Snow Storm Mania: More on Good and Bad

Holy moly the snow in the Northeast is crazy!! It's so snow stormy that it's not even fun to romp around in. You could only walk away from the wind and then never get home anyway because it's impossible to see. Pretty awesome.

So I'm all cozy, house-sitting some cats and enjoying decadent thermostat settings of anywhere from 62 to 68. Treats for me. Too bad the sit-ees didn't leave a huge cache of marvelous treats in the fridge for the snow storm (although they did leave about a hundred batteries in case I wanted to play Wii . . . which I don't). I don't tend to check the weather, my stock reason being that it's pretty much the only thing I can ever be sure of actually happening, right now, in this moment, ever. Plus my friend rightly calls weather news "The Worry Channel" and I'm all set with that generally speaking. But knowing a storm is coming is handy. Oh, one of my only jokes also: do Xtian radio stations provide weather reports, or is that blasphemy?

So back to the good/bad issue I've been thinking about. Here is the problem: learning that anything is good means creating a seed of judgment in yourself that the opposite behavior is bad, and this is why we're all doomed to live in eternal strife/conflict. Take something like punctuality or sharing. We learn that it's polite to be on time and to share our toys. Well then, now we have some basis for thinking that anyone who is late or doesn't share toys is impolite - and we feel we have a basis for thinking of someone (or at least their behavior) as "bad." Then we get to feel offended or angry, because we know that being on time and sharing are "good," and being late and not sharing are "bad" (the issue of why we feel personal offense needs more examination I think, but another time). I mean, beyond good/bad, there are lots of substantive reasons for being on time - it's respectful of other people's time and expectations etc. And sharing is important because it fosters good will and what goes around comes around etc. But these more (barely) substantive explanations are still mired in good and bad and being judgmental. The ideal would be that I become someone who shares, but doesn't get mad or filled with hate at anyone who fails to share in the way I would. And that I am on time as much as possible, but I don't label as rude or disrespectful (aka "bad") someone who is perpetually late. Wouldn't this be nice? If we all had high standards for ourselves and infinite patience and forgiveness for others? Wouldn't the world be awesome? Wait a minute - let's change "patience and forgiveness" to something closer to total good natured indifference, and not even reach the mental state where we have to use our patience and forgiveness muscles, because this usually means something like "you're bad but I am overlooking it out of ego-driven magnanimity." I don't even want to get to that point. I just want to not even notice or be bothered if things are delayed or someone doesn't share.

How can someone be taught to behave very well without teaching them to judge the opposite behavior as being bad? It seems too abstract. When someone is late, so many things inform our anger: we're going to miss part of the show, or maybe not get tickets, or I'm hungry and we are holding dinner for the late person, or I settled into a state of mind in which I am Ready To Go and I had to put down my special projects in order to be on time and now because of this lateness I am sitting here in my nice clothes when I could have spent another half an hour in the garden and finished up the whatever I was doing. Okay so if all these things are attached to someone's timeliness, what is the state of mind that would permit someone to just not be bothered? You have to let go of EVERYTHING. It's fine if we miss the beginning of the show! It's fine if we can't get tickets, we'll do something else! It's fine if the gardening isn't done! It's even fine for me to sit here in my nice clothes with nothing to do but try not to get dirty! Yes I'm hungry and maybe there is emotions connected with the feeling of being hungry (crankiness!) but that's fine too! I don't even internalize a feeling of personal offense if the late person is so oblivious or self-absorbed to others' time that this inconvenience doesn't register for them! Phew. I mean, that is a LOT of stuff to be okay with. I think someone would have to be pretty evolved to abandon all those negative feelings in order to truly not care if someone else is late. This isn't easy. Imagine a kid believing that it doesn't matter if Susie is hogging the green crayon even though the kid really needs it for the shrubbery (and Susie totally knows this), or that it's fine if you miss the beginning of the movie. Seems unlikely.

What to do? I can't think of anything right now except to aspire to be cool with everything a la Buddha says so.

Went to Buddha Class Last Week! Also Another Teacher Training Weekend

One of the real logical rabbit holes I find myself in with Buddha stuff is the idea of acting purely and freeing myself from the constant weighing of what is good and bad. I just don’t understand how anything would ever happen if we could abandon our classifications of good and bad on everything. I can identify the seeds of vanity, self-righteousness, pride, or anything else evaluative or judgmental in practically everything I do. Going to the grocery store, for example, is a complex equation factoring in such variables as: my concepts of proper nutrition as well as my sense of entitlement to enjoy bad nutrition sometimes; my socio-political feelings about the source of food and its superior/inferior quality and ethical implications; my sense of thrift and again a sense of entitlement to nice or fancy things tempering that thrift; my personal preferences for things that I like the taste of or make me feel good or sate; my enjoyment of cooking things for myself and others. These are all decision-making factors that have evolved out of my sense of what is “good” and what is “bad.” I can’t decide to purchase a banana without the entire history of myself somehow influencing the choice. How would I ever get anything done if I were to free myself from the duality of good and bad? Should I close the packaging on these crackers so they don’t get stale? Isn’t that just my sense of what is good and bad? Stale = bad. Crispy = good.

I asked my question about piano playing at Buddha class – which was a really nice class, by the way. It’s a cozy little group of people and the next series is taking place in someone’s deli in town. I’m looking forward to the class, and to making friends, too. Anyway my question about piano playing goes like this: we can generally agree that piano playing is a good thing. Would anyone play piano if we could all transcend good and bad? There are so many things tied up in it – we feel proud of our abilities, a little vain to share them with people who might be impressed, attached to the physical fact of a big old piano that facilitates the piano practice and playing. How would one practice, play, or perform piano purely? The answer was a little abstract for me. We'll see.

Anyway. We’re doing back-bending in yoga training this weekend. Back-bending is sort of my enemy since I messed up my lower back (as is forward-bending, but whatever), but I like that we get to spend some time with it. Aversion, inability, and resistance should usually be investigated.

Also here’s another over-share if anyone’s interested: I think I’m getting happier. When I was really stressed out and miserable not too long ago – about 6 or 7 months ago – I used to check in with myself by asking myself how I was doing: “How you doin’, friend?” And for a while the answer was usually “vaguely suicidal as usual, old pal, just keep walking and don’t think too hard about it!” Well yesterday I was in the shower and I asked myself, “So how are you?” And I said back, “I’m happy.” Something right is happening; I’m really excited about it. I just have to keep working at it, and eventually maybe the “happy” response will stay put!

Timely Information

There are so many things I was not ready to take in when they were presented to me. Parents must have this experience all the time – no child can “hear” whatever wisdom you want to offer to them as you watch them re-learn everything you have struggled to know. People realize what they are ready to realize, and information comes to us when we are ready. Sometimes information comes and it’s such a revelation that it almost hurts to look back on the time that we were without it, but it is all how it is meant to be. I really like the idea that in every moment of our lives we are exactly where we are supposed to be. It takes the pressure off, for one thing. No pressure to already have accomplished more than you have, or learned more, or seen more. Today is exactly where you should be. With the pressure taken off it’s just so much easier to enjoy the day and take what comes and go where you are lead.

I keep thinking about how timely reading Walden feels (see previous post). It’s like reading someone else’s beautifully articulated narration of everything I feel I’ve finally come to know up to this point. What capacity did I have to relate to Thoreau when I was 18? ZERO. And just like all of life, our education attempts to force certain knowledge or revelation upon us when we might not be ready for it. It keeps bringing me back to Desikachar’s observation that our goals can become our obstacles – setting our sights on specific things in one specific direction can actually lead us away from where we would, and perhaps should, otherwise take ourselves. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m all in favor of seeking out teachers and teachings because exposure plants a seed of awareness that we can return to when we’re ready, and connect the dots when actually see the connections, and learning can initiate important changes of mind and heart. And especially when we don’t know where to go, it’s incredibly useful to follow the leader. But I do wonder where else I would have taken myself if the goals of education hadn’t been so prescribed in a certain direction (not in a regretful way! That is because I am exactly where I need to be right now, see supra). I feel that in many ways the things I have accomplished were just huge obstacles.

Whoa Thoreau

I am really enjoying Thoreau right now. Reading the essay Economy is really great. I can’t believe sometimes the texts we are asked to digest as teenagers that we just don’t have the context for. Reading about Thoreau’s economy is so much more poignant as an adult who needs to earn money and maintain a shelter and afford food and cover my nakedness. But it is ringing so true to me now – he cuts apart the function of education where youths go to “play” at life, education serving to encourage people to analyze life when it was once meaningful to actually live life. He criticizes the excesses people make themselves poor to afford, noting that you probably wouldn’t freeze to death in your lean-to, but you might stress yourself into an early grave fending off the relentless hounding of creditors. What I’m waiting for in Walden is a lay-out of the proper priorities of life. Would Thoreau condone owning a piano? Would he view piano-playing as a worthy undertaking? You generally have to own a piano to practice playing piano. I frequently try to articulate for myself the correct nature of a human’s relationship to material possessions and it is just so slippery. I am confident that personal progress should evolve away from material possessions, in the sense that we should be getting over the idea that nice cars and pretty clothes have anything to do with making us happy. What about experiences? What type of “experience” should we seek to afford? Travel or trips to beaches and skiing vacations? Are these more worthy as material expenditures than acquiring more stuff?

I wrote a paper on this topic in law school. Maybe I can work on it a little more, and add Thoreau’s point of view in there, and try to figure out what I really think about this question.

