wanted to step carefully.
I didn't want to leap.

What if the beloved
Didn't catch me?
What if the world
Disappeared beneath my feet?"

As a teenager I was put in the position of making the family meals, and I've held that role fairly continuously throughout my adult life. I don't remember thinking of food as a token of love, and in those early years it was a heavy load on top of my schoolwork, my awakening political awareness and the swirl of emotional troubles between my parents. As a wife and mother I came to feel the job of feeding as a deeply nurturing one.

"So many were given only
A dream of love,
So many given a glimpse,
And that from such a distance.

Who am I to be ungrateful
Who saw the beloved
Face-to-face?"

One month ago my husband and I essentially became vegan, eating no meat, no dairy, no processed grains, sweeteners with the addition of eschewing all cooked and most uncooked oil. (For more on this, see my related blog eat2thrive.blogspot.com.)

"Surrender everything. Give up
All that's precious --
That way you won't be tempted
To bicker with yourself
Over scraps you still control.

Besides, who knows the depth
Of her pity? Who knows
How far down
He can reach with his love?"

Food has become transformed into a vast array of beautiful blessings. Each fruit, vegetable, bag of grain, bowl of soup, pot with simmering leeks, plate with the stain of beets, crunch of jicama and scent of lime or garlic brings such gratitude and pleasure.

We spend way too much time imagining ourselves to be lacking something, avoiding something. This pretending to be incomplete and unworthy stands directly in the way of living our fullest life in this moment as we actually are.

Again from Greg Orr:
"How beautiful
The beloved.

Whether garbed
In mortal tatters,
Or in her dress
Of everlastingness --

Moon broken
On the water,
Or moon
Still whole
In the night sky."

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.

the mind of not all or nothing: just see what emerges.

Walking in the light powdery snow, I was bewitched by the transformations, leaves became cups and simultaneously appear as knife-like edges in the snow. Distances in the valley are aflutter with white flecks turning air and space into volumes. Definitions disappear. Here the submerged log emerged with its tinge of velvet green moss. What is the truth about the light snow, the maple branch below or the leaf litter? Can the surface be surface, while the depth is a huge mass of fallen tree, and the snow be falling too?

All bound up in thinking, I bind myself up with projections, goals, memories, ideas. Reaching for the shapes that I think, I practically block any sense of the real. I cannot pretend to give up thinking, nor do I want to do that. I am beginning to see that it doesn't take huge complicated tools though to loosen the tightness of the bind of my thinking. It is like the way I learn not to reach too hard to catch my own hand to bind an asana only to give up on my spinal alignment.  It begins with noticing that my thinking is confining me.

More and more I see how selective my letting go has been. I seem to release this grip, but not that grip. I believe this, but not that. I tolerate this, but not that.  Once I see this personal structure, this selective way of grasping at one aspect while avoiding another, I have the opportunity to be more fully. Truth and freedom, equanimity and clarity glimmer in all the levels of letting go. It is not an all or nothing proposition, like light appearing in the dark. It is always light.

In my snowy walk, the most striking thing happened as I turned to return to the house. I felt thrilled and surprised to the core to see the subtle impression of my own tracks:  a slight disturbance in the powdery snow with delicate crushing of the leaf edges into the powder. This evidence of my own steps seems most marvelous of all -- holding for just a moment all the wonder of impermanence and presence.

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.

Independence & Freedom

Thinking about independence and freedom as I prepare for the Fourth of July. I see the historical importance of this nation claiming its separation from the British governmental structures and priorities. Yet even that separation seems an illusion to me, as does the independence that is so highly touted today. In our country's politics there is much argument and vitriol over what people imagine to be their independence, a confusion of independence with the desire to be in control, and conflating freedom with a choice of actions.

When we put a plant in the ground we expect the roots to spread and open into the dirt seeking nutrients and moisture for its survival. The plant grows as a separate entity yet must have rain, sun, the balancing of night and day, and many other conditions in order to thrive. This is no surprise to anyone, and in this example it is easier to see that everything is co-arising. The plant's life relies upon the oceans and the evaporation that brings the rain, the wind that carries the clouds as well as the rivers that bring the water down stream, the particles in the soil absorbing the detritus of rotting tree limbs, the heat of the sun transforming the chlorophyll, the enzymes, weeds and bees, the whole connecting network of interlaced parts. We can see the plant as a separate piece and as part of the whole, but we know that it cannot exist as a separate form.

