Life and Practice

After a long week, I've spent the evening watching back to back episodes of 'My So Called Life' (the best TV show ever!). I was 16 when the show aired so not only was I the "target audience", I very much wanted to be Angela Chase.

Watching the show always leaves me with the feeling of being transported back in time. For just a little while after I turn off the show, I can almost physically feel again the agony of each long, uncomfortable moment that was me at 16. I alternated between manic elation and furious anger. There was no ease, no equilibrium, no equanimity.

Which gets me thinking of course about whether anything has changed. Am I a "grown up" now or am I still too hooked on the excitement of dramatic ups and downs to realize how tired they leave me?

I am reminded often that I very much need the mirror that practice provides each morning. It's a daily, unflinching reflection of all that I still hang on to and all that I am still grasping after. I'm grateful that beyond the reflection the practice also provides the tools to realize the stillness and deep quiet that is possible in the moments that I take a deep breath and let go.

Non-attachment and Love

I've been pretty quiet on the blog front lately. I've had lots to think about. It relates to yoga only in the way that everything relates to yoga if the picture is broad enough, so I'll toss some of those thoughts out here.

I've been in several Yoga Sutra study sessions at workshops with Beryl Bender Birch. In each session the idea of non-attachment has come up at some point. Beryl will often have us go around the room and name something we're attached to. The same answers always come up: partner/spouse, children, family, pets, career, house, city...and someone always says yoga. The idea of non-attachment to non-living things that are none-the-less important is generally something that the group has no trouble wrapping its collective head around...but then the group starts to wrestle a bit with the idea of non-attachment to the living beings that are important to us. How do we reconcile non-attachment with love?

I was at a workshop with Beryl only few days after her husband of 20-some years, Thom Birch, had died suddenly. We wrestled with these same questions at that workshop and I saw what it looked like when someone with 30 years of yoga practice came to face this question in a very direct way. Beryl grieved for the husband she missed, but not in an overly-dramatic, grasping way. Years of practice of non-attachment meant that she was able to let go with some amount of grace. Years of love meant that it still hurt.

I do not yet have her grace.

A week ago, Asha, our beloved mix breed dog was diagnosed with liver disease. There is no cure and very little that can be done to treat it. The prognosis from the vet is that she might live 2 more years, or maybe considerably less...they just really don't know. She's only 3 1/2 years old and is very much a "fur-baby" so this is especially tough. I find myself wrestling with these same questions of non-attachment and love. When the liver function is reduced to the point that she can no longer enjoy being a dog, will I be able to make the right decision?...a decision that comes from loving non-attachment?

Ultimately, these events are what I practice for. Nearly every day on the mat these questions come up even if I don't catch them at the time. When I do a pose, realize it's not happening, resolve to revisit it again the next day, and let it go, I set a pattern of non-attachment. When I give in to frustration because things aren't going as I'd like, I set a pattern of grasping, and of attachment.

When I can get myself/ego/identity out of the way, there is room for grace and for love even amidst pain.

Yoga Sutra 2.18-2.25: Moving the Viewfinder

Yoga Sutras 2.18 - 2.25:

"Nature, its three qualities, sattva, rajas and tamas, and its evolutes, the elements, mind, senses of perception and organs of action, exist eternally to serve the seer, for enjoyment or emancipation. The gunas generate their characteristic divisions and energies in the seer. Their stages are distinguishable and non-distinguishable, differentiable and non-differentiable. The seer is pure consciousness. He witnesses nature without being reliant on it. Nature and intelligence exist solely to serve the seer's true purpose, emancipation. The relationship with nature ceases for emancipated beings, its purpose having been fulfilled, but its processes continue to affect others. The conjunction of the seer with the seen is for the seer to discover his own true nature. Lack of spiritual understanding (avidya) is the cause of the false identification of the seer with the seen.
The destruction of ignorance through right knowledge breaks the link binding the seer to the seen. This is kaivalya, emancipation."

-translation by B.K. S. Iyengar

Thoughts:
This is a big chunk of Yoga Sutra for a single blog post, but as they all sound to me to be moving towards the same point I thought I'd just post this whole section.

