What is Addiction? Why is it Bad? All Your Questions Answered.

I am now an expert in clinical diagnoses! Just kidding, I talk out of my rear end, just like everyone else.

At work we were talking about addiction. I was thinking about this because it occurred to me that processed food is like opium or heroin - you take something whole and innocent and natural, refine and extract and condense it to (one of) its essence(s), and you're left with something extremely potent and usually bad for you. The experience of ingesting such highly concentrated materials is an exaggeration of our normal sensory spectrum. Whether in the form of getting super high or tasting something super sweet, our sense are manipulated by processed goods, and we are more likely to feel addicted to them since our concept of the range of our sensory spectrum has been artificially distorted, requiring repeated input from hyper-ized products to return to the falsely elevated feeling of "good." Personally, this makes a lot of sense to me when I think about spaghetti and potato chips, which I love and have emotional cravings for.

Okay so that's what we were talking about at work. So then I suggested that people become "addicted" to processed foods the same way they become addicted to opium or anything else. This isn't a new concept at all, but it finally seemed really clear to me. And we were talking about the overuse of the concept of addiction, and victimhood culture, and people's relinquishing of their own autonomous decision making power to something they can claim to be addicted to. So this got pretty heady pretty fast, so to back it up we decided to define addiction.

My offering: anything that has a negative impact on one's life that one feels powerless to combat. Seem broad? I think it fits. Habits and routines and practices that do not serve us, and yet we continue to do, I think can be swept under the definition of addiction.

And I think this is useful, because then everything can be given the AA treatment - by which I mean: abstention, community support, and giving oneself over to a higher power. My pal at work said that everyone getting to be addicted to whatever they want makes a culture of helplessness and excuse making. I sort of like the view of addiction, however, that connects us to a sense of our own smallness - we are not all powerful, autonomous beings who just need to try harder, think harder, and do better. Instead, we are tiny particles of a larger, more mysterious set of forces, and sometimes the self-obsessed feeling of addiction/helplessness is an inroad to this more selfless feeling of humble connectedness. Why not, right?

Sometimes I feel like I'm combating my "addictions" one by one, and that my view of myself and my progress toward inner peace is the process of shedding the negative habits that I seem to do without thinking. And I have to ask for a little cosmic help to do it because I'm pretty weak, generally speaking - I'm giving myself 30 days for t.v. right now, which would be from October 9th to November 9th I suppose, and I already fell off the wagon once for 1.5 hours of House on the 19th, but it's still a worthy undertaking - and I need a little Sky God Earth Power or whatever to help me exercise my will. The whole thing forces me to redirect my attention more positively, and I really appreciate the after effects.

So I think that giving attention to your challenges as though they are addictions can be a handy way of thinking about yourself in order to take your obstacles seriously and to be connected to the magical powers of the universe. The end.

Bloggerwhelming. Teaching is neat.

You know what's overwhelming? The yoga blogosphere. Holy bananas people are writing a lot about yoga all the time. It's a little too much. Too much to process, too much to reconcile for points of view, too much to select from. How can anyone know what to read when there's so much? Ah the problem of the information age. That's why we're all so vulnerable to selective aggregation services - the news, Pandora, the blogs - we can't process anything effectively on our own so we need the selection service.

Anyway that's besides the point. You know what else I love? Teachin' yoga. Oh man it's really interesting. I am really liking it. I think I'm starting to get a little better at it, but it's slow going. I teach twice a week right now and I'm about to start teaching three times a week. The two classes I teach are so different from each other in audience, space, and general vibe. It's really interesting to have to fit myself into the scheme of things and adjust for the class. And how many people are in the class makes a big difference, too, and where they are in their yoga practice. Anyway I like the whole thing. It's a learning experience unlike anything I've tried to do thus far in my life, and I like it for that reason alone.

Yoga Commodification

So I like yoga a lot, that's pretty clear. And I certainly acknowledge that wanting to find peace etc will make me buy stuff from time to time. Yesterday friend sent me an article about the commodification of the true self that pointed out the sales aspect of yoga to me in a new way. Basically, instead of, say, lipstick or new clothes making you feel better and happier and more like the you you want to be, well, yoga and poses and meditation are the lipstick or clothes.

I guess the real commodity is the same as it's always been: anything that will help relieve you of your feelings of inadequacy. There is a catch-22 here, of course, in the sense that usually we have to be told by the manufacturer that we have some inadequacy, then we internalize that inadequacy as true to us, and then we commit to purchasing something regularly for the rest of time to help relieve that inadequacy. Hooray advertising!

So, yes, in one sense yoga is a commodity that plays upon human dissatisfaction, creating a culture of consumers with the promise of an improved self. There are lines of yoga clothing and lots of workshops and stuff to buy and oils and incense and beads and whatever. In another sense, well, aren't we all ever just trying to grow? And do new things and expand our minds and experiences? And we need to know about stuff and participate in the world and read the newspaper and some books and check out fliers and do all of that, too, right? How can you differentiate "buying in" to make yourself feel better from "growing as a person" to make yourself improve?

