Embodied

If you've ever watched a baby who's just discovered her fingers you'll know right off what I'm talking about. Have you seen the complete, absorbed attention with which she stares at these fascinating appendages while making the neural connections needed to move them? She's puppet and puppeteer in one. This is yoga. This is life.

I will not apologize for the fact that yoga to me is a physical practice because the split between physical and whatever we mean by spiritual is an artificial one in my mind. In my stumbling, bumbling way I tried to convey this to the yogis who showed up on their mats this morning for Sunday practice. When I practice yoga if I can come anywhere near to that beginner mind--the mind of an infant so curious about this thing she'll later label and call a body--then it's a good day. I asked my students and myself to hold each posture with some curiosity. What is this thing we're moving and bending? What happens when I draw my navel in here. Ohh, interesting. Suppose I lengthen my neck here. Ahh, OK. And we start to make connections that are as valuable off the mat as they are on. Let's say I find myself in an interpersonal conflict. Things feel tense. Fight or flight reflexes kick in. What will happen if I consciously breathe here for a few seconds? Oh, my enemy is a human being, too? Interesting.

We are our bodies and I think that often in our quest for something transcendent we ignore this at our own peril. We become these disembodied heads thinking perhaps elevated thoughts but the real stuff is happening in the world of bodies, things, atoms, energies, whatever.  We discuss an idea like compassion as though simply saying it and feeling warm about it will magically make it happen. This is like trying to place a Band-aid of kindness on a gushing wound of suffering. What happens when we talk and attempt to summon compassion may be something, but it is also something physical. You feel excited. You feel motivated. This is a chemical process taking place in your brain, in your adrenal glands, or in places I don't even know. This is not to say it is only or merely atoms moving in response to a stimulus--or that if it is this means it is any less miraculous, but ultimately the heart of the matter is matter. Maybe it's more--but the more is mystery

I watched a movie called "The Age of Stupid" on Netflix the other night. Not unbiased, of course, but then what is? The protagonist played by Pete Postlethwaite is a man of a future after the planet has been devastated by the effects of global warming. Humans are pretty much on their way out if not extinct. He is preparing a video signal to send out to the universe and recaps how we in these decades know what's happening and do nothing to change. I'm reminded of several things here. First, Leonard Cohen's "Everybody knows":

 Everybody knows the boat is leaking,

Everybody knows the captain lied.

And then a clip of Jiddu Krishnamurti I once watched in which he asks, "Why don't you change?" Well, why don't we? Yeah, the answer to that question is complex, but I think one avenue to a conclusion is be be physical--be in this body, in this world right now. There's nothing better to bring you back to the present moment where your actions happen anyway than to breathe and be this body, see what you see and hear what you hear. Really look at another person and let go of your ideas about him. Be here now. What is this? Hmm. Interesting. Postlethwaite asks at the end of the movie why we did nothing to save ourselves. "Is it because we didn't think we were worth saving?"  There may be something to that. There is suffering. We might be the cause of much of that. And yet, there is that baby rapt with attention on her fingertips. Wow! What is this animated matter? What a miracle.

Let it Be

Brynn is downstairs thumbing out a rhythm on the bongos I bought Chris for Christmas last year. She's got a pretty good sense of rhythm. Argus licks his long fur as Odo slinks downstairs toward the litterbox. Now Brynn has moved to her keyboard. I have stolen a few minutes thanks to a teacher class that ended early, happy knowing a studio yoga session--my own practice, not a class I will teach--is a mere 34 minutes away. Ideas are coming together for the three classes I will teach this weekend. Having a tight schedule was nothing after all. Plans changed as plans do. Some stayed the same. Conflicts and nicer moments came and went. Hallelujah!

Satya

It's 7:00 on a Sunday evening before a loaded week. I had this idea of writing a really great post about the way we are embodied--about being physical beings. That's going to have to wait. It will all have to wait because I have papers to grade, scores to enter, articles to read, and a yoga sequence to put together for my fitness center group tomorrow night. I have this idea that I will take a spinning class at 5 AM, come home, shower, go to work, come home, take my daughter to her volunteer job at a local theater, attend a zumba class with my other daughter, teach the fitness center yoga class, come home, finish up my reading for my reading endorsement class and manage to eat, drink and sleep somewhere in all that. Fortunately all of this is a pleasure, though perhaps in smaller doses. Could be I have a mouthful of more than I can chew. On the other hand, what else would I do? TV doesn't sound that appealing. I have had to give up a few loves this year in order to manage. My book group is out. I doubt I'll make it to many Jung Society lectures. As the time approaches, too, I'm sure some of those plans will change. My body my demand a rest or my kids may need my time in a way not anticipated.

Rolf Gates writes that satya on a yoga mat translates as humility, not to be confused with humiliation. He states, "it is being honest. It is being right sized." In my yoga class this morning I tried to convey this sense of satya by suggesting that yoga is an open-ended question and being honest is looking at whatever answer comes up without judgment or a preconditioned response. Being right sized, yes. I think this is far cooler than being grandiose.