I think it is amazing that we so easily think that I am independent if I pay my own rent, put water in the tea kettle, put it on the stove and turn on the gas to boil it for my own tea or coffee; that my choices of which tea or what coffee beans represents freedom. The water from the faucet ties me to the rain, clouds and ocean, all the engineers and fabricators who put the pipes together(and their parents, teachers and friends), the workers and ancient cultures that figured out the filtration mechanisms and all of that. This line of thinking puts me inextricably in a web both ancient and immediate.

There is such confusion about freedom. In every moment there is a deep freedom, unaffected by conditions. It relies upon the view, the viewer, and awareness. This is not to be confused with an ability to willfully choose according to one's desires or having the possibility of controlling outcomes. Freedom in any moment (THIS moment) enables the experience of total interconnectedness, that awareness of co-arising, and escape from the dictates of conditional nature. We can drop the dualities - and shift the focus of our gaze to a much wider way of seeing, even with a very acute focus.

Even one moment of this freedom is liberating. The responsibility then follows to honor one's place in the scheme of things, offering the gifts we have, doing what we can to see the truth rather than what we want to see, and take actions that do less harm. It still feels good to handle one's own affairs - the rent, the tea selection etc. but it can actually be quite comforting to understand that we are, in fact, not independent, not separate. Even the pain of parting (divorce, immigration or death) is a little softer with this deeper view.

Time is on your side in this one

After the rain cleared this afternoon I walked the lawnmower back and forth across the length, the slope, the width and the curving sides of the large swath of grass we keep short in the midst of the wild fields and woods upstate. As I walked, I noticed my breathing become more textured on the uphills, softer on the downs. I glance at the plantings, the trees, look out for toads or bees in the grass, and take note of the way things are after all the rain we've had lately. We recently divided and replanted a great many of our irises and lilies in order to remove an invasive ground cover and to give each of these beautiful flowering stalks more air and light. Of all these iris almost none have bloomed in this, their special moment. I checked out the few blooming on short stalks and kept walking. Last year that bed was a jaw-dropping mass of beauty. This year there are short leaf spears grass-like leaves, constant weeding, and no blooms to speak of. The jury is still out on the lilies, whose time is not yet, but they look young and undeveloped compared to those we did not disturb.

It can take several seasons for a plant to build the stamina and connection to the earth that it needs to send out those miraculous blooms that thrill us. Even after developing a thick and luscious clump of stalks full of buds, those stalks can be chomped by a deer, or broken by the weight of the rain on the first open petals. Yet the roots and leaves continue to do their part to repair and rebuild, to continue the trajectory and after a dormant winter, will try again for the blooms that help create their seeds. Even lilies and iris that spread primarily by their roots are driven to produce those stark and beautiful seed pods that shake out their dried seeds in the winter winds. It is even more dramatic with the little seeds I planted in the vegetable garden that start with just two fragile leaves, then begin to send up the leaves that are characteristic of their species. It takes all season for some to flower, fruit and ripen, where some produce delicious edible leaves almost right away.

So too with a yoga practice. Even if you were once a magnificent blooming clump, when you start to establish a new practice, it takes time. The seeds you plant are of all types - those that produce something right away and those that may take years to evolve into where they are those eloquent blooms. With yoga, time is always on your side. No matter what your age or your original set of conditions, the practice picks up right there and no matter what the external conditions might be, there are ways to continue growth and deepen your practice. Perhaps the joy of seeing those small immature clumps of not-quite-ready-to-bloom iris is what I feel every time I approach my practice. These moments on the mat, like those short green shoots, are full of possibilities and part of the process of realizing who I am.

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.

The Constancy of a Shape Shifter: Taking In the Truth

Yoga is not really a religion, but there are definite principles that underlie all the various families of practice we call "yoga." There are some deep connections between Yoga and Buddhism, Yoga and the Hindu practices, and actually with most of the major spiritual belief systems. This is clearly because all of these structures have to do with how we conduct ourselves, how we treat each other, and how we approach the hardest parts about being human in the world and understanding what can only be seen as the mysteries around us.

photo by j.r.meredith

Truth is one of those underlying principles that seems relevant in every belief structure. This idea of truth sometimes seems like a shape shifter. In any given moment we can know something to be true that is simply no longer true in the next moment. This is not falsifying the truth, but requires that we live in the present moment. Memories are notoriously slippery in terms of what they hold and what they shift around. If we color the moment with interpretations, then the memory we hold of it will also slide around as our view changes with time and distance. If we can actually take in the truth of that moment, it is complete in and of itself and does not require us to add or change elements. We can take it in just as it is. Eventually we can learn to see that everything is subject to conditions, and that conditions by their nature are impermanent.

