Sometimes I feel like I don't have a thought in my head.Sunday, August 16, 2009
Friday, July 3, 2009
Yoga Chronicles: A Teacher's Notes
A while back, Ruthie Streiter began her class at Jaya Yoga Center by saying she’d been on the phone with a friend the other night, talking about what it took to be a good yoga teacher.
I liked this right away. It was a pleasant reminder that there are people trying to be good yoga teachers just the way I am trying to be a good yoga student. I felt in that moment all of us in the class had a common cause.
Unfolding a piece of paper, Ruthie read out a list of four key tasks for the instructor.
Sitting on my mat, I half listened and half began working feverishly to concoct an acronym by which to remember the four items. Later, of course, I could recall the acronym, but not what it stood for.
I emailed Ruthie, and she was kind enough to send me the list, which she said should be sourced to her friend, Kimberly Johnson. Here it is, partially (but I hope responsibly) paraphrased:
Instructors should help students to:
The ideas about breath and impermanence (1 and 3), for instance, are among the core teachings of Buddhist philosophy, and obviously these have wide applicability.
It seemed to me there was a lot to chew on in point number 4.
I'm sometimes envious of yoga teachers and therapists—who often promote enormous personal progress in the people they work with, but in ways that rarely leave their student clients feeling judged or criticized.
(It may sometimes help that students may as yet have no clue whatsoever about the ideal they are shooting for—it may take years even to know how far we are falling short!)
In both fields, I suspect, the pace of the project depends largely on the motivation of the student. What this means for the guides, I imagine, is that faithful adherence to a higher vision may require a great deal of patience.
Is there some way to integrate gentleness with higher vision if you’re in a field in which you must apply specific standards or there is some period of time in which the student must show improvement?
What if you’re a teacher who has to give a grade? Or an editor who feels the piece won’t be publishable if you don’t overhaul a sentence?
I don’t know the answers, but I’m no longer thinking about the question in quite the same way.
Above all, it was the point about visualization that hit home for me.
I’ve read about athletes envisioning a brilliant performance before the big competition, but I’d never played sports or thought that was something I could do.
As for visualizing where I wanted to be in five years, or imagining what kind of tree I might like to be, forget it.
It is very different, somehow, to be asked to behave like a tree.
If somebody asks me to stand like a gnarled old oak, I’ll give it the old college try. And if someone asks me to move like a willow, I’ll do something entirely different—especially if my eyes are closed and nobody’s looking.
This kind of visualization (through enactment, in many instances) is going on in yoga all the time. The English names for some asanas, like plank or corpse pose, already contain images.
It’s not unusual to be asked to imagine your heart as a flower or to breathe like a jellyfish or to think about grass blowing in the wind or the waves on the shore.
Much to surprise, I find myself actually building these images, experiencing them, somehow feeling that I can live them in my body.
It does feel like an act of creation—a path forged by metaphor, or simile, or analogy, or whatever it is. One begins to embody so many different things.
When she came to visit, my friend L. remarked that she’d never written so much fiction as when she was regularly taking yoga. Focus, observation, creativity, imagination, moving energy and feeling, awakened senses—it makes sense to me.
I liked this right away. It was a pleasant reminder that there are people trying to be good yoga teachers just the way I am trying to be a good yoga student. I felt in that moment all of us in the class had a common cause.
Unfolding a piece of paper, Ruthie read out a list of four key tasks for the instructor.
Sitting on my mat, I half listened and half began working feverishly to concoct an acronym by which to remember the four items. Later, of course, I could recall the acronym, but not what it stood for.
I emailed Ruthie, and she was kind enough to send me the list, which she said should be sourced to her friend, Kimberly Johnson. Here it is, partially (but I hope responsibly) paraphrased:
The Four Key Tasks for a Yoga Instructor
Instructors should help students to:
1. Connect to the breath.At the same time, teachers should:
2. Visualize. Visualization helps students to focus, sharpen observation skills, tap into creativity, learn how to use imagination to create and move energy and feeling, and awaken the inner senses.
3. Understand that there is constant change—or, in other words, to grasp the inevitable truth of impermanence. If we know that things are changing all the time, then we won’t cling or grasp as much; it’s easier to let go.
4. Hold a higher vision for students even when the students don't or when it is difficult for them to keep it in perspective.
* * *
I’m not a teacher, but it occurred to me that this list might contain useful ground rules for any kind of instruction.The ideas about breath and impermanence (1 and 3), for instance, are among the core teachings of Buddhist philosophy, and obviously these have wide applicability.
It seemed to me there was a lot to chew on in point number 4.
I'm sometimes envious of yoga teachers and therapists—who often promote enormous personal progress in the people they work with, but in ways that rarely leave their student clients feeling judged or criticized.
(It may sometimes help that students may as yet have no clue whatsoever about the ideal they are shooting for—it may take years even to know how far we are falling short!)
In both fields, I suspect, the pace of the project depends largely on the motivation of the student. What this means for the guides, I imagine, is that faithful adherence to a higher vision may require a great deal of patience.
Is there some way to integrate gentleness with higher vision if you’re in a field in which you must apply specific standards or there is some period of time in which the student must show improvement?
What if you’re a teacher who has to give a grade? Or an editor who feels the piece won’t be publishable if you don’t overhaul a sentence?
I don’t know the answers, but I’m no longer thinking about the question in quite the same way.
Above all, it was the point about visualization that hit home for me.
I’ve read about athletes envisioning a brilliant performance before the big competition, but I’d never played sports or thought that was something I could do.
As for visualizing where I wanted to be in five years, or imagining what kind of tree I might like to be, forget it.
It is very different, somehow, to be asked to behave like a tree.
If somebody asks me to stand like a gnarled old oak, I’ll give it the old college try. And if someone asks me to move like a willow, I’ll do something entirely different—especially if my eyes are closed and nobody’s looking.
This kind of visualization (through enactment, in many instances) is going on in yoga all the time. The English names for some asanas, like plank or corpse pose, already contain images.
It’s not unusual to be asked to imagine your heart as a flower or to breathe like a jellyfish or to think about grass blowing in the wind or the waves on the shore.
