Being Able to Feel

Building and Earthquake

How easy it is for a dream to construct

both building and earthquake.

Also the nine flights of wooden stairs in the dark,

and the trembling horse, its hard breathing

loud in the sudden after-silence and starlight.

This time the dream allows the building to stand.

Something it takes the dreamer a long time to notice,

who thought that the fear was the meaning

when being able to feel the fear was the meaning.

Jane Hirschfield, from "COME, THIEF" Poems, 2011

The practice is not one of dilution nor erasure. It is not curative nor corrective. Let's call it a practice of immersion and illumination. I find this is where life becomes a reflection of truth and broadens to let in all the possibilities.

It is particularly poignant to me that Hirshfield uses the framework of a dream here. I've been struck by how vividly dreams hold the mind and provide experiences even while we sleep. This is such a lovely way of noticing that the mind creates all of our experiences, even the illusions that we rely upon so deeply in order to go on about our lives.

The dream opens slowly to the dreamer, as witness to the mind's story. This, too, is a most remarkable moment when we see ourselves seeing, and are able to feel ourselves feeling.  

In my yoga teacher training at Kripalu we delved into the idea of meditation in motion that yoga offers. More than the placement of this foot there, or drawing a line in the mind from point A to point B; more than losing track of thoughts or feeling the rush of endorphins that bring happiness and loss of memory about the pain we walked in with, yoga is that space in which we can take "a long time to notice." It is the being itself that has meaning, not lost in the reactive, but able to take it all in.

Seeking the Nature of Reactivity: Can I See My Self?

Relationships are complex and intangible. I can stand next to someone and some sort of a relationship forms. We arrange ourselves spatially, use eye contact cues and follow rules of engagement that change constantly.

In one recent class I was teaching, I suddenly proposed: “What if you simply stopped judging the people you love? What if a person who loves you could look you in the eye and say, I completely accept you? What if that person was a co-worker, or a person next to you on the subway, or in this class?” It was shocking to imagine anyone, even a person who loves me, gazing at anyone else, even me, without judgment. In that moment my students’ eyes were fixed on me and their minds were full of reactions to me and my words. Maybe they picked up on the fact that even I, “the teacher,” was shaken awake to imagine this.

Our very nature is a reactive one. Stilling the waves of the mind, as Patanjali states in the second verse of his yoga sutras, means watching that reactive nature with awareness but not being subjected to its every wave. Can we actually function among others, doing our daily tasks without falling victim to our own stories and in essence blinding ourselves to reality? Reality is, in this case, the understanding that we are connected rather than separate in the realm of all living beings. Of course as long as we continue to think of ourselves as separate entities, our functioning will remain judgmental and attached.

I find it very hard not to drop into various definitions, or characters, or roles and react again and again from there. The process seems to form layers of story, and each has its point at the time, but they get heavy to carry around after a while. It is a long-term project to put them down, or perhaps it is very quick but has to happen again and again – maybe for each layer. If I have trouble giving this habit up when living in my own body as my own self, imagine how much harder it is for me to give it up when I have just a moment to consider someone else? The tendency to name, buttonhole, identify, define, attach meanings and judge is a very strong tendency!

I begin with the concept of patterns in my mental attitudes, behaviors, and judgments. Pausing to pay attention is my first line of inquiry; I can start with noticing whether I am inhaling or exhaling and that slows me down before my thoughts get hijacked by their attachment to a pattern. It is only with a pause long enough in which I can see the pattern that I can recognize it and make choices. In conversation I might literally press the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth before I speak in order to give myself time to notice what’s going on in my judgmental mind. The action doesn’t stop, but I can stop my reaction, and that makes it possible to imagine/see/choose a different course.

Buddhist teacher and author Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche speaks to seeing authentic emotions in a June 4, 2010 essay in the Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com/dzogchen-ponlop-rinpoche/emotional-awareness-buddhism_b_598417.html) “If we're going to understand ourselves, much less another person, we have to look beneath our patterns and face our emotions in their natural, undisguised state. When we're stuck at the level of our habitual dramas, it's like going through the day half awake, barely conscious of the world's brilliance. Some part of us may like this half-asleep state, where nothing is too bright, too energetic, or too unknown. But another part of us can hardly wait to be free, to take a chance, to see what's on the other side of the mountain.”

One of the results of my yoga is that I can no longer see myself as a finite object. It is as though I have been transformed into something much more fluid. I can find old patterns, like the marks left by floods on the walls. There is plenty of evidence there of my past behaviors and reactions. Sometimes I repeat the same knee-jerk behavior, but much more often I see it like that faint stain mark and can let the waters out before they rise to that point again. Every now and then I totally surprise myself with something so wide open that I can hardly find any self there at all, just a sense of space and being. Staying in that essential state takes practice. Usually as soon as I notice it, I am out of it. In fact the separation it takes to see it happening, requires that I return to the witness chair. Asana and meditation, slow walks, silences, all help me with that work of staying comfortable while unattached.

So in starting out to think about seeing myself in order to catch my patterns and see others without judgment, I’ve practiced seeing the patterns and begin to understand that they are not me. Sure there are strings of attachment to the stories I’ve created about my life and the memories and the dreams and the forms of others who were around me, but they are my stories, and not me either. It may be that consciousness is even more vast than self-consciousness. This inquiry absorbs my intense, focused attention and helps me to get out of the picture at the same time.

Words, Meaning & Mind

Words represent the conventions of mind.
We can agree on this.
I give you a word, and you and I will both fill in meanings,
Perhaps similar, perhaps not at all alike.
Sitting quietly, words lapping like waves at low tide.

