Busy Body

I want to do all the things.  

Take all the classes, teach all the classes, work all the jobs, make all the art, earn all the money, see all the shows, eat ALL* the food, see all the shows, travel to all the cities and jungles and mountains and countrysides: I can't seem to help myself, I just want it all. I don't accept the idea that I can't have it all, either, that I have to choose. 

(Jeeze, it wasn't that long ago that I wrote a post about contentment, right?  Sounds like there's more growing left for me to do, huh?)

But I can't do it all, I guess. I physically, literally can't do all the things I want to do. I can't go to an ashram in India and a beach in Mexico and a tango club Buenos Aries and work in Chicago all at the same time. I can't work as a yoga teacher and an essayist and an editor and a dancer and devote my life to my spiritual practice as a nun or a minister all at the same time. 

I get excited about opportunities, and I want to say yes to everything there is to do, and I find myself over-committed, and then I have to walk back my involvement. I'm not alone in this, though. Everyone I talk to talks about how busy they all are: with work, with family, especially nowadays with holiday parties. We're all over-committed: because it tastes so good, because it's so much fun, because we said we would, because if we don't we won't get paid, whatever the reason, there's too much of it. 

So I was walking down the street the other day, lamenting the limitations of a 24-hour day, and I began to consider the yamas. The first limb of yoga, I think of these as the social protocols: the yamas instruct us on how to behave toward others. (This is a gross oversimplification, I know; of course it's important we show ourselves ahimsa with positive self-talk, healthy habits, etc. It's just an interesting view of these behaviors in the yoga sutras.) There's a list of them all--nonviolence, honesty, greedlessness, nonstealing--it's not a long list, but its comprehensive. As I walked, the yama that drew my focus was brahmacharya.

Brahmacharya is often translated to celibacy, abstinence, or moderation. In threads of yoga, Matthew Remski translates it as sexual responsibility, and I've heard it literally translated as walking with God. There's all kinds of talk about this particular yama: practicing brahmacharya preserves and generates ojas, the nectar that nourishes us all; sex is an attachment, whether to a person or to an activity, and to abstain from it maintains our purity and we can overcome sex as an obstacle to spiritual knowledge. Sex is a distraction from an aversion, and we should use sex responsibly in order not to avoid dealing with the reality or the struggle of our lives. 

(For the record, I'm not sure I buy this as a line of thinking. I can get on board absolutely with the idea of not engaging in reckless behavior, sexual or otherwise. But I'm not down with the perception of sex as an obstacle to spiritual knowledge wholesale. I think sex can be incredibly healing, and even an act of worship.)

I started to think about the idea of brahmacharya as not giving away too much of your time, your abilities, your energy. If yoga calls us to be good stewards of our life force, maybe we're sexually responsible as well as not overfilling our schedules, or even glutting on favorite TV shows (what are people binge-watching right now? I always pick the show I like, rarely the show that's trending.) 

This practice feels a little revolutionary in my world right now. I make a living giving: my time, my talents, my energy; I don't think I could do work that wasn't generous at its core. Just my nature I guess. So to consider giving less is a little weird to consider. I don't think being mindful of energetic waste means not doing the work I do, of sharing yoga, and creating spaces for health and education; I think it means maybe valuing my time. 

In order to avoid over committing, I have to look closely at my life's values, at what I want my time, energy, work and integrity to stand for. If I value my time, do I really give it away watching lousy reality TV on Bravo , or do I spend it with the people that I love, and don't see often enough? If I need nourishment, does it come from a workout or a healthy, balanced meal, or from a cup of Five Guys french fries? 

It's not easy, but it's important. I love what I do, but I don't want to be one of the people who's always too busy, who says Yes and then has to say No later on, who is double- or triple-booked. I don't quite know how to start. I'm hoping to use some compassion, and patience, and hope that the world can show me that as well.

*I don't really want to eat all the food. Just all the gluten-free, vegan food. Eat. It. All

Paris, Consciousness, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Dharma

My Mister took this pic. We were on our way back from a market called Bio c Bon, and he told me to look Parisian. I'm going for fashionably bored.  

I try to be quiet in digital spaces when bad stuff goes down in our world. I don't always hold a popular opinion, and it's tough to volunteer my voice when the odds are good I might be shouted down. Plus, I often find there are folks out there saying what I'm thinking who said it better than I might have. I'm grateful for them. 

