Yoga Themes: Thematic Yogi

I've been trying out different ways of structuring my classes so I have something to work around. Teaching has been a lot of flailing around with moments of clarity, but I'm starting to notice a few things about what feels the best. I started with a pose - building the class around the pose. That's useful to an extent, but I lack immediate access to anatomical terminology to really feel like this is interesting and effective. That's a future undertaking. And then I tried thematic structuring, using poses as physical metaphors to tie into the theme I offer. What I've settled on so far is somewhere in between. I like having a pose to think about, but it's better when it has a little theme to go along with it. It feels more natural to chatter on about something not limited to the physical experience.

So this week's theme? Patience!

I was flipping through a book I've been loving (which my friend gave to me, even better), about meditation, and one of the big themes is "self-pacing." You can't rush your own development as a human being. Things happen at the rate they happen - there are a lot of competing clocks out there (the universe, happenstance, whatever), and the one that will always come in last is your own notion of where you are and how far along you are on whatever path you are on.

Patience is: an act of humility. It takes a lot of pride-swallowing to say, "I am not ready for this thing that I want to do/have/experience/learn." To wait instead. Harder. Boy, imagine if you had had the wisdom to decline certain experiences as they rose before you when you were younger because you weren't ready. Hm, that might get me into a Catch-22 - if you had the experience, you were ready for it, no? Well, maybe.

Maybe, because the next thing I read in this meditation book was (paraphrasing here), "better knowledge come to you lifetimes too late than a moment too soon." Yes, the possibility of misusing information and knowledge is big. But more importantly, this idea makes me feel better about the waiting part. Where's the fire? What's my hurry? One hundred more lifetimes would be fine, I'd do it all again 100 million times. If it takes that long to realize something, to be fully bloomed, that's fine. Better that than trying to be chasing personal evolution frantically, desperately. This little bit of wisdom makes it easier to be content with the here/now, methinks.

So I was thinking about this, and I came up with an image for patience. It's standing in a forest and seeing a deer in the distance. And then holding out an apple for the deer in an effort to get the deer to come eat the apple out of your hand. You clearly can't chase the deer. It's big and fast and easily spooked. Don't even let yourself feel too heavy on the earth for fear the branches breaking will frighten it away. Nope, just hold out the apple and wait. Make peace with the idea that the deer might never come, but hold out the apple anyway. I mean, if you don't hold out the apple, the deer will definitely never come.

And I like this thematically because if there's one thing I want people to take away from a yoga class, it's don't worry about it. Seriously, never do a handstand, that's fine. Never touch your toes, really, it's completely beside the point. Hold out the apple. Don't chase the deer. Just hold out the apple.

Does that jive? I'm into it. The other good thing is that I teach Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, so I can bust it out on Sunday, fix the big problems by Tuesday, and then polish it up for Thursday. It's great. Oh, maybe the point of this post from the reader's point of view is: only come to my Thursday classes. Hm, I'll have to mix it up a bit so that Sunday isn't always the cold run.

Finding a Locus for a More Hocus-Pocus Yoga Focus

So last week I went to yoga on Monday night at a local place that definitely appears to be the main center of happ-nin yoga around here, and took a Jivamukti class. Jivamukti is a type of yoga that two Manhattanite folks started in the ‘80s that focuses a lot on ahimsa, or nonviolence (very much in the form of vegan living), and has a pretty vigorous post-Ashtanga vinyasa-flow approach. Anyway. From what I understand, in order to call oneself a Jivamukti teacher, as opposed to someone who teaches yoga and was trained and certified by Jivamukti teachers, one must adhere to a certain kind of class structure and style. And I get this in one sense – Jivamukti needs to protect its brand, and it can’t have way off-base teachings with its name attached to it happening all over the place. So, sure. It was in the back of my head, though, at this class, that this teacher couldn’t fully be himself within the parameters of this method. It’s probably not true – there’s certainly lee-way available – but that was one distraction about the class for me. It felt so very by-the-book in terms of the little snippets of yoga wisdom that came out that I wondered if the teacher really felt it. Well, it’s also that he rambled a bit – like he knew what he should be offering up but didn’t really know how to say what he was trying to say. His chattiness ran a little long, which to me indicated a level of searching as he was talking, which meant his vision wasn’t concrete to him yet.

