Catching (on to) the Breath

 I've given myself a bit of a challenge this year, to read all of the books on my bookshelves in LA.  It's not even a fraction of my total library, but still I have been feeling humiliated by all the many half-read and un-read books just languishing away in my little cabinet in the dining room.  I am not allowed to buy another new book (um, except the awesome books I got for Christmas...thanks, family!) until I read every single book I already own.  2 down so far, about 40 to go.

What this means of course is that even those books that I would normally be tempted to put down halfway through, either from boredom or because of that sneaking suspicion that there's something better out there I could or ought to be reading, I now have to plod through until the end.  It also means that I can't play that weird little game with myself where I just stand in front of my bookshelf hemming and hawing about which new tome I ought to start, creating more and more indecisiveness about which direction to go in until finally, fed up with the whole question, I end up abandoning the books altogether and picking up that latest issue of Vanity Fair that just arrived in the mail.

Yes, you can go ahead and draw a larger conclusion about my general disposition from this tendency, and yes, I know it's not very flattering.

Anyhoooo, so I'm reading this book right now...one of the aforementioned "I would normally have given up on this a while ago" books, and because I am committed to the completion of it, I've had to learn to overlook all of the things about the tone and dryness of the language (again, not something I would normally do), in service of the larger message of the book. 

It's written by a former chess wunderkind turned martial artist, and it's all about the learning process and the idea of "peak performance"...i.e., how to get "in the zone".  Much of it, honestly, is written in a kind of male super-athlete speak that I find a tiny bit aggravatting, but UNDERNEATH all of that, there is a lot of insight about how it is in that we learn, and in particular how learning turns to mastery and then to greatness.

There are a lot of things I could talk about in relation to this and to yoga...how it is that the magical process breaks down that goes, "I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it...I can almost do it...I did it!  Oh wait, that was an accident...I can't do it, I can't do it...I can almost do it...okay, I can almost do it...I did it, I did it, I did it...I can do it!"  (Which is a process that I LOVE, and which has been one of the greatest gifts of yoga, as there is nothing so wildly clear as the change in one's body from NOT capable to capable.)

But, what I actually want to talk about is a point that was made near the end of the book, when the author is talking about having gone as a young man to some kind of peak performance training facility, where a bunch of scientists had gathered a bunch of athletes to study them in the midst of training in order to figure out what is really going on with a gifted athlete when he's in that magic super-human place.  And the big lesson that the author learned from being there, is that without fail, the athletes who were able to REST and really slow their heart-rate down between bursts of activity, had far more stamina and competed overall at a much higher level than those who were not able to do this.  AND, that those athletes who had mastered this art of rest, were able to slow down their heart-rate and recover in shorter and shorter periods of time as they progressed.  Meaning, that just 1 or 2 minutes of rest could do for some athletes what a less in-shape person might need 10 or 15 minutes to accomplish.

And what I loved, loved, loved about this, is that I have been thinking so much lately about the breath as a teaching tool...about looking to the pattern and rhythm and quality of the breath, not just as an indicator of what might be going on in a particular person, but also as a sort of instruction book for the human machine: This is how we run best:  Inhale, exhale, pause.

Inhale, meaning action, inspiration, activity; Exhale, meaning release, surrender, letting gooo, and finally this Pause (I know, I'm hooked on the pause)--in which this two things seem to be integrated in rest.  And then we begin again.  This is the ideal operating system for the human body (and mind and spirit) and it is laid out in perfect never-ending example by the very thing that keeps us alive!  But it's so easy to forget, because we live in a world that encourages a kind of productivity hyper-ventilation:  Inhale! Inhale! Inhale! More! More! More!  And the idea of a surrender and a silence are left only to the folks who subscribe to the OWN Network.

But if this performance model is true (which OF COURSE it is), then not only are we just stressing out our systems by not taking regular intervals of rest (and by rest, I don't mean watching television or drinking wine...though that's okay, too) we are also reducing our productivity and our ability to perform at our highest levels.  One of the examples that the author gives is of the best tennis players, and how if you watch the true masters between sets, instead of arguing for a call or pumping their fist over a victory, you can watch them just picking placidly at the strings on their rackets.  Resting.  Breathing.

You can do and do and do and do and think and plan and fix and negotiate and action action action until you're blue in the face, but how is any of that ever going to take deep root if you don't every once in awhile, between sets, just...rest? 

So, Shanti-Towners, today, if you're feeling stressed out at all...just take a moment, step back, and pick at the strings of your metaphorical racket until you're ready to get back in the fray.  And then just notice if you feel better, more capable, stronger than you did before...

Old Ladies and Pilgrims...