I watch myself resting.

Look out the window.
I fill my mind with sunlight on the far trees.
This is a familiar scene,
organized against the backdrop of sky.
Shifting my eyes, it becomes a movie.

The hawk that flew in the cold invisible air
 between here and the hillside a month ago
 drifts through my head,
a moment of remembered attention.

The sound of paws on the floor wakes me: here I am.
Wordless, I pat my thigh to inform and invite my blind cat.
He reacts to the hidden actions and possibilities in sounds,
and knows what happens to my lap when I stand up.

Fear of the Compassionate Heart

my brother, as sketched by my father 1992

I woke up this morning flooded with softness, like the soft rainy day itself, holding thoughts of my cousin and her daughter in my heart. Before I even opened my eyes, my heart had melted. It felt as though waves of love could be sent to surround their eyes, their arms and hands, their words,  the spaces in which they moved their bodies. There was no reason why these two women should be in my mind at all, and in fact I haven't seen my cousin  in more than a year and a half, and have never met her 20+ year old daughter. They have been locked in a struggle for many years with debilitating psychological and emotional issues that have trapped them, literally, in the house, isolating them from social and emotional lives. Though my cousin goes to work, she can do nothing else; her daughter so fearful at all times that she forbids her mother from even allowing anyone to come to the house.  For more than 10 years this situation has been kept close to the vest, and I had no inkling of it. I saw my cousin so rarely, and she seemed to be connected to her work and always warm and kind towards me. My older sister maintained contact with this cousin since childhood as they were closer in age. A few months ago, my sister described this situation to me, detailing her observations and all the suggestions she had made, positing therapeutic strategies, all with a sense of hopelessness and sorrow.

Suffering.  There it is in a neighbor, a friend, a relative, in ourself. The urge rises to help, do something, fix something, give advice. A feeling of helplessness and sorrow washes in, an ocean of uselessness. Anger and frustration take hold, driven by a desire that conditions be changed, people behave differently, understandings shift, problems be solved.  Judgments and assessments abound. So imperfect, the situation or the self; so unsatisfactory, the conditions or the choices.

We all know how it is to stand in one place, take in the view and begin defining everything by what we see there. So it is with suffering.  We take a look at it, perhaps even a long look, and that view begins to settle into all the shapes of our feelings and reactions, our ideas and our behavior.  In any relationship, we can see the patterns of response and the collaborative nature of our view and our actions and feelings.

What if there is no action to take? How do we open ourselves to simply acknowledge without judging and hold the depth of the hurt, sorrow, anger, frustration or pain of the situation? What would happen if we could actually just allow the entirety of it (that pattern or story or set of conditions) to open up in our awareness, to be truly seen - the sheer pain of it might be unbearable, debilitate us or drive us over the cliff! It might show us how powerless we are, or ignorant or just hurt too much.  It can be very frightening to let the truth in, precisely because there might not be anything we can do about it.

This is fear of our own compassionate heart. As in a sitting meditation when for a split second there are no boundaries to the self, it can be so liberating that we react by grasping for our defined self to reassure ourself that "we exist" as we have always thought. What if it is truly so that our existence is a series of structures that we have built with conditions and reactions and once seen as separate from our basic being we are free? It can take a while to see that grasping at our definitions is something we can let go, and allow the feeling of grasping to be seen but not be in charge of defining us. This is a practice of learning to abide, to hold that vast open sense of being.

Holding my cousin and her daughter in my heart with compassion, I go through the same sequence -- feeling myself grasping at what action to take, how to convey my thoughts or advice, even simply figuring out how to show my cousin that I care about her -- and allow myself to let all that go. It takes practice to open the compassionate heart without attachment to outcomes, or assigning responsibilities. For me, perhaps especially as one who has been responsible for taking care of other people, there are knee-jerk reactions in that direction and fears of what taking on those responsibilities could be for me. I watch myself worry over what might happen if I showed my open heart -- how much more pain might flood in! It is at that point when the boundaries vanish, and all my thoughts, reactions, judgments and fears can be seen for the conditioned patterns that they are, not rooted in this moment and not attached to compassion itself.  It cannot hurt me to open my heart, the source of the pain is not my compassion.

Perhaps I truly do wish that the situation was different for my cousin and her daughter. I surely wish they could escape from the trap that cages them away from what looks like happiness and a full life. My discomfort with the pain of others' suffering stems from my own ideas about suffering and my definitions of who I am and what I ought to do to alleviate that suffering. It is by overcoming the fear of my own compassionate heart that I can offer a truthful place for my own feelings, and a healing space for the suffering of others.

Escalating Practice: Encouraging or Lost in Ego?

It is nearly impossible to ignore the sparkle of doing more, the allure of the challenge in the physical asana, or the hierarchy of yoga classes and practices deemed a "higher level." We all see yoga in the external images, those crowning aspects of back bends and inversions that seem so graceful yet unapproachable to so many of us. Without exception, we can find ourselves in classes with bodies that seem more able than our own, or at the very least, we know of such classes labeled "advanced." Is this how we deepen our practice, inspired and driven beyond our current limitations? If not for setting a goal of building strength, or gaining flexibility, or holding steady through that moment when we want to give up, how else do we get beyond feeling weak, inept and unsure of ourselves?