So I'm not sure what's motivating me to speak up now. Maybe it's that I just got back from Paris six months ago, and my memories are still fresh. Maybe I take it really hard that the consequences of Western imperialism are playing out in such a destructive way. Maybe I'm afraid that I, or people I know and love, will have to bear the brunt of others' fear and intolerance. Or maybe I have something unusual to say: you decide.  

The day after news broke about this round of terrorism in Paris, I spent the day in a yoga studio studying with Brenna Geehan. She said a lot, and I wrote some of it down, but one thing I've continued to consider was this:

"As yogis and teachers, it'd be nice if it was part of our duty to change the course that society is on." 

I don't hear a lot of teachers talk like this.  

When we talk about duty, often known as dharma, we talk about something often work- or career- driven, sometimes relationship-driven, and that often seems appealing: my dharma is to manifest love or joy, beauty, peace in my own life, or maybe the lives of others. We don't talk about dharma as a calling to change the direction society is hurtling in presently: my dharma is to dismantle the system of oppression that condones sexual assault on college campuses, or my dharma is to manifest safety for women of color to raise their kids without fearing they'll be annihilated by the police. Brenna's words landed on me in a meaningful way. I wonder, what would it look like for yoga teachers to change the course of families being displaced due to gentrification; to change the course of young people experiencing touch without consent; to change the course of institutionalized racism, or the school-to-prison pipeline, or reproductive justice. 

I believe yoga has a place in politics, and vice versa. We come from a legacy of people on the fringes of society. In the West, yoga doesn't look marginalized anymore; yoga does the marginalizing, or is content to sit quietly and continue nadi shodana, ignoring the suffering around us, and its role in our suffering. If we pretend joy and freedom don't come about by hard work, by spiritual boots on the literal ground, we're missing something.  

I was in Paris recently, and for all of the beauty and romance of the city, I was really put off by the tone of white European xenophobia that was palpable. I had conversation with a friend whose views on Europe and the "refugee crisis" were unsettling at best and racist at worst, and that were rooted in her fear. (I put that phrase in quotes not to belittle it, but because when I hear it, it strikes me the same way the historical phrase "The Question of the Negro" does: a phrase used by the majority culture do describe a minority or marginalized group that they, the majority, can objectify, either conceptually or politically or both. It's a sound byte or a social ill, rather than a swath of humanity that is suffering. I don't like it much.)

Also, in Paris, there were soldiers everywhere. In the tube, at intersections, in the park, square-jawed white men in fatigues carrying AK-47s. I'm not being poetic, I'm being literal.  I watched several of them chase a group of brown-skinned young men out of a park and into a roundabout teeming with oncoming traffic. I was sure someone was going to be hit, but the young men were fast. 

My city hasn't reached the point yet where armed military in the streets is something to take for granted. I hope it never happens. New Yorkers are rolling their eyes at my naïveté maybe; but it didn't make me feel any safer. I felt that all of us were a little less free. 

So what do I do? What's my job as a yogi, as an art maker and a space-holder and a citizen of the world?

Well, I think I stick to my practice: of unpeeling layers and softening my heart, of asking difficult questions and staying present with the answers that lift up. I think I expand my practice, so that I take a chance at being a voice of radical compassion in spaces that don't want it; I practice compassion for people who can't hold what I have to say, and I move deeper toward the reality that the light in my heart is the same light in the shooter's heart is the same light in the victim's heart, and no amount of lead or copper or shrapnel can put it out. 

I make noise. I march. I practice, and create space for others to practice. And I love, fiercely, fully and entirely.  

Group Work

Let me tell you about my friend Adam. Adam is a yogi and a teacher and a painter and writer, and his classes and practice are full of humor and earnestness and joy and power. Adam and I share common teachers, and we practice and teach at the same studio. It has this great option, I've mentioned before, of coming to explore your physical practice on Monday and Friday, and Adam and I are a couple of the regulars.

(A quick note about this: the practice, which the studio calls Tantricago, as an homage to our Tantric roots and our location, is akin to Mysore; anyone in the Ashtanga tradition will recognize the self-initiated, teacher-supported quality of studying and practicing this way. For those of us unfamiliar, it's different than a class: there is no "teacher" in the sense of someone telling you how to move your body through space; people start and end at different times, and come and go when they're ready; every person's practice looks different, from person to person, and from day to day. Quite like a led class, there's the potential for powerful community work to take place.)

