Broke Down Belt...

Took a beautiful class last night at my beloved Laughing Lotus (that's right, we're back in NYC for the holidays, ah sigh)--which always feels to me like coming home.  Even though the studio is blowing up in popularity and expanding and expanding and expanding, I have just sweated and blissed-out and suffered so many hours on those floors, beneath those colored curtains and spinning fans...as soon as I step into the place I feel remembered.  If not by the people who are there, which changes of course, and becomes less defined the longer I'm away, then at least by the walls and the ceilings...even by the bathrooms, which I spent many a night scrubbing in return for my free yoga classes.

On this trip I have been longing to MOVE in the way I only feel moved in my practice there.  So, as quickly as I could after arriving, I got my butt to class.

And as we began, Ali (one of my most beloved teachers), talked about how valuable the Vinyasa practice is because of it's constant changeability.  (I don't think she used that word...I don't know if that IS even a word, but I like it: changeability.  It reflects what it is.)  She talked about how important a practice it is for life, because of this ceaseless motion--something that is so FELT in a Vinyasa yoga class, and can be much more obscured in life, as we all try to pretend that it isn't the case.  That things are not, as they are, always always changing.  And I felt so moved by this.  Even though it's not a new idea--I've probably heard and even said it, a hundred times over.  But yesterday, having barely just arrived back in New York, back in our apartment in Brooklyn, back to all our books and plants and dishes and things that have just been left here, waiting for us, back to our old neighborhood, which is more new every time we return (new shops, new people, new atmosphere)--I needed to be reminded.  I needed to be reminded not too hold on too tightly, to anything.

I read once that all suffering is caused by stopping the natural flow of the mind.

And I remember when I read this I imagined a factory--some great conveyor belt, carrying on it all my thoughts and feelings and ideas, and that in its natural state, in its prime-functioning state, that conveyor belt just smoothly silently steadily flows.  It just moves by, carrying all of the stuff of my mind.  And everything goes along swimmingly on that big ol' belt, until I see something that seems broken or put together wrong, or maybe just an empty space I feel shouldn't be there.  (I'm the foreman in this factory, I guess, or maybe just the conveyor belt operator...that's still up for debate).  And when that happens, when I see something a-miss, I get all into a fuss and I pull the red lever that stops the movement of the belt, everything comes grinding to a halt, and I rush over and start fiddling or fixing or what-have-you, trying to perfect the products of my little mind-factory.

And of course, of course, this is where the trouble begins.

Things back up.  Production slows.  People get frustrated.  Everything, which was moving along of it's own accord before I got involved, starts to feel...overwhelming.

If I could just leave that belt alone...if I, if we, could just allow it to carry on, just allow even the broken pieces, the gaps, the stuff that's upside down or just badly put-together...if we could just allow that to continue its movement, if we could just trust that our job isn't the perfection of what's ON the belt, but merely that the belt continues to turn...wouldn't things be sweeter?  Couldn't we just admire?  Wouldn't so much more get accomplished?

I am thinking about this so much lately...as there is so much about the holidays that encourages looking forward and back, and I am trying as much as possible to stay steady in the present.  But nothing, I've found, roots me quite as deeply and sweetly in the natural movement of my life as does, well...moving.  Moving as I inhale, and moving as I exhale.  Moving so that my movement is a reflection of my breath. My breath which is ceaseless in it's progress.  So, Shanti-towners...if your conveyor belt feels stuck, if you're trying to glue some broken something back together before you let things move again, maybe...maybe just put it back.  Release your little red lever.  And let your life move.

Things We Have Control Over...and Things We Do Not.

We are back at the gate.  Again.  I don’t know how long it’s been since we first taxied away and looped the runway, and came back again…and I don’t want to know.

Travelling with Paul—it’s easy.  I never worry—about bags, about delays, about extra long security lines.  I know he’s going to be right there to help lift my bag on to the conveyor belt, or hold my jacket while I run to the bathroom, or tease me about my lousy attitude if I haven’t had my coffee/water/wine (depending on the time of day).  I have come to rely on this.  I have come to take this as a given.  So now, when I have to brave the airport alone, I feel unprepared at best…and like a sniveling grump-o, at worst.

