Until Next Time, Nashville!

There's more than one way to say good-bye!

One more module to go before we become certified yoga therapists!  Things are getting real.

The Body is Willing

Hello.

It is hot in Nashville.  The temperature has been hovering the mid-90s since we arrived for the fifth of six modules of our yoga therapy training.  The training itself is heating up - we are past the halfway mark and the long days build towards a kind of energy that both sustains and exhausts.

At this point, we are spending a lot of time meeting with clients who volunteer to allow us to work with them, referred by the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Vanderbilt University.  We receive a very short description of the person - two or three sentences about who they are, their age and what their problem(s) are.  There has been a fair bit of debate about whether this information is helpful or gets in the way or totally useless.  Each day, three of us meet with our client while being observed by a faculty member and a group of about 6-8 other trainees.  It is a pretty unnatural situation but there really isn't any way around it as it is so useful to get the feedback that everyone offers and, as an observer, to be able to see the many ways that issues can be addressed.  There has been incredible synchronicity between the seemingly random assignment of client with student therapist - somehow most of us have been matched with people who are just right for us.

Yesterday was my day to meet my client for the first time.  It was an amazing experience and a challenging one.  If I had allowed myself to have any kind of expectations beforehand, I quickly tossed them out the window.  I had to be present with the person in front of me and all the theories about this or that tool or practice pretty much went out the window with the expectations.  But we had the most important thing - a real and immediate connection.  The whole experience was beautiful and I can only express deep gratitude to my client for coming in and sharing their story and life and letting me enter it, just a little.  We will meet again on Saturday for a follow-up.

After the client left and we debriefed as a small group and then with the whole group, I could feel a pain begin to rise in my left eyelid.  It is almost comical!  In the moment, I was (mostly) not stressed since my job was (relatively) clear.  Or so I thought.  After the fact, it is also clear that the added piece of being observed and having everyone in the group hear about and analyze my performance (hard to call it anything else) caused me more stress than I thought.

This morning, as my eyelid was about double its normal size, one of the faculty was discussing the role of breathing in our practice and our tradition.  She said that the body might be willing but the breath won't lie.  Meaning that we can force our bodies to do things that take it a little too far or override our sense of what is best for it but that pushing or overriding will always show up in the breath immediately.  It is a true barometer of what is really happening in our system.

I might add a little caveat that the body is willing - for a time - but the chickens will come home to roost eventually.  Perhaps, like many of the clients we have been seeing, the pushing and overriding has been happening so long and has been pushed so hard that the chickens are coming home in a big way that can no longer be ignored.  Or, perhaps like me, they show up immediately.  A little reminder that just because you can't see it or feel it in the moment, things are happening on subtle levels.  Indeed, it is this very fact that gives yoga therapy its power.  We don't know everything of what will happen or even exactly why.  It is lovely that scientists and researchers are starting to confirm what yoga has known for millennia but even with all that, there is still some mystery to it all.

And I say, thank goodness for that.  Swollen eyelid and all.

Everthing is Waiting For You

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny hidden

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice You must note

the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things

to come, the doors have always been there

to frighten you and invite you,

and the tiny speaker in the phone

is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into

the conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds

and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

  -- David Whyte

      from Everything is Waiting for You 

     ©2003 Many Rivers Press

Personally Speaking

A few months ago, I was telling my Zen teacher about how the new cat at the Monastery ran towards me and practically leapt into my arms.  He said, "Yeah, you almost want to take it personally."

Ouch!  Man, talk about hitting a girl where it hurts the most.

This is Tika, the Temple cat.  She sometimes leaps into my arms too.  So there!

I was recounting this story to a friend a couple of days ago, who also happens to be a Zen monk, and he said, "It's true.  We take everything so personally.  Like it's all about us!  Nothing is personal.  Not even our breath is personal!"

Not even our breath is personal.  Double ouch!

I know what he said is correct because I actually started to cry a little when he said it.  Still....

Not even our breath is personal.

Every Now and Then, Practice Works

Things have been winding up and settling down.

There have been many sleepless nights as I worried about some of the choices my two teenagers have been making.  Trying to find the balance between guidance and support and the teenage equivalent of shouting angrily - STOP! - when your toddler appears to be about to run out into the street.  When the toddler is 19, one must take another tact - more subtle and yet still as startling and forceful.  No one said it would be easy.

