Poetry 105: Unbound My Heart

Unbound My Heart

Once tightly wrapped,

my heart

is beginning to see light.

Slowly at first,

scared to death.

Was it like a mummy

or a muzzle?

Seems cruel to me now,

though I know

it was for self-protection.

Or was it?

They say my heart is wide enough

to hold the whole world-

could that possibly be true?

Skeptically,

cautiously,

I remove one bandage at a time.

Both terrified and excited

for a life in the wide open space

of unrestricted

freedom.

-Me

A Brick Wall in Yoga: Body Image

Several years ago I was forced to renovate my bathroom due to water damage that had caused rot in the walls and floor. 

It was a completely inconvenient and expensive affair, made even more challenging when we learned that the walls of our house (built in the 1950’s) was in fact insulated with newspaper.

I’m finding myself in a similar predicament right now with my yoga (asana) practice. 

I’m at a place that I can no longer avoid the reality that renovation is not just a good idea, but rather a necessity due to years of a practice that has gotten damaged over time, and may have been built on some faulty precepts to begin with.

This is not easy to admit.  Particularly now, on the 15^th Anniversary of my yoga practice.

It is a realization that came to ahead about 4 months ago when I was sitting in a 5-day Silent Mindfulness Meditation Retreat.  It was Day 3, and I was struggling.

Body sensations were firing left and right. Childhood memories were coming up like a firestorm.  It was rough.

Not because I thought something was wrong or bad about it.  These are all experiences one might understand or even expect when you slow down and enter periods of deep stillness.  I did.

No, what I found most difficult was the growing awareness that I had been viewing my meditation practice as chiefly a mind exercise and my yoga (asana) practice as a principally a body exercise. 

Why was this a problem you ask?

Well, it was not a problem per se, but by limiting and compartmentalizing these two practices into narrow categories of “mind” and “body,” I was effectively doing 3 things:

1.)Short-changing the benefits of both practices.
2.)Missing the forest for the trees in terms of a “yogic” or “yoke” experience of a bidirectional mind and body experience.
3.)Leaving a wide-open door for all of my body-image baggage to sneak its way into my yoga (asana) practice. And, to my dismay, I realized it had.

Of all of them, it is #3 that has me preoccupied the most.  It is #3 that I have been least able to skillfully address.  It is #3 that has led me to avoid my yoga mat for much of the summer, and I feel like I have hit a brick wall in my yoga practice.

Since there is now a whole new sub-community dedicated to the issue of body image in the western yoga world, I know I am not alone in this.

An organization based out of California called The Yoga and Body Image Coalition has been increasing their presence on the internet and in publications like Yoga Journal to remind the yoga community, and those who have felt excluded from the yoga community, that being a yogi has nothing to do with the stereotype one might imagine- namely the middle-upper class, young, white, female who is of course thin.

What’s interesting for me is, when I started practicing yoga 15 years ago, I was that stereotype, and yet all that body image baggage was still as great an obstacle for me internally, as it may have been for others who did not fit the stereotype, externally.

It saddens me and embarrasses me to admit this.

I wish I was happily sharing how far I’ve come.  How much I’ve evolved.  How integrated and whole I’ve become…And in a way, I feel confronted with a word that I have tried--to no avail--to extract from my lexicon: failure.

Of course my reasonable mind can quickly contradict this thought of “failure.” 

Within seconds of the “failure” thought, my psychotherapist hat pops right  on, and I can go off on all the reasons why this new insight is good for me.

A.)It is actually a sign of growth.

B.)Yoga is a “living practice” they say. 

C.)You can’t fail at yoga, it doesn’t even work that way.

And that is true.  I know it’s true, but sometimes it doesn’t feel true.

My son and I recently went to a Yoga Festival together and I heard a yoga teacher ask the question: What is perfect yoga?

It was a rhetorical question, but given that I was currently up against a brick wall in my yoga practice that was based in all kinds of beliefs and narratives about perfection, the teacher’s question hit home for me.

So what has helped?

If you read this blog, then you know I’m a big fan of strategies to help myself (and others too) through the sticky spots of the spiritual life.

Two strategies have been a back to basics renovation of my asana practice and the way I engage with my body.

First, I created a list of what are wholesome intentions for my yoga practice (intentions that are in line with my values and how I interpret the values of yoga to be) and what are unwholesome intentions (most often sub or unconscious intentions) to increase my awareness for when I begin to slip into that habitual area of distorted body-image.

