The best time to practice is right now

Yoga is the perfect opportunity to be curious about who you are. ~ Jason Crandell

For those wounded by civilization, yoga is the most healing salve. ~ Terri Guillemets

The deeper I go into practice, the more I become aware of how complicated I make life sometimes. There are all these layers of the mind that peel away. It reminds me of the way the experience of the asanas changes on a physical level. For the first few dozen or even hundred downward facing dogs, the experience is pretty much holding your breath and looking forward to coming down. And then suddenly, one day you actually feel what it means to inwardly rotate the thighs and spread the hip bones and all this space opens up in the pose. And it will change your world, that feeling. See if it doesn't.

Like this, too, in the mind. At first, learning to breathe through and experience difficult emotions without acting, I thought I was learning to deal with the present. (Side note: when I say that it sounds as if I have already learned to breathe through and experience difficult emotions without acting. I can assure you, I haven't. That's why they call it "practice.") Anyhow, I'm starting to realize that a strong emotional reaction is almost never about the present. It's a sure sign that I'm holding a past wound up as evidence in a present situation - probably holding it against someone who had nothing to do with the original pain in the first place. Take a close look and see if this isn't true. And it will change your world, that understanding.

I started this post out thinking that I was going to write about breathing through reactions in the present and then boom! Insight. Look out - you never know when it's coming. Originally, I was going to explore my reaction to a harassing comment left here, but now I see I don't have to. That comment, in the present, means nothing. Who knows why people do these things? His problem is not my problem. The pain and uncertainty and anger it triggered - that's old stuff, really old stuff. And the illusion of ego. Right now, in the present, there's just clarity and a sense of compassion.

The content of this post may have evolved, but I can keep the title because the time is now. Peel away all those layers of history, and inside is the jewel. It is all these illusions that are complicated. The present is incredibly simple. I wonder what is behind the next layer?

Accepting limitations

“Through practice, I’ve come to see that the deepest source of my misery is not wanting things to be the way they are. Not wanting myself to be the way I am. Not wanting the world to be the way it is. Not wanting others to be the way they are. Whenever I’m suffering, I find this ‘war with reality’ to be at the heart of the problem.” -- Stephen Cope

“These days, my practice is teaching me to embrace imperfection: to have compassion for all the ways things haven’t turned out as I planned, in my body and in my life – for the ways things keep falling apart, and failing, and breaking down. It’s less about fixing things, and more about learning to be present for exactly what is.” --Anne Cushman

Once again, I've been gone from this blog for a while. I've been practicing out in the world. I've been writing, but not about yoga. I've been going down different avenues, most of them very internal. Once again, I feel like it's time to come back here and see what there is to be said, explicitly, about practice.

Since the New Year, I've been practicing meditation and pranayama more intensely. I've been reading a lot about yoga philosophy and mindfulness in daily life, and my asana practice has dropped to the side. I've also started training for a marathon. As I've been increasing my weekly mileage, I've been exploring the meditative possibilities of running - how it feels to connect with the body and the breath, to use yogic practices like sending the breath into areas of discomfort and using mindfulness with mental habits such as fear of failure and the desire to give up.

Approximately three weeks ago, I started getting some minor nagging knee pain during runs. It was so negligible that I put it out of my mind and thought I just needed to stretch more and rest my legs. However, on February 22 I completed a 10-mile run and I ended it with severe pain in my knees which worsened over the course of the afternoon and evening. I soon realized that I had a serious overuse injury that was going to require an absolute halt to training until I could move pain free.

I was devastated. I had invested all my identity in my running and had come to rely on it for a sense of purpose and power in my life. At first, I wanted to give up on everything and crawl into bed and never come out. But then all the meditation practice I've been doing kicked in. Instead, I was determined to listen to my body until it spoke to me. I gathered as much information as I could about my condition, and I asked my knees what they needed. At first, they just wanted me to stop moving, but then as the pain subsided, I began to be able to identify specific areas of difficulty and how they were affected by the way I moved my body.

I held back. I watched all my thoughts and practiced letting them go, whatever came up: a sense of failure, a sense of desperation, a competitive urge. When my knees asked for it, I got on my yoga mat and discovered that my body knew which areas to work and stretch to give my knees the freedom of movement they required. Yesterday, I woke up and my body shouted, "RUN ME!" At first, I doubted it, but when I took to the road, I discovered that I could run 4 miles without pain. Not only that, but I was present in every step. I felt the impact of each movement; I felt the chain of energy of each impact with the road.

