Early Experiences off the Mat

I was about 5 years into my yoga practice when I first began to take it off the mat.

It was not a well-formulated, conscious decision by any means. But when I think back, it was a clear moment in time, 2006 to be exact, that my yoga practice began to shift in a new direction that went beyond the asana or yoga poses.

This shift began, as many things do, with a loss.

It was the winter of 2006, and was I 28 years-old.  I had had a medical procedure, and afterward the physician who had performed the procedure said to me, in a rather aloof manner, that he believed I would not ever be able to get pregnant and have children of my own.

Now, I had never been one of those girls who grew up fantasizing about weddings or babies.  At age 28 I was an independent young woman just 6 months out of graduate school who was beginning my career.

But have you ever felt a loss of something that you did not even have yet?  Had not even envisioned for yourself yet?

Well, I did.  Hearing the news that I would likely not be able to have children was devastating.

The following day I went to work (of course, that’s what we all do right?!), but by lunchtime I felt depleted and grief-stricken.  So I left the building I worked in at the time and strolled over to the Barnes and Noble to soothe myself with a hot beverage.

When I walked through the doors of the bookstore/café, I saw the usual rolling carts of discounted books on display.  I absently walked over to them and began to scan covers and titles, and that’s when my eye caught on the orangey-red hue of Christy Turlington’s 2002 book Living Yoga: Creating a Life Practice.

Reading this book, not once, not twice, but many times, was a game-changer for me.  Not because it is the most well-written book about yoga.  Not because I have much interest, if any, in the former model Ms. Turlington (no offense to her). 

For me, re-reading this book was like massaging something inside of me that I could not fully articulate yet.  It was like I knew something organic was happening, but I had no language to put it into words.

I think the 5 years I had been going to yoga classes and bending myself into all sorts of pretzel contortions had opened up a space inside of me to first explore the virtues and philosophy that contextualize the asana limb of yoga.

Ten years later, I would say this shift marked the beginning of a spiritual life. 

Of course back then, I would have said no such thing- the word “spiritual” was definitely not in my vocabulary.   No, I would have intellectualized Ms. Turlington’s spiritual memoir.  And I did.

“Oh, how interesting! Look at the many different types of meditation there are.  Look at the history of the science of yoga.”  Very much a neck-up endeavor, and quite similar to the approach I had taken to my introduction to mindfulness just 2 years before.

And yet, as I was feeling this experience of immense grief, which was both confusing and familiar at the same time, I think a deeper, wiser part of me was beginning to seek new ways to understand and be more skillful with the complex nature of reality and suffering.

This time in my life reminds me of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s words about what I’d call “practice.”  He said:

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.  Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.

I believe in 2006, at that place of some 5 years of yogic movement and grieving the most recent loss, I felt the hands working on me.

This process began organically, as it must I suppose; it seems there can be no forcing in the life of the spirit- which is simultaneously fortunate and unfortunate.

I would later go on to other books and study to further expand my understanding of yoga.  One favorite was Living Your Yoga: Finding the Spiritual in Everyday Life by Judith Lasater.

Again, like with Ms. Turlington’s book Living Yoga: Creating a Life Practice, my first pass through this book began at a more surface level.  For example, I thoroughly enjoyed just reading the chapter titles like “Letting Go,” “Patience,” and “Impermanence.”  

But later, in the second and third pass, new levels of understanding were beginning to take shape. Aided, no doubt, by my additional exploration of my own psyche in psychotherapy which allowed for greater self-awareness and complimented yogic philosophy beautifully.

In one favorite paragraph from Living Your Yoga, Ms. Lasater says yoga practice is “the consistent willingness to open to life in all of its joy and pain.”  She then goes on to explain that this willingness is required both on and off the mat. 

Yoga practice, she says,

certainly includes what you have always thought of as your yoga practice, such as poses, breathing exercises, and meditation. But it also casts a wider net to encompass frustration with your temperamental car, the argument you had with your friend, washing your dinner dishes, and your apprehension about an important meeting.  In other words, to practice is to pay attention to your whole life: your thoughts, your bodily sensations, and your speech and other actions.  As you do, you will discover that nothing is separate from anything else…Each moment of your life is a moment of potential practice.

Thinking back to this earlier chapter in my spiritual life can make me a little sad inside.  I long to reach across time and give that confused twenty something year-old version of me a hug while whispering in her ear: “Take a breath.  Relax as it is. Be patient. Everything will be understood in due time.”