Much to surprise, I find myself actually building these images, experiencing them, somehow feeling that I can live them in my body.
It does feel like an act of creation—a path forged by metaphor, or simile, or analogy, or whatever it is. One begins to embody so many different things.
When she came to visit, my friend L. remarked that she’d never written so much fiction as when she was regularly taking yoga. Focus, observation, creativity, imagination, moving energy and feeling, awakened senses—it makes sense to me.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Yoga Chronicles: Spring Training
“How can you think and hit at the same time?” —Yogi Berra
So asked C., the yoga instructor, staring down at a student. The student agreeably said yes. C.’s secret, delivered to the room, was that the basic techniques we practiced over and over were going to make the advanced stuff easier: they were the foundation.
I’m nowhere near command of even the fundamentals, but I had a flashing sensation of what a baseball player may feel in spring training—the pleasure of doing drills, fielding hundreds of ground balls, making the throw, over and over, until he knows in every cell of his being that he can make that play.
I’ve never played an organized sport, or even tried to master a disorganized one, but I was reminded of what my friend L. had said, long ago, about being a catcher.
There came a moment in the game when her body simply did all that she had trained it to do—automatically, without thinking—and it felt like joy. This was the first time I’d had any inkling of how you might get to that.
* * *
“Do you want to know a secret?”So asked C., the yoga instructor, staring down at a student. The student agreeably said yes. C.’s secret, delivered to the room, was that the basic techniques we practiced over and over were going to make the advanced stuff easier: they were the foundation.
I’m nowhere near command of even the fundamentals, but I had a flashing sensation of what a baseball player may feel in spring training—the pleasure of doing drills, fielding hundreds of ground balls, making the throw, over and over, until he knows in every cell of his being that he can make that play.
I’ve never played an organized sport, or even tried to master a disorganized one, but I was reminded of what my friend L. had said, long ago, about being a catcher.
There came a moment in the game when her body simply did all that she had trained it to do—automatically, without thinking—and it felt like joy. This was the first time I’d had any inkling of how you might get to that.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Barefoot and Posing
I’m an absolute beginner in yoga.
I’m a beginner in Buddhism, too, but at least my dalliance with Buddhism has gone on for a long time.
Even if I’ve never seriously meditated I’ve read books by people who do. I’ve contemplated a lot of their philosophy and to some extent begun trying to live by it.
I do have a sustained practice in the form of therapy. I watch my thoughts, but I also say them out loud to someone who has taught me what it might mean to live the questions (as she pointed out that Rilke said) and shown me by her own actions what openness and compassion can look like.
Over years of talking, things happen—the thoughts shift, they lose their substance, one’s ways of responding to the world become a little less fixed. That may be similar to what happens with meditation.
For me, anyway, the Buddhism and the therapy have been complementary. Buddhism taught me I could sit still and bear the miserable thoughts and feelings that were coming up in therapy.
Therapy gradually taught me that many of the thoughts I was most convinced were true were little more than a barrier against any experience of life I didn’t think I’d be able to manage.
At this point, I’m pretty much an absolute beginner in life.
Although in some ways I feel like a very physical person, all my training has been to lead with my mind. I’m sure that if you spent years on the cushion Buddhism would be a physical practice, but it’s less so if you read a book and then go sit for 15 minutes every now and again.
I’ve dabbled in yoga for years, too, without treating it as much more than a source of calm and exercise. It seemed too religious to get into at any depth, I suppose. My favorite parts were the various forms of lying down and then the deep rest at the end.
I wandered into the local yoga center to meditate, feeling guilty that I came so often for free, but resisting the invitation take classes at a place that I’d remembered visiting years before and finding too strenuous.
Eventually, though, something clicked. C. said, “You should come practice with us,” and I heard the word practice.
Practice. I could take my emotion practice and my watch-my-mind practice and toss in a body practice and see how they all came together.
Fireworks, is how.
Relatively speaking, I don’t think the classes are all that hard. Still, for me in the early weeks the physical effort was so overwhelming it was as if I’d lost touch with my mind entirely.
I went back to the time when I was ambidextrous, and I couldn’t tell right from left. I heard the words but I had no idea how to translate them into what to do.
I felt about five years old, disoriented and vulnerable—but this time trying not to worry about it.
With my thinking disabled, I had none of my usual defenses. Once at the end of class, I almost started to cry. There were moments of grief. I had tiny moments of feeling I could play. Sometimes I walked home nearly floating on my own sense of sunniness.
I had to go into therapy and talk about it all.
I suspect I was a little bit unnerved, because in the early weeks it seemed like I kept coming close to various kinds of accidents. I nearly crashed my bike. I practically set my house on fire.
I had this idea that I was trying to injure myself so I could get out of it.
Then I started to enjoy getting stronger. I’ve had tiny inklings of what it might mean to relax while feeling you were doing something that was way beyond your physical capacity.
I’m learning to visualize.
Some days I can almost balance. The next day, it’s hopeless.
The whole experience reminds me of learning to drive a car. The first time I ever tried to change lanes at 55 miles an hour was on Route 17.
Keep foot on the gas, look, signal, check the mirrors, steer, and not panic my father? I couldn’t imagine how anyone could put together the dozen things one had do get from one side of the road to the other in the tiny space of time allotted.
Once I stepped blithely into a lunge and now I’m only halfway through my checklist of body parts by the time the time the pose is over.
Still, I haven’t quit. Yet.
I’ve always done yoga with my eyes closed. I loved that that was an option—it helped me to black out my own self-consciousness.
I liked yoga the way I like swimming—you’re doing something in close proximity with other people, but you can pretend they’re not there.
It’s not like that this time. My eyes are still closed, but it’s not just because I’m shutting the other people out.
Somehow, this feels like a community. I really like the people, both the teachers and the students. There’s laughter. The classes are often a great deal of fun.
All of this is a whopping five months old.
I can see already that there’s a way to do yoga what would require a serious commitment. I bet you don’t really know anything for years and years.
It’s probably not for me.
Still, I’m intrigued. I’ve just started reading B.K.S. Iyengar. I like how many images there are when people talk about yoga. I like a spiritual approach that gives the body its due.