Sometimes on Monday mornings, Adam and I are the only two practitioners. We're practice buddies, and although we move quite differently-- he lifts up effortlessly into handstand from virasana, my bind is strong and open in parsvakonasana-- each of us is buffeted and encouraged by the presence and practice of the other. I remember being absent one morning and he joked to me that he'd had the hardest time getting his energy moving, "burning up the kapha", he says. On days when I'm there alone, I find my practice is a little more scattered: I'm in my head worrying, or trying to do all the poses and breathe all the breaths, and I wind up fatigued.

For the record, Adam did not paint this. This is a picture of an abstract landscape I took in a building on campus at DePaul University, called Snarled and Yelping Sea. If you want to see any of Adam's work, look here. 

I mention this not particularly as advertising, though it has been really powerful in a positive way for my practice and my teaching. I mention it because  I think, all kidding aside, that each of us is a help to the other in our practices. When the room begins to fill up with practitioners--other friends, colleagues, mentors, even strangers--the generosity, the growth, the healing blossoms. I feel energized, motivated, and supported when I find I'm not the only one practicing that morning, and when our numbers grow, that feeling grows. Each of us may continue to progress and integrate as individuals, even if we were all alone; but sharing that space with each other makes our work greater, richer, and at least for me, more supportive and even more healing.

Have you ever been in a shared healing space? Like community acupuncture, or a gong bath, or a communal adjustment space, a space where everyone is receiving and processing together? So often in our health communities, the work we do is individual: there's a health care provider, a client, and the often sterile and distancing environments around and between them. But community spaces aren't like this: they rely on the sharing of space and energy and breath between people. I think the idea is that the healing, the liberation, of all of us is interconnected--my healing is in part bound up in yours, as is yours in mine. We must work together so that we can lift one another up. 

Community building is challenging work. It asks you to be open, to be vulnerable, to be available, and to give. When you feel under-resourced, giving doesn't sound good, it sounds like a hassle, or even a threat. But I absolutely believe that building community is a vital part of learning. I had a dear friend and writing teacher who would say that story happens between people; growth is often the same way. It isn't always isolation and solitude that creates opportunity for our growth; as often, it's the times when we rub up against each other, when we learn things that challenge our world view, even when we find ourselves in conflict. In a culture where individualism is prized often at the cost of the collective, creating community feels imperative.

“In yoga, safe space arises as a meeting of the consciousness of a teacher, the consciousness of a student, and the consciousness of an organization. Three supports. It’s rare. And it is needed for a subversive reason–-not to ensure we never feel uncomfortable, but to empower us to go to places of intense internal discomfort without external distraction... teaching is generating safe space. Lesson number one... was waking up to the relationship of trauma and privilege: it is the the charmed who have not been somehow harmed.”

— Angela Jamison

In teaching spaces, in creative spaces, as often as I can, I place a premium on creating a grounded, open, fruitful context for practice and learning. Sometimes that learning is full of joy and laughter, and sometimes it allows us to touch (and to share) parts of ourselves that are dark and unknown and a little scary. It's not easy work. But I can promise you, I will bring the best of myself to whatever we're making together--whether we're growing as teachers, as yogis, as artists, as friends. I believe that your liberation is bound up in mine, and mine in yours.

So let's get to work.

A Powerful Thread

"Negative thought patterns can be altered by embodying what balances them. When thoughts of oppression in any degree are held, acted upon, delegated to another, or colluded with, whether through greed, anger, or delusion, one must realize this pattern leads to shared suffering and ignorance, and work hard to reverse it. "  

---Matthew Remski, threads of yoga

I see you.

I used to know this yogi. He seemed interesting: inquisitive, considerate, funny; he was occasionally too self-deprecating--I could never be sure if all the negative comments he made about himself were rooted in insecurity, were false, or if he was fishing for compliments--but otherwise, he was nice enough, and whenever I was struggling with something, he seemed interested in being a good friend to me.  

Something broke, and my best efforts to fix it only made it worse. Anyone who's been dumped will tell you that no amount of ownership, thoughtful reflection and interrogation, and conflict resolution will help if one person in relationship is unwilling or unable to be open and to communicate. It's funny, this is someone I thought I knew well, a member of my community, whom I still see occasionally; and now, we don't speak to each other. We pretend the other is invisible. Frankly, it feels a bit like junior high. After a few months of really hurting, I can finally look at him, and whenever I do, he turns away. When I enter a room he's in, he turns his back to me. For a while, we were doing this totally fake, "how are you?" politeness--which I hated--but  even that fell away, and now, we might as well be strangers. 

I don't feel great about this. As a student of yoga, as a person of faith, I feel I should be able to do better than this. I know, I can't do it by myself; still, I can take in someone's humanity without making them my brother... can't I?