What I'm hearing from this section of the Yoga Sutra:
I need the world to push against. I need all the things that irritate me and frustrate me and amuse me and impress me. I need something to be attached to in order to catch myself in a moment of attachment and get a glimpse of what that looks like. It's in knowing what attachment looks like that I can begin to see what non-attachment looks like. Practice has given me a method of really hearing how loud the world in and outside my mind is. It's only now that I know what the noise sounds like, that I notice when it's missing, when it's gone quiet.

"The conjunction of the seer with the seen is for the seer to discover his own true nature."

Something I that catches my attention throughout the Yoga Sutra that is echoed again here is Patanjali's suggestion that this non-attachment is a process. He does suggest that disentangling ourselves from all the stickiness is possible, but also seems to suggest that we won't learn to step out of our "relationship with nature" until we have spent some time tangled up in the web of defining ourselves and the situations we find ourselves in.

"The relationship with nature ceases for emancipated beings, its purpose having been fulfilled, but its processes continue to affect others."

I notice a sort of back and forth in life of feeling more deeply tangled in situations as they arise and then feeling space from them. Much of the feeling has to do I think, with where I'm standing when I look at life stuff. Moving the viewfinder has a lot to do with what I see and how caught up I feel in "nature" versus how much space I feel.

A great recent post by Patrick got me thinking more about what happens when you stand somewhere else.
Here's an excerpt:
"Nurture's not easy if you're a boy, especially if you're one with good exposure to gender politics. Obviously, nurture is marked feminine in this culture. I was having lunch last week in the campus center and sitting near a table of about eight college guys: sporty, trendy, loud. The energy coming off them, the sheer extroverted testosterone, was absolutely tactile, touchable, visible. Instinctively, I didn't care for it, because those guys mocked me for years when I was in my teens, but then I re-looked at them, imagined them as guys who'd maybe gotten curious about the US yoga trend and walked into my room. And that changed everything; they became powerful bodies with curiosity, with shyness, and immediately I developed a sort of intimate empathy with them. Just to play with it, I let my view switch from one to the other, reinventing the human beings in front of me by means of different lenses. Then it became very funny and amusing and I turned someone that I used to be, into a tool in my toolkit."

I love that! What if the next time I feel stuck, when I feel absolutely glued to one definition of a situation, what if I just stood somewhere else?

"The destruction of ignorance through right knowledge breaks the link binding the seer to the seen. This is kaivalya, emancipation."

Paradox and Contradiction

One of my students noticed a seeming paradox in the way the physical practice works with the mind. If the body is very uncomfortable, you can't seem to work on quieting the mind. On the other hand, if the body is very comfortable in a pose, the mind tends to wander off and start doing its own thing. Both are definitely true in my practice. If there are lots of little irritations in the body and it does not want to quiet down, then the mind doesn't seem to want to quiet down either. On the other hand, if the body is quiet and the mind is busy chattering, then I can be fairly sure that my most challenging poses will bring my attention back to the moment.

Practice is actually full of paradox and contradiction. In that way, it is a true mirror for life.

I've been thinking a bit about why we are able to "do" or "not do" certain poses....I put those in quotes as we all have our own definition of what "do" looks like. :)

I think there's both a physical and mental answer to that question. After 9 years of practice, I still do not lift up and jumpback...why?
The physical answer is that my upper body and core strength develop very sloooooowly. The mental answer is that I just don't want that transition very badly. I'm not all that fussed about it actually.

...but even with slow development of upper body and core strength, handstand drop-overs are really coming along...again why?

I've started to think that in order for poses to happen physically there are 2 things that need to happen in my mental practice. First of all I have to want to do the pose. If I don't actually want to do it, then I won't do the work....but paradoxically, I also have to be ok with the idea that even if I do the work, the pose may never happen. I have to be willing to do the work without expectation of results. There has to be non-attachment, but not apathy. Only then do I really pay attention to each breath and each moment. Only then is this yoga.