I found myself thinking I should keep my own yoga journal, because I can imagine myself being continually fascinated by experiences and ideas.
If everything that occurs to me now seems impossibly stupid a month from now, oh well. If perchance I stick with it, it might be interesting to see what I learned along the way.
Or not.
Okay, I’ve had the thought. Now let it go.
I’m a beginner in Buddhism, too, but at least my dalliance with Buddhism has gone on for a long time.
Even if I’ve never seriously meditated I’ve read books by people who do. I’ve contemplated a lot of their philosophy and to some extent begun trying to live by it.
I do have a sustained practice in the form of therapy. I watch my thoughts, but I also say them out loud to someone who has taught me what it might mean to live the questions (as she pointed out that Rilke said) and shown me by her own actions what openness and compassion can look like.
Over years of talking, things happen—the thoughts shift, they lose their substance, one’s ways of responding to the world become a little less fixed. That may be similar to what happens with meditation.
For me, anyway, the Buddhism and the therapy have been complementary. Buddhism taught me I could sit still and bear the miserable thoughts and feelings that were coming up in therapy.
Therapy gradually taught me that many of the thoughts I was most convinced were true were little more than a barrier against any experience of life I didn’t think I’d be able to manage.
At this point, I’m pretty much an absolute beginner in life.
Although in some ways I feel like a very physical person, all my training has been to lead with my mind. I’m sure that if you spent years on the cushion Buddhism would be a physical practice, but it’s less so if you read a book and then go sit for 15 minutes every now and again.
I’ve dabbled in yoga for years, too, without treating it as much more than a source of calm and exercise. It seemed too religious to get into at any depth, I suppose. My favorite parts were the various forms of lying down and then the deep rest at the end.
I wandered into the local yoga center to meditate, feeling guilty that I came so often for free, but resisting the invitation take classes at a place that I’d remembered visiting years before and finding too strenuous.
Eventually, though, something clicked. C. said, “You should come practice with us,” and I heard the word practice.
Practice. I could take my emotion practice and my watch-my-mind practice and toss in a body practice and see how they all came together.
Fireworks, is how.
Relatively speaking, I don’t think the classes are all that hard. Still, for me in the early weeks the physical effort was so overwhelming it was as if I’d lost touch with my mind entirely.
I went back to the time when I was ambidextrous, and I couldn’t tell right from left. I heard the words but I had no idea how to translate them into what to do.
I felt about five years old, disoriented and vulnerable—but this time trying not to worry about it.
With my thinking disabled, I had none of my usual defenses. Once at the end of class, I almost started to cry. There were moments of grief. I had tiny moments of feeling I could play. Sometimes I walked home nearly floating on my own sense of sunniness.
I had to go into therapy and talk about it all.
I suspect I was a little bit unnerved, because in the early weeks it seemed like I kept coming close to various kinds of accidents. I nearly crashed my bike. I practically set my house on fire.
I had this idea that I was trying to injure myself so I could get out of it.
Then I started to enjoy getting stronger. I’ve had tiny inklings of what it might mean to relax while feeling you were doing something that was way beyond your physical capacity.
I’m learning to visualize.
Some days I can almost balance. The next day, it’s hopeless.
The whole experience reminds me of learning to drive a car. The first time I ever tried to change lanes at 55 miles an hour was on Route 17.
Keep foot on the gas, look, signal, check the mirrors, steer, and not panic my father? I couldn’t imagine how anyone could put together the dozen things one had do get from one side of the road to the other in the tiny space of time allotted.
Once I stepped blithely into a lunge and now I’m only halfway through my checklist of body parts by the time the time the pose is over.
Still, I haven’t quit. Yet.
I’ve always done yoga with my eyes closed. I loved that that was an option—it helped me to black out my own self-consciousness.
I liked yoga the way I like swimming—you’re doing something in close proximity with other people, but you can pretend they’re not there.
It’s not like that this time. My eyes are still closed, but it’s not just because I’m shutting the other people out.
Somehow, this feels like a community. I really like the people, both the teachers and the students. There’s laughter. The classes are often a great deal of fun.
All of this is a whopping five months old.
I can see already that there’s a way to do yoga what would require a serious commitment. I bet you don’t really know anything for years and years.
It’s probably not for me.
Still, I’m intrigued. I’ve just started reading B.K.S. Iyengar. I like how many images there are when people talk about yoga. I like a spiritual approach that gives the body its due.
I found myself thinking I should keep my own yoga journal, because I can imagine myself being continually fascinated by experiences and ideas.
If everything that occurs to me now seems impossibly stupid a month from now, oh well. If perchance I stick with it, it might be interesting to see what I learned along the way.
Or not.
Okay, I’ve had the thought. Now let it go.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Filing Cabinet: Iyengar: The Breath Is a Horse
“The breath must be enticed or cajoled, like catching a horse in a field, not by chasing after it, but by standing still with an apple in one’s hand."
—B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life, p. 12.
I’ve been puzzling over this quote all week, as if it were some kind of koan. I’ve never thought of my breath as a wild horse.
In meditation, I think of the breath as the thing I am supposed to turn my attention to rather than getting swept up in my thoughts.
I know the breath is essential, and perhaps it is the closest we get to the infinite, but maybe I think it is boring.
It seems much livelier in my head. Historically, the thoughts I've watched have shot around like bullets in a firefight. Now, as I sit more, they sometimes slow to an orderly march, like items on a news ticker.
When I finally move away from them, I imagine, the breath is just going to be there.
But it’s not? I’m supposed to be standing in the middle of a field, holding an apple? It’s actually skittish and willful? I have to woo it?
Somehow, this changes everything.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Back to the Breath
Yoga notes: The other day T., one of the instructors, said something like: “Pay attention to your breath. It’s as close as we can get to the infinite in this life.”
Later: “You need the body to breathe. So in focusing on the breath you are focusing on the body.”
In whatever primitive state of “spiritual” evolution I may be, I like this. I like the infinite in this life. I like this body, which has to open up and let it all in.
I’ve had occasion to be grateful for respirators.
Later: “You need the body to breathe. So in focusing on the breath you are focusing on the body.”
