A Magic Net

Whenever life gets intense, or ‘heavy’, I ask myself, “Why have I stopped looking for the magic in things, in life, instead of always considering what I see to be the only true thing.”

This maya, this illusion that we live in is indeed real. As real as the reflection in a mirror. The tangible structural thing we can hold onto is the object in the mirror, not the reflection. But the reflection is a thing, in and of itself.

So this tells me that the world around me that I perceive, filtered through my own perceptions, is simply a reflection of what I can recognize. Therefore, all that I deem true must somehow fit within the realm of my own experience. One that I’ve had already or have had modeled for me by someone else who I have taken the time and consideration to consider.

So everyone has his or her own filter, and his or her own ‘reality’ of the mirror, aka - reflection. This is what the Hindu philosophy beautifully describes as Indra’s net. A net as big as the universe, upon which at each intersection is a faceted jewel, reflecting in all directions.

This is the lila - a Sanskrit word for the dance of our existential understanding. We can only recognize it though the apparatus of our physical bodies. Which includes the mind, and it seems that the logical, left brain rules our Western world, our way of thinking and therefore our perceptions of what is real.

Is what I know to be real something I can feel, or is it something I can re-create through experimentation? This is the schism it seems in our modern world, and the question that we seek to solve through living in this world and also feeling our way through it. We should consider if the feeling vs. observation crux is mutually exclusive. I don’t think it is. Like two sides of the same coin, the coin exists as one thing and the existence of the sides simply gives us more perspectives upon which to appreciate the coin.

Why do we forget that we perceive the world through the density of our physical selves? I suppose it is convenient to believe that our thoughts are made of such less-dense material that it does not come from that matter which is us. But they do. Thoughts and ideas are not some ethereal wisps of nothingness. They hold vibration, and a place in the time/space continuum. Many things much more complex, do not. And they exist, are real. In the whole scheme of things, thoughts are likely pretty dense affairs.

It is this misunderstanding that thoughts are so sublime, that causes us to forget that thoughts, with their vibrations, do have some effect on our physical selves. If we understand that our thoughts are less ethereal and our bodies are less solid, perhaps we can feel more comfortable in this existential dance. Maybe we can begin to feel the music instead of needing to understand it before we can surrender to the bob and sway of the beat and rhythm.

There is something sweet in the surrender to a feeling. Sometimes it is a bit scary. Sometimes it is euphoric. Sometimes, entirely whimsical. But always, always, there is that element of magic, which is beyond testing and requires a suspension of disbelief.

Which really means, ‘belief’.

Act NOW

November seems to be the month of Yoga Challenges. Seemingly a paradox, yoga studios in my city throw up the challenge of 30 or 40 consecutive days of steadiness and ease to their student base. This provides the studios an influx of both students and cash, and offers students structure and solidarity in their yoga quest.

Last year I embarked on such a journey, learned a lot about myself, and gave myself one injury that took six months to heal and another one that is now chronic. Ah, the dark side of yoga. I would not take it back though. It gave me more perspective into that slippery slope that we call achievement. It happens even in yoga. It happened to me.

It was a dark and stormy night . . . Oh, no, no it wasn’t. Just kidding. All dramatics aside, when I read a fellow yogini’s blog about embarking on a 30 day challenge, I was reminded of my ridiculous (in retrospect) goal of doing two classes a day, for 30 days straight. Then I logged onto Facebook, where another sweet yoga soul wrote about a 40 day yoga/raw food challenge. I guess I can’t really call it ridiculous or judge what I did. I can, however, look at the motivations behind that decision to understand, not what I did or why, but to better understand myself.

So often we get caught up in the outcome, the conclusions. When we only focus on the result of an experience or problem, then we are missing the journey. Remember, it is the train ride, not the station.

When we throw ourselves a challenge, are we asking ourselves to experience the whole of it, or are we focussing only on completing it? Is it the hours on the mat that we open ourselves to, or the toned abs and arms we get as a result? Will we be happier, better, stronger, more content after those 30 days? It seems to be the general agreement that this is so. Just check out a yoga studio’s website selling its latest 30 or 40 challenge.

J Krishnamurti said, “You think you will be content when you have achieved all that you want. Contentment comes when you understand what you actually are and do not pursue what you should be. There is no contentment when you choose to be content; contentment doesn’t come that way.”

There. He said it. We can really only be happy when we understand ourselves as we really are, and not what we think we should be. So if you are considering completing a yoga challenge as a way to become better, calmer, insert superlative here, perhaps you will be more well-served by letting your yoga complete you. Let your yoga challenge you. Yoga is truly the quest for the true self, as Stephen Cope has named one of his books, and this quest is not over in 30 or 40, or even 300, 3000 days.