The way I see it, the very first commitment we make to our practice is a step beyond this allure of escalation. Embedded in that first commitment is an inkling of non-dualistic thinking: that even with our flaws and weaknesses, strengths and proclivities, we can experience the truth of this moment and release our judging mind into the role of observer/witness. Even as we struggle in the first moments of a meditative centering, even as we worry about our tight hamstrings in a forward fold or weak abdominal muscles or sore wrists or tight lower back or whatever it is, we can begin to see it as it is and with a focus on this inhale and exhale we can allow ourself the experience of observing as our own awareness begins to broaden. This is the heart of practice at any stage, after any number of years. If you began the practice as an accomplished athlete in perfect physical form, you would still run right up against this greatest challenge: to be fully present in a broadened perception with a focus of awareness in this moment.

And so it is that I find myself too, right in the middle of standing on my head, and up until a specific moment, my energy is flowing freely and I am observing an array of sensations, including an openness and startling ease. Then, in an instant, my attention turns entirely to counting my breaths, and my mind establishes a goal -- that number of breaths that would put me in the "I DID IT" category. My experience of the moment is hijacked into holding on tight, counting my breaths and encouraging myself to just keep going until I reach that magic number that I've set myself. I hold on for that accomplishment and when I do release from the posture, I pause, observing the flow of energy in response to the asana, the sweep of the experience and my breath in that moment.

Is it any surprise that my practice was to see the grasping at the goal, after experiencing a new level of openness in the asana? Not at all. This is the essence of the practice itself, declining the invitation to escalate into a physical competition, inviting the increase in awareness of what is actually happening, and as always, seeing the dualistic way of thinking/being and not getting lost there. The significance in the number of breaths I remained in headstand is indeed in the experience of that gripping, my fear reaction to the openness in the pose, that by its very nature challenged everything about the status quo of my conditioned ways of seeing myself in the world. So much benefit in perceiving the choices of where we turn our attention! So much freedom comes in those choices!

April Come She Will

I've been traveling strange terrain these past few weeks. From barely melted snows in upstate New York, to full blown cherry blossoms in Washington, DC, to palm trees and azaleas in New Orleans, to uncurling greens on the bushes in Brooklyn, and again the brilliant yellow of daffodil slopes in Maryland. My heart is traveling strange terrain and the world around me seems to reflect the vastness, fragility, beauty, starkness, and unpredictable but inexorable movements of life and death.

For the first time I missed a class at my neighborhood studio where I've taught since Inauguration Day 2009. By missed, I mean simply couldn't show up and had no substitute available to replace me. My father's urgent medical situation required my full presence. There was much sweetness in teaching last week and hearing that a few of my beginning students stayed to practice together.

I've sat with my mother, who is floating on a gentle sea of pain medications and freedom from the constraints of conventions. The tenderness with which she touches her own hands, strokes her own cheek as though forming the shapes in clay; she opens her eyes with clarity and space so enormous that my feet feel lighter as I meet her gaze. She has drifted quite a way in this nearly a month in hospice care. Her room at the group home feels like a soft safe nest. What an act of grace that after a life of such turmoil she is finding her way with such an openness of heart.

I've held my father's hand as he went through procedures, humming the violin part to his humming the viola part of duets we have played, keeping his attention aloft of the changing chest tubes and with the breath itself. His clarity of mind and good humor more endearing than my heart can bear, and his suffering finding a place within my own ribs. He stood by me through all my childhood surgeries, fainting as the anesthesia took me out to sea. I can still feel his two large hands holding my one right hand. So I gaze at the delicate fuzz of spring tree branches against the sky as I walk around the assisted living facility to which I am hoping he can move when, in his words, "the white cells win."

What is a yoga practice? I find my center, my core self, sitting on the Amtrak train speeding from New York to Washington to New York to Washington. I breathe into that three-dimensional space where all three of his chest tubes are draining away the mess that ought not be there. I walk up the stairs to my 4th floor apartment, grateful that my sprained ankle is recovered enough, knowing that each step I take is a practice in letting go of expectations and outcomes; that each breath is truly the gift of presence, in this moment is the fullness and freedom of my life.

There are so many of us on the path. The footprints fit my feet perfectly no matter which way I turn. I feel graced by each and every one of you. I will return your gaze even when I have no eyes with which to see.

Nothing is Wrong, It's just Fear

It wasn't hard for me to tell my mother that she could let go if that's what was right for her. It slipped out as though it was always there, our eyes smiling at each other. She was fingering the scarf I made for her that only a month ago she said had reminded her of the taste of strawberries. Somehow, I was completely calm and relaxed telling her that I will miss her but that it was okay. Maybe it was because I could feel that the stream was already flowing in that direction. Perhaps it was because she seemed so happy to be floating on the water headed towards the falls. I can hear the falls, I just don't know exactly how far away they are.

Attachment. I suppose it is the big attachment, that we hold on to the idea of being alive, of other people staying alive, that life is what we hold dear and hold on tight. The practice of seeing my own attachment to anything, an opinion, an outcome, a schedule, a relationship, has been so revealing of how I make meaning where there are really just constantly shifting conditions whose visibility depends on the light.

So I sit in one place, open to the deep contentment I saw on her face, feeling the fear of the work I will have to do once she is gone, knowing that her presence is not some thing nor does it belong to anyone, not even to her. Her presence is the surface of the water that is everything in the sea: wave, froth, air bubbles, sand, beach, conch shells, sand crabs, sky, wind, the sound of the falls in the distance.

I don't know the way, but all paths lead there.

Teaching with Myself as the Unknown

I am very curious to discover my teaching this week, since my own inner balance has shifted to be ever more obviously unknowable. I twisted my ankle a week ago as I walked on slippery sidewalks. The process of recovery has been revelatory so far. Aside from the literal experience of sensation and changing forms, of course I have had to change my behavior and expectations. I've chucked normal patterns and am observing how I react. It is using a lot more energy than I thought it would, just to watch all this, and be in it.

