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.

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.

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.”

O, joy!

Today, P., the yoga instructor, advised us to breathe like jellyfish!

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.

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.

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.