So what to do? My suggestion is to act. To get on your mat, get into your life. Experience fully, but never with an eye to the ‘end’ or the ‘result.’ In this way we deepen our self knowledge without judgement, and as the Bhagavad Gita suggests, we act without clinging to the fruits of our actions.

Expectations on the Path

A dear friend of mine has begun her journey into yoga on her mat. It's very sweet to get the odd email from her asking about yoga things when previously our dialogue online has been mostly about when and where we can socialize. Recently she has amazed herself by going to class one day to find that her body could do things that just two days before she thought impossible. She wrote to ask me if she could expect these types of 'plateaus' as she continues on this path.

I teach one beginner class a week and nearly all of my private students come to me as beginners, so this question really resonated with me. I am sharing my response:

Dear Sweet Devi! - I'm not sure if I'd call it plateaus - just the semantics of the expectation of 'judged progression' which doesn't really fit in with my world-view of yoga ; )

You will find that as you learn to connect with your body in new ways, you can move it in new ways. It's a mind-body-awareness connection. If you get blocked physically or mentally, through stress, fatigue, or whatever, and that connection becomes clouded or diminished, I guess you could expect to 'stay' at a certain 'level' hence a plateau-thingy.

There is a pervading belief these days that knowledge is solely related to intellect and our yoga tells us that it is that, as well as that it also right-brain dependent. You can understand something with your (left) brain, but you only really KNOW with your 'heart' (right brain functions). The most amazing yogis and eastern spiritual leaders were/are often (almost always) great scholars, and they didn't stop with external knowledge. They continued to delve into the mysteries of the self. Yoga is a path to self realization. Most of your 'gains' in your practice will be related to your connection with yourself. At first it is mostly on the physical level. And then it changes. It goes deeper.

Your physical practice may ebb and flow, and if you stay connected regardless of whether you can touch your toes, you find that there is a whole world of knowledge available to you that you might not have suspected existed. It's tough to prove scientifically, though there is increasing exploration in this vein. But it is definitely tangible to the experienc-er.

I often tell my students - "Let go of expectations, but swim in intentions" I know is sounds so backwards to our western logic! When we set expectations, we actually limit ourselves to a limited outcome. When we determine an intention, we really have to think about it rather than about HOW to do it. Then we prepare ourselves for an adventure rather than a task. We stay more present because every step could reveal a gem for us to consider. If we determine only expectation, we tend to numb ourselves to anything other than the result, and it's usually only a positive experience if we get the result we think we need. Expectation and acceptance are on the opposite sides of the coin . . .

Speaking of two sides of a coin:

I am open to the guidance of synchronicity, and do not let expecations hinder my path. - Dalai Lama

When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have. - Steven Hawking

Welcome to 2010! I recently received a quarterly newsletter from Bernie Clark, my Yin Yoga teacher, that I'd love to share with you. In it, Bernie makes the assertion that for most of us, yoga is not a performance sport. Rather than working for optimal performance, we look to move toward optimal health.

As it is the time of year when we consider creating healthier habits and diminishing unhealthy ones, Bernie's message is one to keep in mind! Check out more about Bernie at www.yinyoga.com, and if you'd like to review his newsletter in full (I'd recommend it - there are a whole bunch of nifty graphs) check out http://yinyoga.com/Newsletter_volume1.php.

Bernie offers us, "advice about how deep we should go in our poses to ensure we achieve optimal health. Note, we are not talking about optimal performance! That is the trade-off we have to understand. Whenever we practice yoga, we need to be clear about our intentions: are we striving for optimal health, or are we working toward some performance goals? Athletes, dancers, and gymnasts may well be trying to maximize their range of motion, but this does not mean that they are getting healthier. Quite the contrary: many athletes and dancers have significant joint issues in later life because they dangerously stressed their bodies to obtain maximum performance when they were younger.

The optimal position for health is the Goldilocks' position: not too much and not too little."

Wouldn't this be a wonderful thing to keep in mind as we move, not only on our mat, but through life? After all, our life is not a performance!