What early “off the mat” experiences did you have? What would you tell your younger self about the spiritual and/or yogic journey?

Poetry 102: The Window & The Wheel of Samsara

The Window

Before the dawn,

I only see my own reflection.

The darkness dominates;

there seems to be no reality beyond my senses.

Then,

the sun begins to rise.

Light infiltrates darkness.

The city gradually appears-

as if out of nowhere.

And with it,

I disappear.

Again.

The Wheel of Samsara

I am alone again.

I hate it,

but I know it.

The only thing worse than hate

is the not knowing.

Magic & Mystery

I recently rediscovered the magic steps in the woods behind my mother’s house.  I had spent a couple days with her as she was recovering from a surgery, and during one of her naps I retired to the woods of my childhood.

For those of you who read my blog more regularly, you know I’ve been spending a lot of time in the woods as of late, but this time was different.

Returning to the place you grew up is always a bit of a Pandora’s box- even when you actively choose to keep that darn box closed.  And for me, it was no different.

I had not actually slept at my mother’s house since my early twenties, and the thing I learned about a recovery from a major surgery is there is actually a lot of sleeping involved.  This left me with an unexpected amount of unstructured quiet time to myself.  Time to reflect. Time for reverie. Time to remember.

Because I lived in this house for 18 years until I left for college, there were a whole lot of memories that bubbled up to the surface as I sat there at her kitchen table, listening to the light snores coming from her bedroom.  And as I sat, I looked out the long row of windows that line her kitchen toward the woods that surround the property.  This view from the kitchen table pulled me back in time to when these woods were magical for me.

I grew up in an age when the land that surrounded your home was just as much your “home” as was your bedroom, living room and kitchen. 

Growing up, the front door and back door to our house were forever opening and closing as my sister and I wandered in and out to play or my parents walked in or out to attend to the gardens, chickens and geese, or yard work.

The woods was my favorite part though- in all4 New England seasons.

In the spring, I loved the woods for playing a game my sister and I called “highway.” In this game she and I would go out in the rain when the woods, which bordered a swampy wetland , was particularly muddy. In the game, we would  try to balance on all of the fallen trees and walk across them.  The fallen trees were the “highways” and if you fell, you were out.

In truth though, being “out” meant nothing.  If you fell off the log, you would just climb back on and continue to tightrope walk across to another fallen tree.  This little detail is actually what made it one of those perfect childhood games- a game with no beginning and no end, no winners and no losers.   Similar to games like tag and hide and seek.

These times spent in the woods felt magical to me.  One minute I was having a boring Saturday afternoon and the next I was transported to a fantasy world just down the steps from my house.

I suppose this is why it should come as no surprise that a rock formation lodged in the hill behind our house soon got dubbed the magic steps, and in every season, a hike in the woods behind our house soon required that we first climb the magic steps to christen our journey. 

This ritual began  in early fantasy games of our childhood and continued into  the later camping out nights of our youth.  Climbing the magic steps became its own rite of passage to our larger imagination.

So decades later, when I found myself again in the forest that held so many memories for me, without much thinking, I began to walk in the direction of that familiar rock formation.

This experience made me contemplate how the forest holds such a magical quality for many of us during childhood.  With all the myths that we watch on the big screen or read about in books that include fairies coming alive and encounters with strange and wonderful animal creatures, perhaps this “magic” we experience is a prelude to what we might later in adulthood call mystery or spirit.

I recently listened to an interview with the 20^th century theologian Howard Thurman.  He began by talking about the oak tree in the backyard of his childhood home in Daytona Beach, Florida.   

In the interview, he described the tree in such loving terms with that same sentimental tone that I share regarding the landscape just outside of the doors of his actual house.

In a newspaper article I found from the Orlando Sentinel from 1987, it was noted that followers of Dr. Thurman who made the pilgrimage to his childhood home, which was later transformed into a cultural center, would often sit under this very same tree to honor the work of this great man.  The article noted, some of the pilgrims would cry.

It makes me wonder, maybe in childhood we need these more concrete objects and places like trees and forests so that we can slip into that state of imagination that opens us up to what is far beyond what we can actually see or hear or touch; a state of imagination that would allow, for example, a young African American boy like Dr. Thurman, born in a Jim Crow south, to envision something as distant as an inter-racial church congregation.