In whatever primitive state of “spiritual” evolution I may be, I like this. I like the infinite in this life. I like this body, which has to open up and let it all in.
I’ve had occasion to be grateful for respirators.
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Scentient Being
C., the yoga instructor, proposed that each of us imagine our heart as a flower. “What does it smell like?” she asked.A peony, in my case.
I love peonies—as I child, I associated their blooming with my birthday, although that rarely seems to happen anymore.
C. remembered that the pink peonies of her youth were crawling with red ants. According to Wikipedia, this is because the buds of peonies are covered with nectar.
In early Japan, Wikipedia adds, the Japanese word for peony occasionally referred to wild boar. Why? Because straying Buddhists used flower names as code when they went looking the meats they were forbidden to consume.
The Japanese have also been known to arrange the pink slices of boar’s meat in peony patterns.
This seems almost a Buddhist lesson in itself. Something like: don’t get attached to the idea that anybody’s perfect.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Metta, Meet Mister Softee
On Thursday, I ventured to the Jaya Yoga Center to hear Sharon Salzberg, who was making a rare Brooklyn appearance. Salzberg, a big name on the Buddhist circuit, is best known for teachings on “metta,” or “lovingkindness,” and I enjoyed listening to her.
As Salzberg sat quietly in a chair beside her microphone, waiting for the event to begin, she was startled by the sound of a Mister Softee ice cream truck. The windows were open to a balmy evening; the truck was rolling slowly down Eighth Avenue, endlessly recycling its jangling tune.
(It would linger again at the close of her remarks—the evening’s bell of mindfulness.)
Salzberg threw back her head and laughed—at first, she said, because she thought that the jingle was on someone’s cell phone, and then because it brought back fond memories of a Manhattan childhood. (I had one of those, too—I seem to recall my father wishing he had a rifle, so he could go down and shoot Mister Softee with it.)
Like Pema Chodron and several other Buddhist speakers I’ve heard, Salzberg has a lively sense of humor. Unlike Chodron, Salzberg does not appear to favor the monastic life. She can make wry remarks about switching to “the metta channel” while in a fit of rising irritation over a slow line at Whole Foods.
Salzberg said many interesting things, but I liked her idea of meditation as a kind of skills training in both mindfulness and compassion.
She said—I think—that the scientists who are now busy wiring the brains of meditators have discovered that different centers light up with different types of meditation.
(Mindfulness meditation seems to mean bringing your focus to a single object of concentration, like the breath; compassion meditation involves exercises in which you send wishes for health and well-being to friends and enemies in ever-widening circles.)
Apparently the research is indicating that compassion can be cultivated.
Salzberg expressed surprise that this was news to the scientists, but for a long time it would have been news to me. I’d always imagined that compassion was something that arose spontaneously, not something you could work at.
With either form of meditation, you may increase the odds of taking a moment to examine the wisdom of your initial thoughts and impulses. As Salzberg put it, quoting a fifth grader, “mindfulness is not hitting someone in the mouth.”
Friday, April 3, 2009
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Change in the Air
I once had a lover who told me that every time we had sex, we changed each other—forever.I was head-over-heels enthralled and tried hard to pretend that the idea didn’t frighten me, but it did. I twisted into knots of terror at the very thought of being changed.
The other day, C., the yoga instructor, told us to think of our breaths as like the waves shifting sand on the shore. With every inhale, every exhale, we are subtly new.
I was surprised to realize how good it felt to hear this kind of talk again. I rejoiced in thinking of the breath as the ocean, just as I earlier had delighted in another teacher’s suggestion that we think of “om” as the wind.
I think I can welcome this vision for the mechanism of transformation: gradual, consistent, and with a lot less drama.
Friday, March 6, 2009
A Buddha and a Beer
For the truth is, however admirable mindfulness may be, however much peace, grounding, stability and self-acceptance it can bring, as an experience to be shared, it’s stultifyingly boring.
It is selfish, undoubtedly, to want to hold onto the ragged edges that make me feel genuinely connected, not perhaps to humanity, but to the people I love.
—Judith Warner (both quotes from “Being and Mindfulness," a post on her New York Times blog, March 5, 2009)
The other day in therapy, I was (in my own stultifying way) exploring my own ambivalence (which is not unrelated to Warner’s) about my continuing journey through the places that scare me to the path with heart.
“Loving-kindness, blech! I am sick and tired of being sincere, I’ve had it with being wholesome and life-affirming, I want 13 glasses of wine and 6 cigarettes!”
“Maybe you can have both,” B. says, in her patient way.
“So anyway,” I tell her, “I was walking to your office, I was thinking all this, and then I pick up the Voice to look at Rob Breszny’s astrology column. And listen to this!”
I unfold the paper as theatrically as possible, and begin to read:
“TAURUS: Your key theme for the week is "Healthy Obsessions." Not "Melodramatic Compulsions" or "Exhausting Crazes" or "Manias That Make You Seem Interesting to Casual Bystanders," but "Healthy Obsessions."
I roll my eyes, making sure the long-suffering therapist is catching that Mr. Free Will Astrology is talking directly to me. It appears that she is. The oracle continues:
“You will have to take really good care of yourself as you concentrate extravagantly on tasks that fill you with zeal. This may require you to rebel against the influences of role models, both in your actual life and in the movies you've seen, who act as if getting sick and imbalanced is an integral part of being true to one's genius.”
Oy! I toss the paper up into the air. (Thankfully, it’s now stapled, so the pages don’t fly all over the room.)
Okay, so maybe I’m stuck with the consciousness and the spirituality and the community and all that gunk. But I don’t want to lose the ragged edge, either. I go off on a long, hyperbolic rant about why my friend who just the other day was rooting for the Dow to drop—“Come on, baby, 300! Do it for me!"—is frequently more appealing than people who talk about love all the time.
If you move toward mindfulness, how do you tell a joke? Can you really not gossip anymore, ever? How can you possibly practice criticism?
