Non-attachment or advancing vs simplicity

Tags

achievement, advancing, Awareness, bakasana, Injuries, progression, Road to Nowhere, Talking Heads, Yoga, yoga teaching

Just how attached to your yoga practice, or any other practice (like art, writing etc) are you, anyway?

This is the question I’ve been facing up to lately, in the wake of my ongoing physical injuries and ill health.

Right now in my yoga practice I can’t do everything I normally would. I can’t stand on one leg, or even put too much pressure or weight onto my right leg. Heck, I’m still Ms Limpy and dealing with the strain my injury places on the rest of my body. It sucks.

Fortunately for me, the style of yoga I’m doing right now is more concerned with the gathering of energy in the body and working the kinks out of the most compressed parts of our spine, than it is with “stretching” or “getting a good workout”.

That doesn’t mean the practice isn’t a sweaty or intense one, because it can be. There’s a lot of focus on the body’s natural movement without pulling or swinging or using force to get into various poses.

My teacher (who knows what’s going on with my health and injuries) is constantly telling me to do less, be softer, and right now… to do an “appropriate” practice.

This is VERY challenging because my ego still wants to do more!

My teacher insists that I only do with the left side of my body what the right side can do. For the balance. So most of my standing postures are extremely limited and I’m trying to be okay with that and keep my frustrations in check. (There’s a small victory for my ego though, when we get to arm balance poses like bakasana – heehee!)

Of course, this is quite ironic. I often tell my own yoga students things like this:

When doing simpler movements that your mind doesn’t have to concentrate on very much, don’t start doing your shopping list in your head! These poses are just as beneficial as something you find more challenging, but they present an opportunity to learn to keep your mind with your body. So focus on your breathing. Look at your body and what it’s doing. Pay attention to the minutiae. Inhabit yourself.

Teacher, take your own advice, right? Also, the words of my beloved teacher sound off in my mind: Work right where you’re at.

I remember hating that advice the first time I heard it…

So when my ego takes off on one of it’s BUT I WANT TO DO MORE riffs, I chuckle and remind myself to inhabit my body and the work that it’s doing right now, and NOT what it could do before or what it will do once I’m healed.

Of course even reminding myself like this, it’s still hard to let go of wanting MORE because our society worships at the altar of BIGGER. BETTER. NOW.

Just the other day my sister sent a photo of my four year old niece holding up a piece of paper with her name written in squiggly hand-writing. She was all Cheshire-cat grins because she can now write her own name! Actually, she’s been able to do it for a little while now, but has only just recently learned how to write “Y” the correct way up. Hehe.

While I adore the photo and the happiness on my niece’s face, it occurred to me that all of this celebration of achievement just sets us up for feeling terrible when we can’t or don’t achieve something we really want.

It also drew my attention to the fact that we tend to praise growth, advancement, development. We cheer on babies and children for walking and talking etc, we get all proud when people excel at their schooling and we high five ourselves when we can suddenly do a yoga pose we’ve been working on for ages. We deify our sporting heroes and Olympic athletes. Being the best is considered to be all-important, right?

Advancing is what counts – someone wrote this to me recently on Twitter. I beg to differ because really, what is “advancing” anyway?

Don’t get me wrong – enjoying progression isn’t a bad thing, as long as it isn’t our central/only focus. As long as it doesn’t stop us from enjoying other things, like a simpler yoga practice for example.

To expand: for every person who masters a new yoga pose and gets a hit of pride for what they can now do, there’s someone else who finds that years of practice have NOT made them more flexible. And in the face of our celebration of achievement, this can make a person feel like crap.

But what’s important here? Encouraging a student to keep going? Telling them their flexibility will come eventually (which might or might not be true)? Or helping them understand that yoga/life isn’t all about being the bendiest person in the room?

Yoga teachers – what are we saying when we give compliments for doing poses well? Do we balance that with information that can help less physically able students to feel like yoga isn’t a waste of their time?

There’s much to be learned by doing less.

Right now when I stop berating myself for not being able to do everything, I notice that I’m fine-tuning the small details of my practice. Like strengthening my lower back, checking what my knees are up to, and relaxing the tension from my shoulders. I’m learning to concentrate on the small details of moving my body in a way that my “normal” practice – with its focus on “achieving” – often glosses over. My awareness of what I’m doing is increasing.

So chill the heck out everyone (including myself)! Where are we trying to get to with all this achievement, anyway?