As an adult and parent now, I am watching my children encounter magic.  With my 6 year-olds’ well-orchestrated fantasy games and my 2 year-olds’ look of wonder at things as concrete and small as acorns and pine cones, I try to hold this idea that magic may just be the early incarnation of mystery and spirit.

One of my daughter’s favorite books right now is Pocahontas.  This particular picture book we own is one of those cheesy Disney spin-offs of the 1995 animated movie, but in it there is a picture of the willow tree that Pocahontas talks to for comfort and guidance. 

If you don’t remember, or you have never seen it, this particular willow tree has the face of a grandmother- with wrinkles and all.

My daughter loves this particular page in the book, often going back to it and exclaiming “Ga-ma! Ga-ma!” 

For me, the talking willow tree brings forth the nostalgia of those magic steps in the woods of my childhood which I now view as an early willingness to encounter and embrace a mystery and spirit that may be far beyond my own imagination- as it should be.

How did you encounter magic in your childhood? How do you embrace mystery now?

A New Dawn

I took this photo at dawn on December 31^st, the last day of the last year.

I have always been drawn to the dawn.  It contains an auspicious hopefulness about it.

A favorite of mine, who I am forever quoting in this blog, 19^th Century author, transcendentalist and fellow New Englander Henry David Thoreau often wrote about dawn as a metaphor for spiritual awakening.

He said:

“It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes and labors of men.  Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.  . . . . We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.”

That makes sense to me.  Because I see spiritual awakening as an unfolding, and anyone who has risen early to welcome the dawn has certainly witnessed the same unfolding process right before their eyes, yet unable to quite pinpoint where it begins and ends.

A popular quote by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, “And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been,” has that same sense of hopefulness and dawn for a fresh start.

I’d like to send all of you a belated hopeful wish for the dawn of your  new year and your own spiritual awakening.

Lost in the Wilderness

Growing up, the wilderness was not presented to me as a scary place, but rather one of excitement, adventure and even sanctuary.

Whether it was from playing with my sister and friends on the forested hill of my own backyard or summers and holidays spent in the deep woods of Central Maine , I viewed the wilderness as a stretch of friendly forest trees who consistently welcomed me with their outstretched limbs for refuge and playful fun.

And I thought everyone viewed the wilderness this way.

In fact, this belief was further deepened by camping--often with other families-- on nearly each and every family trip we took, including to places like Disney World- hotels were very much a foreign concept to me until much later in life.

And then there was the annual Wilderness School graduation.

At various points in their careers, both of my parents were working with troubled adolescents.  And being the avid wilderness believers that they were, when nothing else worked, they would recommend Wilderness School as a kind of therapeutic last resort.

On the last day, when the teenagers would return from 5, 8, or even 20 days in the woods, there would be a party for them that included picnic style food, a slide show (what can I say, it was the 70’s and 80’s) of pictures of the kids zip-lining from trees and hiking up high mountain summits, and an informal graduation ceremony.

For my family, it was a ritualized annual event to go and take part in the Wilderness School graduation festivities- literally celebrating the miraculous value of the woods.

It wasn’t until I was well into young adulthood when I realized that everyone did not feel the same as I did about the wilderness, and lately, even for me, the wilderness has taken on some new meaning.

As many of you know, I did not grow up with the bible- Old or New Testament.  So I missed out on the stories of both Moses’ experience in the wilderness in Exodus and Jesus’ time spent in the wilderness written about in Matthew and Mark.

Hearing these biblical stories now though, I am intrigued with the idea of the wilderness being a metaphor for internal psychic states that are far more dialectical than any of my romantic childhood memories.

I was reminded of this recently while reading Thomas Merton’s Seeds of Contemplation in his chapter “The Night of the Senses.”

In it he writes:

“The spirit enters a wilderness and travels blindly in directions that seem to lead away from vision, away from God, away from all fulfillment and joy.  It may become almost impossible to believe that this road goes anywhere at all except to a desolation full of dry bones- the ruin of all our hopes and good intentions.

The prospect of this wilderness is something that so appalls most men that they refuse to enter upon its burning sands and travel among its rocks.  They cannot believe that contemplation and sanctity are to be found in a desolation where there is no food and no shelter and no rest and no refreshment for their imagination and intellect and for the desires of nature.”

Imagining this kind of pictorial desolation in the landscape is actually not difficult for me. 

As a Peace Corps Volunteer in Central Asia’s Uzbekistan in the early 2000’s, I crisscrossed the country several times east to west and north to south by train, bus and taxi, and those long rides brought a whole new meaning  (and visual) to the words barren landscape.