Although on the other hand, I can think of two people right away who seem funny, edgy, quick-witted, endlessly good-spirited and supremely alive. In both cases their virtues seem to arise from an apparently effortless practice of observation—or attention, as they might say in the mindfulness trade. They are so alert to the world—so present—and they are so generous in offering it up. I like this! You might like that! Look at that! Isn’t that interesting? There’s nothing mushy—or ragged—about it.
In my earnest moments, I declare that I have realized that when I act out of my own fear and habits of self-protection, I can cause other people pain, and somehow, finally, I just don’t want to do that anymore.
In other words, I guess, I want to open my heart, and to try to bring love rather than hurt into the world. This is where it starts to feel icky. Who am I, Pollyanna? And where does this line of thinking end?
If I start thinking about pain, I find myself saying, I have to include the animals. It starts with the dog and moves on to the birds, and before you know it it’s chickens and cows. You’ve read about industrial farming, you finally (after years) let yourself absorb what that is, and now what are you going to do? Sometimes it makes me think about all the people who had inklings of the Holocaust. How do you know what you know and turn away without acting?
“I want a burger and beer!” I yell to my therapist.
There’s no particular resolution to this thing. Okay, I think at the end of the session, I’ll stick with this path. Later, I go out for dinner with a friend who is so kind as to treat, and I show no hesitation in consuming her out of a big chunk of her income. I have a Scotch at the bar. Then I order a huge steak, medium rare, with frites. We both drink three glasses of wine.
By the end, I do not feel well. I am just at the edge of that point where things start to spin. Luckily, I have almost two miles to walk. If the police stopped me, could I walk a straight line? For a while I follow the sidewalk cracks, and then I veer into a crust of snow.
I look up into the crisp night, see twinkling stars, and then feel an urge to just close my eyes. Lurching, I open them again, this time taking in the soft green of the traffic lights glowing along the planks of the park benches. Boy, wouldn’t it be nice to just lie down?
No, not a good idea.
I make it home, guzzle water from my new eco-friendly metal bottle with the elaborate plastic sip top, and collapse into bed.
It’s not a great night, what with a car alarm going off for hours, but when I wake up, it’s not so bad. I’m grateful. More water, a muffin, some coffee, a Tylenol. Geez, why did I want to poison myself?
I walk to the yoga center. I should feel bad, but on the other hand, sometimes there’s nothing like a hangover. Life gets too stimulating, and right now it feels good to have energy for nothing beyond climbing this hill.
When I get to class, my body does what it is asked to. It is so forgiving, so much better to me than I deserve, I could cry. Leaving, I feel as if I have been granted a reprieve. I walk home feeling solid on the earth and once again bouncing like helium balloon, buoyed by something that feels really good and clean. I want to go deeper, I want to be mindful, I want to live!
Ah, well. It is what it is.
It is selfish, undoubtedly, to want to hold onto the ragged edges that make me feel genuinely connected, not perhaps to humanity, but to the people I love.
—Judith Warner (both quotes from “Being and Mindfulness," a post on her New York Times blog, March 5, 2009)
The other day in therapy, I was (in my own stultifying way) exploring my own ambivalence (which is not unrelated to Warner’s) about my continuing journey through the places that scare me to the path with heart.
“Loving-kindness, blech! I am sick and tired of being sincere, I’ve had it with being wholesome and life-affirming, I want 13 glasses of wine and 6 cigarettes!”
“Maybe you can have both,” B. says, in her patient way.
“So anyway,” I tell her, “I was walking to your office, I was thinking all this, and then I pick up the Voice to look at Rob Breszny’s astrology column. And listen to this!”
I unfold the paper as theatrically as possible, and begin to read:
“TAURUS: Your key theme for the week is "Healthy Obsessions." Not "Melodramatic Compulsions" or "Exhausting Crazes" or "Manias That Make You Seem Interesting to Casual Bystanders," but "Healthy Obsessions."
I roll my eyes, making sure the long-suffering therapist is catching that Mr. Free Will Astrology is talking directly to me. It appears that she is. The oracle continues:
“You will have to take really good care of yourself as you concentrate extravagantly on tasks that fill you with zeal. This may require you to rebel against the influences of role models, both in your actual life and in the movies you've seen, who act as if getting sick and imbalanced is an integral part of being true to one's genius.”
Oy! I toss the paper up into the air. (Thankfully, it’s now stapled, so the pages don’t fly all over the room.)
Okay, so maybe I’m stuck with the consciousness and the spirituality and the community and all that gunk. But I don’t want to lose the ragged edge, either. I go off on a long, hyperbolic rant about why my friend who just the other day was rooting for the Dow to drop—“Come on, baby, 300! Do it for me!"—is frequently more appealing than people who talk about love all the time.
If you move toward mindfulness, how do you tell a joke? Can you really not gossip anymore, ever? How can you possibly practice criticism?
Although on the other hand, I can think of two people right away who seem funny, edgy, quick-witted, endlessly good-spirited and supremely alive. In both cases their virtues seem to arise from an apparently effortless practice of observation—or attention, as they might say in the mindfulness trade. They are so alert to the world—so present—and they are so generous in offering it up. I like this! You might like that! Look at that! Isn’t that interesting? There’s nothing mushy—or ragged—about it.
In my earnest moments, I declare that I have realized that when I act out of my own fear and habits of self-protection, I can cause other people pain, and somehow, finally, I just don’t want to do that anymore.
In other words, I guess, I want to open my heart, and to try to bring love rather than hurt into the world. This is where it starts to feel icky. Who am I, Pollyanna? And where does this line of thinking end?
If I start thinking about pain, I find myself saying, I have to include the animals. It starts with the dog and moves on to the birds, and before you know it it’s chickens and cows. You’ve read about industrial farming, you finally (after years) let yourself absorb what that is, and now what are you going to do? Sometimes it makes me think about all the people who had inklings of the Holocaust. How do you know what you know and turn away without acting?
“I want a burger and beer!” I yell to my therapist.
There’s no particular resolution to this thing. Okay, I think at the end of the session, I’ll stick with this path. Later, I go out for dinner with a friend who is so kind as to treat, and I show no hesitation in consuming her out of a big chunk of her income. I have a Scotch at the bar. Then I order a huge steak, medium rare, with frites. We both drink three glasses of wine.