Thus far, the list looks like this:

Wholesome Intentions:

Curiosity, Challenge, Exploring Limits, Investigating, Listening, Opening, Open hearted, Inhabiting, Embodying, Detoxing, Relaxing, Wholeness, Integration, Dropping in, Healing, Self compassion, Reconnecting, Stretching, Devotion, Gratitude, Primitive animal nature, Self love, Investigating, Strengthening.

Unwholesome Intentions:

Perfecting, Sculpting, Altering, Shaming, Blaming, Hating, Pushing, Forcing, If only-ing, Criticizing, Putting down, Labeling, Reconstructing, Personalizing, Goal-directed, Outcome-driven, Painful, Harming, Punishing, Striving, Penance, Punitive.

Second, I’ve created another list (can you tell yet I’m a Type A?!) of some do’s and don’ts that have been helpful to me along the way to break the habits of negative body image thinking and behavior.  They go like this:

Learn to feed your body- what it needs to run on all cylinders.
Learn to stop eating when your body is full.
Water your body throughout the day (like a plant or your dog)
Stand up and move your body for at least 60 seconds every hour on the hour (except when you are sleeping)
 Let your body sleep at nighttime at least 5-9 hours a day.
When possible, put your feet above your head and heart once a day for at least 60 seconds.
Take one conscious breath (in and out) each time you transition from one action/activity to another.
Bathe, brush your teeth and floss regularly.
Do not suck in your belly when you walk by a mirror.
 Do not examine your butt when you walk by a mirror.
Do not criticize your thighs when you walk by a mirror.
 Do not focus solely on your double (triple) chins in a photograph of you.
Do not bury your emotions under a pile of food.
If you have a fever, rest. 
If you have a fever for more than 3 days, go to your doctor.
Do not toxify your liver or kidneys.
Feel the bottoms of your feet when you walk.
Feel your chest move in and out when you breathe.
Do not cover up your butt with long shirts, cardigans and jackets.
Do not underestimate what your body can do by saying “My body can’t do that,” before you have even tried it.
Be curious.
Have a regular physical.
Have a regular gynecological exam.
Have a regular mammogram and breast exam.
Include fruits, vegetables, protein, antioxidants and omegas in your meal plan.
Express gratitude for your body as a whole and with each individual part and organ on a regular basis for all their hard work.
Give direct loving attention to each area of the body on a regular basis with the body scan, massage or a simple prayer.
Take brain breaks before bed by choosing to not engage in problem solving, analyzing, perseverating, or ruminating.
 Engage in movement activities several times a week that allow your ego/mind to take a backseat to your body for a time (e.g. swimming or other exercise, yoga poses, sex, dancing).
 Talk to and about your body with the respect, tenderness and kindness that you would offer a girl or boy of age 9 or 10.
 Occasionally remind yourself of the impermanence of the body- we know how this story will end
Remember that your body is an ally that has been with you since day one, not an enemy.
 Remember that your relationship with your body is just like any other relationship, and to be a healthy relationship it requires regular amounts of compassion, deep listening, kindness, long-term investment, and effort.

The other piece I have found helpful is in the book Heal Thy Self by co-founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program, Saki Santorelli.

In his chapter called “The Soft Body of Your Calling,” he writes:

Oh, servant of the healing arts…Aren’t you searching for the cure too? Aren’t you curled up close, protecting that old interior soreness, that longing for remedy you secretly hope for but hardly dare to admit? Let’s talk about this! How else could you possibly be of help to another? What could have drawn you to this calling if not this reference point, this open inside wound that needs tending?

Look, my friend, we are all wounded. Welcome home! No more hiding! Fragmented and longing, aren’t we all searching for the cure that will restore us to wholeness?...

If language and music are ample evidence of a deeper silence, our wounds and flaws are sure signs of our fundamental completeness. If speech is a finger pointing toward the unspoken, our sense of incompleteness, our fragile, tender vulnerability is a sure sign of our strength.  This tender softness is a portal. We hide it. Call it flaw, never realizing it is the entry point for marvelous possibility. Rumi reminds us of the entryway:

            

            Trust your wound to a Teacher’s surgery.

            Flies collect on a wound. They cover it,

Those flies of your self-protecting feelings,

Your love for what you think is yours.

Let a Teacher wave away the flies

And put a plaster on the wound.

Don’t turn your head. Keep looking

At the bandaged place. That’s where

The Light enters you.