Therefore, though a born and bred New Englander, it is not a stretch for me to imagine “wilderness” as more like desert than deep forest.

What is very different for me though, a paradigm shift really, is visualizing the wilderness as anything but soothing.

That is until recently.  My latest experience with melancholic brooding and confusion drew out the metaphoric wilderness I had only read about.

Not because this was my first bout with that uneasy feeling you may, or may not, also be all too familiar with.  No, what was different was there was a counterweight on the other side of it- god.

I felt lost in the wilderness, but all the while continued to have a conversation with god.  Well, conversation may be overstating.  Probably more like me making desperate pleas: “god, where are you?! Help me! Show me that you are there. I need you!”

When this groundless feeling continued beyond hours into days, I began to sympathize with Thomas Merton’s other statement about “the wilderness” later in the same chapter:

“If a man in this night lets his spirit get carried away with fear or impatience and anxiety, everything is lost. He will twist and turn and torture himself with attempts to see some light and feel some warmth and recapture the old consolations that are beyond recovery. And finally he will run away from darkness, and do the best he can to dope himself with the first light that comes along.”

For me this would include binge watching hours upon hours of Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix and eating large amounts of carbohydrates.

But wait! Merton assures us, there is another way…

“There are others who, no matter how much they suffer perplexity and uneasiness in the wilderness where God begins to lead them, still feel drawn further and further on into the wasteland…They sense, by a kind of instinct, that peace lies in the heart of this darkness. Something prompts them to keep still, to trust in God, to be quiet and listen for His voice; to be patient and not to get excited.”

I held these words in my heart as I literally, not figuratively, hiked in the wilderness this past weekend.  (Okay, maybe wilderness is an exaggeration, the woods anyway).

It started out light-hearted.  I was even singing  the lyrics to Madonna’s Like a Virgin while I marched through the rocks and trees.

And just in case you forgot the words:

 I made it through the wilderness.

Somehow I made it through.

Didn't know how lost I was

until I found you.

But then I came to this long stretch of trail that was straight down hill and seemed to go on forever, and that familiar apprehensive feeling swept over me like a tsunami.

I had hiked these woods before- not a lot of times, but enough to think I knew the way without a map on me.  But this time I had my 2 year-old with me, in my arms actually because she was refusing to travel in the toddler backpack, and it was 2 hours from dark and it was, is, winter in New England.

I began to worry.  I began to second guess.

Should I turn around? How much further should I go with this amount of sunlight left and the temperature going down? Am I being irresponsible to head out into the wilderness with a child on my back? Should I have chosen a safer path that is more familiar?

Yup, I was knee-deep in doubt which was a short walk from fear; both very tricky emotions to navigate in the literal and the figurative wilderness.

However, something inside of me said just go a little further.  And then, I saw it: the bend.

My memories of this particular forest told me that the path I was on was one large loop, but that one extensive stretch of trail that had no turns for such a long time caused me to second-guess myself and consider turning around.     

But I didn’t.  I persisted. 

Though I was never so glad to see that bend in the road, and with it, faith restored.

This little en vivo wilderness adventure led me to consider these dualities: doubt and faith, dangerous and nourishing,  lost and found,  small self and big Self.  Upon reflection, it seemed so unpredictable that such paradoxical experiences could all be found together in the wilderness, and yet undeniably true.

As an adult now, without those protective childhood rose-tinted glasses, when I think back to those Wilderness School graduations for the teens who in all likelihood were one step away from the juvenile detention center, I would bet they experienced a lot of the “darkness” in the wilderness that Merton described. 

Maybe no one took a photograph of it.  Maybe it wasn’t pretty and entailed a lot of tears and swearing and refusal to take one more goddam step!  But I bet, with all that lightness found at the picnic in the end, there was also a very heavy dose of darkness found at the beginning and especially in the middle.

But then grace happened. 

Perhaps in the form of faith. Perhaps in the form of the mythological guardian angel cast as the Wilderness School counselor who sat beside the teen in the leaves and mud until she was able to get up again.  If bedtime stories, or biblical stories teach us anything it’s that in the end, the phoenix does rise from the ashes.

Like those teens, the wilderness is more complex for me now.  I continue to regard her as a place of solace, but she also can be grueling and transformative as well.  I suppose it is similar to any sort of honest relationship with god, right?

I’m curious, what have your experiences been getting lost in the wilderness? How did you proceed?