As soon as we are formed, our body begins to be affected by being in the world. Like the tree trunk in the picture accompanying this post, we are worn by the business of living and by our contact with those living around us. We are not perfect, we are not invincible, we cannot do whatever we want. We cannot take on everything. We like to think we can, but our bodies let us know... and if we don't listen, they shout louder. If we fight it, if we ignore our bodies, we end up in pain. What I have learned these past two weeks is that the pain is not here to punish us. The pain is our teacher. It is here to remind us to listen and to find what it is that we need. Come back into your body. Ask it what it has to tell you today. And then listen. Whether you like what it has to say or not.

Backsliding

"Disease, dullness, doubt, carelessness, laziness, sensuality, false perception, failure to reach firm ground and slipping from the ground gained - these distractions of the mind-stuff are the obstacles. Accompaniments to the mental distractions include distress, despair, trembling of the body and disturbed breathing."

-- Patanjali, Yoga Sutras I:30-31

Even once you have begun to practice yoga and have experienced the amazing effects it can have on your life, there is still the tendency to backslide. Patanjali was well aware of this problem and acknowledged it in the Yoga Sutras. In the past month or so, I have come up against most, if not all, of the mental distractions he described... and their negative effects. When the backsliding happens, I tend to fall off the wagon hard: eating badly, skipping asana practice and other physical exercise, indulging stress and anxiety, and lashing out. I guess if it happened to Patanjali, it can happen to anyone!

To the degree to which practicing yoga regularly can transform your experience of daily life, not doing yoga is like a slow poison, eating away at your happiness. Suddenly you feel dull and lifeless: mentally, emotionally and physically. Luckily, there are signs which wake us up and remind us to practice: pain, despair, distress in the body and breathing. Even more luckily, the ancient yogis determined a number of techniques that can help us get back on track. Through meditation, pranayama, and asana practice, we can return our mind to a calm state. Patanjali suggests that wee can also "cultivate attitudes of friendliness toward the happy, compassion toward the unhappy, delight toward the virtuous and disregard toward the wicked."

Patricia Walden and Jarvis Chen suggest that one can use "tapas (discipline), svadhyaya (self-study), and Isvara-pranidhana (surrender) to overcome the obstacles." They also quote the Bhagavad Gita, which says that "No effort on the path is ever lost." This is one of the most comforting aspects of yoga for me. You can fall off the wagon a few times - everyone does - but you always have a choice to practice in the present moment, and it is your choice right now that matters. Sometimes the real world is not that forgiving. You can make mistakes in the real world that can alienate others or close doors forever. But the practice of yoga is forgiving because what counts is your willingness to continue to practice right now.

Sometimes when you can't see the road clearly it is easy to lose your way, or to take a turn too quickly and end up in a ditch. But maybe, just maybe, the next time you see the "blind drive" sign, you might remember and slow down a little, or stop the car and get out and walk. You can't undo the last slide, but you can hope that your previous effort was not lost. It will be easier to get back on track again, and to avoid pitfalls in the future, because you practiced.

Satya - To tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about satya, or truthfulness, one of the five yamas (ethical restraints) proposed by Patanjali. The concept is deceptively simply - be truthful in your words and actions. But in reality, it is an extremely difficult precept to follow.

For one thing, satya comes into direct conflict with the restraint of ahimsa, or non-harming. The use of the word ahimsa is an interesting one. Yoga does not simply ask us to be kind to others, it asks us specifically to restrain from causing harm. That is a much broader and more difficult practice. When it comes to satya, the trick is to tell the truth without causing harm to others - or to ourselves. Another challenge is that satya includes not only our words, but also our actions. We must always act in such a way that our behavior expresses our true thoughts and intentions (and don't forget ahimsa.)

Perhaps the most difficult thing of all is the fact that so many of us spend so much time being dishonest with ourselves. It's very difficult to know if your words and actions are not truthful when you are not even consciously aware of your own truth, what you really think and feel in any given situation. For many of us, the fictional stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we want have become such an integral part of the fabric of our being that we are unable to recognize the lies we tell on a daily basis. The tricky thing about truthfulness is that it refers to the absolute truth - so the embroidery and exaggeration that we may be used to using, all of the fish stories and half-truths and white lies that have become second nature to us - these too are not satya. Just because something closely resembles the truth does not make it true.