This is something I want to keep in mind for my own teaching. Sincerity is important. Lack of sincerity is extremely obvious, no matter how well you can “say” the words. And I’ve noticed this in the classes that I’ve been teaching – part of me feels like I need to hand out some kind of peace/love guidance thing to give to the class, and it’s pretty tough to articulate peace/love feelings genuinely. First of all, it’s hard to articulate them at all. “You know, peace and stuff.” Second, communicating one’s feelings genuinely and succinctly enough in a class context requires serious choice of words and clarity of thought, so you have to know and mean what you say. Third, hell to muffins I am no beacon of successful peace/love for someone to model and I don’t want to suggest that any yoga information I have to offer represents my confidence or achievement of something great.

Which leads to me to the fourth, which is that peace/love isn’t the primary thing for me in yoga right now. The teacher last week, in spite of my feelings about his convictions and his teaching, said something that really rang in my mind – he said that if you are doing yoga postures in a checklist kind of way to feel accomplishment then you are missing the point of yoga. And this is something I do. I am pretty caught up in the athleticism of yoga. I love feeling myself progress in postures that have been eluding me because they require more strength than I have, and I feel pretty pleased with myself when I notice I have gained the strength to do something. I am mostly motivated to do yoga by my desire to exert my energy and expand my vocabulary of movements so that I can really get sweaty. The sheer exertion feels like a huge relief, and I can purge some anxiety and shed the day away, but this mostly happens because of the physical fatigue, not because I connect with the Universal like a champ. Well, actually, I have usually considered my exertion to BE my connection with the Universal, but there is definitely an element of the inner world that is lacking right now, something I’m just not going for. I can feel transcendent etc. when I am doing my postures, and I do my final relaxation on the floor, and I sit still and try to focus on my breathing, but I’m not as gung-ho about it as I am the pure work-out part of it. So I’d like to up the ante a little bit on my spiritual hocus-pocus, so that maybe I’ll have something more genuine to offer to future classes about the inner-world aspect of yoga practice.

Bein' a Lady, Buddha's Aaight Reprieve, More Preposterous Life Fantasies

I just heard Hilary Clinton’s Women’s Rights are Human Rights speech from September 4, 1995 at the 4th World Conference on Women Plenary Session in Beijing, China. Something is going on with me and the woman stuff – I am pretty interested in it lately. I finished The Feminine Mystique, of course, and currently on the docket is The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer; I also just wrapped up Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness by Ariel Gore. It feels a little bit cosmic to have heard Clinton’s speech replayed on the radio today, and about a month ago I also heard a show about Eleanor Roosevelt and her life – which, to be brief, was basically kick-ass. I feel like a little spark of time/place is settling over me, a neat dimension to my identity that isn’t just who, but when, I am (yay corniness!).

So let’s consider the Bluebird book for a minute – this book definitely is in favor of an Action Girl approach to female happiness. (Action Girl is also, by the way, an excellent comic book that all should enjoy.) She is in favor of confronting what it is you truly want to do, and trying to do it, even when it isn’t what you are “supposed” to be doing. This kind of tough-self-love appears frequently to revolve around relationship-ending narratives, a la “screw this house-dog-car-job scene, I’m going to chart the seasonal fecal change of snowbirds” or whatever. I get this – I think a lot of people spend their youths trying to feel safe and secure by finding love and purpose to attach to, and then once they are fully adult and feel actually safe and secure, they realize they are being held back by the love and purpose that they were once so desperate to tether themselves to for fear of floating away. It seems like a natural life progression, actually – like a second childhood cycle. As babies and kids we need need need direction and instruction and safety, and then as teenagers we resist and rebel and deny all direction and instruction so we can become a different, independent self. Then we do it all again, probably dozens of times in our adult life: attach, rebel; attach, rebel.