Dude, Meditating is Hard, But Still Awesome

Meditation practice is so hard. What I mean by meditating (or what I should say) is meditation preparation, since really what I’m still trying to do is develop my concentration. Hopefully after a lot of practice concentrating I will approach actual meditation. I did some meditating the other morning and my mind was like frantic horses, all stomping and galloping and running all the hell around the place. And trying to bring my focus back singularly to my breath really is like pushing against the gate while the horses are trying to get out. Horses! Me vs. Horses! And being released from meditation, letting the gate burst open, is their flight – and as I stop pushing the gate against their tramping and stomping, it is both an immense relief and a return to chaos. I thought about this while I was trying to concentrate. I should have only been thinking about my breath. So that’s how that’s going.

Sometimes people say they “can’t” meditate or they tried it and they aren’t “good” at it because they just can’t stand to sit still or they have to keep moving and thinking etc. And just to get a little mean here for a minute, saying you are too scatter-brained to meditate is like saying you are too out-of-shape to exercise, or too thirsty to drink a glass of water. One is the very reason to pursue the other, and the other, its cure. We will find water and drink it even if it’s a pain because it’s so vital to our comfort and existence. Calming my mind sometimes feels this important or urgent. It can feel like my very life is in the balance . . . and yet, it’s so much easier to just watch a movie with my free time instead of training my mind. It’s like dying of dehydration because that’s easier than finding water. Ridiculous. One way that meditating is hard for me is that it feels like I am confronting everything ever that has been or will be, and trying to shoo it out of the room so I can just play and be happy, but that takes so much work I’d rather just go find another space and do something else. But there isn’t “another space,” only the outskirts of existence. But still I will get too tired or weak to herd the noise, and I let all the chaos hog up the nice space, exiling me to sit in the sewers of distraction with my cowardice and sloth. Yoinks. Holy metaphors!

And the temptation to use meditation time as grocery-list time is hard, too. I’m just sitting there with nothing to do but nothing, and the rest of the day or the next day starts to come into my head asking for shape: “when should you go to the post office? Also don’t forget to go to the post office in the first place. How about calling your cousin back finally, huh? Maybe you can do that today.” On and on. Always the future coming in and wanting to beckon me out of the present, or the past wanting to settle accounts or put me on trial yet again for my errors. It’s so hard but I feel pretty dedicated, at least today I do. I haven’t been the most consistent student but that’s coming along, too.

What WOULD Happen to Heaven?

It is striking me as an important question at the moment, to follow up on my Heaven/Life post (a few posts ago) - what DOES happen to notions of Heaven if we can achieve perfect bliss on Earth?! I have nothing further to say about it at the moment except that this question is blowing my mind. To bits.

Obligations Give us a Sense of Purpose/Meaning

In college I had a pretty snarky (and kind of dreamy!) teacher in the Classics department who taught Religion in the Pagan World. Once, we were discussing ritual and its significance etc. He said that ritual is powerful because having obligations provides the necessary illusion that our lives matter. I think the gist was that religious ritual makes us matter by connecting our behavior to the harvest or the rain or something. Consequence for my actions, any consequence at all, means that I am significant, that I have impact. It’s nice. Maybe our modern expression of ritual is our habits or obligations. As a very minor example, I shower once in a while because the consequence of my stinkiness is to offend others’ sensibilities. My smelly armpits have impact on the world. Creating the obligation of showering reflects my belief that my participation in society, and the manner of my participation, matters.

Everything we do is like this. Tidying up. Calling our parents. Feeding the cat. We need obligations to feel as though we matter. Which, as you may have guessed, I am pretty sure we don’t. We don’t “matter” to anything. But this is also nice. It means that I can go ahead and behave in ways that make me feel as though I matter, knowing that it is merely a balm against the chafing of my own insignificance, because my insignificance is comforting, too – it means that “consequence” for my actions can remain somewhat abstract. It doesn’t really matter if I am the stinky person in the world on any particular day. I don’t matter. Anyone taking offense at my stinkiness would be trying to create their own sense of significance in the world in opposition to me through our handy tool of disapproval – which is just another expression of obligation (this would go something like this: “I oblige myself to be un-stinky, and to give meaning to this obligation, I must therefore disapprove of the opposite expression – stinkiness – and therefore reaffirm the credibility of my showering ritual”). So anyway I can do my stuff to make me feel significant and let the rest roll off my back.

I’ve just been rolling this idea around my head a little bit and wanted to see where it went. We’ll see.

Exposure, Repetition, Acclimation, Acceptance, Enjoyment

Habit habit habit. One thing about having my days pretty free is that the exact arc of the day is still sort of difficult to nail down, and my exact habits of life are still being written every day. Meditation practice in the morning? Well, I usually want some tea and water to replenish me from the night, so sitting still right away isn’t very comfortable. Thirsty, hungry. Plus when I practice meditation in the morning it sort makes me sleepy for the day, and a touch of lethargy comes over me. And I can’t have tea first because that’s a lingering, leisurely experience for me, so I’d start meditating like an hour later and it feels too wasteful. And plus I have trouble with caffeinated meditating, too agitated. Man, even as I type this though I’m thinking of all the pro-reasons and pro-practicalities of doing meditation in the morning and how simple the logistics are. So maybe it’s fine. But when to do yoga? Right after meditation practice? Then I’m sort of getting hungry, and trying to focus on yoga in a hungry state isn’t the most productive thing. A little yoghurt and warm water before meditation, and then right into yoga? But I like to read in the mornings, too – my attention is crisp and reading is very productive for me in the morning, and reading for an hour with a pot of tea with honey and milk is soooo pleasant. But reading is a really practical companion in the evening when my energy for other things is almost completely gone, or in the afternoon when a little tea is a good pick me up. Bleh. So that’s the idea. Long story short I would like to have a ritual of existence nailed down so I could liberate that portion of my mind dedicated to the anxiety of shaping my daily sense of productivity, and just get the hell on with it. Habit would be nice.

And good habit-making is difficult - but I think that there is a sort of systemization available for integrating things into your life, which I have handily identified in 5 steps, taking you from initial Exposure all the way to your eventual Enjoyment. These are: Enjoyment, Repetition, Acclimation, Acceptance, and Enjoyment.

I’m getting this from pop music, which I looooove. I love terrible pop music. And I was wondering to myself why it is that I love crappy music so much. When I first hear a crappy pop song, usually I think that it is just another crappy pop song, and I don’t really like it. But then eventually I really like it. When does that happen? Well, that is the story of habituation. (I am sort of drawn to crappy pop music with my sociology/anthropology hat on, but let’s get real, I sort of enjoy it because I am an all-around low brow and that’s how it is, so I am willing to put the radio station on crappy pop song stations in general.)

But anyway, so yeah, first I hear the crappy song and I think that it’s crappy. I associate the crappiness of the music with my very identity, and I am in some way affirming part of myself when I dislike this song. I retain a sense of my fine, fine, discriminating taste, and judgment, and self. Song bad, me good. And then I hear the song again, in the car usually, and if I’m spacing out or drinking coffee or in traffic then I hear most or part of the song again. This Repetition happens several times until I become familiar enough with the tune to have achieved Acclimation. I’m used to it now. It’s crap, but it’s familiar crap, and the offense of its crappiness as an affront to my sense of integrity (I won’t listen to this crap!) diminishes. And then, without even realizing it, Acclimation gives way to Acceptance. This stage of habituation is really important, because it is in this period after repeated exposure that the initial judgment of bad and good truly fades, and is replaced with a kind of familiar semi-neutrality. The song becomes part of the auditory landscape of my very life experience, woven integrally into the fabric of my days. It is the car, it is the billboards, it is the mall, it is the corner coffee shop, it is toast. I can hear it on the radio and still change the channel, but it’s not really to make a point about what I do or don’t like, it’s more like I just don’t feel like hearing that song right then. After acceptance it is a short trip into Enjoyment. Eventually, I will sing along with the song in the car. I will not change the channel. I will be comforted by its familiarity, I will make joke lyrics to its tune, I will see the hidden humanity in its banal, limp, vacuous lyrics. I enjoy it. Just like I order coffee and toast, take my car to the mall, and unconsciously read billboards. It is what is there, and I participate in what is, as though I enjoy it. And I do, I do enjoy it. Song good, me good. There is nothing else to do, nothing else to think anymore.

Well that sounded pretty dark but the point here is that I can follow the pop music formula for enjoyment with respect to specific habits I would like to cultivate for myself. Hmmm there could be a sixth stage, called “Preference,” but I guess that’s for another time. So anyway I have the initial Exposure to most things, and right now I am stuck in the stage of Repetition. I will facilitate my Repetition with deliberate scheduling. Hooray scheduling!

Heaven/Life Conundrum

I had dinner with some friends last night and one friend got to talking about "trans-humanism," which, I'll tell you upfront, I am not currently interested in wiki-ing up for my own edification at this moment. The way my friend explained the short version was that it's a way of viewing the future that is concerned with/interested in the implications of the manipulation of the genetic map of human beings and our relationship with machines and how to make peace happen in the future with all of our knowledge about how to monkey with ourselves, and imagines a "post-human" sort of state of society. Neat-o. At one point he said that we are basically the last generation of "regular humans," and it just sounded so freaking true when he said it that I was alarmed. I think we might be. I am in favor of being a regular human as much as possible.

Anyway, as Friend #1 explained, one of the happy potential implications of post-human or trans-humanist society is a state of being or consciousness that is only peaceful and transcends conflict and angst etc. Friend #2 at dinner said this sounded horrible, and that passion and struggle and pain and love and elation are the human experience and he wouldn't want a perfectly happy experience, bleh, no way. And then the question was this: so what do you imagine heaven to be like, Friend #2? Answer? Well, it's basically a peaceful state of consciousness transcending conflict and angst etc. So why wouldn't he want to experience in his earthly body the feeling of his imagined heaven? Why? Because we are so attached to our identities in this turmoil? Wrongly attached? I think Buddha would say so. Buddha says, as I understand it, that we have access to heaven right now and we choose suffering out of ignorance, confusing our delusions and distractions with our "self" - but do we prefer our ignorance (out of ignorance?)? Is the habit of longing for things and clinging to our pain so ingrained that we don't think we even want happiness? Do we think we have to experience earthly turmoil in order to enjoy heaven in a relative way? What is happening here? I'm not sure. It's pretty interesting.

