Practicing Impermanance

I do not take time with my beloveds for granted. I know how precious time is. In theory, this capacity to honor and respect the brevity of life, and therein relationships, should make me well qualified to practice impermanence. But, I must confess, it is in fact the opposite.

I first read about impermanence when I was first exploring yoga in my early 20's. I had been going to Vinyasa classes two nights a week for the asana practice, but I had reached a point of wanting to know more about the other 7 limbs of yoga.  So I went to my favorite used book store and left a couple hours later (I like to linger a while in bookstores) with a book called Living Your Yoga: Finding the Spiritual in Everyday Life by Judith Lasater.  This was the first yoga book I had ever bought and it is still on my shelf today.

Despite the title, as I’ve said before, I was not consciously spiritually seeking at this time, though maybe I was unconsciously.   However, I was intrigued with what I was reading in Living Your Yoga about this idea of “taking your yoga off the mat.” I read chapters simply titled: Faith, Compassion, Control, Perspective, Letting Go, and, among others, Impermanence.

Ms. Lasater primarily borrowed from the ancient text the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali to discuss concepts like impermanence which is defined in the book as “mistaking the noneternal for the eternal.” Which she then paraphrases as “Simply put, when we think that we (or the people and things that we love) will remain the same, we do not understand impermanence.”

Now, by this definition, you could argue that I am actually quite good at the practice of impermanence because I rarely think things will remain the same.  I wholeheartedly understand that life is in near constant dynamic flux and the length of time any single event, person or object will be in my life is absolutely unknown because the world will simply not give you any guarantee for length of stay of a pet, a sibling, a car, a job, a spouse, or even, sadly, a child.

 

There were multiple experiences in my early life that taught me this lesson about the shifting reality of life, but the one that brought it home for me most was losing someone to AIDS as a teenager.

His name was Michael and I was 15 years-old when I first met him.  My parents had gotten divorced the year before and my father had come out of the closet.  Michael was my father’s first official boyfriend. 

By the time I met Michael, he already had AIDS, as opposed to being HIV Positive.  And this was 1992.  In 1992, if you met someone who had AIDS, in your mind, it was a death sentence.  And for Michael it was.  In September, 1995 he died.  I was in the first month of my freshman year of college and it was 3 years after I had met him for the first time.

The experience of watching someone go from being a 200 pound well-built, healthy 40-something year-old stranger, to a thin-as-a-rail, hospice bound friend who could barely speak my name was unquestionably transformative for me.

This was impermanence in action, and it helped me to enter into relationships thereafter with far fewer assumptions and expectations than others around me.  I was also able to be more present with my experiences with the folks in my life because I would not presume to know how long the experience or the relationship would last.  Now I would of course call this understanding mindfulness skills, but I did not have this language then.  All I had was this learning which grew out of the experience of watching Michael die in a period of 3 years when I was a teenager.  And now, as an adult, I feel enormous gratitude for learning these truths, like impermanence, early on.

Judith Lasater writes in Living Your Yoga, “Out attachment to things remaining the same creates suffering.  When we cling to the illusion of permanence, what we actually hope to secure is protection from the terrifying unknown that impermanence may represent.”   I absolutely find this to be true, and believe reality can be the motivating factor for practicing impermanence.

However, I want to caution you of swinging on the pendulum too far over to the other side of this practice.  Let me explain.

I think we can get too good, so to speak, at practicing impermanence that we begin to hold back in fully participating in life and love. This happened to me.  In the insight I gained from watching the life of my friend move out of his body, I also took on an edge of detachment from others.  I did have increased capacity to be fully in the moment in my own life experiences and in relationships with others, but I also began to keep people in general at arms-length because you never know how long someone will be in your life for.  So while I learned to avoid presumptions and expectations in relationships, I also found myself leaning just slightly back rather than fully leaning in.

So the trick is, to find that sweet spot, right? Where we fully engage with all the people, things and events in our lives without holding back, while simultaneously allowing for each person, thing and event to unfold as it will without clinging to or controlling for specific outcomes. Letting the wave come in and wash over us, and then watching it go right back out.  The message of which, as Ms. Lasater reminds us, is as close as our breath: “Every day, all day, our bodies engage in impermanence with each breath. Your current inhalation is unlike any other you have ever taken.  At its fullness, it surrenders to the exhalation, itself different from the one preceding it.

How about you? Where in your life can you practice impermanence today? Where are you trying to cling to and controlling people, things and events? What are you leaning away or detaching from?