Anyway Gore is in favor of bold and radical happiness action, and I think that is great, and I completely agree – it has that seed of Friedan’s call to arms to resist “adjusting” to your expected role that I really love. She also examines the problem of fearfulness – the opposite of happiness is anxiety, she says, and one of the cures for anxiety? – why, meditation, of course. I was thinking that while I don’t feel like I’m a Buddhist exactly, and that I think it’s a bad idea to try to find yourself by finding something religious to hold on to, I have to give a little bit of credit to the path of self-via-spirituality – I do think that investigating my spiritual side a little did give me access to ways of viewing my life that have functioned as little launch pads for further self-discovery . . . like balancing (or reconciling) the feelings that, one the one hand, I am exactly where I need to be at any given moment on any given day, and on the other hand, I should strive for change and growth and the feeling of using and expanding my capacities. Every reasonable point of view is a paradox, isn’t it? Including that one! Ha ha, both reasonable and paradoxical, nice.

But anyway willingness to take radical action and intellectualized balanced approaches notwithstanding, this still leaves most of us with the question of What Am I Supposed to be Doing? The feeling of infinite choice and the problem of choosing one thing to the exclusion of several others – as well as the influence of circumstance, inclination, funding, time, and everything else over what even feels possible or practical among the infinite - it can all be so very paralyzing. I am still distilling myself – I keep having fantasies lately of going to South America again, only this time, going for longer and taking a language class and having the “experience” I had always wanted – I mean, it’s been so wonderful to take care of this one buried longing – yoga certification – that I think I’d really feel relieved in a check-list sort of way if I did that. But it would really interrupt everything else that is unfolding right now – my guitar lessons start this week, and yoga is going really well, and my reading is really engaging, and my husband and I are thinking it’s time to buckle down and buy a piece of real estate to set up all our wacky projects in. Well, anyway, you can see how going to South America for six months would postpone all these things that are in progress - and even though I appreciate Gore's happiness prescription, making oneself happy isn't permission to follow whim or totally cave into one's panic about life and aging, to me. So could I do it in a few years? What if there’re babies in my life? Then what? It makes me a little sad to think about shelving the South America dream, but really, one thing at a time.

Excuse me Professor Buddha, can we go over again why living in the moment is so great?

Regarding the past, I can definitely get down with letting go of being hounded by regrets and anger and stuff like that. Regarding the future, I can understand completely how fruitless it is to think any version of “I’ll be happy when . . . .” I can roll with happiness-as-gratitude-and-a-sense-of-ongoing-marvel and that feeling thankful for all that I have is very important. Etc. Also that thing that nun said about how it doesn’t really help peace on Earth to scream at other people to change their ways really made a lot of sense to me. AND on top of this I really get a lot out of sitting quietly and focusing on my breathing and hoping for peace on Earth, it’s pretty awesome. But really, why am I supposed to live in the moment again? What moment? This one? Hum of the fridge, sound of a dried leaf scratching a window, fall of shadows from the retractable overhead light. Yeah yeah, I am certainly capable of contemplative appreciation for the simple things etc. And I know I could die any second now for any one of a zillion random reasons, but if life is going to make any sense, I need my personal concept of a future to exist. In order to shower, to better myself, care about others in a real-life, secular humanist empathetic way, I need to keep tomorrow, and next week, and ten years from now in mind. Am I just taking this moment-living thing too literally? It's just that I hear this idea batted around an awful lot and if I’m supposed to define it for myself or something, well then, living in the moment includes a touch of future, because it has to in order to have any meaning. Betty Friedan wrote that “It is precisely this unique human capacity to transcend the present, to live one’s life by purposes stretching into the future---to live not at the mercy of the world, but as a builder and designer of that world---that is the distinction between animal and human behavior, or between the human being and the machine.” I see her point.