I admit it - lies perform some very important functions in my daily existence: creating my desired fictional sense of self, preventing hurt to myself and others, avoiding uncomfortable situations, etc. The thought of trying to unlearn these behaviors is pretty daunting. I'm relatively determined - but still, overwhelmed. For one thing, speaking the truth might mean that all of those lovely defense mechanisms would go away, leaving me vulnerable to those classic demons What Might Happen, and worse, What People Might Think. I'm a pretty private person (which you might not know from this blog, but blogging is not real life), and I'm also a little bit introverted by nature so the thought of speaking my truth on a daily basis is way up there with skydiving on my list of terrors. (I'm also pretty afraid of heights.) But I've done a pretty good job of doing things that terrify me, and I'm not totally ruling skydiving out of my future either. Speaking the truth to strangers is a pretty good practice.

An interesting system of speaking truthfully to others without causing harm is Marshall Rosenberg's Non-Violent Communication (NVC), which I think I've mentioned here before. I've dabbled in NVC and it's one of those practices that I believe in but have trouble implementing regularly in life. For one thing, it goes against our entire ingrained culture of expected communications. The idea is basically founded on the expression of universal and specific emotions which result from universal needs. It's a very non-judgmental way of communicating the truth without blame.

The tricky thing is that when the processes of lying, exaggeration, embellishment, and unauthentic action are ingrained, how do you become mindful of the process in order to stop it? I believe that some yogis will even take a vow of silence in order to facilitate the process of awareness of the thought patterns that lead to dishonest and/or harmful speech. Unfortunately my work will not exactly allow me to do this. I'm trying to just work with awareness, but it's a long slow process. I don't exactly have or easy answers on this one.

I'm half-Japanese and have a little Japanese cultural influence, and I think this is something that causes me particular challenges in this area. So much of Japanese culture is based on creating smooth and harmonious social relationships, and communication patterns tend to be very indirect. I've noticed that if someone asks me the right questions, I'm often able to speak truthfully, but if not, I have a tendency to leave the truth implied or completely unsaid. I've been accused of expecting others to read my mind, and there's probably some truth in that. I also sometimes act the way others want or expect me to, rather than in a truthful way. I've noticed that the result can be that my needs are not met in my relationships with the other people in my life or that the relationships are not completely authentic - and sometimes things build up to a point where the truth comes out suddenly in an unpleasant and hurtful way. I don't intend to mislead anyone ever; very often I am not even aware of the truth myself.

So this all sounds really awful - but it's honest. And don't get me wrong - I'm not beating myself up over it. I think it's a pretty common experience - and great practice. Adopting the practice of satya is like unravelling an enormous knot. Something that takes patience - but which I happen to be pretty good at. We'll see if the skill transfers. Like everything else, satya comes back to mindfulness, back to the breath, to the present moment, to tapping into instinct and figuring out what the truth even is.

Like living itself, satya takes a big dose of courage. I'm giving myself a big pat on the back for even trying. Maybe one of these lifetimes, I'll get it right.

Set Yourself Free: Letting Go of Perfection

"It is good to remember that one of our goals in life is to not be perfect. We often lose track of this aspiration. When we make mistakes, we think that we are failing or not measuring up. But if life is about experimenting, experiencing, and learning, then to be imperfect is a prerequisite. Life becomes much more interesting once we let go of our quest for perfection and aspire for imperfection instead.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t strive to be our best. We simply accept that there is no such thing as perfection—especially in life. All living things are in a ceaseless state of movement. Even as you read this, your hair is growing, your cells are dying and being reborn, and your blood is moving through your veins. Your life changes more than it stays the same. Perfection may happen in a moment, but it will not last because it is an impermanent state. Trying to hold on to perfection or forcing it to happen causes frustration and unhappiness.

In spite of this, many of us are in the habit of trying to be perfect. One way to nudge ourselves out of this tendency is to look at our lives and notice that no one is judging us to see whether or not we are perfect. Sometimes, perfectionism is a holdover from our childhood—an ideal we inherited from a demanding parent. We are adults now, and we can choose to let go of the need to perform for someone else’s approval. Similarly, we can choose to experience the universe as a loving place where we are free to be imperfect. Once we realize this, we can begin to take ourselves less seriously and have more fun. Imperfection is inherent to being human. By embracing your imperfections, you embrace yourself."

From http://www.dailyom.com/articles/2009/17597.html - March 11, 2009