Ego's Incessant Corruption

In my Buddha book and at Buddha class there is a meditation approach to cultivating love for the whole world and developing a real bodhicitta (wish to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all living beings), wherein you think to yourself how much you want to remove the full range of suffering of everyone you love, and then eventually extend this wish to the whole world. Once this is sincere and you really get it then you are starting to get somewhere.

This is a helpful way of viewing the world for me sometimes. Like if there's a pushy person at the bank or something who might make me roll my eyes and think what a jerk they are - instead, I can think to myself that I wish for their suffering to end, for their feeling of impatience, their feeling that they have to be aggressive on their own behalf, for any feeling making their trip to the bank so negative to go away so they could be happier. I think it's a fair assumption that a host of unpleasant mental functions are contributing to people's behavior, since this is my personal experience too. I can cultivate a little compassion for people by referencing my own craziness, like when I want the line to move faster and someone decides to write a check, I might feel impatience swell up in me (not that much though because I am an exact-change-counter-outer in lines which takes a bit long sometimes so I am happy to hang for check-writers). For some people that impatience just rolls right out of their mouths or makes them push and shove or whatever. I can genuinely wish for their suffering to end the same way I wish all my trips into the world could be free from suffering.

Okay so there's the good side of this way of thinking. But there's a dark side. I am really challenged by my feelings of dislike for someone that I have to maintain a pleasant relationship with, and calling upon my "may your suffering end" technique has taken a dark turn. It feels like pity in my mind. I'd like my thought to be something like "I see a grain of my own suffering in your experience, and through us the suffering of the world, and I wish for your and the world's suffering to end, forever, amen." What it comes out as is more like "I wish for your suffering to end, because you are so freakin' insufferable and so unlikable that I feel bad for you, and I also feel kind of bad for me that I have to be around you, and if your suffering ends then maybe it would be less painful for me to be around you, amen." So that's the bad side of this way of thinking.

I'm just noticing how my own ego can corrupt a gesture of love and compassion into a way to feel superior to people - especially people I don't like, because believing they are lesser than I am by pitying them makes their unlikeability more palatable, and less threatening, or whatever. It's pretty impressive actually, the ego's cleverness. I don't even know if I'm using "ego" in the correct "Ego" way but I think that's what I'm driving at, etc. Anyway I'll have to spend a little mental energy on purifying this technique again for myself and not conflating it with pity and dislike and superiority.

Found my Twenty!

Nice. I had completely accepted losing that $20 and now it's back.

Yup, still here.

Nice.

What Happened Yesterday, Continued: What are you Talking About?

I was planning on going to a Buddha class last night in New Paltz until the phone-upgrade incident (post below) side-tracked me for an hour making me miss the class – but anyway I picked up my one Buddha book again yesterday and the day before, and thinking about going to class had me reminiscing a bit about the Buddha place in Brooklyn.

Once, the teacher asked us to identify some great source of distraction for us that keeps our minds frantic. One woman said “food.” And the teacher thought she meant the “I want treats” version of food, and we talked about that stuff, about craving and searching for something that we hope will make us happy, and how treats provide a goal to work toward that makes us feel happy. I assumed, however, that what the woman meant was the struggle to get and pay for food as part of the overall problem of survival, that the fear of dying cold, broke, starving, alone, and in pain was the main source of distraction for her mind. I think that’s what she meant. That’s what I wanted the teacher to talk about.

Another time the teacher asked what kind of fears we have. I wanted to say “dying cold, broke, starving, alone, and in pain,” but someone else beat me with a different question. This student said “not fulfilling my potential.” And the teacher picked this up and went with it, and it was pretty interesting and everything, but I also wanted to ask this student what she meant – what is “potential” and how would we “fulfill” it? Does she mean creating a great work? Fame, success, adulation, the execution of some nagging vision? I’m assuming the teacher probably talked about fulfilling our potential for compassion, love, and happiness, but I kind of think this lady was talking about being super rad in some vaguely powerful, socially recognizable, basically magazine-cover kind of way, and she was afraid she’d die without feeling like she really got it done in a way that satisfied her sense of self or ego or whatever. I assumed this because she was super tall, super pretty, definitely over 35, and not famous.

Isn’t it silly that I thought people were saying something different from what the teacher interpreted two different times? And silly that I imparted to the first lady my own ideas/fears, and imparted to the the second lady a pretty shallow personality (which maybe also was probably most likely um basically related to my own fears and insecurities and sometimes desire for recognition that I wanted the teacher to address)? Anyway everything really is only our heads. We hear what we want. I think the teacher was doing this too with the first lady, since he sometimes references treats as a weakness, and talks about getting older and chubbier and how it strikes at his vanity, and also has jars of jam and little chocolates on his shrine. We all have our own things.

I am a Money Sieve

I totally just lost twenty bucks at the laundry mat (laundromat? whatever). Easy come, easy go. Hopefully somebody feels super lucky and psyched right now!

But seriously I hemorrhage money. It just slips away. My relationship with money is highly conflicted of course. I want to hold on to it as much as I just want to set it on fire. I don't think I have too much of a spendthrift issue at all - I eat at home most of the time, there is no daily latte in my life, I don't have to satisfy any clothes coveting for the most part, since shopping for clothes is a dark journey into self-esteem-ville that I happily avoid. I like good cheese and farm raised pork chops and am willing to pay for Buddha and yoga classes etc, but I think I really live pretty modestly.

So this brings me to what it means to "afford" things. I sort of think that if you are willing to spend money on something only if you can "afford" it then you really shouldn't spend money on it at all. Everything else you find important you will find the money for. Like going out to dinner. Would you go out every night of the week if you could "afford" to? I don't think so. Gets boring. All that noise, too many choices to make. And on the other hand, how much are you willing to change your own behavior even when money is pretty tight? For example, there is no way I'm not going to buy good milk. And I will purchase a social beer for $4.50 plus tip and pay the door charge for a show even if I am pretty low on funds, because supporting local music and friends and business and community connectedness is a priority. (This is pretty leisurely of me to say since I have no children, I have a very nice husband, and I have a really supportive safety-network that makes fudging the numbers pretty easy.)

Money has this tricky social aspect to it, as well. Money and friends is pretty tough sometimes. Mixing our social forces with market forces is always tricky. My tendency is always to overpay or offer more money whenever a friend is involved, and I am pretty confident that with my friends, their tendency is to undercharge or vigorously wave me away when our social and market imperatives combine in one big awkward exchange. So overall it comes out pretty fair. Sometimes when nobody has any money it can get really emotional - "he's my friend, he should cut me a break!" and "she's my friend, she should offer me more!" Out of fear of this kind of bad juice in the air I view money as disposable and expendable and really unimportant to me when it comes to keeping everybody's feelings intact. I sort of assume that I am probably more capable of letting go of any cheap-bastard animosity toward anyone than they are toward me, so overcharge me, I won't care! Yeah, just like getting in the door at a friend's concert isn't really money I have to spend to hear music or keep my friends, it's just a little toll on good will that we need to accept as part of the mixed up tumbler of money and relationships.

So last night I got an upgrade for my cell phone. I went to a Radio Shack to try to get a charger for my really old phone, and basically my cute little old phone got laughed out of the shop. Turns out you can do phone upgrades at Radio Shack, what do you know. The clerk was super nice to me, and really knew the ins and outs of the whole thing, and showed me the free phone I could get with my plan, and endured a whole bunch of ridiculous service-associate-phone-calls due to the fact that I was unsure of what name my phone plan was under and what phone plan I had and wasn't really sure about much besides my phone number, and even that was tough since I don't really call myself ever. So at the end of this exchange, in which I had to say goodbye to my little pink phone in exchange for a fancy new touch-screen and type-pad purple phone, she offered me a little side sale for screen protectors for $7.99. I definitely don't give a crap about screen protectors or phone cozies or pad puffers or whatever. Phone = rings = plenty. But she sort of said "so since I tried to help you out here how about a $7.99 screen protector, usually they're $12.99." And I bought them. The impact of what I saw as her social gestures in this market context nudged me into buying something I didn't want. She did say "yes" in a woo-hoo kind of way when I sighed and said I'd get them, so I hope at least this helped her meet some kind of retail donkey quota for Radio [Butt]Crack and maybe she gets a prize. She was nice, I want her to have a prize. So what happened here was either the most despicable form of salesmanship ever - manipulation of a person through a sense of social obligation to gain market advantage - or kind of a no-big-deal favor from one human being to another that acknowledges both of our participation in the big crappy capitalist sh**storm of survival. Like I said, money is pretty disposable to me when feelings are involved (I don't get carried away though, and I sort of despise street canvassers, yuck, let me walk around in peace, I donate online), so it's whatever. And instead of spending $25 bucks on a charger for my old phone, I got a new phone with a charger included for $7.99 (plus a lame-o $18 thing that Sprint will charge me later so it's basically a wash, but still, new phone still weighs in favor of me making out better than I would have thanks to this chick's patience and salesmanship etc).

So am I sucker or a reasonable human being or both? Should I put up more money-holding armor? I still wish I hadn't dropped that twenty. Man that sucks. Right when I'm trying to reel it in. And I helped return a wallet to someone today in that very laundromat! But I also got a free hamburger from the shop across the street from me today. I guess it's all a wash in the end. Losing that twenty doesn't feel unfair, really. Also I have to say that waitressing helps with that easy-come-easy-go feeling. Twenty bucks is no big deal when night to night you make a range of 10 to 200 dollars. Whatever, that's life, it all evens out.