Where is the human progress in contentment and happiness? Friedan’s book (The Feminine Mystique, of course) is about how at a certain point in our culture, women were epidemically suppressing their potential and sense of self in order to “adjust” to society. This is why housewives ran screaming down the street in the middle of the night. Not because housewifing is dumb in and of itself, but because culturally we’re outgrowing the apron role as our only possibility – to have only one true option is a limitation and can’t be forced back in to those old clothes. Friedan wrote about this fifty years ago, and I feel like this is what I see not just in me but in everyone, all the time now – misery and confusion from trying to adjust to cultural circumstances that do not have the same shape as the true self: offices, huge grocery stores, cars, air conditioning, offices, offices, offices. Thoreau in “Economy” (in Walden) says that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation,” and that “resignation is desperation confirmed.” He said this in reference to the relentless slaving and over-hoarding of his working contemporaries. Friedan then says 100 years later, about the oppression of women, “The adjusted, or cured ones who live without conflict or anxiety in the confined world of home have forfeited their own being; the others, the miserable, frustrated ones, still have some hope.” I do truly dig what you're saying about living in the moment, Buddha man, but can personal evolution really be a by-product of contentment? Should I not want personal evolution?

Okay here’s the other thing that is bothering me about Buddha stuff. I already am kind of bummed about the priestly hierarchy stuff – my friend said he abstains from a lot of this stuff since he really doesn’t want “bigger parents.” I agree. Also, why should a be-robed “master” seem to be important to me? He and/or his lifestyle certainly don’t represent the goal of practicing dharma to me (sort of in that way that a psychiatrist somehow represents the successful end of psychotherapy, at least from the point of view of the patient – but you’d never want to model your life after a shrink, they ALWAYS have the most f***ed up kids, have you noticed?). What the be-robed Buddha man represents to me is retreat from life into total abstraction and a career choice that just won't work for me. I know they mop floors and eat cookies or whatever and are supposed to be grounded, but they sure as hell aren’t trying to live among society in a way that I can understand – and isn’t this what they’re supposed to be helping? Regular folk? I really love that Iyengar rejected monk-hood, explicitly with the idea that yoga and enlightenment are paths meant to be compatible with checking the mail and walking the dog and going to work and paying the mechanic . . . oh that reminds me, one of the monks had a dog. I’m exaggerating the priestly thing a bit, probably.

But upon whom, please, should I be modeling my concept of myself?

Hmm. Well, this is the very guidance that all paths lack, isn’t it? I mean we already all know that we cannot take our identities from the generation before us – would anyone like to be his or her parents? I didn’t think so. For a long period of life the whole point of parents is to have someone’s image to reject in order to form your own identity. But where is the example being set that I want to follow? I don’t think it exists, and that’s what’s so unnerving. There is no shape in the world exactly my size that I can fit myself into; we have all outgrown everything that can be known because it is already over; there is only the unknown – the future. Who and how we are is constantly evolving because we cannot be content to repeat what we have outgrown – I mean, maybe there is no “now.” We need the future and discontent to have identities, and identity is what gives us our future and sense of discontent – and I know ego and identity are all supposed to be bullsh*t and the very cause of my suffering but I’m not convinced.

Compassion and Abstraction

That is to say, compassion is an abstraction. In Buddhism the practitioner is asked to focus intently on the object of his/her meditation, and eventually to hold the feeling of compassion for all living beings in the mind in order to generate the spontaneous wish to relieve their suffering and to achieve enlightenment in order to do so. I find it hard to hold this idea in my head. I find it hard to fully comprehend a broad compassion. I find it hard to concentrate on one tiny instance of compassionate feeling, even, because it is extremely upsetting to focus on others’ suffering. It is much nicer instead to think of anything else.

I am still thinking about how I don’t like to watch upsetting movies. The two hour roller coaster is so fatiguing, and I feel so manipulated by it, and so spent. I am supposed to be trying to maintain equanimity in my life and in my mind, and going to the movies is the opposite of equanimity. It is purposefully discombobulating, the intentional upsetting of one’s balance for entertainment. I keep wondering whether this can ever be productive, ever.

