The Cycle of Vulnerability and Withdrawl

I've been thinking a lot lately about vulnerability and my tendency to cycle through a mental phase of opening up followed by a phase of pulling in. A post on Expansion and Contraction from new blogger, Abhyasa, gave me some more food for thought.

It's interesting to me to watch where the fear and discomfort come up.

Physically, I associate opening up with back-bending and if that is true, then physically, open is my default. I have never been afraid of "doing" back bends. I was never afraid of dropping back. I have never been afraid of kapotasana. I have "lost and found" both drop-backs and kapotasana several times now over the life of my practice, yet even when they were tight or puzzlingly inaccessible, I wasn't afraid of doing the poses.

Physically, I find back-bending, at the least, energizing and at the most, euphoric...but for a long time that post-back bend exhilaration was almost always followed several hours later by a feeling of panic...a sort of vague feeling of vulnerability, a feeling that I had opened up too much. I'd have a sudden need to both physically and mentally pull in, curl into a ball and close up. The deeper the back bends and the more of them I was doing, the greater the need to close up once the post-back bend euphoria passed.

Mentally, outside of practice I followed the same pattern: the deeper the opening up, the greater the feeling panic afterwards and the greater the desire to pull in and withdraw.

For a long time, I felt a certain amount of guilt when the openness overwhelmed me and I closed down. Why couldn't I maintain openness all the time? Why the post-openness panic?

The wisdom of the Ashtanga sequencing is slowly working it's magic and the physical ups and downs are leveling out. Mental patterns are following the physical ones. Physically, I am sloooooowly building strength to match the bendiness I was born with. I notice as the body evens out, so does the mind. There is more steadiness underneath the openness and I am extremely grateful for every bit of it.

The Pause At the End of the Exhale

My attention in practice the past couple of weeks has been to the relationship between breath and action. What happens in the pause? What happens at the end of the exhale?

I’ve noticed as new poses are added to my practice or when I come to any pose that I find especially challenging, I tend to shorten the inhale. I notice many new students initially shorten the inhale in sun salutation B. As they learn to stretch the breath and coordinate with movement, students sometimes resort to what my teacher calls “guppy breathing”…a short big gulp of air on the inhale followed by a longer exhalation.

But Claudia’s recent post got me thinking that it had been awhile since I really put some attention on the exhale. So for the past couple weeks I’ve been watching and playing with the exhale.

I noticed that I don’t tend to shorten the exhale. My breathing pattern of the past remains. If I shorten one part of the breath, it is the inhale that gets shorter. What I had not noticed until my recent play with the breath was that although I don’t shorten the breath on the exhale, I do shorten the corresponding movement that should match the exhale. Apparently, I’m in a hurry!
:)

For example, in sun salutations when completing the exhale in downward dog, I notice I start hopping the feet forward before the exhale is finished and well before the slight pause that comes after the exhale.

When I caught this and began to hold the heels in place in downdog until the end of each exhale, I felt a sense of uneasiness, fear.
Fear, I think, of emptiness, the undefined moment, the moment of pause at the end of the exhale when there is nothing to do. A similar sensation comes up sometimes when I do retentions after the exhale in pranayama exercises.....and by pausing without moving after the exhale, I was asking what would happen, if for a moment, I stopped defining and doing? Would I just disappear? Of course, no.

As with any part of practice, after a few repetitions of finishing the movement on the exhale, it became more familiar, lost it's feeling of stepping into the unknown, and the uneasiness faded. Practice went on.


Iyengar’s commentary on the Yoga Sutra in sutra 2.3 says abhinivesa (the fear of non-being, fear of death) "is instinctive" .
Chogam Trungpa says something related in CTSM "People are afraid of emptiness of space, or the absence of company, the absence of a shadow. It is generally a fear of space, a fear that we will not be able to anchor ourselves to any solid ground, that we will lose our identity as a fixed and solid and definite thing."

So the feeling of uneasiness and anxiousness in the pause at the end of the exhale is the fear of non-being leading to acting out of ego, acting out of a want to label the moment, out of wanting to have something to do to push back the fear of disappearing into the ether.

This got me thinking further about Claudia’s post and the link between past experience (and samskara perhaps?) and breathing pattern. Even as a kid, I was in a hurry to move on and grow up. I was sending away for college brochures when I was 12. I didn’t pay attention to my breath then, but I suspect even then, my actions were ahead of my breath. I defined myself by what I imagined I would do, careerwise.

I have a terrible habit of cutting off the end of other people’s sentences in conversation. I’ve noticed it in the past few years, but tend to catch myself just a bit too late to shut myself up!
If it's a pattern in practice, that usually means the same pattern is present elsewhere in life off the mat. Now I've begun to look for the “pause after the exhale” in life off the mat and am working on resisting the urge to fill it with something.

Yoga Sutra 2.3: The Things That Get in the Way

In sutra 2.2 Patanjali says yoga reduces the affliction...in sutra 2.3, he names the afflictions:

"The five afflictions which disturb the equilibrium of consciousness are: ignorance or lack of wisdom, ego, pride of the ego, or the sense of 'I', attachment to pleasure, aversion to pain, fear of death and clinging to life" --Iyengar translation

Thoughts:
so I'm pondering on where each of these show up in my practice...where do I have a chance to work on them?

"ignorance or lack of wisdom"
I'm not sure there are specific parts of practice that come to my mind when I think of lessening this affliction. Much of practice is a regular reminder that I have so much to learn! Time itself may be the best teacher when if comes to "lack of wisdom".

"ego, pride of the ego, or the sense of 'I'"
Hmmm...lots of work to do here. This makes me think specifically of Uttitha Hasta Pandangustasana. It's the moments when I think "I've got this!" or "I'm good at this!" that I inevitably fall over. Ego has a tendency to metaphorically "knock me over" in life off the mat as well. A willingness to laugh at myself is definitely helpful here.

"attachment to pleasure, aversion to pain"
The method of samavritti (literally means same waves) or equal breath makes me more and more aware of my tendencies here. I notice that in asana practice, I tend to let the breath get longer in the places of comfort (a nice forward bend) and shorter in the places of discomfort (chataranga or anything requiring strength to hold). If I hold the rest of my life up to the same light of awareness, the same is true. Lots more work to do here on the mat and off.

"fear of death and clinging to life"
I've heard it said more than once that all fears are ultimately a fear of death or "non-being" (though at the moment, can't recall just who actually should get the credit for saying that). The daily work of doing something that brings up fear (the particular fear triggers keep changing as my practice evolves) has been one of the greatest gifts that I have gotten from this practice. All the things in my life that have brought the greatest amount of joy have started with a moment when I made a choice to "take a deep breath and jump!"

Fear in Practice

I like to give examples to my students of why yoga asana practice in the studio is also practice for life. It's an important moment when they realize that they probably can do something (say a backbend or a handstand) but they are afraid of it. They're physically ready and able to do the pose, yet it still brings up fear. I almost always say the same thing. Asana practice is a good place to practice doing what you're afraid of every day.

I'm not talking about being afraid of injury or a fear of straining something by doing a pose. That's an entirely different subject. I'm talking about unattached elemental fear. In practice we learn to do what we're afraid of despite the feeling of fear. When that process is familiar it's something that accompanies us into the rest of life. A feeling of confidence builds when fear comes up and you stay with the practice. This has been one of the greatest benefits of yoga practice for me. It's both an exhilarating and humbling practice and I have at least a lifetime's worth of work still to do!

I came across this great quote in a book by Kathy Dobie. It was attributed to anonymous in the book. "No interesting project can be embarked on without fear. I shall be scared to death half the time."