And this afternoon, when I left our Brooklyn apartment to come home to our LA apartment (don’t ask), the weight of my over-packed carry-on was like a premonition in my hand.  I did a quick mental calculation of subway steps and train transfers, and walked out into the whipping cold—all by my lonesome.

It’s ridiculous, folks, for me to feel this way.  The number of years I spent navigating all the ups and downs and transfers of my life solo—there is no reason I should feel so besotted with loneliness at the thought of, gasp, carrying my own bag AND purse AND jacket.  The. Whole. Way. Alooooooooone.

Alright, so…I lug my bag down the appropriate number of train steps,  I brave a subway transfer or two, I wait diligently for the appropriate “A” Train to come by, the one that goes to Howard Beach/JFK, and not the one that goes to all the other millions of places the “A” Train goes.  I am assured by a very grumpy woman who is also carrying a suitcase (I wrongly assumed she was also airport-bound) that the train will say on the side that it’s going to JFK.  This does not turn out to be the case.  (And when grumpy-suitcase-woman snuck on to an unmarked C-train without a word…I became deeply suspicious.) However, sneaky suitcase woman or not, I ended up on the right train, somehow…though the whole adventure takes me a lot longer than it should.  And this is it—the beginning of things taking longer than they should.

The train, the other train, the harried trip to the self-check-in kiosks…all of it took longer than it should.  And at the airport, as I’m shoving my scarf into my jacket and fretting about whether my carry-on is going to fit properly into the overhead bins when I get there or whether, like it happened on the way there, some nice old man was going to have to help me jam it into one of the compartments while a dozen aggravated travelers wait behind me…the strap of my purse breaks off my arm.  (This early death may, and I emphasize may, have been hurried along by my trying to jam my laptop into a purse that a laptop for certain does not belong in.)  Regardless of the cause, it breaks…and the guilty laptop and several other things go spilling out onto the floor.

“Oh, your purse broke!” Calls out a woman from across the way who is trying to be helpful.  People are always trying to be helpful like this when you’re in New York. 

Yes, thank you, I said.  I noticed.

As I knelt down, repacking my now-disabled purse, I kept hearing my friend Saskia’s voice chanting in my ear, saying, “the hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”  It’s something that her father used to say to her when she was young, and it stuck for me, just as it must have for her.  I love it.  The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.

Now barely able to keep my personals in check, I go hurrying (yes, I know) down the million mile airport hallways to the security check point where, for some reason, only three of the many security lines are open and traveler traffic is at a standstill.  I look at my watch.  My plane will begin boarding in fifteen minutes.  I can feel my face starting to get flush.

There are very few things that upset me more than being late.  It is a pathological upset for me.  That, and food getting cold before I am able to eat it.  These are two turns of fate that make me feel like I am losing my grip on the handlebars of my life.  Being late makes me crazy.  I used to have serious meltdowns about it.  I have gotten past that, now that 1. I am an adult and can’t really justify having meltdowns about totally meaningless things and 2. I have been late enough times in my life that I now know the world won’t end.  However, the fact of my aloneness and my giant carry-on bag and my broken purse and the idea that I could miss my plane through no fault of my own, was all conspiring to elevate my temperature and heart-rate and internal rage-o-meter.

And as I stood in line, shuffling from one foot to the other, sighing and rubbing my forehead and aggressively planting my bag in front of some chick who kept trying to cut in front of me, I thought back to the yoga class I had taken the day before. 

There is a new (ish) studio in my beloved DUMBO neighborhood that I am trying to pop into when we’re in town, and I was lucky enough to get into a class yesterday with a teacher I knew from Laughing Lotus, back in the day.  She’s lovely and either Australian or South African—(she is cool-accented, wherever she’s from) and wild-of-hair (like me) and grounded.  She’s one of these teachers who has studied yoga with all kinds of people in all kinds of styles, and you can feel it in her teaching—it’s round and robust.  Full.

Anyhow, for all her gifts in the yogic arts, she started class wrestling with the stereo.  The studio’s stereo system is apparently finicky, and so for the first several minutes of class all we could see was her prone body and the back of her curly head as she coaxed the volume on the ancient set up and down and up and down.  And as she fiddled and groaned about the volume (which refused to budge), she told us how she’d been reading an article earlier that day about all of the things in our lives we think we have control over but actually don’t.  “Electronics,” she said, twirling the volume up and down, “elevator buttons…we think that somehow pushing that button over and over again is actually doing something…but it’s not.  It really has no effect on it, at all.” 