More on Yoga Sutras n Stuff, Feat.: God

At Yoga Sutras discussion group we're up to the aphorism on god - so far the system has described what yoga "is" (the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind/freedom from identification with those fluctuations), and all the different kinds of mental wanderings one can experience (a bunch), and then how to work hard at yoga (by practicing both dedication/perseverance and non-attachment/dispassion), and then some of the good stuff that happens with that (various types of samadhi, aka oneness with the Seer), and the types of effort/personalities that achieve varying stages of oneness (basically success is proportionate to effort) . . . and then, most fascinatingly, the god stuff.

The god stuff, in a nutshell, states that whilst hard work and climbing the ole workaday mountain to enlightenment are the usual road to samadhi, another, more efficient and effective road to liberation is to surrender everything to god.

The nice thing in some of the Sutras commentaries is that there is room in the term Patanjali uses for god to let it apply to anyone's deity/prophet/high power (Jesus, Krishna, the Universal Intelligence, etc). Um, please note that scholars and commentators differ in their approach, and I'm singing my own song here so let's roll with it. So anyway contemporary practitioners can "surrender" to whatever higher power gives them the very bestest sparkly magicals. On a personal note, this to me is most tangibly experienced in the tingle underneath the skin and the swirling many-colored darkness behind the eyes. I think I can "surrender" to that. I have a little trouble with the more abstract part of it.

I guess it's the word surrender that I have the most trouble with. What does that mean? God I think I can comprehend - all knowing source of all great big awesome neat thing. Sure. And I've heard the relinquishing stuff before - give over to god, relinquish everything to god, take absolute shelter in god - but what does that mean?

The usual way that people submit themselves to god, it seems to be, is through prayer. What's that? Well, in discussion group, my dedicated, regularly-attending pal identified three types of praying: one, journal/talk-therapy prayer (hi god, here's what went on today and what I'm thinking about); two, request prayer (dear god, please gimme a better job and make peace on Earth and help me deal with my crazy sister); three, gratitude prayer (wow god, thank you for my safety and access to food and the experience of community and my proximity to a good grocery store and the miracles of popcorn and breathing and babies and flowers).

The one that I feel gets me closest to understanding the surrender part is the gratitude prayer. It seems effective for connecting one to a sense of wonder (popcorn really is a miracle, I'm serious, NASA for kids has a great entry HERE), and of humility for one's blessings (safety, nutrition, political freedom). It's still pretty vague for me, but the "something is bigger than me" part comes from general wonder. Wow, I love the tingle under my skin, where does it come from? Golly, the sun is sooooo huge! Did you know that if you put a seed in the dirt and let it hang out it can grow into something pretty big and frequently delicious, what?!

So that's how that makes sense to me at the moment. I had one other glimpse of effectively connecting with a feeling of surrender to god in another class where a teacher was talking about it (the same day that discussion group was covering it, fate!), and it was still feeling pretty "Huh?" to me. But then we were doing something sort of hard in class, and he said something like, "see how we forget to take shelter when things are hard? And we could just surrender to god right now." That made some sense, too. I'm having trouble articulating why, but it did make sense at the moment.

Anyway fun to think about.

Yoga Book Truth Error Thing

So at my weekly Yoga Sutras discussion group we are moving through the aphorisms of Patanjali a little at a time. It's pretty fun, and I have a regular discussion buddy and another lady who shows up when she can, and another who plans to come back after her summer vacation - things promise to be pretty action-packed, and I'm pleased about it. So we just went through the types of "vrttis," the fluctuations of the mind, and I was thinking about "error." One translation says that "Error is incorrect knowledge based on misinterpretation of reality." And the classic example apparently is mistaking a rope for a snake - drawing a "hasty conclusion" whilst in the "grip of emotions." Sure, yes, I dig that. It's a nice articulation of the way errors are made. Our feelings in any moment can distort a perception away from its basic aspect.

This same translation offers an explication that I think is nice, and adds that "Not always negative, error can lead us to question ourselves once more and to progress. Truth is often a succession of corrected mistakes."

Pleasant, no? I really liked that last phrase a lot. What a nice way to view one's mistakes - as a path to truth. Then I got to thinking about how negatively we think about corrections and mistakes - and thinking about how, as I've said before, I view yoga mostly as one big helpful suggestion, and not really as a right/wrong thing. I'd like something more like, "truth is a succession of adjustments to perception," or "truth is a succession of refined attempts," or "truth is the accumulated result of recovery from blunder," or "the process and result of seeking truth is the accumulation of humility and curiosity" - well, I could go on and on. Just something a bit softer, maybe?

That's all.

