CLASS-IFIED

I'm in SNOWY (heavenly) New York for the weekend, taking care of business and, as luck would have it, yesterday I got to teach my second community class at my beloved Laughing Lotus.  This month's theme at the Lotus:  the Bhagavad Gita.

Confession:  I LIKE the Bhagavad Gita.  I do not loooooooooove the Bhagavad Gita.  I find it a little masculine and head-y and I always feel like I'm slogging through it, which is not the quality I'm looking for in my spiritual texts...I'm more of a gliding-through-the-sky girl when it comes to writing I love.  So, okay, so I slogged through it once again and marked a lot of passages that stood out to me, confident that if I just kept plugging away a theme would emerge.

Cut to, the morning of class.  I have left my beloved in our warm bed so that I can spend some quiet AM time meditating, practicing, and writing about the BG (in hopes of coaxing out a coherent theme).  I've settled on "I am not the doer"...a subject that is littered all throughout the book, and something I've been touching on in some of my classes this week anyhow. Good, I think, that's good enough.  And I put away my notebook and climb back into my still-warm bed.

On the way to class I'm feeling nervous, but the nerves have an underpinning of confidence.  I know what it means now to teach a class, and more and more I am learning what kind of teacher I am...what I need and what excites me and most of all, how to look for and respond to what it is my students need...how to be in the room with them and feel okay throwing away plans and coming up with new ones on the spot in order to best support them.  So, that feels good.  And I'm sort of rehearsing what I want to say about all this I am not the doer stuff, but I'm sort of leaving it alone...I don't want to overplan.  I'm good, I'm gonna be good.

So, here is what my there was SUPPOSED to sound like:

[Introduce BG, say there is a lot of this "I am not the doer" stuff in there], then say:

"A few months ago I got an email from a teacher in response to an update from me on all my goings-on which read, 'remember, you are not the doer'.  And I was sort of like "oh okay, right, so yogic, blah blah blah I am TOO the doer!  Didn't you read all that stuff I am DOOOO-ing?!" But it's been sitting with me for the past many weeks and I finally realized what she was talking about. Which is,  I better hope that I am not the doer, because the "I" in that scenario, is my overly-controlling, competitive, approval-seeking small self.  If "I" am the doer, whatever I just "did" is probably going to be pretty crappy.  Let's hope that "I" am not the doer, because if "I" am not, then it means that something else is working through me.  Something larger.  Something inspired.  Something so much greater and more skilled than "I" could ever be.  Etc., etc., etc."

But here is what it ACTUALLY sounded like:

[Introduced BG...with way too much detail.  Like someone recounting the plot of a movie to people who have already seen it, and including all the minor interludes and jump-cuts.  I think more than one person started staring off into the middle distance.  Oh my god, this is only an hour and fifteen minute class, Lia, let's get to the point.]  And, then say:

(I can't even begin to replicate what I actually did say on this blog, because I'm going to fall into a coma just trying to type it...but I definitely said something along the lines of, "because the I who is the doer, is not the I...it's the little I instead of the big I...in all spiritual traditions there is this contrast between the big I and the small I...and the I in the "I am not the doer" is the...ramble, ramble, ramble)

Argh!  Thank god the actual CLASS went really great. As soon as I shut my big mouth I immediately stepped into the class, for reals, as teacher (talk about not being the doer, sheesh).  I felt confident and light-hearted and we all had a lot of FUN, I believe, which felt good.   I even managed to reapproach the theme with a lot more ease throughout the course of the class and get to the heart of what was originally a totally convoluted point.

So, redemption was had, but still I've been thinking a lot since then about what happened with the ol theme-a-rating, and I've realized that two major things went wrong:

1.  I didn't get specific enough with MYSELF before class started.  The themes are usually effortless for me because, in one way or another, I have tapped into something--some question or idea--that I'm very passionate about, and so I don't have to think of things to say (I am not the doer)...I just sort of touch that little tender spot where the question exists in me, and the words flow (I am not the doer).  But, obviously, if that's not readily accessible to my conscious mind, it means I need to dig a little deeper.  (Or find another freaking theme).

2.  And this is the big one.  I. Wasn't. Being. Honest.  I'm NOT moved by the Bhagavad Gita, I DON'T love or even completely jive with everything it has to say, and THAT'S where I needed to start with my theme.  Instead I think I was subtly trying to sound a certain way...like a "yoga" instructor, maybe.

Note to self:  next time...less doing.

What To Do In Case of Miracle

I was having a discussion the other day with some ladies, one of whom had just finished an intensive disaster preparedness seminar, in which she learned all kinds of things about what to do in case of earthquake, snake-bite, poison ingestion, choking, seizure...you name it, and she regaled us for several minutes with all the horrors of "what could happen".