By the end, I do not feel well. I am just at the edge of that point where things start to spin. Luckily, I have almost two miles to walk. If the police stopped me, could I walk a straight line? For a while I follow the sidewalk cracks, and then I veer into a crust of snow.
I look up into the crisp night, see twinkling stars, and then feel an urge to just close my eyes. Lurching, I open them again, this time taking in the soft green of the traffic lights glowing along the planks of the park benches. Boy, wouldn’t it be nice to just lie down?
No, not a good idea.
I make it home, guzzle water from my new eco-friendly metal bottle with the elaborate plastic sip top, and collapse into bed.
It’s not a great night, what with a car alarm going off for hours, but when I wake up, it’s not so bad. I’m grateful. More water, a muffin, some coffee, a Tylenol. Geez, why did I want to poison myself?
I walk to the yoga center. I should feel bad, but on the other hand, sometimes there’s nothing like a hangover. Life gets too stimulating, and right now it feels good to have energy for nothing beyond climbing this hill.
When I get to class, my body does what it is asked to. It is so forgiving, so much better to me than I deserve, I could cry. Leaving, I feel as if I have been granted a reprieve. I walk home feeling solid on the earth and once again bouncing like helium balloon, buoyed by something that feels really good and clean. I want to go deeper, I want to be mindful, I want to live!
Ah, well. It is what it is.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
The Fiction Theory
One of my recent theories arose from a combination of my experiences in therapy and something I read for the book group at the yoga center.
I was talking in session about how the road I was traveling in therapy often seemed epic to me—I’ve got sirens, I’ve got monsters, I’ve got shoals and gales, and somehow the tattered boat sails onward.
Somehow, it’s difficult to convey the drama to other people. First, there’s no real reason why they should care. Second, the truth about oneself is so often embarrassing and unpleasant. And third, the journey is so full of particulars.
For me, having two friends for dinner might be the equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. For you, it might be effortless. There’s so much context to understand.
On the other hand, whatever the particulars, the trip that is epic for me is entirely ordinary. It’s the nature of life to be striving at something. Whatever I’m doing is only one version of what every other person on this planet is doing.
So: how to reconcile these two things, the greatness and the insignificance, the uniqueness and the universality?
Enter a thought stirred up by a book I read with the group at the yoga center, namely The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination, a book by the noted psychiatrist Robert Coles. Per Houghton Mifflin, it’s “a study of how listening to stories promotes learning and self-discovery.”
Coles talks about how a handful of provocative texts, by writers from Tolstoy to Tillie Olsen, are received by a wide group of readers—children, patients, doctors in training.
No matter their background, readers were likely to identify with some aspect of character or plot. As they explored these connections in conversation, they often experienced a deepening of compassion or startling insights about themselves or their families or their work.
With a slight tweak, this became the basis for my new theory, namely: that fiction exists because it provides us with a set of particulars that can be widely shared.
A fiction provides us with the details of various lives and events, and we happily pore through them to find the underlying lessons. We can do this in the company of other people, and we can share our discoveries.
We may develop a broader sense of empathy than we might have imagined. Isn’t one of the hallmarks of great literature supposed to be that we can all see that the story is universal, even when we’ve never experienced such circumstances?
Fiction may also exist because it provides a vehicle that allows us to go through the process of sorting through the particulars of human experience in a manageable way. What we are doing as we read and think about what we’ve just absorbed is a microcosm of what we do at every moment of our lives.
We are trying to decode the narrative. We are trying to make sense of it all.
Perhaps fiction’s virtue lines not only in its content but the fact that it creates the space for people of all varieties to share in the same experience of seeking understanding.
People who love to read probably have no need of an elaborate philosophical pretext to justify reading a novel, but I was excited. I decided I might want to start a book group to read fiction. And then we would go through this process of finding the universal in the particulars of our chosen story together.
A few weeks later, a handful of people came over for supper, and at the end of all the evening, someone remarked: “That was like a book group, except no one had to read the book!”
At which point I remembered what book groups are often like. Some participants have read the book, others have read half of it, and others didn’t have time to start. People make various insightful remarks, but the conversation fragments, and before long nobody is talking about the book.
Oh, well. There is a difference, I thought, between an idea about connecting and the actuality of connecting, and maybe this is still a divide I have yet to cross. Which isn’t to say that one couldn’t connect in a book group, even if it isn’t actually about the book.
I was talking in session about how the road I was traveling in therapy often seemed epic to me—I’ve got sirens, I’ve got monsters, I’ve got shoals and gales, and somehow the tattered boat sails onward.
Somehow, it’s difficult to convey the drama to other people. First, there’s no real reason why they should care. Second, the truth about oneself is so often embarrassing and unpleasant. And third, the journey is so full of particulars.
For me, having two friends for dinner might be the equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. For you, it might be effortless. There’s so much context to understand.
On the other hand, whatever the particulars, the trip that is epic for me is entirely ordinary. It’s the nature of life to be striving at something. Whatever I’m doing is only one version of what every other person on this planet is doing.
So: how to reconcile these two things, the greatness and the insignificance, the uniqueness and the universality?
Enter a thought stirred up by a book I read with the group at the yoga center, namely The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination, a book by the noted psychiatrist Robert Coles. Per Houghton Mifflin, it’s “a study of how listening to stories promotes learning and self-discovery.”
Coles talks about how a handful of provocative texts, by writers from Tolstoy to Tillie Olsen, are received by a wide group of readers—children, patients, doctors in training.
No matter their background, readers were likely to identify with some aspect of character or plot. As they explored these connections in conversation, they often experienced a deepening of compassion or startling insights about themselves or their families or their work.
With a slight tweak, this became the basis for my new theory, namely: that fiction exists because it provides us with a set of particulars that can be widely shared.
A fiction provides us with the details of various lives and events, and we happily pore through them to find the underlying lessons. We can do this in the company of other people, and we can share our discoveries.
We may develop a broader sense of empathy than we might have imagined. Isn’t one of the hallmarks of great literature supposed to be that we can all see that the story is universal, even when we’ve never experienced such circumstances?