And I thought about this, as I stood in the security line, trying not to scream.

What, honestly, was there to be done?  All the griping and forehead wiping in the world wasn’t going to make things go any faster than they were going.  My angry face was not going to stop me from missing my plane, if that’s what was going to happen.  The fact that I, good student that I am, already had my laptop and liquids and shoes ready to go when I was still fifty feet from the conveyor belt was not, as much as I might want it to, going to change anything about the behavior of anyone else in line in front of me.  I was stuck.  That elevator was going to come when it was going to come, no matter how many times I pushed that goddamn button.

(And let me just tell you…it was a lot.)

And for what felt like the dozenth time in as many days, I thought about how much easier things can be, what a relief they can be, when you can just get comfortable with where you are.  Even (god forbid) if it’s not where you want to be. 

The universe does not owe me an on-time flight.  It certainly is not so deeply indebted to me that I am allowed to act like an a-hole, just because I am in a hurry.  No amount of mental gymnastics are going to change the reality of slow trains, slow lines, and broken bags.  So, why does it feel like it might?  What is it, what little crossed wire in the brain makes it seem like if we just get upset enough, if we just grouse enough or pout enough or rail enough against…that things might actually rearrange themselves in front of us, and more to our liking?

It’s never happened that way for me.  What happens for me is that I get myself worked up into enough of a lather, enough things break or malfunction or trip me up (literally), that I eventually have no choice but to surrender to the reality of the situation.  This elevator is not f-ing coming, and so I had either better take the stairs or find something interesting to read while I wait, because I am going to be here for a while.  And when that happens, when I’m able to snap my little internal control freak in half, then things open up.  Suddenly the line doesn’t move so slowly, the machine-operators don’t seem so incompetent, and before I know it, I’m sitting on my plane.  Happily engrossed by the in-flight magazine…waiting to take off.

Coastal Opposites

Shanti-towners!  I'm here!  I promise!  The big day is fast approaching (zee wedding), and things are getting a little nutso in the Aprile/Willis household, so please forgive my sporadic blog absences.

Last week we were in Brooklyn, taking care of some business and having our respective bachelor and bachelorette parties.  All I have to say about that is that at one point during the evening I was being paraded down the streets of NYC wearing a red feather boa, some body jewelry that made me look like I'd broken out in a cubic zirconia rash, a "Miss Bachelorette" sash, my very man-ish sunglasses, and a crown of plastic penises.

Yes, you read that right.

At one point during this delightfully humiliating journey, a woman entered the elevator we were giggling in, took one look at me and said, very demurely, "do you realize you have falluses on your head?"

Yes, I told her. Yes, I am.

But, this is not my point, Shanti Towners! (though it was a great night, and I'm very thankful to everyone who was there and who made it that way).

Ahem.

There were two things, outside of all the wedding festivities and the sweet time with my mister that I was most excited about for the trip to NY:

1.  A visit to my beloved Laughing Lotus.  For weeks leading up to my trip I was fantasizing about whose classes I would take--salivating over the prospect of moving and breathing and sweating in the way only Laughing Lotus can get me to move and breathe and sweat.  And;

2.  A visit to the new Anusara studio that has opened up in my DUMBO neighborhood.  Anusara is just now starting to make it's way into the yoga forefront in New York, and I was really looking forward to taking a class at this new studio (a block and a half from our apartment, no less!  Where was this place 2 years ago?!).

The class at Abhaya Yoga, the anusara studio in DUMBO, came first.  The studio itself is GORGeous.  It's on the 6th floor of one of the big warehouse-y buildings in the neighborhood, and the windows of the room look out over the east river and the manhattan bridge.  Ah, sigh. Right away upon arriving the teacher introduced herself to me, which bode well, and I set myself up in the back-ish row of the class, prepared for some Anursara, east-coast style.  It was a small group in the class--just five or six people--which I'm familiar with from my own teach-ifiying at newer studios in Los Angeles.  And she seemed sweet, the teacher, and knowledgeable...