And as she was talking I was feeling some distaste, not for her (she's lovely), but for the whole world of "disaster preparedness".  So often I feel like seminars about disasters are contributing to a kind of generalized fear...about disasters.  There's so many "what if's" and "get ready"s being thrown around, I don't know...something about it doesn't sit right with me.  And then I immediately thought about how silly it was for me to have any kind of issue with being prepared.  Because, isn't it important to be prepared?  Shouldn't we know how to un-choke someone who is choking?  Haven't 100's, 1000's of lives been saved by exactly this kind of pre-disaster know-how?

And then I thought of two things...I thought of a story I'd heard in which a man in some seminar had fallen to the ground in distress, and another man, unrelated to the first, had jumped up and tried to help, and for reasons unbeknownst to him, this second man had felt the urge (and followed it) to bite down hard on the compromised man's index finger.  It turned out that the man who had fallen to the ground had been having a heart attack, and the other man (the biter) had bitten down at exactly the place where some artery or meridian ends and his bite had acted as a kind of defibrilator. And the first man lived. Again, the biter had no idea why he'd felt the urge to do this...he just did.  Where's THAT covered in the emergency preparation course? 

And the second thing that came to mind is how we have all of these talks and drills and practice runs of the worst stuff that could possibly happen in our lives, so we all know exactly what to expect, how it's going to go, exactly what our chances of survival are and aren't...but we have nothing comparable when it comes to the awesome stuff.  What about a Miracle Prepardness Course?  A Best Day of Your Life Preparation checklist?  The What to Have Handy in Case You Meet the Love of Your Life Kit? Where are these things?

Is it just because we think we don't have to be "prepared" for the good stuff...because the good stuff we can navigate via our intuition? And if that's the case, why wouldn't the same apply to the emergencies (see example number 1 above, about bitey and the bitten)...why is it that we have to run the worst case scenarios over and over in our head, meanwhile giving no attention to all the possible awesome outcomes in our lives?  Is it simply because we BELIEVE more in the inevitability of bad stuff than of good stuff?

We all know that we're going to die, and that we are going to lose people in our lives whom we love.  We all know that's inevitable.  (And I'm not arguing it, obviously.)  But, how many of us feel that same sense of inevitability about experiencing, even just once in our lives, deep and miraculous magic?  Or a total stunning transformation of our minds and our hearts and our souls?  And if we DO believe in it...why aren't we "planning" for it.

Which leads me to the question, what would YOU do in case of awesomeness?  I want to hear your best What To Do in Case of a Miracle checklists, Shanti-towners...leave a comment here and tell me what I should have handy...

Just in case.

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...

One of the Greatest Yogis of them All...

RIP, Dr. King, and thank god for you...

Serious Practice

 There are days when I wake up in the morning and my first thought is, "Oh my God, I wanna be with you."  And without fail, those are the mornings that end with me throwing up my hands in defeat...

Okay, alright, I surrender!

Is this because God is cruel?  (And let me just interject, for those of you who find yourself recoiling at the G-o-d word, that I'm not talking about a man-in-the-sky kind of God...I'm not really talking about a man (or woman) at all...what I'm talking about is the Divine, and that whisper of bliss that comes when you find the grace to sit in her lap, even for a moment.) Is it some awful jack-ass style joke that the more I want the more I NEED the affection of that whatever-you-want-to-name-it connection, the more separate I feel?

No, Shanti-towners, the Divine is not cruel.  But, as it turns out, the Divine (just like us mortals) isn't so easily wooed by desperation.

Isn't it the case that the most beautiful works of art, the greatest performances, the most charismatic people, and the most breath-taking of sights...aren't they so, in part, because of their effortlessness?  Isn't it their ease that draws you to them?  The uncomplicated beauty, their raw-ness, their total lack of need for your approval?  Isn't that the thing that makes you want to just melt into them, to hang on their every word, to spend hours drinking them in?

Well, it's how the Divine feels about you, too.  It's not your struggle.  It's not your effort.  It's not your need, your necessary wounds, or your muscular attempt to Get Things Right that brings the Divine nearer.  Because, do you know what happens when you start to want something a little too much?  Your MIND jumps in.  The little siren in the firehouse of your brain goes off, and a hundred men in hazard suits go sliding down a pole to the rescue.

Move aside!  We'll handle this!

And suddenly the Divine (that inexpressible, irreduceable, unbelievably beautiful force) gets reduced to a series of ideas about who you are, who you have been, who you will one day be and in what way your connection to that which is greater than you might help you (finally) get there.

And the Divine, it turns out, isn't really interested in your ideas of what he-she-it is.

The Divine, she is sweet, and soft, and made of things like velvet and honey and things that shimmer.  She's drawn to that which is also sweet and soft and honey-ey and velvet and shimmer-ed.  She is lulled by your grace. When a muscle relaxes, she rushes in to fill the space that was once taken by tension.  When you take a morning to do nothing but drink tea and stare into the tops of trees, she orchestrates only the best birds to alight there for you.  And, when you are silly and you laugh and you say f*$% it, I don't care anymore how this looks or where this gets me or who says what about it, she puts on her dancing shoes and comes to join you at the party.