Fiction may also exist because it provides a vehicle that allows us to go through the process of sorting through the particulars of human experience in a manageable way. What we are doing as we read and think about what we’ve just absorbed is a microcosm of what we do at every moment of our lives.
We are trying to decode the narrative. We are trying to make sense of it all.
Perhaps fiction’s virtue lines not only in its content but the fact that it creates the space for people of all varieties to share in the same experience of seeking understanding.
People who love to read probably have no need of an elaborate philosophical pretext to justify reading a novel, but I was excited. I decided I might want to start a book group to read fiction. And then we would go through this process of finding the universal in the particulars of our chosen story together.
A few weeks later, a handful of people came over for supper, and at the end of all the evening, someone remarked: “That was like a book group, except no one had to read the book!”
At which point I remembered what book groups are often like. Some participants have read the book, others have read half of it, and others didn’t have time to start. People make various insightful remarks, but the conversation fragments, and before long nobody is talking about the book.
Oh, well. There is a difference, I thought, between an idea about connecting and the actuality of connecting, and maybe this is still a divide I have yet to cross. Which isn’t to say that one couldn’t connect in a book group, even if it isn’t actually about the book.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Prayer for a Blog (Among Other Things)
On this path effort never goes to waste,
and there is no failure.
—Bhagavad Gita, 2:4
and there is no failure.
—Bhagavad Gita, 2:4
Friday, February 27, 2009
Written on the Body
Today, C., the yoga instructor, informed us that she was teaching us to understand the grammar of our bodies. Finally, a grammar I could actually like!
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Unguided Om
The other morning, there were three meditators and no one officially to guide us. I put the clock on the floor. When we were done, S. asked, “Shall we end with an om?” And the three of us
ahhooOOOOOOommmed.
It was the first time I’d ever sounded an om without an instructor. That felt pretty good—wild, and exciting.
(16th Street sweater tree)
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Happy ♥ Day!
It’s still VALENTINE'S DAY. Maybe because we’re all so grateful for what we’ve still got, the occasion seems unusually festive this year. I’ve seen men clutching paper cones of flowers, children holding giant red helium balloons, and neon hearts in windows all over the neighborhood. I’ve seen such an unusual number of couples I’m tempted to find them an ark.
I actually like Valentine’s Day, and I’m quite fond of the ♥ symbol. Recently, however, it occurred to me that it doesn’t look a whole lot like a human heart. So where does it come from?
The answer is that nobody knows. There’s some speculation that it’s supposed to look like a woman’s vulva or a cow’s heart, and a more compelling theory that it looks just like the seed of the silphium, a now extinct fennel (related to Queen Anne’s lace) that had a heyday as a Greco-Roman contraceptive.
♥ Ancient silver coin from Cyrene depicting a silphium seed or fruit .
♥ Heart-symbol-vulva-shape hypothesis illustration.
This question actually came up for me while I was sitting in a brief meditation session at the local yoga center, something I try to do two times a week. I used to sit with a man named T., who’s recovering from heart surgery. We rarely talked, but I miss him.
Lately, I sit with whichever of the yoga instructors is teaching the next class. Often this is J. Normally I set my blankets up at a slight angle to hers, which means that I can face her, politely, but also avoid staring at her directly. Ideally, I’ll train my fuzzy gaze on some knot in the floorboard.
The first time I went last week, I unexpectedly wound up sitting with R. I had already settled on my bolsters when she came in. She chose a spot only about eight feet away and faced me head-on! I took a fragmentary look, observed her relaxed and upright posture, noted that she looked both beautiful and blissful, and became completely unnerved.
I decided that this might be the day to meditate with my eyes closed.
It was a lovely morning, a harbinger of spring. Periodically I felt the brightening of the sun through my eyelids. The birds had resumed their chatter in the trees outside. The truck traffic seemed uncommonly low.
I’m usually quite aware of sounds when I sit. For much of the winter, the hissing of the radiators had reminded me of the swelling sounds of danger on a movie soundtrack.
I once heard a meditation instructor explain that you had to give the monkeys in your mind something to do—something other thinking out loud inside your head, that is. Ever since, I’d been stationing them at the sides of my skull, just inside my eardrums. Their job was to listen.
As the house sparrows chirped to the monkey in my right ear, it suddenly dawned on me that all my attention was going to my right or my left. Maybe some days it wandered to the source of a pain, which was likely to be in my back or my shoulders or my legs. It was anywhere but out front.
And that was more or less deliberate, I realized. Lately I’ve been thinking I have no idea what people mean when they talk about the energy among people, and maybe this is an example of why. I might as well have erected a big glass pane between me and my opposite number.
And so entered the heart. Eyes closed, I decided I might as well try to acknowledge that R. was there. I could relax my chest muscles and try to imagine that if there were to be a sense of awareness between us, I wouldn’t block it out. I might even send her a good thought.Which I did, from the shelter of my closed eyes. My chest began to feel warm and somehow unsettled, as if my flesh were a pot that was being gently stirred. I experienced a rising, swelling sensation: something fierce and vulnerable, pushing outward.
So that was it. When I visualized that feeling that was pushing from somewhere behind my sternum, behind my breasts, and tapering down to my belly, it seemed to be shaped like a big heart—“a Valentine’s heart,” one of the monkeys observed. “Yeah, but that doesn’t look like heart at all,” said the other.
“Thinking,” my meditating self chimed in. “Thinking about hearts.”
Soon enough, the session ended. R. unfolded herself and stretched. “That was really pleasant,” she said. “It barely felt like 45 minutes at all.”
It hadn't hurt me, either.
Intrigued, I tried my opening-the-chest experiment again the next morning, this time with J. It was another pretty day. We often exchange thanks as we finish, but this time she added, “That was nice.”
“I thought so, too,” I said.
“I don’t know why--maybe because there weren’t any jackhammers outside,” J. said.
Who knows?
Happy Valentine's Day.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Walt, Dizzily
Tonight I went to the yoga center again. We were doing a book group on the Bhagavad Gita. Here's a sample of Sri Krishna, an incarnation of God, from the Eknath Easwaran translation:
I pervade the entire universe in my unmanifested form. All creatures find their existence in me, but I am not limited by them. Behold my divine mystery!