I'm hesitating a little here, because this teacher obviously knew her stuff, obviously cared deeply about the practice, and even though I spent the first half of class being annoyed by the way she was cooing at me, and everyone else, like beginners (Moi?! A beginner?! I think noooooot!)--even with all that, she was relentless in her likeability, and I knew that I was just being kind of piggy anyhow, silently demanding to be acknowledged.  (Very yogic, I know.)  So, I didn't dislike her (not by the end, at least), and she did this great splits-up-the-wall thing that I am immediately stealing and adding to my repertoire.  So it was by no means a baaaaaaaaaad class.

But I still walked away disappointed.

The practice, while smart--I could tell she was opening up the body in the right away and building up toward something--was so...herky-jerky.  It was my least favorite kind of sequencing: Do a pose.  Stop.  Do another pose.  Stop.  Do another pose.  Etc., etc., etc.  There was no linking together of movement, whatsoever, no transitioning from one place to another--just: do this...and then that...and then that.

I know that this isn't uncommon, and is a totally valid way of teaching, but for me...for my little over-active brain...I need the fluidity of movement.  I need to feel like I'm traveling through my practice.  I need something to connect me really fully with my breath, and to get me to start actually feeling the movement of energy in my body, and the movement of my body in my space.

There was none of that.  And I missed it.

So, the next day, when it came time for Laughing Lotus-a-rama...I was even more excited for class.  (My excitement was only slightly dulled by the hangover from my bachelorette party the night before.  Thank you late-night tequila shots.)  I was ready to moooooooooove.  To floooooooow.  And, though I was disappointed that my NY schedule was only going to allow me time for one class, and only an hour-long one at that, I managed to time it out so I could take with one of my favorite teachers at the Lotus.  Ali Cramer. Fire-y goddamn goddess that she is.

The class was packed--not uncommon for a late-afternoon Friday Lotus class--there might have been close to 50 people in the room, and we were mat to mat to mat.  Which, I know drives some  people bonkers about popular studios, but I kind of love it...especially when we're moving.  And move we did.  Ali is a genius sequencer (later that night I actually lulled myself to sleep by re-remembering some of the best transitions from the afternoon's class).  I get a lot of deep visceral joy from moving the way we move in a Lotus class and unlike the teacher at the Anusara studio, Ali is someone I feel particularly SEEN by.  Even with that many people in class, I know she knows I'm there, and I know she's reading my joy and she likey.

So, it was great, people, it was a great class.  No surprise there, because Ali is an amazing teacher.

But...

Oh gosh.

I still left a little...disappointed.

I mean, SO MUCH of what I love is contained in those classes...so much creative, soulful, graceful, rockin' expression.  But, I also have this new hunger that I didn't have before...something that's been nurtured since living in LA...and that's the hunger to slow down and to go deep.  To take real time in some of the poses and explore and breathe and tinker.  And when it's not there...I miss it.

So, for the last few days I've been thinking about these two classes--each of them on exact opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of what I'm exploring and interested in--thinking only, THIS is the gap I am trying to bridge.  And wondering...is it possible to create a class that is both creatively sequenced, rhythmic and hypnotic AND one which contains slow deep alignment work?

It seems to me that the goal of a Vinyasa class, like the kind taught at the Lotus, is not so much about the body as it is about the spirit.  The breath, the chanting, the ceaseless movement...it's really about liberating a body FROM the body and putting him or her right in contact with prana.  With the flow--with that mysterious movement of that even more mysterious life-force.

And, if the Vinyasa is a telescope, moving one through the practice in order to get a bigger and bigger view of the universe, then Anusara is a microscope, just honing deeper and deeper in on the little machinations of the body.  Sure, yes, the ultimate goal is still freedom, but in the Anusara, it's deeply rooted in the proper alignment of the flesh (in the hopes that alignment will then consequently align the mind and the heart). And it's not so much about the ecstatic devotional joy like the Vinyasa.

I find myself often in my teaching moving in one direction and then the other, trying to find a middle ground...moving and then restraining.  Going slow and deep and then revving back into movement again.  I think it's possible, it must be, to taste both the wide expansive view and the deep subtle interior in a single class.  Because, this isn't an unfamiliar struggle.  Even the planning of our wedding has felt like this at times--a movement between big bold strokes of creativity and the quiet subtle changes that come from deep conversation and silent soul-searching.  It's just a movement between these two things...trying to let one inform the other, in the hopes that, in the end, something will arise which will contain both.  The quiet and the wild.  The still and the rhythmic.

Is it possible, Shanti Towners?  I sure hope so....