A Problem of Thinking...

Have you ever considered, that perhaps this is not a thinking problem?

Have you ever considered, that perhaps problems get solved in your life in spite of, and not because of, your thinking?

Have you ever considered (I rarely do) that perhaps all the moments of all the days don’t need to be filled with thinking?  That maybe one doesn’t need to think from the bedroom to the bathroom, from the bathroom to the kitchen, in the kitchen while the tea is bubbling, in the car while the wheels are turning, on the walk while the door is looming, over the sink while the dishes are doing, above the stove where the food is cooking, in the place where the work is happening, at the end when the lights are turning, back in the car as the eve is dawning, back up the steps to where the door is waiting, and on and on and on?

Have you ever considered that the mind is not meant for such stuff?

Have you ever considered that the mind is meant for mind-matter:  for chair building and computer programming and book-reading and play-writing and lightbulb choosing and car driving and philosophy grasping and fire starting and gadget inventing and all the other hundreds and thousands of things that the mind is perfectly suited to?

Have you considered that love, is not the domain of the mind? That feeling, is not the domain of the mind?  That instinct, is not the domain of the mind, art-making is not the domain of the mind, sex and fucking and love-making...all not the domain of the mind?

Perhaps you have.  Perhaps you have considered all of this, because these are so obviously products of the heart, and the senses, and the pumping of the blood.

But what about decision making?  Have you ever considered that decision making is not the domain of the mind?

What?  You may be saying.  Of course decision-making is for my mind.  That's what my mind done does.  That's what it always done did and always will would.

But what if it's not?

What if...if when faced with a decision...you were to get soft and quiet, instead of tight and loud? Not letting the many voices of reason that occupy all your many spaces pipe in immediately with their suggestions.  What then?  What if you were to close your eyes and drink in the smells around you and just rub your face against the wind that is rubbing against it?  What if you were to unclench your jaw and unclench your eyes and unclench that poor little mind, that just wants to help, that always wants to help, but maybe, possibly...can not serve you here?  What would come rushing in?  What would establish itself in clarity?

Albert Einstein would have all his greatest ideas in the shower.  So he said. Or while shaving.

Isaac Newton talks about problem solving like one would talk about watching a flower open, "I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light".

"It is curious," said Mark Twain, "-- the space-annihilating power of thought."


All great men.  All great doers.  All, somehow, in agreement about this--spaciousness.  Be it spaciousness of shower, or spaciousness of dawning realization.

And for myself...every real stroke of insight or clarity or brilliance I have ever had, has bubbled out of silence, and not out of the morass of thought. Never ever ever has it bubbled out of the morass of thought.  Sometimes I have driven myself near to insanity with thought and then finally, because I just could not take it anymore, or because I had cried tears and the tears had broken some kind of dam...finally I relented.  And in the relenting came a ready solution.  And so, sometimes I have equated these two things:  the exhaustive death-match with thought and the miraculous solution at the end.

But perhaps you could have the latter without the former?

The great guess of spiritual practice, the grand hypothesis of yoga and all the others, is that the world, at it's essence, is born from space and from silence.  And, in that silence is the power of creation.  And our small piece of eternity, our sippy-cup of heaven, as humans, is that if we can get ourselves as quiet as that space...then we can taste a bit of what it has to offer.  We can actually step into the power that makes worlds.  That is the experiment.  It's the experiment of meditation and the experiment of yoga and the experiment of writing and the experiment of song and the experiment of love and the experiment of play...what can we do to step in?  How many things can we find that can quiet us well enough and for long enough that we might just get a little eternity juice on our hands and our face?

I am still in the trial phases, myself.  I will report findings when they are available.

In the meantime...if you are struggling with something, if you are turning it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over in your mind.  Just consider, that perhaps your mind is not meant for such things.  Perhaps it is the silence, right down there in the center of you, that is best suited to hurl that particular boulder, to that particular moon.

What My Head and Drew Barrymore Have In Common...

I have been thinking a lot lately about posture.  Blame seeing too many photos of myself with round-y shoulders, blame an ever-increasing (sometimes aggravating) awareness of how my body is moving through space, blame the simple fact that I'm teaching yoga, so I feel like I probably shouldn't be, um...slouching.  All. The. Time.

Whatever the reason, it's been on my mind.

When I first started noticing my own sometimes suspect shoulder slumping, I asked Paul, (no demanded, actually), if he would please point it out to me if he ever saw my posture go all wonky.  Which he, dutifully, did...but only on a few occasions, because I don't think he could stand the look of abject horror that crossed my face if he happened to remind me at the wrong moment.  Oh, I'm sorry, whaaaaaaaat?!  My posture isn't good enough for you?  Well, excuuuuuuuuuuuuse me!

Poor guy.

First, let me just say that my own particular misalignment, turns out, is not an uncommon one.  My shoulders round slightly, my head pokes forward, and the back of my neck compresses.  (Pretty!)  The result is the picture an eager-yet-uncertain student.  Or of a person endlessly reaching for something with the tip of their chin...or...ugh.  It's depressing, just writing about it.

I take some small comfort in the fact that Drew Barrymore and I share the same affliction.

(Oh, Drew...sigh.  Just one of the many things we share in common, I'm sure.  Why can't we be besties?)

So, okay, so I'm interested, obviously in having good posture for all of the body-mechanical benefits.  I want fluidity in my body and efficiency in my muscles, but I'm MUCH more interested (surprise sur-freaking-prise) in the psychological and emotional what-fors behind the whole thing.