The coming week I have shaved off a few classes and obligations, canceled a couple appointments and spread a few things out over the week. The plan is designed to give me more time between everything to elevate the foot, to recharge my energy, to take the time I will need to travel slowly from place to place. Even with these changes I am going to negotiate carefully as I go teach this and that class. The getting to and from the teaching will be as much to learn for me as the teaching itself.

There is no way for me to know what will happen, how it will feel or what the progression of events might include. It amuses me that my mind keeps asking how I might find a solution in the form of someone else who might take away the uncertainty or the discomfort. I know that fundamentally it is my own body that will heal itself if I can stay out of its way. Exploring what helps that healing and what subtracts or detracts from that healing is really at the center of my attention.

I'm struck by how this is yoga practice as everything. Tenderly, non-judgmentally I am exploring the range of motion of the rest of my body, and consciously relaxing my mind in its tendencies to grip and attach, to project and to figure. I practice as I knit. Practice as I wait for help with something, practice as I step down each stair, practice as I move in my sleep. It is a fascinating process of integrating and experiencing. The shift in my view is what changes this injury from a deficit to a gift.

FInding the Jewel in This Moment

Open the pomegranate.
Marvel at the deep color
And perfect imperfection
of geometry and succulence.
Now deal with the stain,
holding that appreciation
within yourself
succulent and
perfectly
imperfect
as you are.

This is the best moment of your life.
This is the best moment of your life.
This is the only moment of your life.
This is your moment.
This is your life.

Cold wind in your face,eyes watering,
Shove your hands into your pockets.
Meet the gaze of each passerby
and smile to the corners of your eyes
sharing the exhilaration, the confrontation.
Being alive and awake.
Watch yourself rush, or regret, pity or retreat.
And smile at your self
grateful for the cold
to the corners of your eyes,
cherishing the warmth of your heart
and your runny nose.

This is the best moment of your life.
This is the best moment of your life.
This is the only moment of your life.
This is your moment.
This is your life.

Attachment to What Is, or Not?

A gust of wind thrashed in the upper branches of the tree across the street from my 4th floor window. I watched the dance of the leaves, and the light, the grace and vigor of the branch in its responses to the moving air. What do I see? Is it the world as it is in this moment, or is it a change from what I expected to see, or from what I saw a moment ago? In other words, is this moving, thrashing branch being measured against my idea of the tree holding still? Could it be that my idea of "tree" creates my concept of "tree in the wind?" If I simply see the tree, whether stationary or in motion, I can experience this moment without assigning meaning, without defining any dualistic value. The moment is reactive to conditions, the conditions are in the moment.

What is change without attachment to what was, or the measurement of what is against something that might have been or might yet be? Is that at the core of my human understandings or might I be masking something else by these attachments?

Maybe letting go of those meanings, that identification with the object as the defined object, would shake my view of the world. Perhaps the inner core of my being does not require that a tree hold steady as a shape against the sky or produce firewood or shade or even oxygen. It is shocking to think that every cell has an atomic structure, smaller than the eye can see and difficult for the mind to imagine without physical models in exaggeratedly large sizes. Yet they exist in the same way that planets do, now that we have created an exaggeration of our own vision in the form of powerful telescopes. Aren't these fundamentally acts of imagination?

I'm sensing that what we see and the meanings we give are really still in the realm of myth and story. The story changes as the teller accommodates new possibilities, and the exploration continues of the illusions around us, defining and explaining to make it easier to function here, or understand what we think. It is natural human behavior to attach to what we think and what we think we know. Isn't much of anger, disappointment, violence and harm coming from exactly this attachment? How much energy is spent trying to convince others that one opinion is right and another wrong, or one action is just and another hateful, or one concept is correct and another incorrect, one god is true and another false.

I attach so much of my own being to these details of memory, training, and meaning. In my yoga and meditation there are moments when there is a sense of a conscious witness beyond these attachments, watching the person I am go through these patterns of attachment. This awareness is detached from the assigned meanings, values, shapes and histories. There is much compassion in the observation, a sense of kindness and lack of judgment in this way of knowing about being myself. That in itself is deeply comforting, enabling, spacious.

Functioning in the world is not a detached condition! My feelings soar and plummet, my thoughts zoom around, my head fills with details and observations, critiques and comparisons. Even my body continually sends a variety of messages, never to be exactly as I might expect or assume it to be. Even without really detaching, I can watch this happening and actually function with more equanimity while the whirlwind whirls. That tree branch is still thrashing out there, yet has not changed the tree. Even if the limb falls, the idea of tree can remain or the idea of tree can include limb-on-the-sidewalk. This is a state of mind, rather than one of the tree itself. My attachment to meanings and definitions is not required for that tree to continue in its relationships to the conditions around it, the wind and the sidewalk, to photosynthesis and the air I breathe.

Beyond the Distraction of the Mind

Taking one more breath to focus my attention on the present moment, I am releasing the temptation to attach to thoughts and judgments. This morning it took all my focus in my second Sirsasana (headstand). My mind kept trying to tell me what was going on, when my breath already knew all about it. It is like having something distract your attention by running across the road ahead of you. Your attention is immediately pulled and all systems begin to go into alert, even though your own path is not actually affected by the action of the other, who has already gone from one side to the other. Meanwhile, you fall out of headstand because your mind is too full of muscle work and fear and thinking about balance and strength, instead of just breathing along the spine and lifting from the Muladhara (the root chakra). The same thing can happen in any moment of practice, hijacking by the head right out of the moment into some idea or feeling or criticism.