As you commit to new schedules, or making old ones more efficient; to introducing healthier habits and overall optimization of your health, remember Goldilocks. I hope you get it 'just right' : )

Another Lesson in Aparigraha

I managed to get myself invited to a clothes swap party. This is the second one in the past month I’ve been invited to. I couldn’t make the first one, so when I got invited to yet another, I figured that the universe was politely suggesting I needed to clear some crap out of my closet. I hope I can use the word ‘crap’ and still be all yoga-like : )

Around this time, I had decided that I was tired of rooting through wicker baskets filled to the brim with yoga clothes. It had become like the magician’s magic hankie - every time I pulled a stretchy top out of the basket, a myriad of them would work themselves out as if being pulled from the sleeve of a sly prestidigitator’s jacket. I wear yoga wear every day. Why should blouses and evening wear have top billing on the hangers? I wanted face each morning by going to my closet, imagining I was in Lululemon, jauntily choosing a new yogified outfit for the day.

So I took heed and decided to delve into the mysteries of what lie between hangers of old business wear and togs of my pre-yogi life. I used to work in and around the corporate environment so within the confines of my closet were still the remnants from that life, which seems so long ago now. In fact, I can remember when I would meet new people and I first started to identify myself as a yoga teacher, I always qualified it with, “ . . . but I used to be in the corporate world.” As time marched on, as I became more confident that people would accept and respect me as a yoga teacher, and my ego moved more in line with that, I dropped the footnote. Just the other day a student came up to me and connected with me because he had read my bio at one of the studios I worked at. The bio indicated that I had left the corporate world - and I had to laugh, because I kind of forgot that I still had the vestige of this ‘clarification’ hanging about. Ah, well - he told me that it did encourage him to keep moving in his direction to something that was more fulfilling for him than working at the office.

The next week another studio asked for an updated bio and I submitted one without any mention of what I did before I became a yoga teacher. I had finally exorcised the compulsion to qualify my right to be where I am by way of my LBY (life before yoga)! Or so I thought.

Of course we all come to where we are as a result of where we have been. There is no need to erase the past. But there is no need to hang on tightly to it either and I realized that these little mentions were a way of holding on to something that was no longer serving me. In fact, it had stopped serving me many years ago. So much so that I consciously chose to step away and pursue another path that filled me up in a much more meaningful way.

And there were of course some items in my closet that I had not worn since I sat at a boardroom table. They came to face me in the shadows of that closet. In particular, a gorgeous, amazingly tailored VERY expensive designer suit I actually paid full price for. Every year when I culled my wardrobe (which I do religiously) it always had made the cut. It was so lovely. So refined. But so totally useless to me now.

This suit gave me a lot to think about. Why was I keeping it when I would rarely ever have the occasion to wear it? How was having this suit serving me? Was it simply bolstering some identification with the privilege of calling it my own?

I began to muse about what things we keep in our lives, what we hold on to from the past, which no longer serve us. Things like old suits and textbooks and teddy bears from our youth do little to actually harm us. But there are some things we grip tightly to that not only do not serve us, they become injurious. One of the tenets of the yogic path is to practice aparigraha - non-clinging. We are pretty good at clinging, holding, gripping. But from a yogic perspective, this causes much suffering, so it is best to lay off of our velcro-ways. Like still ‘hating’ someone who once crossed you years ago. Or an image of ourselves as incomplete and small. Or even the assessment of ourselves as ‘inflexible’ or weak.

Every moment we have the grace to breath another breath is a full moment, complete in and of itself. Although the past delivers us to this moment, we cannot fully immerse ourselves in it until we step from the past and leave it behind. Each moment has the potential to deliver a brand new perspective. If we are diligent enough to recognize this, or at least practice recognizing this, we are better able to release ourselves from the bonds of the perceptions that may no longer work in the most life affirming way. And when we can more clearly see where we are in each new experience, we can make a choice about how we wish to be in that experience. This is freedom.

In the end, I kept the suit. One of my students pointed out that I could wear it to a funeral. . . . I considered that I could use it on Hallowe’en to dress up as a business person. However I may use it, I am humbled knowing that I can’t quite break that bond of attachment. In this, however, perhaps this suit is serving a purpose after all.

Yogi Ping Pong

I’ve been thinking a lot about ego these days. Is it good, is it bad, is it to be squelched or celebrated? So many questions.

The ping pong of questions rallied as I was speaking with a friend about how daunting it can be when someone comes to critique your class. I shared with a friend my recent ‘aha’ about the stint of darkness in my life as it related to an out of control ego and mused that perhaps this was the culprit in the daunting-ness. Ping. We then moved to the thought of, ‘well, if I’m feeling insecure, then maybe I need MORE ego-turbo-boost.’ Pong. Then it came around to the idea that perhaps the daunt was a symptom of ego that was not serving us; ego which is identifying so much with individual preservation that it usurps our connection with the universal, making us feel isolated and unsure. Ping. And back and forth. So many questions.