A very wise woman I know once confessed to me that she felt she had a puritanical pilgrim who lived inside her, dictating her wrongs and rights. I so loved this image, and it made me curious, at the time, about what my own inner critic might look like. (I just loved imagining a tiny version of my friend bedecked in bonnet and long dress, shaking her head grimly at every misstep.) Not a terrible inner demon to have, as demons go--not like having a devious thug living inside you or anything....

Anyhow, many months have passed since this exchange with my wise friend, and it is not until now, these past few weeks, when I believe I may have come face to face with the shape and consistency of my own inner critic. And folks, it is not pretty. 

Let me back this up by saying that for the last month or so I have been working at a Los Angeles restaurant which, when I got the job, seemed like the perfect solution to my "day job" problem. Busy place, family run...good money, nothing corporate about it...in my neighborhood. Everything a girl could ask for. (Let me also say that I have not waited tables in quite a long time, and had been having some, oh, nostalgia for the ol' actress/waitress storyline in my life...and have also been determined since coming here to work the least amount of hours for the most amount of money...) But it's not as if I wasn't warned! I was! When I interviewed for the job I was told that the owner (an older woman of foreign birth) had quite the temper and one had to have a thick skin to deal with her. And I remember at the moment of being told, a little warning bell going off in my head, one that sounded a bit like...

"Lia. You do NOT have a thick skin. Nor do you want to. And people yelling at you makes you cry."

But, I ignored this little voice in my head, so convinced was I that I NEEDED this job. 

I could spend the next several paragraphs describing the various crazy and chaotic things that go on in this restaurant. I could talk about the disorganization and general grumpiness that abounds (no rare thing, in the restaurant biz, I know), but what I want to talk about is what it has been like to find myself faced, externally, with a kind of emotional chaos I have as of yet not experienced much of in my life.

Okay, that's not true. I have experienced this kind of emotional chaos...in fact, I experience it a lot...INSIDE MY BRAIN!!!

When I first started to see all the upset all around me at this place, I went through a fearful "oh my god, what is going on in my life that I am in the middle of all this craziness?" phase...which of course only made me feel worse about myself--as if working in this restaurant (for gods sakes) was some kind of shameful admission that I, too, am a miserable angry person. The aforementioned probably the best summation of my worst nightmare: myself as closed door instead of open book. 

Phase 2 involved me attempting to treat said craziness as spiritual exercise: how do I stand in the middle of this chaos and remain with myself? (This, I now see, working as a kind of denial...or as a way for me to pretend I have no involvement in said chaos). But as the craziness of the place has gotten closer and closer to me, culminating the other night in a confrontation so upsetting I still have not shaken it off, I have come to the realization that the craziness around me is, and must be, a direct product/reflection/embodiment of the craziness inside me.

It was when I heard myself saying (angrily) to myself, over and over (about aforementioned angry foreign woman), "Why is she so mean?! Why can't she say anything nice? Why does she criticize everything I do?" that a little light went off, like a neon sign emblazoned on my brain, and the sign read:

Girlfriend, why are YOU so mean to you? Why can't YOU say anything nice to you? Why do YOU criticize everything YOU do? 

And it hit me, oh my god, I have an angry foreign woman living inside me!! She gets red faced at any tiny mistake and she just can't wait to lash out at me...she is watching me like a hawk and she is trying to control my every move!! And, folks, I desperately want away from her. (In the external world and the inner one...) But I can not help but be astounded at the generosity of the universe...

Generosity? You might be saying, what generosity? You're slinging food under the angry gaze of a crazed old lady...what kind of generosity is that? Which, believe me, I have been feeling up until now that there is little to be thankful for in this situation, but when I LOOK, when I really look deeply I see that there is a partnership going on here in my life. I am not allowed, under any circumstances to run away from or ignore my own ill treatment of myself. If I do--if I try to deny it or shove it down to the depths, not only will it increase, it will present itself IN PHYSICAL form, for my investigation. That is a gift so great I can barely fathom it...that everything I need to learn in order to continue to open, and to grow, will come to me in the exact form necessary to force change.  In some moments the agent of change is beautiful--a birth, an experience in nature, a falling in love...and in some moments the agent of change is hard and sharp. But here's the deal--the universe (or god or your higher self or just your SELF, period) knows what it is up against. If your heart and mind are soft and open, well then, no heavy tools necessary. But if you are feeling closed, tight, fearful...man oh man, there's only a certain kind of machinery that's going to get through all that stone, and it might be a bit painful. But it's going to get there. Even if the heart doesn't break open until the millisecond before your last breath...that persistent partner that we all have in the universe will not quit. And that is a blessing of enormous magnitude.

So thank you, universe, for all of the things that break me open...including angry old ladies in restaurants...