Don't give in! Just observe that the mind is at work and continue with the breath. Maybe you are approaching the edge of what is comfortable for you and the mind tells you to push through with muscles and will power. Back off and breathe into the place that is threatening you... perhaps it is the hamstring or the memory of the hamstring.. either way it is so much more interesting to find that you can release that to sustain yourself, rather than push that to make something happen.

Trying things that are new, or that seem difficult, often brings up this kind of mental chatter. Back-down-or-push-through thinking comes from the dualistic mind: either/or, strong/weak, can/can't... dualistic. When released into the breath, it is possible to simply experience what actually is in that moment without judging it, without turning it into something. I like to use Ujjayi breath in this kind of moment to draw my attention, to give even the sound of the waves as support for my focus. I can feel the breath gently grating through the back of my throat, like a whisper of love while I notice my muscles burning with the contraction or my spine lengthening in an inversion. When I go from Padangusthasana (forward bend holding toes) to Utthita Hasta Padangustahasana (standing up extending one leg to the side holding the toe) there is a moment on one side when I can feel my mind tipping my balance. It is the strangest thing, yet I also know that I can pull my breath from the floor through my standing leg and exhale out the other leg. This is an energetic connection of the breath throughout my body, my being, that has nothing to do with the balancing act my mind is chattering about. If I allow the distraction, I feel the separation of bending and standing, the dualities of balancing and falling, of folding and stretching. All of these concepts tend to knock me out of the asana. When that happens, and it sometimes does, I watch it happen like a fly on the wall witnessing the whole comedy of errors. And it is this witness consciousness that seems endlessly compassionate, willing to see it as comedy rather than tragedy, ready to accept whatever is happening, including the process of aging that my body is experiencing.

The practice of yoga includes the watching mind, the falling body, the laughing and the disappointment. It includes the feeling of awe and wonder as I rise from a full forward bend attached to my foot and elongate into that right angle leg-hip stretch. Even though I know that it is my muscles and bones that are in the asana, it really is my breath that gets me there. And even more important, my willingness to let being present take priority over whatever else my head might be telling me. It is then that my head gets the best gift from the practice, the open space to see itself, to really be more and more of what it can be, of finding me, expressing the human being I am. There is no point in projecting what will happen or aim for a particular thing, in my opinion. It is always just this intense quality of being that makes yoga infinitely interesting and engaging to me.

Patterns & Reactivity: Can I See My Self

Relationships are complex and intangible. I can stand next to someone and some sort of a relationship forms. We arrange ourselves spatially, use eye contact cues and follow rules of engagement that change constantly.

In one class I was teaching recently, I suddenly proposed: “What if you simply stopped judging the people you love? What if a person who loves you could look you in the eye and say, I completely accept you? What if that person was a co-worker, or a person next to you on the subway, or in this class?” It was shocking to imagine anyone, even a person who loves me, gazing at anyone else, even me, without judgment. In that moment my students’ eyes were fixed on me and their minds were full of reactions to me and my words. Maybe they picked up on the fact that even I, “the teacher,” was shaken awake to imagine this.

Our very nature is a reactive one. Stilling the waves of the mind, as Patanjali states in the second verse of his yoga sutras, means watching that reactive nature with awareness but not being subjected to its every wave. Can we actually function among others, doing our daily tasks without falling victim to our own stories and in essence blinding ourselves to reality? Reality is, in this case, that understanding that we are connected rather than separate in the realm of all living beings. Of course as long as we continue to think of ourselves as separate entities, our functioning will remain judgmental and attached.

I find it very hard not to drop into various definitions, or characters, or roles and react again and again from there. The process seems to form layers of story, and each has its point at the time, but they get heavy to carry around after a while. It is a long-term project to put them down, or perhaps it is very quick but has to happen again and again – maybe for each layer. If I have trouble giving this habit up when living in my own body as my own self, imagine how much harder it is for me to give it up when I have just a moment to consider someone else? The tendency to name, buttonhole, identify, define, attach meanings and judge is a very strong tendency!

I begin with the concept of patterns in my mental attitudes, behaviors, and judgments. Pausing to pay attention is my first line of inquiry; I can start with noticing whether I am inhaling or exhaling and that slows me down before my thoughts get hijacked by their attachment to a pattern. It is only with a pause long enough in which I can see the pattern that I can recognize it and make choices. In conversation I might literally press the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth before I speak in order to give myself time to notice what’s going on in my judgmental mind. The action doesn’t stop, but I can stop my reaction, and that makes it possible to imagine/see/choose a different course.

Buddhist teacher and author Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche speaks to seeing authentic emotions in a June 4, 2010 essay in the Huffington Post (www.huffingtonpost.com/dzogchen-ponlop-rinpoche/emotional-awareness-buddhism_b_598417.html “If we're going to understand ourselves, much less another person, we have to look beneath our patterns and face our emotions in their natural, undisguised state. When we're stuck at the level of our habitual dramas, it's like going through the day half awake, barely conscious of the world's brilliance. Some part of us may like this half-asleep state, where nothing is too bright, too energetic, or too unknown. But another part of us can hardly wait to be free, to take a chance, to see what's on the other side of the mountain.”