Here's what it feels like in my own body:  it feels like some part of me thinks that my head reaching forward is keeping things under control, like that if my head can beat my body--can cross the finish line first--then I'm going to be in control of whatever is in front of me.  My head, in this position, is in front of my heart.  It is, in some ways maybe (and I apologize for the necessary cliche-ness of this next statement) it is protecting my heart.  I mean, of course it's NOT.  But it feels like it might be.  Because I'll tell you what, anytime I remember to lean my head back in a yoga class or, like I did just before sitting down to write this post, I stand against the wall with my butt and shoulders touching it and then press the back of my head into the wall...the vulnerability I feel when I get my head in proper alignment...is marked.

In the yoga philosophy, the front plane of the body represents the individual, the egoic, self, and the back-plane of the body represents the universal, the larger self.  If this is true, then the larger self is something we only have to lean back into, and the little "I" self is always something that's just out in front of us. And while I'm sure you could diagnose a head-reaching-forward posture as something which is simply the result of too much time on the computer or in the car, or talking to people who are taller than you (I made that one up), I'm going to venture out on a limb here and say, maybe...maybe it's something bigger than that.

Maybe Drew Barrymore doesn't feel totally safe resting back into that big unknown.  Maybe Drew is a bit of an overachiever (being famous at age four, or whatever, for being totally adorable...I think that could do it), and maybe the only way she's known how to navigate is by reaching and grasping and "me first" ing.  And maybe this used to be something that helped her survive, but maybe now it's just doing more harm than good.  Maybe her little system would like a break.  Maybe if Drew could just, exhale, and lean her little head back...who knows what might happen.

I'm talking strictly about Drew Barrymore here, obviously, not anyone else.  Just to clear up any confusion.  If any of you thought I might be talking about...someone...else.  I'm not.  I'm really just going to keep my analysis to the postures of celebrities.  Tune in next week when we'll delve into some deep discussion about Jennifer Aniston's lumbar curve.  Wowza!

(Alright, I'm talking about me.)

I have no real solution to this posture dilemma, except that I am trying to remember to sit up straight, and to tell my little head (softly) that maybe she doesn't need to work so hard all the time.  Maybe the world won't end.  Maybe her life won't go slipping out of her grasp if she just...rests back every once in a while.

Now if someone could just send me Drew Barrymore's number...I could tell her, too.

Me and Ghandi and a Wall of Mirrors...

Paul lately has been quoting this thing that he heard someone say (I'm sure he knows who said it, but I've forgotten) about comparison.  "Comparison," this person said, "is the worst form of violence...toward yourself."

I love this quote. He only had to get to the "violence" part when he first recounted it, and I knew how it was going to end.  (Because it is, isn't it, it's a little act of violence, to compare oneself to others?)  It's just a little tiny knife that we can drive into ourselves, sometimes (oh god, I hope this isn't just me) many, many times a day.

(I, seriously, I think I have a problem with this.)

I compare myself to the people in my life--to Paul (am I as a good a [fill in the blank] as he is?), to my family (am I as connected, as good a daughter/sister/aunt, etc.), to my friends (you name the topic), to other actors, to other yoga teachers, to other teachers in any discipline, to other women, to other women specifically my age, to other men my age, to other "wives", to other yoga students, to other people who live on my block, to old people, to BABIES for gods sakes (they're so wide open and present...why can't I be that present), to Mother Theresa, to Ghandi, to President Obama, to anyone who is on the news for doing anything truly inspired, to Oprah and to this one girl in my yoga studio who I think might be enlightened.

I'm sorry...did you just say you compare yourself TO GHANDI?

Yes, voice of reason, I did. Oh, what, I'm just supposed to resign myself to not being like Ghandi?!  I could be like Ghandi.  If I could just stop worrying about stupid shit, I could totally be Ghandi.

And here, of course, is where the problem lies, because (and this may come as a bit of a shock) no, I can not be Ghandi.  Or Oprah.  Or that girl at my yoga studio.  Because those identities have already been taken.  Also, most of those people, the ones who seem to just get it, the ones who are on zee path...probably they don't spend a lot of time comparing themselves to other people.  As it's hard to move very fast down any path when you are stopping frequently to stab yourself with small comparison knives.

Because the problem with comparison, with growth by means of comparison, is that...it never ENDS.  Never ever ever, if you are basing your good-ness or not good-ness on what you are doing in comparison to what other people are doing...will you ever find any lasting sense of peace.  Beeeeeecause (and I know this from experience) as soon as you've worked through one kink...as soon as you've befriended that girl or decoded the life of Ghandi enough that you don't feel quite so small in comparison...some new shiny person is going to come along who has it all figured out IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT WAY and off you'll be thrown, once again.

It's like this, people...

A few of the studios I'm teaching in have mirrored walls, or just one mirrored wall, and it drives me CRAZY, because there is always one student (or two or three) who spends all of class checking themselves out in the mirror.  Now, some might say this could be a helpful practice because you can see what your body is or is not doing, and where you may or may not be out of line, and that's true, you can...but as soon as you take that mirror away, what are you left with?  You're left with a mental image of how your body looks doing a pose, and all your effort will go into recreating what you think the pose is supposed to look like.   Practice without a mirror, however, means that you have to get deep...you might have to close your eyes...you might have to rest your mind on subtleties of movement you didn't even know you HAD...the turn of your femur in your hip socket, the clench and release of your toes...and suddenly you are guiding yourself from this deep place of knowing.  Because when you're in that deep, and the alignment clicks into place, you don't SEE it (comparsion), you FEEL it.  You feel it's rightness.  You feel that steady ground of the right path beneath your feet.

And so, if comparison is an act of violence, then to get sweeter with ourselves, we have to pull our eyes away from the reflection...we have to start measuring our worth, our success, our goodness, by that "A-ha" click of bone stacking on top of bone, of muscle releasing, and of the deep sense in our own bodies that we are, indeed, just fine as we are.

About this, I think that Ghandi would approve...