Oh Yoga Books, You are so Timely/Prescient

It frequently happens that something I have buh-logged about is immediately addressed by part of a yoga/meditation book I am reading.

So this time yoga is speaking about my trip to Chile I wrote about (a few posts ago). In The Heart of Yoga by T.K.V. Desikachar I am in the section about the search for clarity and the concepts of duhkha and sukha. Duhkha being, generally speaking, a place of constriction or limitation or choking, in which we do not feel free. This can come up when we want something but can't seem to get it, for example. And sukha is a feeling of freedom, a place of light.

Desikachar notes that "it is precisely those who are searching for clarity who often experience duhkha most strongly." He goes on to reference some commentary on the Yoga Sutra that says "dust that lands on the skin is harmless, but if only a tiny particle gets into the eye, it is very painful," because "someone who is searching for clarity becomes sensitive because the eyes must be open, even if what they see is sometimes very unpleasant."

This was sort of my experience in Chile. Of course when you are looking for freedom you become more aware of your cage, of course this is true. Of course looking for clarity makes you see all the layers obscuring your vision. I don't tend to articulate it this way to myself though. This helps me sort of rewrite my version of my time in Chile - I tend to think of it as a huge failure of will, of weakness and lack of discipline. But another way to view it is that the hyper-sensitizing of my awareness of myself, especially when all I wanted was to find sanctuary within myself (with very little guidance), showed me everything I had to cut through on my way to a more peaceful and accepting state of mind, and it was totally overwhelming. No wonder people always have intense experiences on retreats and stuff. If you want to clear the garbage from your mind, you kind of have to wade through the refuse, and pick it all up piece by piece with your hands. No wonder paths to clarity are so hard, and it feels easier to just immerse in distractions instead of renewing the confrontation day after day after day.

I wish we could get to clarity but skip the clean-up process. Anyway I feel more charitable towards myself when I think of my trip to Chile, and that's a nice thing.

School School School

Man I love learning stuff. I love waiting for the click in my brain when I'm reading something I don't quite get. When you push a little bit and then figure something out you get to have that little burst popcorn kernel all to yourself forever, a little flower of comprehension to snuggle up to. Mmm mmm love it.

I frequently put down my learning, however, after the initial bloom of comprehension. Sort of goes along with my being pretty-good-at-a-whole-bunch-of-stuff-but-not-meaningfully-proficient-at-anything-at-all.

Why is this? I mean I do believe that depth actually is breadth and through the former you can achieve the latter, and following the thread of god through any discipline or body of knowledge takes you through the source of all. Iyengar says this about love - that dedicating our love to someone is our entry to universal, divine, unlimited love. Yep yep yep sure totally on board.

Ah but putting this into practice means choosing something to follow all the way down its rabbit hole, and I don't feel I've done a ton of that in this lifetime. I think I tend to figure out the baseline rules or concepts so that I know just enough of what is happening to see where something is going, and then I sort of get off the bus. So now I'm 32 and I have a bunch of things that I can do pretty okay and enjoy pretty okay but nothing that I feel I've followed so far afield that it's brought me back home. I'd like to buckle down a little but it's hard to choose what (to my three readers: I've written about this before so if there is a repetitive blogging apology to be made consider it made).

There is toughing it out involved. When the learning curve is super high in the early stages of learning about something, it's pretty thrilling to start to see the pieces put themselves together into the whole. But then there's the plateau. Sigh, the inevitable plateau when you know what's going on but don't know what to do next to make it feel like you're still on the ride. After that the feeling of progress is infinitesimal and at the same time the jump to the next plateau is further away. This is the point in learning that I usually move on.

Well no more! Kind of. We'll see. I think I have three things about myself that I really feel like I want to follow all the way down - under "meaningful work" in my criteria for happiness. My music-playing, yoga stuff, and a bit of philosophy reading that I want to know more about. Feels manageable. Whoops I'm totally forgetting my other little projects like brushing up on my Latin and working on my collages. But this is the problem - the desire to do so many things (breadth) just makes doing anything (depth) impossible. This is the problem with constantly trying on new selves. It never goes anywhere anyway, you are always just you afterward.

And the vanity issue is troubling, too. Experts are so intimidating and special and magical. It would be neat to be seen as an expert on anything. And my own sense of pride and credibility and self-worth is tied into how hard I work on any one thing (which is usually not that hard). So I'm looking for that feeling as well. Not too bodhichitta of me. Mergh, bleh.

Hounded

I went to Chile by myself for about 4 weeks in February of 2005. I have always had a vague sort of Latin-America-is-neat type of thing, and my college Spanish was pretty okay, and I had some money saved up and I wasn't getting any older etc etc.

I came home about a week early. I was supposed to stay a full month but I didn't make it. I was starting to feel insane and lonely and trapped in my head. In some way this was what I wanted - I wanted to be alone and feel like I knew myself and affirm some kind of self-sufficiency or independence of mind. But what I found, confronted with myself, by myself save for the hotel owners and waitresses, was not familiarity or a return to being, liberated from obligation, uninterrupted by context, but instead, a daily, lonely terror of boredom and self-loathing. Somewhere inside, I thought, I could reconnect to some nascent version of my identity that gazes contentedly out windows, feels no more severely than curious and happy wandering through new scenery, and has no worry about the future and no regret about the past. But being alone with my thoughts was too hard. Every single petty horror of my life up to that point chased me all day long, replaying over and over, sometimes with new clever ways I should have behaved thrown in for a bit of memory theater. My mind was swimming and churning so much that after a while, I couldn't even make sense of what I wanted to do with my day besides find breakfast and go to sleep. Did I feel like walking? Did I want to go to the museum in this town? Did I want to read a book, and could I find one in English ('cause screw practicing my Spanish, btw)? How about a movie? Which place for dinner? How do I even "know" how I "feel" or what I "want" to do? What is my compass? Who am I besides every stupid and horrible thing I've ever done? Every single inclination I might have had just felt so stupid, just some attempt to sustain the desperate, infinite distraction from myself. I couldn't wait to get back to my life and all the convenient distractions of it; the kitchen and cooking, my friends, some job to take up the hours of the day, anything but the endless walking in loops in my toxic brain.

So this is habit of mind for which I seek relief. This is what I want yoga or Buddhism to cure me of. And I believe that I can escape the prison of memory, and I can re-train myself to ruminate positive things, and learn to contribute only positive, helpful things to me and my loved ones and the world, AND ALL THAT STUFF. And while I am further along in my sense of confidence and worth and stuff than I was in 2005, what still troubles me most is the sustained effort of training my mind. It's so difficult. There is this pacing that I do that doesn't help me, and I know that working on my concentration, which would eventually result in meditation, is so clearly right in my reach, and I just have to sit down and dedicate a little sincere time and effort to it, and I will build up new habits of mind that will free me from myself, but it's hard. I get fatigued by trying to live purposefully, and sometimes all it feels like is the "righteous" version of traveling in Chile - instead of figuring out whether I want to go to the museum, I'm choosing books to read or yoga classes to attend, like the low-fat edition of everything else I've ever done. When does the distraction end and existence begin? When I've absorbed enough tools of positive action to put them to work? When I am more disciplined? When? How? I hope I am getting closer.

Divinity Fantasy Waning; Yoga Trainging Weekend; Follow up on DIY Spirituality

Still thinking about how to follow a path or philosophy or religion without having to adhere to it on the absolute face of its doctrine. Clearly there are shades of gray in every interpretation of a path. I mean, every one of the gajillions of sects, tributaries, and off-shoots of Xtianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and whatever, each represent its own independent shade of gray of its parent religion.

And yoga is the same way. Right now I am using two of Iyengar's books, Light on Yoga, and Light on Life, as foundation-providing texts. They are in the required materials of my course and he's a main guy of stuff and if I get something from him he is basically recognized as an authority and I can defend my position very well behind his textual shield. And then this other required book by Desikachar has a very different take on things that makes me reevaluate Iyengar's books. And even Iyengar, apparently, has changed his approach to things over the years - the source text for yoga asana, Light on Yoga, was written quite a while ago, and things just change. Perspective on yoga and how to do it changes. It is, to borrow from either Iyengar or Desikachar (I can't remember who said it), to live in a state of "sustained transformation." Evolution revolution, man.

So different branches of faiths have their own interpretations of a path, and then even further, each person filters a particular doctrine through his or her own experiences and understanding. Our language itself doesn't even permit any real confidence that what someone means to say is what the hearer understands. Even two people who agree about something in any given moment could have different concepts of what is happening. We just can't know. It's all shades of gray.

Living with shades of gray is actually a more complete way to experience life. This language vagueness I just mentioned reminds me of a grammar tussle I got into once. I was taking a class to become a tutor for adult literacy, and some retired school teacher corrected me when I said "different than" - she said "no no, different FROM." Lady, f*** you it's "different from." First of all, there can be, for the deliberate speaker, shades of difference between the two. Troy is a different city FROM Albany, but my time living in Troy was different THAN my time living in Albany. But besides this, even if I wasn't speaking deliberately, did she know what I meant? Yes she did. The function of grammar isn't to create a set of rules that people have to adhere to - and then provide a means by which small minded retirees can feel superior to others. Correct grammar is an important social anchor for personal and professional credibility, but that's where strict adherence should remain - somewhere with rules of etiquette - it's really only there to rely on when you don't already know your audience or situation. Communicating effectively requires flexibility - your language choice must accommodate your audience, adjust in order to express the tone you wish to impart; you must call upon all the innumerable shades of subtle gray available to you in order to be clear and precise. And in fact, it is the flexibility of language that I find so wonderful about it; I think that beauty is lost when people insist that English has to exist according to rigid rules. These are people who are, as Ms. Gertrude Block put it (in the June 2010 edition of the NYSBA Journal), "America['s] . . . huge middle class of 'rules-followers'" who use strict grammatical adherence as a way to "distinguish[] the educated from the uneducated." It's absurd. It's like using "they" as a gender neutral pronoun instead of having to say "he or she." Let it go, people, it might be in the dictionary eventually, and if it happens, that will be okay, stop freaking out about it. Use it if you want to, don't if you don't. Language IS ALL ABOUT flexibility - "meaning is use." (This is attributed to the linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein, and I only know the quote and his generic history - reading more about this is on my self-improvement list under "language arts education.") So let's add to the pile that strict rule-adherence is actually a pretty small-minded way to live. Stay gray or stay home.