One of the results of my yoga is that I can no longer see myself as a finite object. It is as though I have been transformed into something much more fluid. I can find old patterns, like the marks left by floods on the walls. There is plenty of evidence there of my past behaviors and reactions. Sometimes I repeat the same knee-jerk behavior, but much more often I see it like that faint stain mark and can let the waters out before they rise to that point again. Every now and then I totally surprise myself with something so wide open that I can hardly find any self there at all, just a sense of space and being. Staying in that essential state takes practice. Usually as soon as I notice it, I am out of it. In fact the separation it takes to see it happening, requires that I return to the witness chair. Asana and meditation, slow walks, silences, all help me with that work of staying comfortable while unattached.

So in starting out to think about seeing myself in order to catch my patterns and see others without judgment, I’ve come to find that I can learn to see the patterns but not that they are not me. Sure there are stringy attachments to the stories I’ve created about my life and the memories and the dreams and the forms of others who were around me, but they are my stories, not me either. Maybe consciousness is even more vast than self-consciousness. It seems the inquiry will require my intense, focused attention and for me to get out of the picture at the same time.

Three Ideas+One: Let Go, Observe, Breathe -- Then Soften

I think we often work too hard at the things we are focused on, enough so that we are unproductive and our senses dulled. When I begin teaching, I start with awareness. Even with the first breaths I can feel how some of my students zoom into this muscling and posturing all around even the inhale, for example, making it into something rather than experiencing what it is. Big, serious, straining, forced inhales get stuck in people's throats and under their ribs. Even the exhales can choke off the ability to notice the subtleties of the moment, or observe what the breath is in the body.

It struck me recently that leading students in each aspect of something is like leaving them abandoned in a boat where they would be floating helplessly the next day. I asked a few of my beginning students how they would start their own practice on the mat, and found them frightened and puzzled -- "I don't know what to do!!" I remember feeling this way too. Of course I can direct them, but that is not my way of teaching beginners. How to help them take on that internal communication - the dialogue of inquiry, with directions that come from outside of them? Sometimes, I rely on my own integrated experiences to lead my "languaging" as it is called in the yoga training. (I scoffed and laughed out loud when I first saw that word, but I really get it now.) I scan my breath sensors under my own ribs to see where the catch might be, suggesting to my students "notice what you notice, perhaps the back of your rib cage, perhaps a texture in your throat..." etc. Not trying to tell them what to feel or what to notice... but aren't I really doing just that by leading with suggestive language?

So I isolated three primary questions my students can ask themselves at any time in a practice: What can I let go -- or where can I release; What do I notice; and Where is my breath? This worked well for beginning students, and I've tried it now with my more intermediate group and my more mature students too. I can remind them of variants of these questions throughout the course of events in our practice, and I feel them beginning to internalize it, discovering a path of their own no matter what is going on.

The next stage I ask is for softness. Taking on the working-too-hard-at-this, I have begun exaggerating fierceness of energy flow in a movement and then say, "Now softly" or "Soften" and repeat whatever it is ... it is so much easier for students to find a sense of relaxing into the breath, asana or effort, rather than pushing further and further. This is remarkable in utkatasana, especially for beginners to discover that they can continuously find more to release even as they are making such an effort.

"Finding one's edge," or "practicing at one's edge" seems misleading terminology for my students. I don't use it. I would rather speak of finding more space, exploring with the breath, softening within the form, and observing. We can witness the deep desire we have to go farther, as if there was a way to measure where we are, and realize that we can release that judgmental attitude, that attachment to the external.

After a deep forward bend at the pinnacle of my chair session this afternoon, I quietly asked, "Shall we do that again?" and a soft chorus of voices said, "yes, yes." The exploration had begun, though this asana was complex and challenging for each individual in the room, they had found the breath in it, had discovered freedoms in themselves, had softened into the support of the earth and were ready to release into the uniqueness of their own body experiences. At the end of our session, we turned our radiant open hearts towards each other. There is no energy more fierce, nor faces any softer, than that.

Controlling the Scene

When I was nine years old, I went sailing with my dad on a lake in the city of Seattle. We were living there for a year, and he was studying for his skipper certification while working on his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University there. We had a remarkable moment together, when, with a sudden wave activity from some motor boat, our little sunfish began rocking dramatically. He was new at this, and had his littlest kid with him, while his two older kids (all of 14 and 15 years old) were off in their own boat. He was panicked, trying to be in charge of both boats, shouting instructions to my siblings off in the distance, and as our boat began tipping, he jumped out and began thrashing while shouting instructions to me to hold on and such... until he stood up to find the water was just barely above his knees. Obviously, he was relieved, held on to the boat and looked to see that my siblings were doing just fine in their boat, in fact they began sailing circles around us.

I tell this story because it resonates with my yoga practice. The enormous effort we all make to try to control the situation, or to make it into something specific that fits what we think or feel, this effort is, in and of itself, inhibiting us from finding out what is going on. I laughed back then as I watched my very serious dad realize his own situation, but he did not. His good watch was ruined and he felt foolish. Still, the best part was that everyone was really fine... and in fact the two teenage kids in the other sailboat had done quite well on their own, about which they felt pretty good.

There are times in an asana or in meditation when it feels as though the waters are too rough, or the breath just can not be enough to support me, or when I see a little too clearly how my fear inhibits me and it paralyzes me. If I could just slip off the boat and stand up, I would realize that I can find out how deep the water really is, and if it is shallow enough I can walk my boat in. If the water is actually over my head, I can at least dog paddle until I figure out which way to swim.