Liberation from Disappointment

Nineteenth century author Henry David Thoreau said: "If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find compensation in every disappointment." If that's true Mr. Thoreau, then I am a well-compensated individual.

I disappoint very easily.  Plans get cancelled. People don’t come through.  Good times turn to bad times faster than I can imagine.  All of this leads me to disappointment.

I used to think of this rabbit of hole of disappointment as a problem of mine- meaning, something I needed to work on in myself.  I saw it as an ugly spot that required correction.  However, in the last few months I have been trying to work with this emotion in a different way.

This effort (and make no mistake, it is effort) began after listening to a Dharma Talk by author and Buddhist teacher Christina Feldman called the “Wisdom of Disappointment.” 

Sometimes when I am driving to and from work I will listen to a podcast on a website called www.dharmaseed.org. The podcasts are free, and they include many of the who’s who of western Buddhist teachers.

I was drawn to this talk because of its title alone: the “Wisdom of Disappointment.”

“How on earth,” I thought, “coulddisappointment be virtuous? What possible good could disappointment do?”

Though clearly suspicious, I proceeded to listen.  And then I listened again.  And yet again.

In the talk, Ms. Feldman, in her soft, feathery English accent, says,

“Disappointment is one of the hearts most frequent visitors. It can be a doorway to despair and bitterness or acknowledged as being the starting point of every a journey of liberation.”

I must tell you, this perspective on disappointment was a complete paradigm shift for me, and yet, I was totally intrigued.  And I wondered, could such a paradox be possible?

Recently, I’ve had a series of experiences that have allowed me to test this hypothesis.

On one such occasion I was walking a very narrow tight rope between what Ms. Feldman identified as “despair and bitterness” versus a point of “liberation.”  In fact, it really was touch and go there for a while as to which way I was going to go, and I knew I needed to draw on the wisdom of some other brothers and sisters who aspire to rise above as I do.

The moment came at about 2 in the morning.  I woke up out of a restless sleep to ruminations about a recent let down I had experienced, and there was an additional sprinkling of betrayal in there too for good measure.

In that moment it was clear to me I had a choice.  I could continue to water those seeds of negative emotion born out of disappointment, or I could rise.  I chose to rise.

So I thought to myself, as I lay in bed, who has wisdom about rising? And without skipping a beat, my mind said: Desmond Tutu.

For those of you who don’t know, Desmond Tutu is a Nobel Peace Prize winning Archbishop Emeritus of South Africa who headed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the end of apartheid, and he considers the experience of voting for the first time at age 63 to be the greatest moment of his life.

Given that biography, I felt certain Desmond Tutu could teach me a thing or two about how to liberate myself from disappointment.  So I began to watch and listen to his interviews.

(As an aside, one of the benefits of technology is at the touch of an iPhone, a spiritual teacher can be virtually available to you- especially at 2 in the morning when you can’t seem to get out of your own way.)

In each interview and video this religious leader who grew up under apartheidconsistently advocated for a non-violent and compassionate responses to horrors that anyone else would have excused as reasonable for retaliation- even if only in the mind where disappointment and her sisters (resentment, revenge, etc) festers.

He also reliably states over and over: “God is in charge.” Words which I have now incorporated into one of my most tried and true mantras to ceaselessly repeat to myself until it no longer needs repeating.  To me, his words also go well with my other mantra of author Anne Lamott’s words, “Grace, eventually.”

But you know what was even better than his words? His fantastic laugh.  This 84 year-old man has the most wonderful, infectious, boyish laugh.  Not unlike the 80 year-old Tibetan Dalai Lama who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989 and the 89 year-old Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King in 1967 for that matter.

Maybe there is something to that…These 3 elders all have gone through lives of terrific hardship and victimization by anyone’s standards. Civil war. Minority Oppression.  Exile. Yet they laugh? How could they possibly laugh? What do they know that I don’t know? How did they figure out how to liberate themselves from disappointment?

I don’t know.  I wish I did.

Here’s what I do know though.  It’s possible. 

Individuals like Desmond Tutu inspire me to aspire.  If they can do it, then so can I.  And the reward? What is the treasure buried at the end of this rainbow? Wisdom.  I just know it.

So how do you liberate yourself from disappointment?

And just because, I’ve included the words of another elder, a sister, who seemed to know something about rising.

Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, 1928 - 2014

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don’t you take it awful hard

‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I’ve got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.