I had the chance this morning to lead a small group through some yoga asanas. More than half of them were more accomplished yogis than I am, which scared me. I tried to infuse some talk about satya into the sequences and it occurred to me to just be honest with myself and them as well. There wasn't much I could teach anybody there, but I could enjoy talking them through some sequences and encouraging them to hold an asana longer than they might usually do and to stay with it. Their faces were beautiful, their bodies amazing in variety and form.  In the end it was just a pleasure to be there, nothing more or less.

So to be honest with you, humble, even, I'm just this human being at this point in time slogging through her days, mixing up left from right and noticing too late the perplexed look on the faces of her yoga students, who scratches her head in wonderment at the 2nd grader who stumbles over words in her guided reading text, who tries to cram too much curriculum into a day, forgets to charge her cell phone, who needs to pick those beets in the garden, clean the fridge, make sure she has clean underwear for the week, sneaks off to write a blog entry when she should be doing this, that, and some more. I'm also this human being who finds a second in the chaos to notice a look of focus on a yoga student's face, or the way someone's leg shakes in ardha chandrasana and he holds it anyway, the way her daughter's eyes look bluer with her new hair color or to appreciate her family for the people they are and their ability to return the favor. I'm a human being who still manages a five-second glance of wonder at an amazing sky of stars before heading off to one more thing on an impossibly long list of things to do.

Sex, Sin, and Zen

Four Stars--a wickedly funny look at a profound subject, and you wouldn't want it any other way. This is Zen that doesn't stink of Zen too much. Funny and human, Warner still conveys an authentic sense of what Zen is as he looks openly at "everything from celibacy to polyamory." Some chapters may make you squirm--deal with it! The spectrum of human sexuality is broad and this honest look at what is is capable of promoting more healing than our current trend to repress or hide from anything that makes us uncomfortable ever will. Warner's compassion for real, flesh and blood human beings is the true subtext. I am more likely to consider a zazen practice after reading his books than any that promise a sure path to  enlightenment.

Scratching the Devotional Itch

These first few weeks of teaching have thrown me off my yoga game. I've made it to a studio class a handful of times, but sparsely enough that a few of the regulars asked where I'd been. I've even been on hiatus from yoga instructing because the center where I teach closes down just before Labor Day for annual cleaning and repair. I have felt the lack. Hatha yoga is a physical practice. I'm not embarrassed to admit that often it is primarily a physical practice for me. Coming from someone who largely ignored her body for the first 40 years of life, getting physical equaled getting "spiritual" or tuning in to my life. It taught me through the asanas not to run away from life through daydreams or over-analysis. I'm still analytical, but not solely so. I have a body and it works. This is why I can feel satisfied in a class that plays Led Zeppelin or Rage Against the Machine just as easily as one with Om Nama Shivaya playing in the background. I've even been skeptical of some classes that need to depend on the ancient sounding Indian music to give it some sort of legitimacy. I may have fooled myself a little into thinking that was all. This afternoon I returned to the studio looking for mostly a good sweat. However, I entered the room and some of that Indian music was playing and my heart did a little flip of excitement. I was in for yoga and then some. Aha! My little ghost cat laughed. You do have a bhakti side after all. All right, already. Sue me. I haven't experienced samadhi or anything, but yes, there is that simple joy of being/moving/breathing and the music brought it on.  It's just hard to talk or write about without sounding stupid. Nevertheless, yoga satisfies my itch for devotion.

I was worried, though, that yoga, my spurned lover, would be withholding. My body might creak, my bhandas might not do their thing. Well, not tonight. Yoga welcomed me back with sweet warmth and ease of movement. My bhandas were happy to see me again and I felt light, present, and alive. Amazing grace, indeed. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Yours for a Song

Friday night I took a trip down the Leonard Cohen Highway on Youtube and encountered "Lover Lover Lover" for the first time even though it was originally recorded in '74 (I was 7), and I've been listening to Cohen now for over 15 years. I really don't know everything there is to know, do I? That fact still surprises me sometimes. But what a song. It's had me spellbound, and I'm almost sick of listening to it now.

Much has already been written about the way Cohen meshes the sacred and the profane in his lyrics--sex with spirit and all. You can see that in the album cover alone shown in this 'Tube clip. In this original recording his young voice is unambiguous, and that archetypal longing--that one where you want a life do-over, where you want back what you've lost, where you want original ecstasy said to be available both in epiphany and in orgasm--rings out loud and painfully clear. Wanting is not having by definition, and it's wanting, not having, that inspires the best in poetry and music. How many ways can you sing the blues?

The song is sublime. Cohen sings the "father's" reply to all this desire:

"I never turned aside," he said,

"I never walked away.

It was you who built the temple,

It was you who covered up my face."

The yearned for has always been here a whisper away. You've been wearing the ruby slippers all along, right? How maddening and perfectly ironic. We create our own suffering. We shield ourselves from the divine face with which we crave union because we can't really live with it day in, day out. This idea also plays out in Cohen's "Night Comes On." Listen:



We have to go back to the world--and that's all right.