And I do get upset – I was really upset by the movie I just saw with my friend in which the main character recounts some pretty upsetting things about his childhood, and I was watching my physical reaction to the scene. My stomach felt that anxiety feeling, I was angry and sad for his bad experience, I felt protective of the character as an adult even though the bad time was all over and there was nothing more to do about it, and I felt that feeling of wanting to hold someone and make all their pain go away. And I know this is what the Buddha teacher is talking about. That we have all had this experience of wishing we could take on the suffering of someone we love for them so they wouldn’t have to feel it. Whether it’s a little kid who had a terrible time during recess that day, or a friend going through a break up, or someone was rude to your mom in a coffee shop or someone is sick and dying – whatever it is, there have been moments in our lives in which we have wished for the power to make it all feel better or disappear or never have happened at all. And as far as I understand it, that unbearable feeling of seeing people we love upset or in pain is what we use to fuel our determination to reach enlightenment. I resent being upset by my own compassionate impulses when I go to the movies, and it makes me never want to go to the movies, at least not for emotionally trying films. Crappy romances, sure thing, no problem. Emotionally substantive? No thanks. No wonder it’s so hard for me to keep compassion in my mind for the benefit of world peace if I can’t bear it at the movies. Of course I don’t want to imagine suffering on purpose and focus on it really really hard. Every day I’d have to make myself cry as motivation for working toward enlightenment. I don’t really want to do that right now. I guess I’ll bring it up at the next Buddha club meeting and see what the guy says.

Hi, Sweetie, How Was Buddha Sleepover Camp? Fine. Make Any Friends? I Guess.

So I went to a big Buddhist temple in Western New York for a night. I went to three meditation teaching things, had some monk/nun-made vegetarian food, and slept in the women's dorm with some other Buddha learner chicks. It was very nice and the people were very nice and the grounds were very nice with some very nice walking trails and it was all extremely nice. So here's the other stuff:

First things first: this was a big step up from talking about meditating in a guy's deli in New Paltz on Wednesday nights. Community class is casual and practical and not intimidating at all. At the temple it's a little different, or at least it's too much for me - we're talking serious varsity Buddhism here, as far as I can tell. The people in the robes, the beads (whatever those are for), the bowing on the ground, the glamorous and cavernous temple with shiny Buddhas everywhere, the singing prayers in the meditation sessions (and I'm not crazy about the tune they set the prayers to, by the way). I feel like I muddied the waters a little bit, or least was sort of in danger of muddying the waters. The delight of Buddhism for me right now is its manageability, its portability. Here is the stuff that I can handle right now: just focus on your breathing, concentrate on that one thing to the exclusion of all else as best you can (while remaining relaxed), and try to direct your effort to something good like world peace and not something mean or negative. This is a habit I can take home and work on. The teachings on the retreat are significantly more complicated for me, even though they boil down to the same thing eventually, I think. It just seemed like there's about a zillion Buddhas to thank for their teachings, and each of them has different useful symbolism to them, and there are symbolic gestures in the prayers like making prayer shapes with your hands and then moving it to four different points on your body at certain moments in the prayers, and three bows on the floor that everyone makes before the meditation teaching begins. I don't know, feels complicated. I got some useful imagery out of it I think, but I have to just focus on the most simple part of it before I go learning a million new things that are supposed to help me. Plus one meeting a week has been enough to keep me thinking for a while - at the temple I went to three sessions in 24 hours. I just couldn't process it all in any meaningful way. I was fatigued.

Second: I did get something nice out this (besides my comfort with my own beginner level), and that's that I don't care about the hyper-reasoning or rationales that have been distracting me with Buddhism, such as whether it is impossible to make decisions without relying on a good/bad paradigm of life, whether training your mind to be selective in its thoughts isn't just a way to say Repress Your Dark Side To Be Happy - I think being so overwhelmed with the Super Buddha information made me feel a little less critical of it, paradoxically. I think I am starting to believe that I can't change emotional and spiritual problems intellectually, and a few different sources have told me the same thing in the last few weeks so the point has been taking root in my mind - Iyengar in Light on Life says that you must address your emotional health emotionally; and also in psychotherapy there is apparently such a thing as "intellectual resistance" to progress - we want to talk ourselves out of or into certain ways of feeling, and it's not really that productive (I read this in Friedan's The Feminine Mystique this week, what a rad book that is!). This is still pretty abstract for me but I'm liking where it's going.