So, Shanti-towners, if you feel in the grip of a mind that has a serious need to connect, that has a lot of serious solid ideas about what that connection means, and that is quick to call frivolous the only things that make you soften, just think about your serious self as an old grizzled man nestled up to a bar, waiting for someone to come and cheer him up.  And think of the Divine as a silk-clad red-lipsticked goddess who has just wafted through the door, and ask yourself if there might not be another version of you she might be drawn to more than this old man self.  Say that cowboy with the look of mischief in his eye, or the bearded poet all choked up with beauty...even, say, that little petticoat-clad child, darting between the dangling legs of every patron, searching for some trinket.

Remember who you are, and then remember who she is, and remember, especially, that you don't need to take any of it all that seriously.


Wishing you a day of play, and wonder, and deep companionship with that sexy dame, Divinity.

Yantra-fied

Hey, Lia, what did you this weekend?

Well, cyber-self, I'm so glad you asked.

My pleasure.

This weekend, I made a yantra.

A yantra?  What's that?!

Another excellent question.

Thank you.

No, no, thank you.

No, you.

No, thank yoooooooooooooou. Okay, a yantra is a...um.  It's a.  Um.  It's a very pretty painted, uh, yoga picture.

Hmm. That doesn't seem right.

No, no it's not.

(and...scene.)


Okay, so I DID actually make a yantra this weekend (pictured above), and no, it's not a pretty painted yoga picture.  Well, it sort of is, I guess, but in order to give you a more accurate description, let's take it to the experts, or expert, really...Mrs. Sarah (gorgeous goddess) Tomlinson. She defines a yantra on her yantra website like this:

Yantras are sacred geometric designs containing the energy of a particular deity or planet. Each design enhances a specific quality within such as love, forgiveness and strength. The Yantras are ancient forms handed down to use for healing by the Tantrics of Ancient India to uplift the energy both in your internal and external environment.

 Helpful? Yes?  Yes.

I know Sarah from New York and Laughing Lotus.  I hadn't met her prior to my teacher training, but I'd heard her name quite a lot, and if you ever pick up an issue of Yoga Journal or LA Yoga, you can often find a yantra in the back made by Sarah, as she's a renowned one in the field of yantras and yantra-making.  But beyond that she is also AWESOME.  Like super crazy awesome.  She was, by far, one of my favorite guest teachers to come in and work with us during my teacher training (she taught the Ayurveda portion of the training) and I forced her to become my friend by demanding personalized mantras from her.  Mwah ha ha.

(there wasn't actually any force involved, that part's not true, but she did give me my mantra(s), that part is true.)

Anyhoooo, this weekend she was in Los Angeles teaching a yantra painting workshop and I jumped at the chance to get to spend some quality time with her AND to get to make something awesome to boot.

Let me just say, I think I might be in love with yantra-ing.  The process of making one involves all kinds of tools...compass and ruler and pencil and eraser and square paper and paints and PHEW!  It takes a couple of hours just to get the intial yantra pattern drawn in pencil, and then several more hours to get the thing painted.  All the detail work just makes me gooey with bliss, as something about measuring out perfectly plotted circles and dividing lines creates a cool hush in the mind, and I immediately understood why the making of the yantra is a meditation in and of itself.

But one of the best parts of the whole process is the CHOOSING of the yantra to begin with.  Sarah laid laminated images of several yantras on the floor for each of us to look at, and we were to pick the one(s) we were most drawn to, and that was to be our yantra that we would paint.  This kind of "let your intuition choose" game can be a little hard for me, as I immediately start guessing and second-guessing myself.

Which one am I drawn to?  I think I might be drawn to that one?  Or, wait...is that my brain or my intuitiion talking?  Okay, wait let me just take another look...okay, that one.  Or, hold on...shouldn't I go with my very FIRST instinct?  In that case it would have to be that other one.  Wait, okay, let me just quiet my mind.  Alright, no, this one. Definitely, okay, this one.  I'm sure.  I'm pretty sure.  Yes, okay, I'm doing it.

And so on.

Until, after much hemming and hawing and deciding and then re-deciding, I finally ended up with a yantra that seemed very, um, appropriate:

Cinnamasta Yantra, the yantra of INTUITION.

Well, yes.  It seems I could use some help in that arena....  And it doesn't hurt that I find this yantra so stupidly beautiful. 

I finally finished it on Monday morning...the completed yantra is pictured above.  Ain't it lovely? 

If you want to make your own you should definitely check out Sarah's website on the subject where you can peruse beautiful yantras and even order her awesome yantra-making book!

Follow up to 1/8/2011

Came across this piece today in the Huffington Post, which says what I was trying to say, but so much more beautifully...

Thank you, Rev. Anne Howard, for being brave enough to preach love instead of retribution. 

More of that, please.