The room is full. There are probably 20 or more people there. We are spread out in a circle on a polished wooden floor. Mostly women, a few men, scattered about on blankets and bolsters. We begin with a solemn period of meditation, everyone oriented toward the two flickering candles in glass canisters at the the center of the room. As soon as we break off the meditation, some sock-clad person making a beeline toward the snacks will indavertently send the candles skittering across the floor. After filling our hands, our napkins, our plates, we will discuss.
Ardent practitioners, concerned parents, seekers, lapsed Catholics, Capricorns and Scorpios and a handful of us on the cusp on Gemini, who knows what else is going on in the room. There's a woman inspired by the Gita to consider a study of comparative religion and a man who chokes back a sob as he reads a passage about spiritual wisdom. The home-baked cookies circulate, and the box of chocolates, and the gourmet popcorn and those vinegar potato chips. Offerings spread out on paper napkins. Seltzer, juices, Honest tea, wine in plastic cups.
I don't actually know what anyone in this room is after. I myself have resolved never to aspire to enlightenment. At moments like this, when Oneness (the Unmanifest) is in the air--these seem to be exactly the moments when I find myself surging in love with this world and all its grief and particularity. When it's all over, someone suggests that in the future we could try reading other kinds of poets, like maybe Whitman. "That's a crazy idea," announces a woman rolling on her back in some kind of upturned-beetle pose, somehow without causing offense. I think about Whitman on the way home. It's a crisp night with stars. You could eat the air. There's only one line I know: "I contain multitudes!" This reminds me of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and Leaves of Grass.
I pervade the entire universe in my unmanifested form. All creatures find their existence in me, but I am not limited by them. Behold my divine mystery!
The room is full. There are probably 20 or more people there. We are spread out in a circle on a polished wooden floor. Mostly women, a few men, scattered about on blankets and bolsters. We begin with a solemn period of meditation, everyone oriented toward the two flickering candles in glass canisters at the the center of the room. As soon as we break off the meditation, some sock-clad person making a beeline toward the snacks will indavertently send the candles skittering across the floor. After filling our hands, our napkins, our plates, we will discuss.
Ardent practitioners, concerned parents, seekers, lapsed Catholics, Capricorns and Scorpios and a handful of us on the cusp on Gemini, who knows what else is going on in the room. There's a woman inspired by the Gita to consider a study of comparative religion and a man who chokes back a sob as he reads a passage about spiritual wisdom. The home-baked cookies circulate, and the box of chocolates, and the gourmet popcorn and those vinegar potato chips. Offerings spread out on paper napkins. Seltzer, juices, Honest tea, wine in plastic cups.
I don't actually know what anyone in this room is after. I myself have resolved never to aspire to enlightenment. At moments like this, when Oneness (the Unmanifest) is in the air--these seem to be exactly the moments when I find myself surging in love with this world and all its grief and particularity. When it's all over, someone suggests that in the future we could try reading other kinds of poets, like maybe Whitman. "That's a crazy idea," announces a woman rolling on her back in some kind of upturned-beetle pose, somehow without causing offense. I think about Whitman on the way home. It's a crisp night with stars. You could eat the air. There's only one line I know: "I contain multitudes!" This reminds me of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and Leaves of Grass.
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt; | |
| Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd; | |
| Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d; | 25 |
| Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried; | |
| Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stem’d pipes of steamboats, I look’d. | |
| I too many and many a time cross’d the river, the sun half an hour high; | |
| I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls—I saw them high in the air, floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, | |
| I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow, | 30 |
| I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging toward the south. That's Crossing Brookyn Ferry, snatched from Wikipedia. I swear that's the only spiritual experience I ever have--walking over the bridge (which he didn't walk; that was a ferry!) and feeling him and all his people and seeing what I do the way I do because he told me to. I love the way he piles up the specifics. All that he saw that is no longer there is there because he reminds me it once was; all that I see I know he would feel; the masts are gone and the seagulls remain, but who knows where even they will be a hundred years hence. My heart bursts every time. |
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Day One
You could call this notes from a failing perfectionist. Or: notes from someone who after years of agonized questioning has observed that one person's perfect is another person's version of being a total jerk. At any moment, who is to say?
A week ago I chatted with an acquaintance who'd gone to Antarctica. The whole thing was thrilling and she was glad she'd gone and at the same time horrified. She said it was so familiar and at the same time so unfamiliar. She said that when you walk out in to the snow you sink in up to your shins, or deeper. And the holes don't go away. And this is a problem for the penguins: they are falling into our footprints.
This, you might say, is one more good reason for not starting a blog. The horror of footprints.
And then yesterday I went to a yoga class. A man had just stepped in off the street to ask for a class schedule. He was brand new to yoga. "There is a class right now," said the director. "Are you coming to that?" He said yes. "Now, that is a lesson for me!" she said. "Just jump right in!" She introduced him by name, and he seemed to do very well, because from whatever position I had flopped into on the floor, I could hear her calling, laughing: "Very good, hey-you-off-the-street!"
Or words to that effect. It's the blogosphere, you don't have to get anything exactly right, isn't that so?
So here we go.
A week ago I chatted with an acquaintance who'd gone to Antarctica. The whole thing was thrilling and she was glad she'd gone and at the same time horrified. She said it was so familiar and at the same time so unfamiliar. She said that when you walk out in to the snow you sink in up to your shins, or deeper. And the holes don't go away. And this is a problem for the penguins: they are falling into our footprints.
This, you might say, is one more good reason for not starting a blog. The horror of footprints.
And then yesterday I went to a yoga class. A man had just stepped in off the street to ask for a class schedule. He was brand new to yoga. "There is a class right now," said the director. "Are you coming to that?" He said yes. "Now, that is a lesson for me!" she said. "Just jump right in!" She introduced him by name, and he seemed to do very well, because from whatever position I had flopped into on the floor, I could hear her calling, laughing: "Very good, hey-you-off-the-street!"
Or words to that effect. It's the blogosphere, you don't have to get anything exactly right, isn't that so?
So here we go.
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