We’re on a road to nowhere

Come on inside

Takin’ that ride to nowhere

We’ll take that ride

~ Svasti

Partying on with some integration #reverb10

Tags

#reverb10, Awareness, bhakti, bliss, Body integration, chanting, dirty rotten hippie, heart chakra, kirtan, Mark Whitwell, Meditation, party, Presence, Sanskrit, Shadow Yoga, Vahni, Yoga

Almost at total catch up point now! Today’s been a weird day that involved a grown woman – at least ten years older than me – throwing a fully fledged tantrum in the work place. I can’t tell you how befuddling I find that!

Unfortunately I also find such things a little stressful, and with stress comes my good friend Anxiety. Let me tell you that anxiety blows. And this close to Christmas, it’s the last thing I need!

Anyhoo! On with the #reverbing!!

Party. What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.
~ December 9 prompt

Go ahead, call me a dirty rotten hippie if you must but my idea of an awesome time is a night of kirtan – that’d be a Sanskrit word meaning something like chant/sing the glory/repeating.

And generally kirtan involves repetitive singing/chanting of a stanza or two – usually also in Sanskrit – sung over and over with varying degrees of intensity pretty much til your heart bursts open in joy, sitting on a cushion in a small crowd of like-minded souls, singing and later sipping chai, copping a hug or two and looking forward to the next one.

The end result is usually some form of ooey-gooey loved up state of being, having been hit by the bliss machine and feeling like a million bucks, plastered with the widest smile you’ve been wearing all week.

I know some people aren’t into kirtan because they think chanting the names of gods and goddesses they don’t believe in is somehow hokey. But the beauty of Sanskrit is that the words themselves have a vibrational quality. Simple repetition of these sounds and letting your singing voice come from the heart (not your head or your throat) creates an incredible heart chakra opening. It doesn’t really matter what the words mean!

Earlier this year, one of our group decided to have a kirtan party for her birthday. So a whole bunch of us gathered to eat wholesome pot luck yogic-type food, drink chai and chant for hours on end.

The party was held at a beautiful place called Prana House, upstairs on Sydney Rd on the north side of Melbourne. White drapes are the main decorations there, with incense burning and people wandering around in stocking feet. Everyone in comfy clothes, ready for a boogie!

We always start a kirtan session seated, but once the bhakti takes hold people often want to dance. And that night we certainly did! People of all ages were getting their groove on, including some very cute little munchkin yogis-in-training.

Before the night was out I’d been hugged ferociously, I’d sung my heart out and danced up a frenzy. No one was drunk; no one threw up or passed out. Everyone I met there was pleasant and happy to talk to others – no aloofness or sexual politics. Just a bunch of hippie/yogi types enjoying that expansion of love that kirtan generates…

::

Body integration. This year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn’t mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present?
~ December 12 prompt

Let your mind rest in the practice, says my Shadow Yoga teacher.

I’d heard that one dozens of times before but didn’t really understand what she meant until recent times.

Mark Whitwell talks about the same thing in a different way – he says that asana can be your senior spiritual practice. That there is no meditation, just resting in the present moment.

I’m from a school of training that focuses on asana leading to seated meditation practice, and I still believe in the importance of an extended seated practice (starting at an hour, working up to multiple hours). BUT meditation with the same focus I described above.

As I’ve mentioned before, one of my nemesis-asana in Shadow Yoga is Vahni. I’ve been working it for the last year or so and yet it still causes me grief. These days I pretty much have it down on the left side of my body, but I regularly fall out of it on the right. Generally speaking, I fear it on some level and I know my fear contributes to how well I can do the pose.

In class a few weeks ago, I was most surprised to find myself moving fluidly into Vahni (on the left, of course). I sat back on my left heel with the right leg crossed over the left, and I discovered poise and comfort. But more than that, my mind and body were completely in this pose I’ve found challenging for so long. It was silent and calm. It was glorious!

Right then, a little voice at the back of my mind got all excited and said, Oh WOW! Look, we’re doing it, we’re doing it!!

Listening to my inner dialog caused me to fall out of the pose and land on my butt! I let loose with a hearty chuckle as I hit the floor.

As my Guru often says – the moment when you’re telling yourself that you’ve “got” something is actually when you don’t. There is nothing to attain or point to, we only need to come naturally to that state of pure presence and awareness. It can’t be forced.

It was a great teaching for me as a student and as well as for teaching others. Finding that sort of presence in asana practice (and not just meditation) isn’t easy to grasp. But what it showed me is how often I am NOT in that state while I practice asana, and that’s just a wasted opportunity.