Third: another nice thing I got out of this - I feel a little better about hiding from the world these days. I feel occasional waves of guilt about not using my law powers for good because it's too stressful for me. There was this one nun at the temple who heard me talking to someone about whether meditating and yoga are actually "doing" anything "good" for the world, and she laughed a bit, and chimed in. She said she wasn't laughing at me of course, but that her path to Buddhism really started when she found herself at a peace rally in a state of terrible rage. She said she felt that she was not really contributing to peace in the sense that she, too, was ready to kill and shout and destroy in order to get other people to change their behavior. That she was yelling and fighting to get someone else to work on world on peace, and it wasn't really going anywhere. She parroted what other people had said to her about meditation, along the lines of "if you want to help the world why don't you protest, picket, write letters, etc," but that she decided that she could really only work on herself. Someone also said that Buddhism is pretty much in favor of whatever you want to do as long as you're not hurting yourself (or others ostensibly), and stress is, well, extremely harmful for me and my health. But I'm still struggling with this whole problem, in the sense that spirituality seems like escapism to me sometimes, and that enduring the aggressiveness of social advocacy is really important, and that I should contribute somehow. I'm really glad that I can vote, and the only reason I can vote is because some insistent lady folks went to jail and took a few punches for me (yes this is more from The Feminine Mystique). What if they had all just meditated for change? I don't know. But I do feel like I have a positive framework for at least justifying/rationalizing my hermit-like behavior a little bit.

Fourth: made a friend! I had a really nice chit chat with someone from Canada who was really into Buddhism, and I got a really useful mini-lecture on Buddhist history and some nice feedback on searching for a path and what that means and that it's okay to shop around for a spiritual path, and all that stuff. We won't keep in touch or anything but it was a nice little two-hour friendship that made me feel pretty good about my personal struggle and that it's okay not to really know what's going on for now. I don't really know what's going on with my life direction and spiritual existence, and that's what's going on with my life direction and spiritual existence. It's sort of nice.

Went to Buddha Class, Can’t Wait to Make New Friends!

Two nights ago was Buddha class in a deli in New Paltz. It was really nice. A bunch of people came, like about ten or so, and the guy was really nice and gave a good talk about meditation and how it is really useful. Speaking of which, I am probably going to Buddha sleepover camp a few hours away from here next week for two nights, or one night and two days. I’m a little nervous about it, in sort of silly ways like will there be tea? How much bathroom privacy will I get? These things impact my desire to leave the house quite a bit.

I hung around a little to talk to the Buddha guy about Buddha stuff, and it was nice to get some stuff off my chest – what’s the difference between suppressing thoughts and “choosing” whether to think about them? What about the buying groceries thing, isn’t that impossible if you don’t see anything as good or bad anymore? I don’t get the whole “emptiness” thing yet, what’s the deal? Anyway he was really friendly and said he’s looking forward to talking about Buddha stuff more in the coming weeks, and boy oh boy will I be there in the front row with my hand raised. He did call me “cerebral” which I took in a flattering way, which is vanity, and totally not okay with Buddha, but oh well. One thing at a time.

And I’m working on my class write-up for the class I need to teach for my certification, and it’s pretty engaging, but also sort of difficult. I think I’m making the class too hard, putting too much stuff in it. I’ll try it out a few different ways and see how it goes.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Forgetfulness and Anxiety

A lot of the busy-ness of my mind has to do with fear of forgetting something. I use "fear" here pretty broadly, since I don't wish to forget to get milk on the way home, for example. I'm not really "scared" of forgetting the milk, since this is a pretty low-consequence obligation, at most resulting in a little disappointment or chagrin when I make coffee or tea in the morning and it won't be just exactly how I like it - but I still find the worry over whether I will remember to get the milk to be a "fearful" sensation.