Okay so let's accept shades of gray as a given - even as a requirement for broad-mindedness. What is the limit of personal interpretation within which you can still claim to be an adherent of a particular faith? Short of absolute contradiction or incoherence, you're in the game. That's it. These are parameters I can work with. I think I can feel comfortable calling myself a devotee of anything (even grammar) as long as I don't completely contradict its holdings, or twist it into something incoherently unrecognizable to its source.

So I guess I'm really going to have to be comfortable with uncertainty, with ambiguity, with interpretation and personalization. And how does this affect a yoga teacher's credibility? How do students feel when they hear conflicting messages from their teachers? I guess you just have to present information in guideline form. It's scarier in that it requires a student to ask more of him- or herself, and the student must be more sensitive to his or her own experience, and be critical of information as it is presented, and combine one's intuition and experience with ancient teachings and foundation texts. In this way living without absolutes requires a greater depth of understanding; and this, in turn, is actually more precise than something that is supposedly black and white.

Phew. On a side note, the divinity school fantasy is waning, as I knew it would, and gets to be back burned along with all the other things I get carried away with. One thing at a time.

Some Questions Answered Courtesy of Iyengar

Well as usual somebody (Iyengar, in Light on Life) has definitely thought of everything I have thought of already, phrased it better, and provided a rational and practical reassurance for the challenge of living comfortably with uncertainty. Oh spiritual stuff, you are so old and well-churned.

First, re: my concerns on art existing as a function of our self-destruction, and losing all that precious gut-wrenching beauty etc etc to the humanity-neutralizing bliss of enlightenment:

"According to Indian philosophy, art is of two types. One is called bhogakala, the art of appeasing the pleasure of the body and mind. The other is yogakala, the art of auspicious performance to please the spiritual heart of the soul."

Okay, so this is about intent, sure. I hope it doesn't mean all art becomes recordings of birds flapping and stuff like that. But I can see where this goes. Maybe there will be more on this eventually. Next!

Re: merging with the Universal (bliss = samadhi) sounds boring and impractical:

"Samadhi is an experience, which . . . is worth struggling to reach. It is transformative and utterly purifying. But what then? Samadhi is a state of being in which you cannot do. You cannot catch a bus when in samadhi. In a state of oneness, how would you be able to discriminate which one to get on? Samadhi leaves the practitioner changed forever, but he still has to get dressed in the morning, eat breakfast, and answer his correspondence. Nature does not simply disappear once and for all. It is simply that the realized yogi is never again unaware of the true relationship between Nature and Cosmic Soul."

Okay good! There's another quote about "ego" - which, even though it is undesirable and we want to get rid of it - as a necessary alias for helping us function in the world, but I can't find it right now. Yoga, she is so reasonable.

One Freakin' Thing at a Time

I was discussing yesterday with Friend the issue of submitting to an entire religion or philosophy whole heartedly, believing (and presumably also adhering to) every aspect of it, as opposed to taking what you want and not worrying too much about the rest. Friend suggested that maybe this was a Western thing, this feeling that participating in something that you only kind of mostly believe is insincere, or deceptive, or at least an incomplete experience. A spiritual path would be diluted if it were only guidelines, left to each semi-adherent to adjust it as s/he sees fit, no? What are you looking for if you want to keep your own ideas whole and just sort of be affected or moved by something - you're certainly not looking for change or for god, right?

Well, I don't know. I love that I can enjoy Buddhism without having to worry too much about samsara and karma. I love this so much that - bear with me here - I got myself all excited about going to divinity school. Really. I mean hell, why not? I'd love to study the Bible for reals, and if I can enjoy it for what it offers and shed the rest, well, that would be great! Actual Xtians already do this - it's not like all those Xtians wear strictly single-fiber clothes as the Bible commands, etc etc all that other crap that nobody pays attention to. As the secular world so frequently likes to point out to crazy bigoted fundamentalists, there's an awful lot of cherry picking of the Bible that goes on. And sometimes it's evil and used to justify meanness, but sometimes it's great - HERE is an awesome radio story about an evangelical preacher who decides that there is no hell. And his revelation is really persuasive and moving and makes me like Jesus so much more, and makes the crucifixion make so much sense that it goes beyond sensible and back to magical. But anyway thinking about the take-it-or-leave-it part of religion and philosophy made me excited about being able to actually enjoy Xtianity stuff (because whoa nelly believe you me normally I wouldn't really want to be associated with all the stuff that goes on under that umbrella), especially if I can just make it my own.

So yeah back to this - right now in my fantasy life if I could go to divinity school and become a pastor-type thing that would be awesome. Which at last brings me to my actual point: one freakin' thing at a time, pal. This is a kind of curse of the contemporary purposeless human (which is me, so maybe it's just me), this feeling that there is something really huge and complete that you can/should be working toward, and that whatever you're doing at the moment isn't really what you should be working on unless it's part of this bigger thing, and you should maybe hurry up and figure out what your bigger thing is so you can feel peacefully ready to die someday, and death, by the way, will happen before you know it. School is so handy for that feeling. You get to have the manageable task thing from semester to semester, and it's all part of Your Important Degree, and everyone agrees in our cultural that Education is Really Important, and it's just a highly credible long-term thing to be doing.

But right so with this potential new permissive kind of belief I started letting all these things about myself take form in a litte spirituality orb, adding pieces of my philosophical self (law degree! totally read part of a book by Aristotle that one time! I have completely heard of Plato and the Situationists!); my spiritual self (read most of a book by a real live Buddhist! totally learning about yoga! meditate sort of!); my other hobbies (playing music! and I took some Latin in college, those are totally religious things!); and my personality (kind of a talkative know-it-all, enjoy writing a blog, so perfect for a preacher-type!), and made a little fantasy about becoming a woman of the cloth and quoting Joseph Campbell and just digging life and having something really big to be working on, and feeling finally like all the freakin' hats I've tried on in the last 32 years will actually make one cohesive outfit. Of hats. Whatever.

Okay, slow down. Not even one third of the way through my yoga training. That half of that Aristotle book was kind of boring. Still have to finish the Buddha book anyway. Need to get a job. I sometimes can get myself worked up about a big purpose to the point that I can't even actually take the steps required to finish one tiny component part of the fantasy. It's like this: "I can't read this book on yoga, I'm too busy becoming a yogi." Anyone picking up what I'm putting down, here? So my mission for the foreseeable future is to do one thing at a time and actually enjoy it and not worry that too much time is passing without me making important strides toward my Real Big Purpose in life, and that I'm not losing time or progress or anything if I don't start on a Bible-reading regimen or start a philosophy book club or brush up on my Latin all by next month. Chillax. One freakin' thing at a time. My actual life in this actual moment is really nice and has the benefit of leading me toward something big, yoga teaching! That's big enough. Hell being happy is big enough. That's what I'm going to work on.

RTFM (read the f***ing manual)

So I undertook to systematize my learning a little bit for the last few days. I have some flashcards now with things on them that I'd like to have in the front of my mind. I'd like to say that I am choosing to memorize the things that are most important and feel as though they are useful for integrating my mind into a yogic state, but really I am choosing things that I think would be impressive or make me sound credible to know off the top of my head. That's embarrassing to say. Tryin' to be brutal.

Actually though deliberate memorization gets a bad rap. I think this is a modern education debate thing - like we should "learn how to learn" instead of by rote. I agree somewhat, but I have a lot of faith in the nature of the mind to make connections based on the information it has stored away and ready to recite. I can't make connections to things I've decided I can just "look up whenever I need them" - understanding is more than knowing you could know if you wanted to. Making information take shape in your mind requires a little repetition and memorizing, a little deliberate connection-making to become solid and useful. I heart memorizing. Also I am pretty good at it and enjoy it. But my memorizing endeavor isn't totally vanity-based really. It really helps me "see" things better.

And I've taken on another little self-directed project to give more shape to my yoga learning, and I'm really glad about it since I realized it combines some things I've been thinking about: injuries, pain, and yoga beginners. Since I've hurt my back my asana has been pretty scaled back - I did none for about five days, really. So as I continue to repair, I'm thinking about how to ease myself in to some yoga without provoking the same injury over and over again. At the same time I've been ruminating the issue of the yoga beginner. Specifically, I have a really willing friend, a Yoga Beginner, available to me to let me practice my new yoga knowledge on, and I want very badly to make yoga interesting and appealing and satisfying and transforming and to make this Beginner love yoga as much as I do. I am treating this as a test, actually. Because the other part is that the Beginner is not really interested in yoga but is just being extremely nice to me, so now basically It's On, Big Time. And on top of this, Beginner has some limitations that make a lot of stuff that I would offer impossible due to the pain the asanas provoke in said Beginner. So here I am, in my own bit of physical pain, dealing with a pretty significant limitation (ever pull your back? suxxxx big time, you use it for every single thing you do, including brush your teeth and sit still), and wondering how to make yoga appealing for someone with limitations. What to do?