I'm dismayed by how much trouble we go to in order to pretend that others aren't there. On public transit most of us plug our faces and ears into our phones, and a few holdouts read a book. In the grocery store, we push carts down the aisle and inspect boxes and jars on shelf, trying desperately to ignore the person who's whisking past us, or who needs something we're blocking. Rather than say, "Excuse me," with a smile, we wait, or we slither in and snatch the jar off the shelf. Behind the wheel, we split our attention between the road and the smartphone, and we change lanes without looking. We only see other drivers when we shout at them for screwing with our commute.

I've heard plenty of yogis talk about avoiding watching the news because it's too sad, or because they're too sensitive and it affects their energy. Our practice often serves as a kind of panacea for what we'd rather not see or acknowledge about what's happening in our cities, our suburbs, our shopping malls, community colleges, and our capitol buildings.

I think I read in Yoga and the Quest for the True Self that part of what the practice illuminates in us is an increasing ability to see things as they really are. (For the record, this book is great. It combines yoga philosophy with an exploration of psychology of the true self and the false self; it's really compelling and insightful.) But there's a lot in our world that challenges doing that. Seeing what is real means acknowledging that as much as I want to believe that I'm brave, I know fear is still a challenge in my physical practice, especially in inversions and backbends. (Pincha Mayurasana and Ustrasana are especially challenging postures for me, and mostly on a mental plane.) Much as I want to believe that I'm disciplined enough to go to bed early, the truth is I really enjoy staying up to watch (bad) TV. Beyond all the surface stuff, seeing things as they really are means examining the way I'm reenacting past patterns of injury in my present relationships; it means acknowledging when my ego is what's causing my pain, and how I am contributing to my own suffering; it means sitting with the qualities and the realities of my life that make me really uncomfortable, over which I lose sleep.

I've written before here about what it means not to look away, and asked if it's cruelty or dishonesty to avoid some of the images of bodies being murdered and destroyed that zing around our media consciousness. I can't really pinpoint the place or the moment when avoiding images of violence and murder in the media stops being self-care and starts being avoidance. I wonder, if the practice is about giving us the strength, the bravery, the equanimity to be able to see, to sit with, to tolerate things as they are, then maybe the practice also gives us the strength to make a change when we can't tolerate it. 

Elisa Commerce said once that all people really want is to be seen and known. That's it. The ability for one person to stay present with another, in joy or sorrow or mundanity, and share by their presence or their language, I see you. I'm with you. I bear witness to what you are sharing and experiencing. I know this is true of me. Sometimes I wonder if I can take it. Sometimes I wonder at the fact that so few of us are able to do it.

In an essay by Matthew Remski (an essay that's changed my life, the way I practice and the way I work) he advises practitioners:

“2. Measure your spiritual evolution by your general capacity for social participation.
3. Work toward an equal balance of self- and other-care. If you go to one-hour asana class, donate another hour to the society. ”

— "Modern Yoga Will Not Form a Real Culture Until Every Studio Can Also Double As a Soup Kitchen, and other observations from the threshold between yoga and activism" by Matthew Remski

I love this idea. After all, at a certain point, we expect or hope our practice will bear more fruit than being able to stand on our hands or put our feet behind our head. Natasha Rizopoulos  said in a workshop once that her goal for her students was that yoga would help them in their regular lives: make it easier to carry groceries, climb stairs, run in the yard after their kids. I want yoga to make it easier for me to spend time with relatives that stress me out, or to tolerate sitting in traffic when I'm late. I want yoga to help sustain me in the work I do with other people. I want it to fill up my fountain so that I can keep filling others' cups without feeling depleted and resentful. 

Seems to me the spiritual evolution becomes clearer as I'm better able to acknowledge others.  To meet the eyes of the yogi who ignores me, and hold my gaze steady even when he averts his eyes; to dwell in the presence of those who've hurt me, without feeling like I have to flee whenever they arrive; to smile and nod at the woman picking out mac and cheese for her mouthy kid perched in her cart; or even to acknowledge the one who plunks down beside me on the red line: this is my spiritual practice. My work is to acknowledge the humanity of others, without attachment to how they respond to or treat me, and to stay present with what arises. The world, the city, the block is full of people who challenge us with their presence, and remind us of what we'd like to forget about ourselves. So I'm trying not to ignore you. If you see me walking down the street, and I start to cry each time we meet, well, don't walk on by. Catch my eye and let's take a beat together in a shared human experience.