This is a very hard thing to do. It is like telling someone to let go of something without moving... but in fact we can do that too.

In a yoga practice it is probable that you will run into yourself at every turn. Much as the practice may promise you a release from the definitions and constraints that bring you discomfort and suffering, it will open all the possibilities, not just the ones that feel like letting go and floating in a sea of beautiful colors. There are very specific physical things that happen through a physical yoga practice. Of course, muscles strengthen, lengthen, loosen, tighten; breath changes, opens, shortens, lengthens, and quiets. The mind, meanwhile, attaches, detaches, interprets, tells stories. The mind is busy noticing, taking notes, questioning, smothering feelings and highlighting feelings, and so forth. The yoga mat is a great place for noticing how you, very specifically you, deal with all kinds of circumstances and expressions of yourself. It helps to start with what is actually happening, and notice the intricate weaving that the mind does all around that. Just notice it, and let it go.

So what is actually happening? Is that the truth? It is a good start. In any Asana or posture there is potential to notice changes and shifts, whether you are sustaining the pose for several breaths, or moving in and out of the pose again and again. It is not like a law of averages or finding a median where the way it feels more often or most of the time is the truth... the truth is in each moment of the Asana. It can take time in a practice to accept that which is in any moment as true. The fear, hostility or desperation that arises as you twist for the sixth or tenth time in Utkatasana (Chair Pose), and the relief, determination or urgency that arises as you release back from that twist into plain Utkatasana, the flood of gratitude, blame, or shaky surrender as you fold into Uttanasana (forward fold) or rise into Tadasana (mountain pose) are all true. We don't have to keep a catalog of all of these truths. The hip will hold on to some of it, the heart to some, the mind to some. Next time you take on the twisting either that day or in another day's practice, you will hear the echos and feel the stories rise. This is you in action and is the seat of your explorations about yourself and truth. Yet the twists will have their own shapes that next time, and learning to accept that which is now, that which is this moment, is truly the path of truth, the conditional nature of our experiences and the deepest understanding of impermanence.

What my left hip felt yesterday made me laugh at myself. How hard I was willing to work to close off from that truth, and to tell a different story. The hip kept prompting me to see the moment and I could watch my mind work to wind and unwind its attachments and interpretations. Today, this moment, is simply today, this moment. The more space I can give the truth, the clearer my practice is too. And when that attitude comes off the mat, well, try it and you will see why it is an underlying principle in all deep spiritual practices! By the way, there really is no getting around it, either. It is there whether we take it in or not. The amazing revelation in all this is that taking in the truth brings authenticity into everything. Imagine that! No wonder so many seekers give their lives to the search.

Acceptance

"Acceptance does not mean that you have to like everything or that you have to take a passive attitude toward everything and abandon your principles and values. It does not mean that you are satisfied with things as they are or that you are resigned to tolerating things as they "have to be." It does not mean that you should stop trying to break free of your own self-destructive habits or to give up on your desire to change and grow or that you should tolerate injustice, for instance, or avoid getting involved in changing the world around you because it is the way it is and therefore hopeless. Acceptance as we are speaking of it simply means that you have come around to a willingness to see things as they are. This attitude sets the stage for acting appropriately in your life no matter what is happening. You are much more likely to know what to do and have the inner conviction to act when you have a clear picture of what is actually happening than when your vision is clouded by your mind's self-serving judgments and desires or its fears and prejudice." Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness



Cultivating an open mind doesn't have to mean having no opinions, but it does mean being ready to set that opinion aside long enough to hear something else, or notice the effects holding that opinion might have. Today I watched my students make such a variety of efforts related to our yoga practice. One student continuously took each movement beyond her comfort zone, another simply closed her eyes and moved from within. Each one was living within the constraints of what she knew to be so, as well as within the parameters set by her opinions about what she thought she knew. When Jon Kabat-Zinn describes acceptance, he lists many of the aspects of ourselves that we fear we will have to give up or lose if we "accept" what we know to be true. He goes on to explain that acceptance "means that you have come around to a willingness to see things as they are." From this vantage point the one student can see the source of pain in her shoulder, and also the source of pain in her pushing herself into that posture AND the possibility that she gains more from staying within her pain-free range. The other student can accept that her inner voice will take her where she needs to be, and she can see that this inner direction may be steering her towards or away from fully experiencing the movement. Acceptance is an important step towards the truth and towards awareness of the range of possibilities. The part that limits us the most is that clouding of the mind by its "self-serving judgments and desires or its fears and prejudice."