Initially when I was thinking about how to entice Beginner into loving yoga, I thought, "Oh laboratory of the self, reveal to me the keys of challenging and excellent as well as accessible yoga," and I practiced on myself and it didn't really work that well. And I watched some beginner yoga recording on youtube, which was pretty useful actually, but kind of boring. So then yesterday I was looking in Light on Yoga, and remembered that there is a big long list of yoga series in the back which Iyengar created as a week-by-week program (in the course of over 180 weeks, damn!) for mastering asana systematically. Buh, duh, meh, blergh, RTFM, genius! So now that's my new plan. I'm trying out the Iyengar weekly systematized yoga prescription, and that's going to be my guide for teaching Yoga Beginner as well. I'm not going to limit myself in my own practice to the guide, since I'll go to class and do other stuff, but I think recreating Iyengar's recommended process for learning asana will be really useful. I started today and it's really illuminating already - Iyengar doesn't offer downward dog (a serious central staple of yoga class which Beginner happens to have trouble with) until somewhere around the 18th to 20th weeks! It makes so much sense given how tough downward dog is on the wrists. You can't just jump into that (ha ha accidental dorky yoga joke if you know what I'm talking about - hint: you can "jump" into downward dog). Anyway yay! I'm excited by my little project. Combine that with some good old fashioned memorization, and you've got a yoga journey on your hands, daaaaaamn.

Another Yoga Time Weekend: Breathing

So this past weekend the yoga teacher training was focused on breathing, or pranayama. This is one of the eight petals of yoga. Iygengar says it's pretty dangerous to practice deliberate, harnessed breathing without guidance, and that the potential for depression is high if practiced incorrectly. Man oh man. Well, I already know that the potential for pulling one's back like an over-eager jackass is also pretty high in yoga (oh ye physical discipline of healing), so I can roll with there being dangers in breathing. Oh and here's a youtube of Iyengar taking an inhale and an exhale which is certainly persuasive of the potential for meaningful control of one's breath, regardless of to what extent one credits the effects of such control.

But I do credit the effects - meditation is a breathing exercise, that's the whole thing. And it is profound to feel the unstoppable effort of our diaphragm rising and falling with the inhale and exhale, completely without our effort, like the heartbeat. Really I think the breathing part of yoga is super awesome. This weekend I learned that can isolate my breathing to expand my ribcage solely in the right side of my body. This is rad to me.

But somehow I was drifting a little bit into "yeah okay whatever"-ville during the weekend. Why? We had a guest speaker who studied with T.K.V. Desikachar in India, so that's neat. I should have been more interested in it than I was. For some reason I was very scattered of mind. I was sort of hungry the whole time, which doesn't help my concentration - I was traveling all weekend so my usual persnickety micro-organizing of my physical state was a little bit shambled. What was happening though that I wasn't really super focused on it? Boredom? Nah, I'm a little old for that, I can get what I want out of things without it being slick and ultra-compelling.

Maybe it was the cursory nature? Six hours of talking about and practicing different breathing techniques seems like a lot but it's not. I guess I still want a teacher that I can call my teacher. I remember once the Buddha guy relating a story about his teacher, and he said, "this was before he was my teacher, this was when he was just the guy teaching the class." So I know that having a "teacher" is much more than attending classes with people. I still feel a little bit adrift in my learning process. I can probably bump it up a little by doing all those handy learning things that I know how to do: systematize and break down chunks of information for handy memorizing. That's time consuming and creates a feeling of progress. Maybe I was just a little annoyed that my back was limiting my participation. Maybe I'm lazy.

There was a lot of great and interesting stuff that I got out of it, though. I am going to practice one of the breathing things every day for a few weeks and see how I feel (not that I live any kind of controlled variable way, but we'll see what I notice). And the personal stuff was interesting, too - the guest speaker started out talking about his own journey into yoga practice, and a lot of it rang true to me, and was exciting to hear about. He talked about the process of learning to see himself and how he grieved the loss of his former self even as he was happy to be newly revealed. He talked about finding his ability to concentrate, how he had felt cut adrift in his mind for years, and yoga helped him return to a more focused state of mind. I am really tempted by the focus thing - wouldn't we all like to feel like we can actually do things we are trying to do?

But maybe that's the other problem - I don't feel any particular longing toward some thing that I just wish wish wish I could be doing. Maybe because I'm already doing the yoga and stuff so I don't have to be sitting at my desk wishing I could be doing yoga. But it's still so directionless, all this yoga doing and meditating and reading. It's great, but so what? I would really like to feel some kind of drive toward something specific; but of course maybe that's a hang up and I just need to shed that expectation for myself. I might actually want to be a yoga teacher, a good one, not just a student - that would be a great thing to be working on. I'm not sure yet, though. There's so much to do still, and so much to learn about, and so much practicing to do.

Pulled Back, Lame-O

Stupid doin' stuff made me all busted. Pulled my back a little bit. I ran into a yoga teacher this morning and mentioned it, and she is also a masseuse, and in about two seconds she had her thumb on the exact spot and was all "yep I feel it right there" and gave me some yoga suggestions for it. I think that's so rad when people know stuff like that.

Anyway so I'm not doing much asana (physical yoga) for a few days. Boo. But that's okay, Iyengar's Light on Life is into the mental stuff pretty fierce right now, so I can think about that instead.

Iyengar gets into all the things that I was wondering about as far as "who am I if not what I think and feel and do" questions. Well, this sense of identity that I describe is the "mind" and although it masquerades as the Soul, it is not who I am. We will mistake the mind for the Soul unless we discriminate more closely among the functions of our consciousness. Just for starters, we have our mind (manas), our ego or I-shape (ahamkara), and our intelligence (buddhi). I have to read it again, it's dense.

But there's still a little bit of doubt in me about how this works, because Iyengar says that "[f]rom our ignorant identification with our ego and its mortality arises man's creativity and his destructiveness, the glory of culture, the horror of his history." And although I agree with Iyengar that yes, "[it] is a forlorn hope" to "embark on great and wonderful projects to affirm that the egoistic self will not die," and that it is "an ineffective and temporary balm against mortality," I DON'T agree (yet, I guess) that we should all want to abandon our obsession with our identity and mortality if it also means the loss of so many beautiful human gestures. I mean, can we all agree that piano playing and music writing and great books are worthy, beautiful, important expressions of humanity? Even if it is motivated by our fearful, self-obsessive impulses? What happens to the "glory of culture" when we all reach our higher selves? I am imagining a futuristic world of enlightened beings and I'm pretty sure we are totally obsessed with the destructive and impassioned past, and have posters of James Dean and Terry Fox hanging in our rooms.

Anyway, I'm still convinced that higher self and enlightenment is pretty rad and all, but I'm troubled by the loss of what I see as my humanity. Still a long way to go yet, I guess.

Yeah, no worries about achieving enlightenment any time soon. But maybe I'm making some in-roads into myself - in that I actually feel more attuned to how ridiculous I am than I can remember feeling. Lordy I'm ridiculous. I rehearse the past in my mind, re-doing and improving my behavior so that I perform better; I keep memories of regrettable behavior in the forefront of my mind, keeping my fear of making the same mistake always at the surface so that I will never do it again; I have pre-conditioned feelings about people and situations and places that I lean on and revert to which preclude me from actually seeing what is happening in the moment; I repeat to myself my negative feelings about things as though it helps me know who and how I never want to be in some imagined future version of my life - except really it's just poison for me and keeps my life and sense of self perpetually in a state of delay ("I will never be like that, in the future"). But I guess it's good that I am very aware of this lately. I'm excited for the next step when I can have a little bit of self-control over these habits of the mind. I think that might be years away, though.

What is a Personality Trait?

So of course I like the promises of Buddhism and Yoga that happiness comes to the diligent practitioner. But the way this happiness is explained is sometimes confusing to me - it sounds like everything that I think of as making me who I am would disappear if I were to achieve this happiness, and that makes me nervous. I think the point is supposed to be that actually my inner essence would be illuminated as I distill and focus my mind, shedding delusions and revealing my Self to me and connecting to the universe etc., but it sound kind of scary. For example, here's something written by Sri Swami Satchidananda from the preface to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali:

"[Yoga's] goal is nothing less that the total transformation of a seemingly limited physical, mental and emotional person into a fully illumined, thoroughly harmonized and perfected being . . . "

okay sounds rad so far, but then this is the rest of the sentence:

" . . . from an individual with likes and dislikes, pains and pleasures, successes and failures, to a sage of permanent peace, joy, and selfless dedication to the entire creation."

So who would I be if I came to have no likes/dislikes, no pain/pleasure, and no success/failure? These are among the things that I identify as constituting who I "am" - sort of in the way that people might describe me to someone I know: "she likes music and cooking, quit her job and moved out of NYC this year, blah blah blah." Even if you take this kind of description one layer deeper, it still relates to likes/dislikes - "she respects discipline, and thinks that finding things funny makes everything better." Or something like that. That's actually kind of hard - to describe what I think might be me accurately. Probably because it's all delusion and my true self is hidden to me under layers of distraction, and when I do find my true self, there will be no words for it.

But I mean I'm pretty well mired down in the idea that I "am" what I "do" or "think" or "feel." (I know, I know, "You are not the body, you are not the mind" - but I don't totally feel it at this point since I'm a beginner) How would I make decisions if I had no likes or dislikes? What would my compass be? We guide ourselves through inclinations, which are informed by past feelings of pain/pleasure and success/failure - so how would I guide myself if my inclinations were neutralized by my own boundless joy? For sure, I want to be supremely happy, but I don't want to be a blank vessel of joy. Seriously, how boring. What do enlightened people talk about besides being enlightened? Would we have music, and art, and fiction? Well, yes, since monasteries are full of that stuff. How about roads? Well sure, necessity would still be addressed by communities of enlightened beings if they needed a good road to get to the water supply or whatever.