In which I discover I'm Buddh-ish

It's not a new discovery, though. I've had Buddhish tendencies all my life, I think. When I was a young Mormon girl I understood resurrection to mean reincarnation. I asked for clarification once, "You mean I could have been born before, then died, then came back as me?" Something like that, and my Sunday School teacher, who either wasn't listening or who did not understand what I was asking said, "Yes." Maybe, "Yep," but for awhile that confirmed it for me. Now I'm a gal with the tendencies who does not believe in resurrection nor reincarnation necessarily, but feel drawn to a life that includes paying attention and living with what is.

What is isn't always that exciting. Sometimes it's embarrassing and awkward. There are those ghost cats I wrote about last week and occasional moments of recognition that I'm not the "good" girl I thought I was. Being human is a different experience than the story goes. On Facebook last week I made a funny post about a quote attributed to the Buddha himself. I wrote that I doubted there ever was such a fellow but that this quote agreed with my reason and common sense. But there are writings about Gautama, just as there are about Jesus, and perhaps there was a human being who went through these experiences that led to the birth of Buddhism. This week I picked up Brad Warner's latest Sex, Sin and Zen at the bookstore. I manage to squeak in about five minutes of reading a night before collapsing in ultimate fatigue.  In the first few chapters he quotes one of those writings, the Kalama Sutra, and, synchronicity for me, uses a very similar selection to the quote I posted on Facebook:

Rely not on the teacher, but on the teaching. Rely not on the words of the teaching, but on the spirit of the words.  Rely not on theory, but on experience. Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.

I won't call myself a Buddhist or any "ist," but this quote does sum it up for me. The incohate sense of the wisdom behind these words has been there from my high school days when I first doubted the religion in which I'd been immersed.  This week a series of coincidences and trains of thought have brought on a new sort of Buddhish epiphany: That of the Middle Way. Enough that I'm considering changing the heading to this blog. I'm referring to "looking for clarity and simplicity through..." That is to say, I'd already chosen what I thought would bring about clarity and simplicity (yoga, diet, sustainability) in theory. Would it hold out in practice? What if it didn't? Am I big enough to lose some face over it?

Early this summer I attempted a switch to a "pure" diet of raw, whole foods. I think this was an almost religious move on my part--a sense that I was not pure or whole and needed to get there. We see that a lot in the idealist, spiritual side of things. It's the Adam and Eve syndrome. We're fallen, filthy, etcetera, etcetera. I did feel good in one sense. I was at a good body weight. My yoga was lighter and more effortless. For awhile. But it threw me out of balance in other ways. Weight crept back on when I ate too many avocados or nuts. It wasn't the answer to all that ailed me. I still got irritable, still entangled myself in desire. In short, I was no more pure than six years ago when I ate anything and it showed. Warner talks about the pendulum swing in traditional philosophy/religion between materialism and spirituality. You can worship the body and neglect the mind and you can destroy the body in an effort to find an incredible spiritual high. Neither works for very long and Buddha's recognition of this was the advent of The Middle Way. This hit me like a ton of bricks last night. Enough that I got up and baked some chocolate chip cookies and ate a moderate two of them, enjoyed them, and woke up this morning feeling just fine. I do not believe I am a chocolate chip cookie fiend, nor in danger of becoming one. In fact, I haven't craved another since. Funny, that.

But here's the angle that really sells me on Buddhism, at least the kind that Brad Warner writes about and the kind I've always thought rang true: it is real, not too full of itself, and does not make fancy promises.

Every religion, philosophy, addiction, and any other method for dealing with what life throws at us that I've ever encountered says, "You feel unfulfilled? Okay. Try this. It will fulfill you." Materialism works for a time. But after you buy something the thrill of buying it vanishes, and you want to buy something else. Spirituality can give you a great big high. But there's always a comedown.

Buddhism doesn't promise to fulfill our desires. Instead it says, "You feel unfulfilled? That's okay. That's normal. Everybody feels unfulfilled. You will always feel unfulfilled. There is no problem with feeling unfulfilled. In fact, if you learn to see it the right way, that very lack of fulfillment is the greatest thing you can ever experience." This is the realistic outlook.

So what am I trying to say? Well, I walked into an herb shop today out of curiosity. The woman at the cash register asked what ailed me. When I told her I was generally healthy she said she I was no fun, then, and she wouldn't be able to help me out much. I bought a book on cooking with stevia and we chatted a bit about all the health food modalities out there. She said in her 20 years in the business she's seen that the happiest people are those who are flexible in their approach. Those who form rigid identities around being raw foodists or vegans or whatever have the more difficult go at well being. Once again, coming from the lips of one of many buddhas out there, "The Middle Way."

I'll be perfectly honest with you and admit that I don't always know what the middle way is. I don't know if I'm latching on to this in the hope it will fulfill my desires. I enjoy the idea that it makes me a little less holier than thou. I'm not about to join any sect, though I do feel inclined to try a little more sitting practice and look a little closer at the sitting I do in yoga. I can let myself feel unfulfilled without rushing to try to plug the hole and just see what that's like. I can nod at the desires and longings that bubble to the surface and let them be what they are. It's worth a try. I'll let you know how it goes.