I like to think about acceptance as I watch the season change. Accepting all the stages and phases of these transformative times is such a deep experience. There is more joy in it for me than clinging to the idea that summer is the time when I can relax or when the world is more beautiful. It insures disappointment to imagine that only the height of the season represents that season. Taking in the subtle beginnings, watching the process of the changes, cherishing each part of this warming and cooling, blooming and storing, procreating and dying gives me a much wider sense of my own options too. Acceptance helps me to see myself interacting, reacting, and in stillness without needing to attach judgment to each of these. I can tolerate stressful situations by adapting to the conditional nature of the moment, and accept that there is a deeper level where other possibilities exist too. This can bring a sense of hope, a sense of potential for solutions that might otherwise be invisible or inaccessible. In practice this might mean discovering movements and energy that would otherwise be blocked by attachment to associations, prejudices, judgments and patterns from the past. For me acceptance, hope and possibility are each held within one another.

Sacred Spaces - Inside & Out

I remember my first experiences of taking yoga classes at the local Shambhala Yoga & Dance Center in my Brooklyn, NY neighborhood and feeling that just walking in to the small empty space was a special and personal act. There was a sense of safety there, where feelings could come and go, and where, for the most part, whatever might happen would be all to the good. Okay, occasionally a muscle pull might hamper the experience, but not with any harmful intention. Safety and openness to the possibilities, attentiveness and care on the part of teachers, and the non-judgment of fellow classmates definitely gave the space a sense of sacredness for our inquiry and our breath. Without the presence of "a god" and minus the requirements of religious dogma, the practice seemed to unify me with my understandings of spirit, self and connection to everything else. In some ways, any space in which living beings exist is a sacred space, including the manmade and natural world and the flora and fauna (yes even insects!) within it.

As a yoga teacher I am aware of my responsibility to continue this tradition of making a safe space in which yoga can be practiced. Respecting the commonalities of breath and suffering, the innate beauty of being alive in the world as we know it, of all the inner adjustments that my students and I go through, I feel the practice as an invitation to discover the sacred, the divine, the open space in ourselves and in everything around us. This helps us feel the inner peace, develops the ability to accept that which actually is so within us, and builds strength and resilience too.

I am in the process of constructing a small practice space in a former granary structure in upstate New York. The building was once up on stilts with heavy wooden bins built into it to house the grain off the ground. Long ago it sank into the earth, half the roof vanished and two sides of the building peeled away. Yet even in that form it had a magical quality of the hands that built it, and its story of once holding precious resources. It looked wonderful in the snow. The first part of the process was raising the structure onto a dry stone foundation, using salvaged materials to rebuild the shattered roof, and placing a new floor, hand sanded for the bare feet that will walk upon it. The current stage is to place the simple framed windows my husband salvaged from our house, hang a sliding door once on a neighbor's barn, and replace the remaining original ribboned and rotted siding with new locally cut wood. I feel a tug at my heart from the original structure, and am glad that the building will stand so straight as it once did long ago. The transformation of this little structure is a reminder of the experiences offered within it.

It has deep meaning to clear a space dedicated to the practice, yet, I also find that any place can be transformed into a sacred space if the intentions of practice are brought to bear. I might practice in a hotel room on the floor next to the bed. There are many times when I have practiced on the kitchen floor in my apartment, or on the bedroom floor. I've meditated while waiting at airports, and practiced sitting in a chair while waiting for a meeting to begin. Yoga studios might pack students in like sardines, with barely 3 inches between mats, or when only 4 students show up the room remains open and empty. Perhaps your yoga class is held in the basement of a church or in a meeting room at the office or in a medical center. Any of these places can offer the space necessary to "perform" the Asanas, and they also offer the opportunity to open that inner space where the self is accepted and the moment is fully experienced. That is where the sensation of the sacred is to be found, I think. We can find ourselves in the woods or on a front porch, in the kitchen, a magnificent temple or my new rustic granary studio space. It is the finding of the self, and doing all we can do that brings our hearts and our energy into the moment and open to "yoga" - the union or yoking - transforming even the seat on the bus into a sacred space for experiencing this life.

How Do I Change?

Working through the amazing experiences of shoulder stand with my legs in lotus. How did this happen? Not as though I set the goal, but somehow after many things led up to Ardha Baddha Padma Paschimatanasana (half lotus legs forward fold, bound to folded toe), which is a place I have not gone before, I sat in lotus feeling the stability of the world above and below me. So I rocked back and hung there, breathing, gently holding my legs just as though I was sitting on the sky, and then stretching my core and and opening the groin muscles just enough to begin straightening my lotus knees to the sky too. I rolled back down to sit. Crossed my lotus the other way and went back up. Breathing up and down my spine. Gentle flexing of thighs and hips, no where I had to go, just breathing. Hard to say... right side up, up side down...sitting or what exactly? It just didn't matter.