I did ask the Buddha man about this once a while ago, asking if Buddhism has room for me to want to learn Portuguese, to bake bread, or whatever, and he said sure, go for it - and that the real fantasy at the core of learning Portuguese and how to bake bread isn't those things themselves, but of inner peace. Like I don't picture myself baking bread all pissed off, I picture my happiness. It's attached to the bread making in my head, but it's still really about inner peace. Uh, writing that out makes me realize that I don't really understand what he meant.

And Iyengar also brings this up in Light on Life - he mentions that he had at least one opportunity to withdraw into monastic-type of life, but he declined. He opted for the life of a "householder" and all the attendant anxieties of survival and family, saying that it was just more suited for him, and practicing Yoga and finding happiness in the realm of a person with regular problems is actually kind of more satisfying and a greater accomplishment than being a dedicated monk-type. So maybe I can merge with the Universal Consciousness and still prefer almond croissants to chocolate ones, and want to buy new clothes, and think some bands are dumb and some aren't.

Anyway, I don't know, in some ways the promise of happiness sounds like whitewashing my whole brain. Maybe that's true, and maybe that's the whole point, but I'm a little scared of the idea of giving over to that completely. But then there's the "householder" thing that makes it seem like that's not necessary. Well if I did achieve some kind of enlightened state, I'm pretty sure I would be even more "who I am" but I guess I'm in the material world enough not to really know what that means.

Sensitivity and Alcohol

I think yoga may be making me more sensitive. That's supposed to be one of the things that happens, anyway. It's been about two months now that I've been pretty well engaged with frequent yoga practice and meditation and I think I am noticing a change in my level of tuned-in-ness. Of course, I am at leisure at the moment to pay attention to my feelings and all that stuff because I don't have a job. But I'm going to ignore that factor for a minute here.

I'm saying that I think I am more sensitive lately because I am feeling very much inclined to be more gentle with myself in a lot of ways. Like chewing more slowly. And I haven't over-done it with feeling full in a while, which is something I definitely tend to do (more numbing behavior). I've also abandoned the idea of ever being a jogger. It's too hard on me. I'd rather walk for an hour and a half and enjoy the fatigue that way, and clear my mind and breathe the air. It's just gentler. And this gentleness is in my yoga, too - I'm much more inclined to use props and blankets and bolsters than I used to be. I don't need to be hard-core or over-extend myself to have a credible experience in yoga - I used to really insist on a more intense experience for myself, with lots of push ups and handstands and back bends, but I'm only doing what feels good, and letting myself inch towards more advanced postures. It's more subtle than just getting exercise. And more rewarding, too.

But most noticeably, my jones for booze has been waning for a week or so lately. I spent a week in Brooklyn last week and had too much to drink one night and felt like hell. Every time I have done this I have sworn off booze to myself. But it never lasts and I'm not sure why. I really don't get anything good out of alcohol except for the feeling of escape. And that relief is so empty and meaningless, and impairs my physical self to the point that my mental well being is compromised. I think one expression of my sensitivity is that I get massive hangovers, like super horrible bad bad bad hangovers. Like way beyond what anyone else who drank the same as I did. (This is just how I am, though - my digestion is sensitive, mosquito bites turn into huge welts for me and one swelled my eye shut last year, I have to go to the hospital when I have poison ivy, I need to get 7-8 hours of sleep or things are bad, one cup too much of coffee can give me a full blown migraine.)

Anyway Iyengar in Light on Life says that when our bodies are impaired, we cannot move beyond the realm of the body; when the body is well, we can use our physical selves as the gateway to our more subtle bodies and selves. When I drink I am trying to escape my inner self by impairing my physical self. But what I really want is to access and master and engage my inner self. Alcohol does nothing to advance this for me. I would love never to drink again. I don't know if that is in the cards for me, but we'll see.

Here's the relationship I wish I could have with alcohol:
1) participation in general conviviality with friends
2) meal flavor accompaniment
3) a little warm buzz in my chest and tummy

Here's the relationship I actually have with alcohol:
1) fear and dread
2) passionate delight in the taste and feeling
3) a loosening of caution and sense of moderation
4) feeling of pressure to drink with friends
5) slipping into a sad hole of uselessness for an evening and premature fatigue
6) bad sleep, possible unanticipated barfing and shivering and headaches
7) resentment toward the expense
8) depleted serotonin and mystery blues

Here's the experience I have WITHOUT alcohol:
1) good sleep
2) higher productivity
3) happier digestion
4) steadiness of emotion and sense of wellness
5) highly conflicted feelings of social isolation for not participating in drinking
6) waves of anxiety in the evening filling in the hole where the alcohol would usually glaze over my agitation

Yeah so basically it's no contest. The gentleness I feel like offering myself lately doesn't have room for alcohol. It's not gentle. It's violent, and jarring, and incapacitating, and poisonous. It's an expensive, damaging poison. To me, not to everyone of course. The things that I use alcohol for I would rather use yoga for. Yoga is a calming, centering, rewarding, productive recipient of my energy. Not alcohol. This is how I want to be gentle with myself.

Am I a Sucker? Is Buddha Playin' Me?

Unhappiness is an incredibly vulnerable state of being. It makes people do all kinds of things they don't want to do. Desperation is a kind of unhappiness - I'm thinking of our special brand of capitalist desperation that makes people do horrible things in order to subsist. And loneliness is another kind of unhappiness, leading us to endure bad treatment to salve it, or to just experience loss, jealousy, self-doubt, neediness, and all kinds of other difficult things that accompany loneliness. And to get rid of those feelings we are willing to do difficult, or unhealthy, or expensive things. We are motivated by our unhappiness to do all kinds of things that aren't good for us.

Knowing that unhappiness is an important motivator, and that unhappiness is prayed upon by manipulators for gain, makes me hesitant when I think about spiritual paths. I mean, the enormous human suffering of basic existence and the promise to eliminate it is the basis of religion, right? God will take care of you. Give over to god. I mean, you know how you know if you're in a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn? The number of churches goes way up. I always thought the title "the audacity of hope" was so stupid for this reason - hello, the function of hope is to keep the downtrodden moving. When things are good nobody needs hope. Hope exists primarily and fundamentally where people are suffering. It's not audacious, it's obvious.

It just hadn't occurred to me yet that the persuasiveness I feel from the Buddha guy is based on this, and that my seeking out of yoga and Buddhism advertises me as a vulnerable person. I guess it does. And when the Buddha man speaks he really does describe my exact suffering, straight out of the unwritten dairy of my whole cell-scape. And this understanding is what makes me so open to meditation - it's like this: "see how well I know how you suffer? Guess what else I know. I know what you should do about it." Anyone can pick up the "I feel your pain" thread and then promise that there is a solution at the end of their particular sales pitch.

The embarrassment I feel of the capitalist end of the search for happiness is crushing sometimes. Like weight loss commercials. Yeesh, depressing. I can't help imagining someone at home alone, watching their tv, suffering in their feelings about their body, feeling spoken to, and calling the 800 number. We're just so vulnerable. Really our unhappiness is a given, and the promise to solve it is everywhere. I try not to buy into these promises, or even to see them if I can help it, because of course it is reciprocal - if someone promises to solve your beauty problems, it might occur to you that you have beauty problems to solve. Ain't need no more stuff to fret about, thankyouverymuch. My friend got an email about a course on self-love and it was so transparently massaging the typical contemporary expressions of unhappiness ("can't get enough done? feel unproductive? stressed out? I have the answer!") that it made me embarrassed. How stupid and desperate does everyone with something to sell think we are? Well, we're extremely desperate, and it makes us very stupid.

Bleh anyway I hope I am using my unhappiness as a motivator for good things. I mean, it's definitely made me buy stuff - the yoga teacher training course, books about yoga and meditation, and the Buddha classes ain't free. I'm purchasing my access to a path away from my unhappiness (sucka!). At least church is free (at first, then we take your tithe, bitches!). It's tough because I don't want to feel like a vulnerable sucker, but I definitely don't believe that I should drop my deliberate engagement with my search for happiness - doing it alone hasn't been the answer either. Whatever, I feel pretty good about yoga and Buddha as healthy, positive recipients of my energy, but I do want to make sure I am mindful of the extent to which my own desire for happiness make me vulnerable to believing or buying anything.

Yo yo yo Yoga Training Weekend

It's a yoga training weekend this weekend! We're doing some forward bending, and it's pretty great. It's supposed to be great on ye olde organs and digestion etc, and I have to say I enjoyed some profound digestive functioning after three hours of all that organ massaging. Good stuff. I also had a vegan burrito (not in the "hey dude I had this rad vegan burrito" kind of way) that was pretty fibrous but whatever.

The magic in yoga for me is in things like that, like the digestion assistance of a pose - I love yoga for the exercise, but I'm frequently impressed by how emotional and cellular certain positions are. And of course the more consistently I do it the more tuned in I am to the feelings that come up (pardon my corniness). Like yesterday we rested on bolsters in child's pose and I just felt so cozy and happy in a way that the usual positions of daily life (chair, bed, car, table, couch, etc) don't prompt us to feel. It's magical.

Anyway I have been doing lots of yoga and meditating but I haven't really been hitting the books too hard, so that's on the horizon. I get to blame it a little bit on my transience lately. Haven't really had a settled home base in which to nestle myself with my trappings of comfort and focus. But come on, I can read a book anywhere.