Fever Break

The stress fever at work has, knock on wood, broken. I had a little time off at the end of last week and had a terrible time - the weather was great, people were around to have funtimes, I have a car, whatever - but it was pretty horrible. I just could not relax. And then I ended up with a migraine Sunday night so bad I barfed. I think I have been really stressed out by work. It's bizarre to think I don't necessarily recognize that that is what is the matter. It feels so cellular to be in a state of stress, less about what is stressing me out and more about how it feels and how much I want to feel differently.

The capacity to endure stress is really curious. The reasons we endure stress are particularly interesting - all of the justifications that comprise denial - driven by (generally) false imperatives of things like money, networking, contacts, health insurance, expenses, reputation, inclusion . . . they bolster our sense that whatever we are doing is the right choice, and this is our denial about how to live.

I wish I could endure more stress - oh the things I would get done if I didn't have to sit with my cup of tea for half an hour, or clean the house just so I can sit in a chair and enjoy the orderliness. I might have a magazine publishing law firm with music lessons and yoga classes in the community space. Ah, I see - so the justifications that comprise denial are fed from an egoistic center of ambition - and this sense of ambition is created from . . . what source of values? Family? Society? Capitalist conspiracy? So the chain is like this: values - ambition - justification/denial - stress. Maybe values and ambition are really the same thing. Anyway interesting to think about.

It's funny that I just said I wish I could endure more stress. As though all the tools of living that I engage in, like yoga, health and exercise stuff, socializing, therapy, acupuncture, or whatever, are supposed to help me adapt upwards to a way of living that is not suiting me. So of course I can blame exercise and diet for failing to support me enough, and then change my exercise and diet routine instead of the core issues. Don't get me wrong, I'm all about going for walks and eating vegetables, for sure. But in some ways even that stuff is just topical ointment, too, isn't it? I remember one of my yoga teachers talking about an article called "How Yoga Ruined My Life" that someone wrote about how after getting super into yoga, a lot of things from this person's life were shed because it was clear that some things were incompatible with his/her new perspective on life. I'm sure it must feel like total ruination to abandon staples of one's identity. It's hard to change the narrative once you've so fully adopted a story's trajectory.

I wonder what my adopted story trajectory is? I don't think I can see it clearly enough to tell. Take the lawyer thing - am I bold for rejecting a legal career (yes I can change the narrative!), or is this just part of some more buried story about how I will never have an actual job (I relentlessly and unconsciously pursue my built-in trajectory and rearrange the narrative to sound as cool as possible)? Tough to say.

So what will have to change in my world for work to be less stressful? I could always stand to work on myself, so that's a given. And I've been trying to be more clear and consistent with my supervise-ees at work, and that's been an incredible challenge, but is paying off. And more time for me me me, of course, my favorite.

Holy Blog Post

I have been sucked sucked sucked sucked into my job. That is the darn truth. And I miss ye olde blog, I really do. I think what I miss is the time set aside to force me to put my thoughts into complete sentences. I think it has residual benefits in my world.

Yes, clear articulation of thoughts/feelings is something that requires practice, and I am feeling a little out of practice. I have verily stumbled over my words lately, having the idea and intention fully formed in my head, but lacking the actual terminology to translate thoughts/feelings into sentences. Yes indeedy, practice is useful.

Let's see, what have I been stumbling over verbally lately? Ah yes. Personnel issues. My job is, let me repeat, easy and fun, but oh lordy my gracious what to do about those employees? Talk about letting go of control, yep, learning a lot about that. Can't be every player on the team. And how about explaining stuff that you never thought you would ever have to explain to someone over 18, like Fibbing is Bad, and Apologizing for Blunders is Good. Do all young people come half-raised these days? Christ-y I feel old.

But anyway, I need to re-direct my energy away from too much work and back into me me me, because I am much more balanced when I get to nurture myself. Seriously, I really thrive when I don't have a job. Seems ridiculous to say out loud, but the best possible thing for me is not working. So far, at least. So anyway I'm still trying to move toward a yoga-tastic version of life, which includes a Regular Yoga gig, hooray! It starts on Thursdays in August in a church community room - I will post a link when it's mega-officially a go. And I started a Yoga Sutras discussion group on Monday nights, and it's been two weeks, and I'm loving that so far. I hope it keeps up! And I got myself a couple of subbing gigs, which is wonderful experience.

Speaking of yoga subbing gigs - can we talk about the general public for a minute? My first subbing class someone walked out after 20 minutes, but that's fine - you can't be everyone's teacher. My second subbing gig someone came to class with a shoulder injury that prevented her from lifting her arm over her head or putting any weight on it. Of course, I had prepared an elaborate shoulder-based class, sigh. So she probably had a sub-par experience, but my feeling is kind of that she should have stayed home. Would you go to typing class with a broken hand? Probably not. Boy, I can't wait to see more of the general yoga-going public. It's completely different from teaching friends. I'm ready though, to repel who I repel and attract who I attract. We'll see!