The other thing I realised is the ease with which I can perform asana I’m otherwise a little frightened of in that state – a meditative mind isn’t providing confidence exactly, just a state of openness where anything is possible if you let it be just as it is…

No struggle. No drama.

~Svasti

Jagrat-Svapna

Tags

Awareness, Dreaming, Non-duality, Poem, Poetry, Self, Sleep walking, Wake up

A sea of bodies moving and
Minds are out to lunch
Head in the clouds,
Dreaming dreams eyes open?
Does any part of you register
A world outside your skin-bag?

Your body animates like
Marionettes jerkily shifting
Colliding blindly unseeing
Unfeeling autopilots, all
Cut off from Self
Can’t you see others?

Breathe and connect and know
There is nowhere that is not Self
There is no thing that is not Self

Wake up! I say, wake up!!

~Svasti

Losing, letting go and surrender

Tags

Anger, Awareness, Emotions, Enlightenment, Lost things, Meditation, Road rage, Sadhakas, Spirituality, Surrender

The yogic spiritual path is really no different in a lot of ways to those on any other path. Stuff still happens, life goes on. Its the orientation to what happens and how you meet those things that is the difference.

People are prone to saying: “Oh, but you meditate. You should be so calm, never angry”. Well get this people – that state of calm that everyone imagines all people who meditate should have… isn’t that simple! That “everything’s zen” persona many people like to portray is usually bogus. Unless its not, in rare cases.

When I first jumped on this path some time ago now, I had this idea that having that floaty, happy calm feeling was the goal. That if I can induce that state (easy when around some of the great masters), then I was on the way. 😉

But guess what? This state, this sattvic (balanced) way of being can only be stablised 24/7 after a great deal of journeying – in some cases a life time. But always at least a good 10-20 years worth of practice for most people.

In the mean time, those moments where we experience that state (or something we imagine is that state) are precious and inspire us onwards. But then life gets in the way and we’re back at square 1!!

Not to mention, that sadhakas (spiritual practitioners) can and do undergo depression, sadness, anger and every other human emotion – in the process of purifying their karmas. However, the practices learned are meant to be applied to these states so that each time you do find yourself at square 1, its really not quite the same place. Instead of simply being reactive, there’s a process in place.

Remember this – its the birthright of every human being to eventually achieve enlightenment, even if its not in this lifetime.

And now to discuss “losing, letting go and surrender”. Yes I seem to lose a lot of stuff. My lunch – going from the bakery to my car. $15 in change whilst at a cafe. A button off a new top, a day after I thought I’d lost a button but really hadn’t. A prize of 4 movie tickets that I was awarded at my last job (whilst still in the building), between where the party was held and walking back to my desk. All crazy stuff right?

Over the years I’ve lost quite a few things I’ve had attachment to – great relationships, friends, pieces I jewelery I adored. And I have driven myself nuts fretting over those losses.

Then there’s my recent loss of pretty much everything that represented the “form” of my life. Those material things we all identify with. Kinda different to losing ‘stuff’ but not completely.

Right now as always, my spiritual path seems to be addressing this. Sometimes we just have to learn to relax and let go – surrender. Actually, its a little bit more like “struggle, struggle… surrender”.

OK, so I lost stuff I thought was important, I cared about or just bought/received. Each time I lose stuff now I’m noting my carelessness and how this could have been different if I’d had more considered awareness. And then I let go.

I still wish I hadn’t lost the stuff. But I’m saving myself from going crazy. And in three cases the ‘lost’ stuff I mentioned did eventually turned up. Like my lunch (down a space in my car), my button (inside the front door of my house – how lucky is that?) and my movie ticket prize (honest co-workers). But instead of spending the day thinking about what I’ve lost and draining my energy that way, I’ve thought about the pattern of what has happened. And that if stuff is meant to turn up, it will.

What can I say? It makes my day less stressful. And it makes me more aware of the little actions I take or don’t take.

Then there’s the common experience of struggling with traffic. We all do it. Get impatient, swear, shout, give dirty looks to someone we think is an idiot and shouldn’t be allowed on the road. Hmmm.

I started to notice the more I struggled with traffic, the more I was annoyed or tried to get around someone, the more strung out I was. Now I’m talking a pattern of days, weeks, months. I noticed that whenever I didn’t hold a vested interest in how fast the traffic was moving, things flowed better. Moment-to-moment stress about traffic is counter-productive and takes you away from what is – here I am in a car in traffic. OK. So its still something I have to work at but such a relief when I do just… relax…

Awareness, after all, is not just about meditation. Its about every darn thing in this world.

~Svasti