The Flow in Practice

Yoga practice starts with intentions. Just taking mat in hand is the beginning. Next, I find a spot to lay the mat out, a cushion or a block nearby, and put myself down on the mat. Whether sitting, standing or lying down, it is my breath in my body that brings me into the present moment. I feel the movement of my skin as I breathe, notice the texture of my throat and the softness inside my belly and ribs. I let my joints open and my bones settle into gravity. This is the path, to open what can be released and be with whatever sensations come. The movements stretch and challenge, bringing awareness to feelings and the spaces beyond feelings.

The plan unfolds from the breath. I move the places that are motivated by the breath, and pay special attention to those joints and muscles that feel especially tight or fragile. I make my movements such my body is fully drawn into the breath. Gently loosening with movements that are charged with the inhale and released by the exhale, I can explore whatever is brought up. Learning to attend to what actually is so, I can choose to hold a posture or a sequence of movements and extend the breath or undulate in and out using the breath to energize.

Releasing a stiff joint takes time, takes movement, takes heart. Compassion towards myself means being attentive to the muscle that is tight without force or goal setting. Moderating the urgency to move or push, and allowing myself to breathe through the challenges that arise, using strength and patience, and humor. I don't really ever doubt whether I will live through this moment! Why make it into something so dramatic? What if my balance is terrible on one side? I reinvent my foothold on the earth and build that foundation all the way up my spine until I can breath the extension. I laugh when I fall out of a posture, marveling. I take the stiff side twice, noticing aspects that are different the second time, not judging a level of accomplishment, just noticing the effects of practice.

So one day or series of days I might spend more time with twists or standing postures, with inversions or back bends. Perhaps this day, this moment calls for sensing the balance in every asana, or drawing awareness into the back of my ribcage no matter what else is going on. Slow breathing or rapid Kapalabhati, these choices are drawn from the inside with a conscious mind as a witness not the director of the flow. This openness to possibility and non judgment, breaks out of a pattern of set events and lets the design on the mat flow from my own breath. This combination of attention and kindness, effort and exploration, is what seems to build my ability to be more fully myself. When I take classes I give over the flow to the teacher, and usually discover all kinds of things about myself and about the student experience of yoga teaching.

Even if I try to do the same sequence every day, my practice is never the same.

“I” and the Universal Self

In the course of my life I've been trained in a concept of speaking about feelings or interpretations of fact or observations in terms of "I" statements. This can help prevent many upsetting and hurtful conversations. Clearly, things can get complicated quite fast when starting a phrase with "you." Something directive, anticipatory, projecting, assumptive, dismissive, and plain wrong can so easily slip in when one person begins to say something directly related to another person's identity or self. "YOU" is a one word descriptive of "OTHER" in some ways. If I say, "I see your shoulders are hunching" it is different in feeling than if I say, "You are hunching your shoulders." What is different? One is my observation, and implies that I am responsible for what I notice. The other is a statement about you, implying that there is consciousness and responsibility on your part and potentially judgment on mine. The later statement is much more likely to set up distance between us.

At the very same moment that I am trying to frame things from my own perspective without stepping on your identity, I am also able to see the construction of my own framing and content. In a way, I can observe myself seeing your hunched shoulders and in doing so I can become aware of a series of choices I can make, both about my reactions and about my actions, including what I do or don’t say and my choice of words. Of course, if I take enough time noticing all this, I might find that I need not really say anything at all, and that simply relaxing my own shoulders is enough, unless I am teaching a student to notice their own condition.

Watching, or witnessing, my own way of interacting leads me to a distinct feeling of being more than just the reaction I might be having. I am more than the urge to speak, more than the impulse to interact with others or produce a result. This sense of being feels much larger than “I” do. Being is a fluid awareness, not set within boundaries of conditional thought or circumstance.

My sense of being an alive, breathing entity can easily be limited and defined by my patterns of behavior or thought, my judgments, feelings, and mental constructions. I can choose to see others in these terms and stay in a dualistic world of "me-you," "here-there," "right-wrong," etc. Some of this is conceptually necessary for figuring out what's going on around us – for example, is the car at the intersection moving or still? (In terms of physics we might explain that nothing is still, since every cell has moving parts, each atom has movement between the neutrons, electrons and protons.) And yet, even while using this ability to understand duality, I do not have to make myself miserable and separate from others by constant judgment, filling up with self-limiting ideas that do not reflect the essentially limitless aspects of being.

Strangely, the more I learn to see the “I,” the clearer it seems that beyond the “I” is something very much more universal that is shared with all living beings. Through my practice, it seems that the “being” is what makes life worth living and so I remain curious about the human structure within which “I” live.

The Path Is Not Global - It's Very Personal

There's a strange tendency to imagine that others have their act together when I feel that I do not. I see this as my ego fighting for attention. The idea that I seek to be judging myself, that I imagine myself to have any way of measuring or assessing the condition of others, are a product of ego and the craving for distinctness, for separateness and, yes, identity. This is part of what has become visible or clear in yoga and meditation practice.

Yoga is a humbling activity. I may discover incredible open spaces and be reassured by the fact that my body continues to move and respond to my queries about energy and muscle, about positive and negative aspects of being. I also become acutely aware that all there is to me is my breathing and my ever-varying levels of willingness to be aware. There is nothing about this that is global in scope, it is quite personal. There is nothing grand or powerful in this, it is really the good part of that speck in the universe feeling, perhaps a sparkling speck, but speck nonetheless.

My practice connects me to a universal energy and awareness, both widens and narrows my attention, and puts me into a context that is vast, but it is the small self, the individual person on the sidewalk walking, who experiences these frames of reference. I feel it intensely in my teaching and when I take classes from others. My breath may join with all the beings in the room, my cells may share their composition and reactivity with everyone else, but there is still that person, THAT person, who grew up wearing my face and feeling my feelings and that person is the one through which I am sorting out the world outside and inside.