And don’t believe for a moment

That you’re healing yourself.

Mr. Santorelli’s gorgeous language struck such a cord deep inside my soul, that I continue to go back to read it again and again. 

His words (and the poet Rumi’s) have been like poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s phrase “the hands that work on us” for me as I begin, brick by brick, to gently remove this brick wall in myself and in my yoga practice.

What brick walls have you encountered in the spiritual life? What renovations have you had to make to maintain a wholesome spiritual practice?

Letting Go in Motherhood

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, motherhood is not for the faint-hearted.

In my early twenties I lived in Central Asia working for the Peace Corps, and I was told that the Peace Corps would be the “toughest job you’ll ever love.”

They were wrong. 

Motherhood trumps Peace Corps any day of the week and twice on school nights right  after football practice.

This truth was exquisitely illustrated today when I dropped off my youngest, my baby, to her first day of Pre-School.

With her toddler-size white sandals and a bow in her curly hair, my daughter held my hand tight as we walked to her classroom in the back of the school.  And then, as nature would have it, she released my hand, and courageously walked toward her kind and smiling teacher, not looking back.

It was perfect.

As was the ache in my heart.

Letting go.  Non-attachment.  Non-grasping.  Radical acceptance.  Impermanence.  All elephants of a different color that today felt like impossible spiritual practices in the context of parenthood.

Yet in this moment, 3 ideas from the diverse realms of science, philosophy and poetry are like salve for a wound.

The first idea, from science, I heard in an interview with Matthieu Ricard, a French-Tibetan monk, author, humanitarian, and the Dalai Lama's French interpreter. 

His comment stemmed from a conversation he had  had with an astrophysicist that he documented in his book, The Quantum and the Lotus, of which Matthieu Ricard said:

The most fascinating thing I learned through this dialogue was precisely about something very deep about the nature of reality related to interdependence  and impermanence…

The fact that if one photon or particle split into two, and they shoot out at physically any distance in the universe, they still remain part of a whole.  So there's something there that is still not separate.  So that was a credible insight for me because interdependence is not just the fact that things are related, but also that, therefore, they are devoid of total autonomous, independent existence.

This morning, as my daughter “split off” and “shot out into the universe,” I took solace in knowing she and I “still remain part of a whole.”

The second idea was from philosophy.

In my effort to skillfully embrace this letting-go life stage milestone with my daughter, I sought out the council of Shunryu Suzuki from his classic book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. 

As a lay-person, I figured it was a no-brainer that he would have some sort of good advice about this topic of impermanence.

And voila!

In his chapter called “Attachment, Non-Attachment” he quotes Dogen-zenji (see we all seek council from some wise soul..) who said:

Although everything has Buddha nature, we love flowers, and we do not care for weeds…A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.

Of this, Shunryu Suzuki writes:

In this way our life should be understood. Then there is no problem…Happiness is sorrow; sorrow is happiness. There is happiness in difficulty; difficulty in happiness. Even though the ways we feel are different, they are not really different; in essence they are the same.

Reading this passage today somehow offered me permission to allow all the various (and contradictory) emotions of this parent-child milestone, knowing all of them arise and return to the same source.  And, that I should not be so quick to interpret the difficult emotions as some sort of “problem” or sign of grasping.

The third, and final, idea is from poetry.

Having previously read several of his poems, but having none of them “in my blood stream” (as translator Joanna Macy says of the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke), I decided to look up a few of the poems of departed Irish poet John O’Donohue.

I remembered that to me his poems felt more like prayers, and today, as I first officially sent my baby girl off into the world, I certainly wanted to do it with a spirit of faith, love and blessing.

With that, I’ll close this entry with 2 poems from Mr. John O’Donohue: For a New Beginning and Beannacht.

For a New Beginning

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,

Where your thoughts never think to wander,

This beginning has been quietly forming,

Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,

Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,

Noticing how you willed yourself on,

Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety

And the gray promises that sameness whispered,

Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,

Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,

And out you stepped onto new ground,

Your eyes young again with energy and dream,

A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear

You can trust the promise of this opening;

Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning

That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;

Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;

Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,

For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

Beannacht

On the day when

The weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you stumble,

May the clay dance

To balance you.

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

The grey window

And the ghost of loss

Gets into you,

May a flock of colours,

Indigo, red, green

And azure blue,

Come to awaken in you

A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

In the currach of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

Wind work these words

Of love around you,

An invisible cloak

To mind your life.