I've been humming spontaneously all morning since then. Came in off my mat and wrote this, thinking about 21.5.800 and all the people blogging and writing and doing yoga in search of some transformation.


Change is simply
taking on the challenges of being
openly,
without the barriers of attachment
to the story I have told myself.
Gradually I become more aware,
and in that awareness there is
more of me.
Have I changed,
or found myself
as I have always been,
full of possibilities,
continuous, without end?

In this way
loss becomes a part
of gain,
sorrow becomes a part
of joy,
and the dualities
begin to dissolve
that make this now
and that then.
Or to put it another way,
there is nothing else
but this.

Resistance only works for a while,
and if I am patient,
I can breathe into that
to the place that lets go
into everything.

Why Does Yoga Change Us?

I think of someone telling me to pay attention. This normally would come from outside me and is a request to attend to something outside me. In yoga, this is not so, but a simple question - "Can you be attentive?" - with encouragement to just try it, just be attentive. This is so different from "pay attention." We start wherever we are, with whatever our past history or opinions might be about anything or everything. Our yoga teacher simply asks us to begin to draw our attention towards something directly, and in this process, begin to explore how to direct your mind, what the myriad reactions are to that activity, and just notice how incredibly hard it is to keep your attention on anything for more than a few seconds, really. This is amazing, and reveals so much about the way we function in a most basic sense.

Yoga is not a series of lectures or principles. It is an ongoing direct experience that is unpredictable, open ended, and, in a way totally constructivist to use jargon from the educational world. We build our own knowledge base, one breath, one realization, one move at a time. Each of us takes our own time, our own path.

Just sitting is new and reveals stories about us. How many times did I sit down in a class, in a meeting, at a meal, on a couch and not give a single fleeting thought to the act of sitting? Yet the first yoga class I taught, I was asking people in the room to bring themselves to a seat and observe the act itself of finding themselves sitting. I asked them to explore this totally common position, noticing whatever they might notice. To loosen and tighten their lens and see if they could focus, and if so, on what? the hip joint? the knee? the inhale? the way the rib cage spreads with breathing?

Our attention brings with it all the layers that we have learned about our human experiences until we learn to see them as such and let them go. So just sitting brings up our feelings about ourselves and the people next to us, about our bodies, about our wounds and our goals, about being in the room at all, about our stiff neck and our thoughts. Alertness at this level is new and can be tiring, but it is also energizing and raises our curiosity at the same time. The stunning thing we realize is that we cannot stay alert for long.

"Let your attention follow your breath. If it wanders,just notice that and bring it back to your breath." Wander is hardly the word. When we begin practice we can hardly notice that our attention has shifted. Even noticing that is new and strange. To remain so focused, to be entirely engaged in this very moment is extraordinary for most of us until we encounter yoga practice.

The authenticity of the experience has a ripple effect that is both subtle and enormously obvious. What we feel in our bodies after a yoga class is easiest to remember in a way, since our muscles and joints remind us of that fluidity, that flexing, that strength building practice. Maybe even the new shapes and uses of feet and hands will remain in the way we move. Remembering the intensity and open space of the mind in practice is another matter. Perhaps it comes back as we remember to draw our attention to our breath as we wait for our morning oatmeal to be ready, just noticing that we are standing there breathing. Maybe we feel ourselves making the choice as we take a big exhale after one phone call, before inhaling and looking up the next number as we work. Yet it is this reality of existence that transforms us off the mat. The way we can see beyond the wandering mind, bringing our focus into our awareness, learning how to direct this attention as we simultaneously learn to release unnecessary effort. It becomes clear that we must release in order to focus, and as our actions become less and less effortful, we find ourselves changed in relation to much of the story we have previously told ourselves about ourselves and everything else.

Compared to all the times I have mindlessly just sat, this new awareness is totally transformational. I am in my body, I am directing my mind, my awareness is active and alert. I am directly experiencing the moment I am living. Even as my mind searches for words and my fingers type, I feel the energy from my core, the earth and air supporting me, the movement in my cells, the endless possibilities. I am not judging myself or anyone else. I am clear of the inner obstacles that might hunch my shoulders, strain my back, overuse my wrists. My thoughts are available to me, and I am free to choose my words with care that I not load them with unwanted meanings and assumptions. This freedom lives in my body as a way of being, reinvented every time I remember my breath. My yoga practice continues to wake me up, even after 8 years, to be authentically experiencing this moment.