But we are getting there.  When I see Finn gently and eagerly care for Lucy's pet rat (yes, she has one!  She is named Violet), I feel hopeful that this sweet, gentle side of him is the underpinning that props up the rest, even the less than sweet parts.  And when Lucy points out some aspect of how I am deluding myself, this time with clarity and directness but also compassion (versus when she just sticks it to me like a dagger in the back), I marvel at her innate wisdom and try to trust that when she tells me that her summer plans are to go live on a commune in rural Tennessee.

Neither of my two are taking the traditional post-high school graduation route.  I see and hear other parents talking about university and scholarships and accomplishments and it gives me pause.  Did I do something horribly wrong?  Then a friend said to me, somewhat impatiently at my dimness, "What did you expect?!  You raised them to think for themselves and now they are!"

D'oh.

Still, as a parent, I want some sense of security, some sense that they will be, not just alright, but good - really good and happy - in the world.  Of course, I want the impossible.  Maybe in six months time they will have found a direction that will guide them for the coming years and it will feel more settled, but it's never really settled.  It's never settled.

The only thing that can be settled is our mind.  The slings and arrows will just keep coming - this is guaranteed.  Are you running around in a panic, trying to avoid them, dashing this way and that?  Or are you calmly watching them land, stepping aside as needed?  Maybe getting hit as needed too.  It is becoming more and more painfully obvious to me that the only way we can approach reaching that second state of mind (the calm one not the dashing around one) is with practice.  By this I don't even mean yoga practice or Zen practice but I do mean some kind of regular, daily practice of engaging with discomfort.

I am talking about a practice that challenges us to face up to the little things that might send us racing about - a momentary itch in our nose when we are trying to sit still or the frustration of trying and missing an attempt to do an āsana (posture) that we do every single day.  Small and unimportant things.  And that's exactly it!  So small and so unimportant that we can practice them and the consequences of not meeting their challenge (I hesitate to say fail) are equally small and unimportant.  Ok, I scratched my nose during meditation.  Or I fell out of parivritti trikonāsana again.  Again!  These small experiences are the drip of water that creates the hole in the rock over time.  Day by day, they are not a big deal but check back in a few years, or a few decades.  These small practices matter.

A few years ago, I went to an Ashtanga primary series class led by Sharath Jois (Pattabhi Jois's grandson and heir to his school and role as "guru").  It was early in the morning and very crowded with people who all seemed to know each other and all seemed to be very fabulous and all seemed to have very advanced practices.  I totally freaked out - I felt surrounded by a thick air of competition and was overwhelmed by feelings of being inadequate.  It thoroughly infected me and my response was to make my practice so aggressive that, by the time I finished, I was completely depleted.  I honestly thought that I would not be able to walk to the subway without collapsing.  I remember being really scared about how I would get home.  It was something of a wake-up call.

Sharath is in town again now.  After that horrifying practice a few years ago, I vowed never to do that again.  Yet, for some reason, I signed up for three of the six days of practice that he is offering.  This morning was the first one.  The crowd was even larger this time - 350 people!  We filled the gymnasium at a local college, with our mats just inches apart.  Normally that alone would make me very anxious as a long-limbed person who needs a fair bit of space but this time all I could feel was a kind of awe that we were all there practicing together.  It felt beautiful, not anxious.  I actually had the best, most relaxed practice in months.

My working myself to exhaustion last time was not about Sharath or the bevy of gorgeous 25 year-olds (male and female) in their Lululemon outfits who could float through the practice barely touching the ground.  All that crazy was my crazy.  Like the water dripping on a rock, several years later I am pleased to see that I am a little less crazy.  No worries - there is plenty of room for improvement but, as one of the monks at the Monastery likes to say, "practice works!"

Finn and Lucy are launching themselves out into this horrible, cruel, beautiful world in ways that I never imagined.  There will be trouble ahead.  There will be moments of poetry.  Those are certainties.  The rest is up to me to create.

How To Be Satisfied

Satisfied, 2014.  Porcelain and wash, 5" x 12"

Coreopsis, 2016.  Organic matter, size varies.

Graduate (Lucy and Wendy), 2016.  Fills the universe.