I don't get lost staring at my own belly-button, so to speak. It's not that kind of Ego with a capital E. But I think it is important to acknowledge and understand -- just as I do with each one of my students -- that it is through this body, this set of experiences and patterns, that the freedom comes. The path is not outside of my self, it requires my very specific self to take the walk in order to see the way.

Freedom of Non-attachment

Traveling recently, I was struck by how little it takes to release attachment or to enmesh myself with those deep swirling currents. In some ways it matters very little what I do, what I eat, what happens in any one moment -- the impact of any of this is created by the meanings (feelings, significances) attached by my mind. In and of themselves, the moments do not have a hierarchy or embedded significance. One moment offers the same freedom as the next, or the last. A phone call changes the emotions and interactions of the moment, a gust of wind changes the experience of the moment, a cool sip of water changes the sensations of the moment and the mind can play with meanings in every case.

Looking out of my hotel window down to the sidewalk below, I watched pedestrians and vehicles coming and going every which way. From above, each body was a head with moving parts to carry it -- the mind in every person filling and emptying continuously in response to the wind, the traffic lights, the weight of their bags, the morning experiences or projections ... whatever the mind's content. I could not even begin to pretend to know what was going on inside but could clearly see the forms moving in space. My yoga teaching has given me a physical awareness of balance and imbalance -- watching the gaits, feeling the movement. There need not be a story attached unless my interest is in making that story to help control or understand, to predict or participate.

Each moment is a bit like visiting an art exhibition, where I place myself in front of a piece of art and observe it at the same time as I observe my reactive nature in relation to it. I can choose to read the narrative on the wall beside the piece or the introductory explanations as I enter the room; I can choose the sequence in which I experience the exhibit or choose to follow the map provided by the creator of the exhibition. Sometimes I might react to the date of a work, or the colors in it, or my feelings evoked by the image I perceive. My reaction might change if I have "information" about the artist or the history of this art form. It seems the same is true for the moments in my day.

Traveling in a new place made it easier for me to notice that the food tasted particularly yummy, or greasy, or bland as I was seeking out the nature of experience in a new place; and in all those circumstances I got up from the table no longer feeling hungry. Having only so many days in a place, perhaps helped me give more attention to whether the day was misty or sunny or rainy or cold since I knew that this was going to be my experience of that place; and each moment filled with sights, fragrances, tastes, sounds, textures, ideas, interactions, choices, experiences.

I felt a strong positive sense of my own unimportance in these days of travel. It was just fine to walk out and be one of those moving bodies seen from a 6th floor window, walking along with my passing and changeable goals, in rhythm with the moment. Walking to work in my own neighborhood, it was most interesting how this same astonishing joy of being translated once I returned to Brooklyn.

Video with Mooji: be grateful, be quiet & observe what arises

A friend sent me this 10 minute video of Satsang with Mooji related to a participant noting a "wave of helplessness washed over" him and he was frustrated by his conditioned self. Mooji explains how one can be quiet and see the whole idea of being frustrated or stuck with our reactive nature without being stuck or frustrated. He says, "look but don't touch," in simple terms expressing witness consciousness! Mooji speaks with gentleness and ease about being the silent observer in relation to whatever arises in our experience of ourselves. Not judging and not getting involved, he explains that "you are not the moving part," It is a marvelous 10 minutes. Take the time, enjoy this deeply compassionate perspective on what we all go through. Being grateful that whatever it is has arisen in order to make our patterns known. Lovely. Thanks, Anh Chi!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnMUNmyaipw

For more about Mooji, visit www.mooji.com

Finding the Jelly Beans

I did not grow up celebrating Easter, but my life began to include some of the traditions when I had children. One of our family activities was to hide jelly beans in plain sight all around the kitchen and invite the kids to find them. Some years we wove little paper baskets, other years just handed out small collection bowls. Always we made sure there were high ones and low ones, that the colors of the beans matched as many of the objects upon which they were hidden, and that it would be fun rather than a chore to find them in unexpected places.

Discovering that which is hiding in plain sight seems to fit in naturally with a yoga practice. Maybe it was those jelly beans helped teach me to look more closely for the parts that merge into the form or color, the pieces that actually are not part of the object. Even my own breath can shed bits and pieces that have attached to it. If I really allow my attention to follow my breath, I discover that I can release a certain amount of unnecessary effort even there, that there is a specific texture to the breath in this moment, that the breath can direct the body or that I can choose to direct the breath. Over time I can see that I use my breath in specific ways, and can discover new ways to allow my breath to support me.

Our habits seem obvious to others, but sometimes remain strangely invisible to ourselves. The jelly beans are hiding in plain sight. Patterns that have evolved as useful in the past, placed carefully at one time, become less useful and sometimes a great inhibition in the present. Simply turning attention on this helps reveal the little bits that have been added and sometimes reveals the structure. These can then be taken apart and set aside for use when useful, or simply let them go.

Through yoga practice we see obvious but unrecognized elements, like our tendency to cross right leg over left, and not so obvious, like holding our breath in utkatasana (chair/fierce pose). Noticing the pattern that is right there in the open is the first step... like finding the red jelly bean sitting on a red milk cap, or the yellow one resting between the bananas. This is the beginning of seeing who we are, and once that begins, the study of oneself can lead to all the treasures resting in the nature of being, being human, being part of the larger world, feeling alive.