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.
No comments:
Post a Comment