But the studying part definitely isn't the hard part here, I am reminded again as another training weekend comes around. It's the talking! Talking people into poses is super hard! And I love to talk, talk talk talk that's my whole thing. Talkity talkity, on and on, about whatever. So I thought I would just flow right into it, especially since I've been hearing yoga classes for so long, but it's really difficult. The teacher said it's just a new language, which to me means it's learnable, but it seems so natural when teachers are really good, I'm afraid I'll never really be great at it. Anyway I've been trying to subject friends to my practice teaching and it hasn't really picked up yet. This will also get better once I'm better settled.

Anyway. I'm still hell of digging yoga's approach to life. What little I've read in the books has been mostly about yoga philosophy so far, and I love it. It makes even more sense than Buddhism. There's the eight limbs of yoga, describing the aspects of life that you need to get a grip on in order to merge with the Universal Consciousness, which are pretty cool, and then there are five bodies to a person, from outside to inside, from physical to spiritual, each layer of which needs to be integrated for us to reach the yoga state of being or something. As someone who really enjoys the physical world and experiencing athleticism I love that yoga asks your physical self to be an integral part of your spiritual self.

Well that short version of yoga philosophy is straight out of my subscription to Half-Assed Yoga Student Weekly. I'll get smarter about it eventually and then sound super boring all the time! Hooray!

Buddha Man Layin' Down Some Sick Wisdom

I went to the Buddha place in Prospect Heights that I like (it's the only one I've ever been to) last night and man oh man is that guy smooth. He has really learned to articulate the human experience in a way that shoots right into my guts. I wish I could just repeat the whole class right now, but re-stating his special understanding is pretty tough. Straight up wisdom, yo.

Last night was a lot about bodhichitta, the spontaneous wish to realize enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. I don't think I have this wish sincerely inside me yet, or know if it will appear, but I don't think it matters. Bohichitta seems like a technical term, but the talk was about how we have a grain of Buddha inside of us already. We want to help others, like the people we love, remove their suffering - so we can build on that part of our nature to have love and compassion for all people. And how everyone we see is just like us, trying to be happy, but we all have delusions getting in the way of our happiness. And all the crazy things we do and fantasize about to try to find some peace for ourselves and how fruitless it always is, every time, but we keep doing them. Clicking on stuff on line, buying better furniture, constantly experiencing our dissatisfaction in life as a temporary state, after which some thing or purchase or new job or boyfriend will make us finally happy. And it just never happens. We never arrive into our happiness. We get glimpses of it, but it's not sustained. This and all the rest all makes such total sense to me that for the most part I believe Buddha knows exactly the prescription for my ills and I'm ready to follow orders.

With a small exception! So I read most of a book by the founder of this particular branch of Buddhism and wasn't really feelin' it regarding: karma, six levels of reincarnation, and this horrible description of being the womb that really disappointed me. So I asked the guy after class about all this - basically saying that my skeptical impulses with some of the more specific beliefs was distracting me, that I really dig the meditation and love and bliss stuff, but what can I do if I can't get into this other specific stuff? Buddha man of course said the perfect thing. Basically he said don't worry about it. Take what you want and let the rest sit on the back burner. Keep your doubt, it's fine. Treat karma metaphorically if you want. Six levels of suffering in samsara? You don't have to sign on to that - besides, there might be 30, it's just a framework. You don't have to believe everything, Buddha doesn't care.

Man was I relieved to hear this! I was more relieved than I even realized I wanted to be - I can still enjoy Buddhism without treating any particular thing as gospel. My friend asked me afterwards why I needed to hear that my doubt was okay from the Buddha guy, and it's a good question. I am always free to take what I like and leave the rest, in every aspect of life, so why the need to consult? I think it's because I like Buddhism, and knowing I'm welcome in it even if I am not ready to believe some stuff makes me like it more. Knowing that the teacher there himself sympathizes with my hesitancy and doesn't see it as a bar to my enjoying and benefiting from Buddhism is really reaffirming. It's so sensible, that finding happiness and extending love to others is the priority, and that if I'm on board for that aspect of it, then that's great. I love that.

Teachers are Good: Is Spirituality a Substitute for Actual Personality Traits?

I'm thinking about two of my happiness criteria: Meaningful Work and Spirituality. There is some overlap there. I tend to think of meaningful work as a spiritual pursuit - this is all about the discipline = freedom thing (by focusing and working hard we liberate ourselves to a higher place etc). I always thought the most meaningful way to do this was to find your "calling" and then work like the dickens at it, and that my own focus/drive/regimen would lead me where I need to go to find my true self through whatever vehicle I had chosen. For a long time I thought that vehicle was music. So I would sit with myself and play the guitar without guidance and sort of just figured that I would take myself where I needed to go - you know, the teacher within and all that. But I think I need teachers. I haven't had a guitar teacher in about 17 years. That seems remarkably stupid to me all of a sudden. Why? Why create a version of integrity for myself that refuses guidance? It feels so misguided now. I would love a music teacher. I don't know what the hell books to get or exercises to do to bring myself to a new stage in my relationship with music. I don't know anything! And the most fun I have had with music lately has been learning all those AC/DC songs and learning a bunch of pop country music hits off of youtube. I like the channeling of myself into other things. I find it rewarding - I can't just be alone with a pursuit, it's stifling to be without guidance when you hit a wall. I think I have been hitting the same wall for 10 years. I'd like a teacher.

Maybe I'm thinking about this because I get a lot out of my yoga teachers. I do yoga by myself these days when I can't make it to a class, but really it's all about being with teachers and learning from others. I can't imagine trying to yoga it up totally all alone. It's nice to let myself off the hook for self-sufficiency. I can look outside myself for direction and inspiration, and I should.

But back to the overlap of Meaningful Work and Spirituality - sometimes I feel a little dismissive of people who are all about a spiritual thing, because it seems like that's their whole bag. Nothing they do isn't about Jesus, or Buddha, or Yoga, or whatever. Sometimes it seems like a good way to spend a lot of time getting nothing done except talking about the inner self and its control, destiny, design, or sense of peace. Boring! Can anyone be a serious spiritual practitioner AND do something else meaningful? I am starting to see how following a spiritual path can turn into an all-encompassing diversion away from other purposeful activities. I feel pretty susceptible to this, too, being sucked all the way into yoga such that I can only think in terms of yoga - and I feel susceptible because really I don't have any direction in life. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing, and following the Divine down some road would be a really nice thing to do. And maybe this is fine. Or maybe it's another way to keep myself from my personal process of becoming who I am - following a prescribed path instead of my own. Is this vanity - the belief that the only legitimate expression of self has to be of my own invention, without following anyone else? Wouldn't this mean I don't want a guitar teacher? Or is it just short-sighted, and I can follow a prescribed path and still be who I am - that every path belongs to the individual just because it is the individual's path?

I worry that being all about yoga would absorb my personality I guess, because I'm digging it so much right now that I can see how being all yoga-spirity could take over my head. Just as I once worried that learning too much of others' music would diminish the strength and vision of my own inner musical gestures. But this hasn't been the case - learning AC/DC has been a really exciting broadening experience, not a narrowing one. ALL learning functions as a broadening, not a narrowing. Being alone with my pursuits hasn't created a clarity or singularity of purpose at all; it's looking outside myself that has provided the most invigorating and inspiring fodder for my inner self. Really the risk isn't that I will become a super-yogi type of person, because I'm so super resistant to submitting to that kind of mentality. But I think with this kind of resistance that I am confusing integrity with isolationism. Anyway I want to be able to submit to the yoga learning without losing myself, but I hope that I don't protect my sense of self so fiercely that I don't get to really experience whatever it is I'm trying to get out of this.

I Am a Baby About Stress

I used to have what most people would acknowledge as an objectively stressful job: corporate litigation associate ("CLA"). When a CLA says s/he is sooooo stressed out, people pretty much credit that as legitimate. But stress is so subjective. I had incredible stress and anxiety about going to school when I was 11. School was horrible, and trying to manage it all in my head was exhausting. I remember once being yelled at for complaining about stress because I, a child, couldn't possibly understand what stress is really about. I was so offended by this dismissal that I've tried to keep a little bit of compassion in me for people's expressed level of stress no matter how silly it sounds. It's sort of like this: http://achewood.com/index.php?date=02022007

Anyway I was recently helping some friends with a festival they were organizing, and oh lordy did it stress me out. There were emails to answer and things to coordinate and follow up emails and meetings and phone calls and all that crap, and I just was not handling it great. At one point I drove myself to a grocery store parking lot and took a nap in the car until someone called me wondering where I was because they needed help with the stuff I was supposed to be helping with! Pitiful!

Why was this so stressful? I just left an objectively stressful job, and have nothing to do but nurture myself for a living, and I should be relaxed enough that I can manage my own subjective level of stress just fine - but I just wasn't fully up to the task of being on the ball for this festival. I'm going to have to figure out some kind of way to be a productive, obligation-having (and money-earning) person on the planet without it making me get fetal all the time. How?

In yoga class sometimes when we're doing a pose we're given super precise instructions on how to do it just perfectly, and it's super difficult. And this might mean that you can only lift your leg an inch or something. Then the teacher will present the looser, less precise version of the pose, and holy moley you can lift your leg three feet! So then comes the next instruction: keep your leg in the position of the loose pose, but bring yourself back into the difficult, more precise pose. Through this kind of exercise you begin to ask your leg to imagine having both the freedom and ease of the loose pose AS WELL AS adhering to the precise, more difficult expression of the pose. So this is my analogy for life: life is pretty manageable when I have no obligations, and I feel pretty happy over all. But I'm going to have to acquire some kind of stressful obligation in the future in order to comfortably subsist. So from the loose position of low-stress life, can I bring myself into the more difficult, high-obligation expression of life and yet hold on to the happiness I am trying to cultivate? (Buddha says yes, btw) I think so but it'll take a lot of work, I am still "learning" to be happy in spite of various stressors in life. It's tricky.