Later that day I returned home to a house that was getting a new coat of paint on a couple of walls. One of the painters approached me. It turned out that he was leaving to Thailand in the coming months to become ordained as a Buddhist monk and wanted to know if I might be interested in purchasing a rare Ganesh bronze. ‘Wow.’ I thought, ‘What a strange coincidence that I’m having this internal and external ego discussion, and a Buddhist nearly-monk arrives to add to the discussion.’ Pong. 

I told him about, well, what I’ve written about here and the questions that have been surfacing. His general take on the matter was that once we have experienced the ego in all its glory, it should be dissolved. Ping. Then I offered a more Tantric outlook on the situation which begged the question - can we celebrate all manifestations of the manifest - even the ego? Pong. We pinged and ponged, suggesting books and texts and teachers to each other. We discussed the Tantric celebration of embodiment and the Buddhist dissolution of ego and the self and commented on how both of these paths are intended to lead to the same thing - freedom and bliss. 

At one point I sighed and remarked, “Oh I just wish I could have many lives learn all of these teachings and remember them all!” At which point he replied, “I’m hoping this is my last one!” We both stopped and laughed, nodding our heads in agreement. And therein lies the essence of difference between a Tantric and Buddhist approach . . . to the same questions, both arriving at the same point. 

It would have been wonderful to continue the discussion for some time, but he did have to get back to work. And I had to do my taxes. As we moved back into our spheres of reality, the shift was perceptible. From the sublime to the ridiculous aptly describes it. And it was all so perfect. 

But there are so many questions . . . 

Visit from the Ego Monster

A strange thing happened the other day when I had to fill out a self assessment form for my performance at work. They are not relegated merely to the corporate world as one might suspect, even in yoga these things do exist.  There was a list of things I was to comment on and under “Other Comments,” an unexpected line of ink floated out from under my pen:

“This kind of feedback used to result in making me feel as if I were under intense scrutiny, but now I know it is a form of support to help me serve my students better.” 

As I was writing this I had to stop and assess this statement. For the past two months I had been in self doubt on an almost daily basis because I was feeling that I was failing at many things in my life, including my teaching. I felt dark, unstable and always on the edge of something raw. I felt scrutinized by my family, by my peers and most of all myself and I did not know how to not feel this way. 

As I read my self-assessment I had a sudden realization that I had been whooped by the Ego Monster. It slid in under the auspices of crisis and then decided to stay a while. It lived in the crevasses of my resultant rocky self esteem, advancing under the camouflage of things like ‘class feedback sessions’. When the monster was revealed, it came as a shock. The ego is so deft at disguising itself and manifesting in a myriad of forms that it can be tricky to identify. I was worried I was becoming depressed. I was afraid I was a bad teacher. I thought people didn’t want to be around me and I worried that my boyfriend would break up with me. I didn’t think of any of this as an ego-issue.

My ego resisted change, although change is in my life. My ego insisted on perfection, although my life has become a bit haphazard. My ego insisted that I be an expert in teaching many styles of yoga, although I am a student of all styles I teach. My ego asked that the future be wrapped up in a bow of certainty, although the future is a gift of adventure that waits to be unwrapped.

But sneaky, sneaky ego. My spiritual knowledge and my skills at ‘observation’ allowed me to become very adept at only seeing what I wanted to see. I had all the language, the concepts and the nimbleness of mind to paint my ego with a trompe l’oeil, making it nearly imperceptible to detect.

As a person who spends her time looking at the world from a tantric viewpoint, that all is valid and all is an expression of the Divine - even the ego - I cannot demonize this monster. It’s more of a ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ trickster that unless held in check, just goes along and does it’s thing. And it grows, perhaps like a mutating cell. And it gets stronger. And feeds on some of the very things that runs counter to my own idea of the most life-affirming qualities of existence.

So what now? I can’t go sit in a Zen monastery to dissolve the ego, nor would I want to. The ego serves me well, when it has not become toxic. A good way to make something less scary is to remove its effectiveness. For me, this means celebrating the change, the studentship, the uncertainty. It means remembering to look at the big picture and to laugh at all the foibles and challenges in my life.  It means recognizing the honour in being supported through feedback, and it means saying thank you. It means cultivating a sense of deep gratitude for all aspects of my life and all the people who meet me in my days - all of whom are my teachers. Is it possible to shrink that Ego Monster into a very manageable, bite-sized piece? Yes, I think that is part of the big picture.