But other obligations are of course more consequential. Fulfilling these obligations can implicate the security of one's livelihood, or mean disappointing one's friends, or really hold up the progress of something you have committed to and create more work for other people. The economic, reputational, and practical consequences of forgetfulness can be pretty inconvenient or unpleasant.

For me the anxiety I experience in anticipation of these potential consequences means I try hard not to forget what it is I have obliged myself to do - and this means I have a running checklist in my mind that is compulsively being checked off throughout the day. A little paranoid secretary in my head says "don't forget to get milk" over and over until I get the milk. But sometimes I forget to get the milk anyway, and then all day I've crowded my head with repetitive worry for nothing. Oh chagrin - worse chagrin than the consequence of forgetting the milk, actually.

This worry habit of mine really gets in the way of meditation. I fear forgetting. One goal of meditation is supposed to be gaining a sense of existence separate from "I" - and separate from all the things we attach to that "I" including, I assume, its obligations. Along with all the other near-impossibilities of meditation, I find it really hard to submit to the experience without "don't forget the milk" or "remember to call Susie" popping into my head over and over. I'm afraid successful meditation will make me so happy I don't remember to do anything, or who I am, or that I am supposed to call someone later. That's unlikely to happen, and I've never heard of that being one of the "dangers" of meditation, but it makes it impossible for me to live in the moment.

So how can I remember what I'm supposed to do and still give myself over to experiences of concentration that push out the weight and repetition of all my obligations? Write it down? No, then I just think "did I remember to write milk down?" Some kind of email prompting system? Again this kind of reminder is only as good as the data one inputs, which means there is still the worry of whether I've put in the right data. I want to be confident in giving myself permission to forget that I want to get milk, knowing that I will remember to get it once I have "returned" from a forgetting episode like yoga or meditation. It would be nice to just take care of things the second they arise in my head, but that would a weird, inefficient, and equally distracting way to live. Imagine getting up from a movie theater to go pick up milk. It doesn't make sense.

What to do? I don't know.

Practice Makes Payoff

Well I failed in the regimen this weekend, in that I did no yoga on Saturday. But I am letting it slide in my mind since I was camping in the Catskills. Nature stuff enjoyment is definitely an activity that increases my happiness. Walking and biking for sure, and ever since my big brother took me camping in the insane majesty of someplace, Colorado, waking up outside is a little mini-goal I keep in my brain's to-do files. I am pretty sure I actually enjoy this as opposed to just believing that I should enjoy it since it sounds so wholesome and my neat-o brother thinks it's cool.

But anyway actual enjoyment is the point I'm getting to - I went to a festival thing when I was camping, with bunches of people and jam bands and corny tie-dye vendors and bad burritos. And I enjoyed myself. This is remarkable. I am historically a huge pill about these things. Bleh, the people and porta-johns, the fitful sleeping-bag sleep interfered with by endless drum-circling, and noodle jam music that goes nowhere and evokes nothing and that I definitely don't care about, and scene-sters who elevate the whole thing to the point where you have to have a phd in the history of lame-os hanging out to even know what they're talking about.

But I loved it! I didn't care! The music wasn't even that compelling but I really liked it! And I ate only beans and cheese all day and that was fine! I barely slept in my tent but that was okay too! We sort of got lost trying to find the place but I felt no anxiety about it! On and on about all the usual irritations that did not affect me negatively! And I made friends and danced like a nerd and didn't change my clothes for two days! Exclamation point!

Anyway I am citing this experience as evidence that my practicing being happy with yoga and meditation is going to be really effective. Not that enjoying something I don't usually enjoy means that I'm cured of my general misery or anything after only a short time of working on it, that would be impossible (since I love and clutch and tend to my misery like a cherished, ratty, snuggly thing), but I am hugely heartened by this experience. I gave it the old "what the hell I should use this tent my brother gave me so whatever and it'll be hilarious" - and from the general sense that any outdoor stuff and especially camping is something I want to see if I can actually enjoy myself with - and it turned out to be really affirming. I can absolutely learn to turn my mindset to happiness and be psyched for life all the time. I am excited to practice more.